The Professor Is In Archive

4/12 – Grant Writing Workshop with Dr. Karen Kelsky

By
Marilyn Weber
 – April 2, 2013Posted in: History Program Events

Join us for a four-hour grant writing workshop led by Karen Kelsky, nationally-known academic consultant who  blogs as “The Professor Is In.” Dr. Kelsky will offer tangible strategies for grant-writing, including how to think like the selection committee, how to structure your grant proposal, and how to use her Foolproof Grant Template to create a “hero narrative” that demonstrates the originality and import of your research. Dr. Karen would like the participants to send a grant application draft, if they have one, to her at gettenure@gmail.com. (Please also bring this draft to the workshop itself.)

Karen Kelsky, aka, The Professor, is a former tenured professor and Department Head with 15 years of experience teaching at the University of Oregon and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her Ph.D. is in Cultural Anthropology, with a focus on Japan, from the University of Hawai’i. Her B.A. is from the University of Michigan. Her book, Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams, was published in 2001 by Duke University Press. She worked with many Ph.D. students during her university career, and since 2011 has run The Professor Is In, an academic blog and business dedicated to assisting ABDs and Ph.D.s in their academic job searches, as well as grant applications, book proposals, and other elements of the academic career.

Please RSVPto Marilyn Weber, History APO – mweber@gc.cuny.edu

Friday, April 12th, noon – 4 p.m., Room 5114

Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in History and the PhD Program in History.

JGrantWritingWorkshopKelskyFlyer

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Professional Development: Blog Post about Impostor Syndrome on TPII

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – December 12, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development

Dr. Karen Kelsky’s blog has a fantastic new guest post by Phyllis L. F. Rippeyoung, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Ottawa, on the lasting feelings of being an impostor in academia.  She discusses her own feeling of being an impostor, even after winning tenure and national recognition for her work, and shares an insight about impostor syndrome that she was given by a colleague:

In talking to a wise colleague, similarly afflicted with this syndrome, she had the most amazing insight that these feelings are a result of our loving what we do. If we didn’t love it, we wouldn’t be afraid to lose it. I also think that suffering from the syndrome speaks to the respect that we hold for the enterprise. Ethically, I don’t want to publish something that might be wrong.

For more information on impostor syndrome please see our professional development series here on the blog or check out the Graduate Center’s Counseling Services for graduate students; Counseling Services has offered workshops on Impostor Syndrome in the past, and they continually offer free short-term individual and group therapy to help work through issues exactly like this.

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Professional Development: Telling a Wider Story in Your Grant Application

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – December 5, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development

Dr. Karen Kelsky blogs about her solution for writing about how one’s proposed grant project fills a gap in the scholarly literature.  She finds that many grant applicants make the mistake of failing to demonstrate why his/her topic is worthy of study:

The majority of clients happily introduce a cool topic, refer to their bodies of lit, and then, with no further ado, lay down the claim, “however, no one to date has discussed [the exact micro-topic of my dissertation.]”

This is an error.  Just because people have not yet discussed topic X does not in and of itself persuade us, the readers, that topic X is in fact worthy of being discussed.

For examples of how to state the implications of the project in the context of gaps in the literature, check out the full post.  For more general information about how to structure grant applications, take a look at “Dr. Karen’s Foolproof Grant Template” on the same site.

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Professional Development: How to Prepare for a Tenure-Track Job Interview from The Professor Is In

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – November 9, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development, Uncategorized

For those of you preparing for tenure-track job interviews: Dr. Karen Kelsky, blogging as The Professor Is In, shares The #Facepalm Fails of the Academic Interview.

Among the questions that have produced uncomfortable moments of silence and fumbled answers is the obvious, yet almost-too-obvious

Tell us about your dissertation.

Yeah, I’m serious. I am constantly amazed at how many of you do not know how to simply and clearly and concisely describe your dissertation in a way that makes us understand why we should care about it, and how it intervenes and advances your field, in 3 minutes or less. Figure it out.

Check out Dr. Karen’s blog and Facebook page for more great advice about how to prepare for an academic job interview.

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Professional Development: “Why Your Job Cover Letter Sucks” from The Professor Is In

By
Tracy E. Robey
 – November 5, 2012Posted in: Career Advice, Professional Development, Uncategorized

Dr. Karen Kelsky, former tenured faculty member and chairperson now working as a highly successful consultant to academics, tells you “Why Your Job Cover Letter Sucks (and what you can do to fix it).”

In the introduction, she points out that the the vast majority of job letters need work:

In my 15 years as a faculty member I served on approximately 11 search committees. Some of these search committees I chaired. These committees brought in ten new assistant professors into my departments.

Estimating that each search brought in an average of 200 applications (a conservative estimate for a field like Anthropology, a generous estimate for a much smaller field like East Asian Languages and Literatures), that means I have read approximately 2200 job applications.

That means I’ve read 2200 job cover letters.

I’ve also read the cover letters of my own students, and a passel of Ph.D. students who came to me for advice, as well as a large number of clients since opening The Professor is In (as of July 2012 let’s say 600).

So let’s say I’ve read 2400 (2800) job cover letters. Of those 2400 (2800) job cover letters, it is safe to say that 2300 (2700) sucked. Sucked badly. Sucked epically. Sucked the way Cakewrecks cakes suck.

Dr. Karen then goes on to tell you exactly how to organize and fix it, so this is a great place to start when you’re thinking about how to write and revise your job letter.

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