But for current leadership at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), the question to start asking is: Why wouldn’t an English scholar be the perfect fit for such a job?

This year GSAS launched a new professional development initiative called GSAS Futures. Funded by GSAS and the Graduate Student Association and staffed by graduate students, the program aims to prepare GSAS students for innovative careers after Fordham—whether or not these careers are academic.

The Futures program pivots on the idea that an advanced degree in the arts and sciences is intrinsically valuable. Its philosophy is a unique response to an ongoing national conversation about the “usefulness” of graduate studies, especially in the humanities, relative to disciplines such as science and technology.

According to GSAS Futures, graduate students do not need to justify their training by recasting it in more “marketable” terms; rather, students need to harness and articulate their distinct expertise.

“It’s not about ‘translating’ skills. It’s about owning the skills,” said James Van Wyck, an English doctoral candidate and GSAS Graduate Student Professionalization facilitator.

“It’s saying, ‘This is my skill set, and it prepares me to do many things well.’ The idea is to identify what those skills are and how they match up with the needs of a nonprofit organization, or a government agency, or any of the careers our alumni have entered.”

For an English scholar like Tinker, this would mean underscoring skills such as being able to grasp complex material quickly or distilling a vision for multiple audiences, Van Wyck said.

“With GSAS Futures, we want to ensure that if Nathan Tinker had wanted that career all along, we would’ve been preparing him from the moment he arrived on campus.”

“Alternative” academic careers

Historically, graduate arts and sciences programs have often demurred from encouraging students to consider careers outside of academia, said Interim Dean of GSAS Eva Badowska, PhD. However, the data on actual students outcomes have consistently told a different story.

“About 50 percent of graduate students nationally go on to nonacademic careers,” Badowska said. “We have lived in a kind of imaginary space believing that only a small proportion of PhD holders end up in nonacademic careers, whereas there has always been a substantial number of PhDs who do so.”

Graduate schools are slowly starting to recognize this reality by offering more robust career preparation, Badowska said. At Fordham, this recognition has manifested through initiatives such as the newly formed Liberal Arts Task Force and now GSAS Futures.

“Preparation for academic careers happens beautifully in academic departments. But the graduate school can provide something in addition to that, which is the more professional side—for instance, CV and résumé writing, networking, digital presence,” she said.

“We’re giving students the space to think about and articulate the high-level skills they have away from the particular academic field in which they already practice them.”

Anna Beskin, an English doctoral candidate, regularly attends GSAS Futures events. One of the program’s greatest benefits, she said, is the opportunity to gather with peers and share thoughts about graduate training and life after Fordham. These discussions have helped Beskin and her classmates home in on the skills and qualities they have to offer the professional world.

“Being good at close reading, at analyzing, at seeing various perspectives of the same issue serves me well in daily life, not just in academics,” Beskin said. “I see that with my own [undergraduate]students, too. Every time we push their understanding of a text, or complicate something that seemed simple originally, it opens up a different path of thinking. It’s exciting.

“I wish we didn’t have to defend [graduate study], but I feel we sometimes do. So it’s good to be self-aware enough to at least be able to speak about it from your own perspective.”

Data mining

In addition to organizing professionalization events for GSAS students, the Futures program is also working with campus partners such as Alumni Relations to collect extensive data on graduate student outcomes. The goal is to both analyze where alumni have ended up and follow up with current students after graduating.

There’s more to the data analysis than simply observing outcomes, Van Wyck said. It is also important to dig deeper to understand the steps graduates took that led them to the jobs that seem incongruous—like Tinker’s path to biotechnology.

“The data is beginning to tell us a story that many people still have trouble believing. Yes, many of our students go on to nonacademic careers, but they don’t go on to failed careers,” he said.

“The clichés circulated in the media about the PhDs who go on to work at Starbucks are flat-out wrong, especially for Fordham graduate students. They don’t take into account the complexity of the lives our students lead after they graduate and the interesting careers they build for themselves.”

“We need to jettison the idea that there is something incongruous about going from being an English scholar to the director of New York Bio,” Van Wyck said.

Yet she was deeply unhappy.

Lord, who loved museums and thriving metropolises, found herself living in Bozeman, Montana 14 hours from the nearest major city and unable to afford a car on her assistant professor salary.

“One thing graduate students don’t do enough is think about themselves as a whole person—what do you want? What kinds of sacrifices are you willing to make to be an academic?” Lord told a group of master’s and doctoral students at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) on March 24.

After two years in Montana, Lord committed what many consider to be “academic suicide.” She left her tenure-track position and took a visiting professorship at the State University of New York at New Paltz to start fresh on the east coast. Two years later, she left academia altogether.

Alternatives to academia

Lord, who is now the chair and curator of the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, said that her situation is not uncommon among graduate students. Within her own field of history, a mere 30 percent of PhD holders both obtain and remain in tenure track positions.

Many students mistakenly believe that the only outcome of graduate education—particularly at the doctoral level—is academia, Lord said. If these students do manage to secure tenure-track positions at universities (an arduous task in itself) but then realize they aren’t keen on the often-nomadic academic lifestyle, they may be left feeling trapped and disenchanted.

“It takes an average of eight to nine years to complete a PhD,” Lord said. “That’s a long time. Most people enter graduate school in their twenties, which is a time of incredible change… It’s not surprising that so many people change their minds.”

Lord is a strong advocate for what many in higher education call “alt-ac,” or “alternative academic” careers—jobs outside of the conventional tenure-track professorship. However, she disagrees with the view that these jobs are somehow unconventional or merely the post-doctoral “Plan B.”

“There are all sorts of terms batted around for PhDs who leave the academy, for instance ‘Alt Ac’ or non-academic. But what bothers me about those terms is that they always define themselves against the tenure track.

“I don’t see my career as an alternative to something I ‘should’ have been doing,” said Lord, who has also worked as a historian for the U.S. Public Health Service and as the branch chief for the National Historic Landmarks Program of the National Park Service.

She urged the students to explore opportunities in libraries, historical societies, archives, museums, and more in addition to considering academia. The federal government is an especially favorable option for those with PhDs and has long been the largest employer of PhD holders in the United States, she said.

Moreover, these jobs allow graduates to factor in their personal wishes, such as where they want to live and whether they want a nine-to-five job.

A career for the whole person

Regardless of whether students choose the academic route, they can take certain actions now to keep all doors open, Lord said—for instance, writing for non-academic as well as academic outlets and conducting “informational interviews” with organizations to learn more about careers in these fields.

Most importantly, she said, think outside the box.

“In the academy, we get hung up on specialization, or thinking that X field hires only X type of person,” she said. “[In fact,] jobs hire people from all sorts of fields and backgrounds. You can remarket yourself in a way that you can’t do in academia.”

The event was sponsored by GSAS Futures, a professional-development initiative that prepares GSAS students for careers after graduation.

The idea of the cloistered doctoral candidate holds romantic charm, particularly when it comes to the humanities. It conjures images of sojourns to ancient libraries and the handling of original manuscripts, all in the service of attaining a coveted tenure-track position at a research university.

But according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, in 1970, 50 percent of full time faculty was either tenure or tenured track. By the late 2000s that figure had dropped to 31 percent. As tenure track positions dwindle, those graduating with doctoral degrees are eyeing a variety of alternate academic careers sometimes referred to as Alt-ac careers.

As the term Alt-ac is still somewhat fresh, definitions vary. There are some who believe such a career sits strictly within the university—say, in administration or in the library sciences and labs. There are others who would include think tanks, nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), museums, and other research institutions closely allied with the academy. Others would include private sector jobs.

Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D., a professor of English who has written extensively on the subject for the Chronicle, said there is some pushback by traditionalist Ph.D. mentors who are more “in the business of creating Mini-Me” than preparing students for the realities of the job market.

The conversation is being held against the backdrop of a Return on Investment (ROI) trend being touted by several graduate and undergraduate institutions. The methodology requires statistics that track a graduate’s income to measure how long it takes for them to make their ROI. It’s a trend that has many liberal arts colleges up in arms, and has been called into question by several humanists.

“I think you have to really reframe the terms when you apply measurements to the humanities. Even the term ‘metric’ has a different valence in humanities,” said Eva Badowska, Ph.D., associate dean for academic programs at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). “Measurements matter, but you have to contextualize how they matter.”

Badowska attended January’s Modern Language Association annual convention, where there were several panels on the subject.

“It’s remarkable,” she said. “A few years ago you would never have a session titled ‘alternative careers.’”

Any attempt to overhaul training humanities grad students for Alt-ac careers will require hard data, said Katina Rogers, Ph.D., a senior research specialist at the Scholarly Communication Institute at the University of Virginia (UVA).

Rogers holds her doctorate in comparative literatures with a specialty in 20th-century French literature. But she found an alternative calling through studying career paths for humanities scholars and the kinds of jobs and skills they have, as well as surveying employers to find out what skills Ph.D. graduates lacked.

“The goal is to move from anecdote to data in information regarding career paths for humanities scholars,” Rogers said of the study. “The idea to do this type of study came from conversations about changes in the academy—if grad school deans were going to make any curricular change, they needed data that the deans can point to.”

Rogers’ study not only looks at career paths of Ph.D.s, but also at humanities graduates who are All But Dissertation, aka ABD.

She said she is seeing jobs filled at universities in hybrid positions, from student services to research. Outside the campus gates she has seen positions at libraries, museums, cultural heritage institutions, think tanks, as well as roles in government and smaller nonprofits. She said there is potential for implementing some of the skills desired by these types of employers into the curriculum, particularly collaboration, communication skills, and project management.

“Training someone for one specific position, like tenure track, is not really the best,” she said. “But for Alt-ac to really take root in humanities, there needs to be a way to train those skills from a deeply humanist perspective, and have it jibe with the values that humanists really care about.”

Sal Giambanco, GSAS ’90, formerly a Jesuit priest, earned a master’s degree but was ABD in philosophy. As one of the original employees at PayPal, Giambanco has funneled his philosophy training into the tech sector and now is the head of human resources at Omidyar Network, where he is also a partner.

“I hate the term ‘non-academic jobs.’ It sounds like there’s good jobs and bad jobs,” he said. “The academy has got to get in touch with the real world.”

Humanists making the transition into the private sector, he said, need to translate their skill set from the language of the academy to the language of business.

“What’s important is the presentation of those skills in a format that a hiring manager can understand,” he said. “Yet there is little incentive for anyone in the humanities to talk the way I’m talking because there is an [inherent]suspicion of business. But the truth is the private sector drives everything we do.”

Despite the buzz surrounding alternative careers for Ph.D.s, an August 2012 survey of Fordham’s philosophy doctoral graduates found that 92 percent were employed in an academic capacity.

It would seem that, for many, the attractions of the academy are not to be dismissed. Nor is the draw of New York City, particularly for those on the hunt for Alt-ac careers.

“I loved French literature, but I pursued other things because I didn’t want a true nationwide academic search [for work], and New York has a ton of possibilities for interesting jobs outside the academy,” said Rogers, who works remotely at her UVA job from her Brooklyn apartment.
Jay Savage, Ph.D., GSAS ’11, said he met his wife Tara Czechowski, Ph.D., GSAS ’10, at Fordham.  Neither wanted to ditch the city, nor did they want to abandon their academic lifestyle.

“We weren’t willing to go to North Dakota or God knows where to teach,” said Savage. “So I asked myself, what could I do to stay connected to a university and have the time to do my own research on the side?”

Savage, who worked in Fordham’s IT department while earning his doctorate in English at the University, segued his tech-savvy talent into a position as director of academic information technology services at Yeshiva University. Czechowski is now the Dean of Summer Session at Fordham College at Rose Hill.

Savage said that the imaginary wall between administrative work and teaching is something of a misnomer; the reality is that there is much more synergy than is often noted, especially with the explosion in digital humanities in the academy.

“I’m not sure where all the specialization happened, but the paradigm we’ve had for the last 30 to 40 years created a supposed split between the academic work and the non academic work,” he said. “But I don’t think that the faculty is opposed to the administrative work; it’s a much more cohesive organization than some might have you believe.”

He said he found the notion of a wall going up, whether between academic or nonacademic careers, goes against the fundamentals of a Jesuit institution.

“The idea that we’re creating people to be cohesive, functional human beings needs to be embedded into the curriculum,” he said. “If it’s cura personalis, we shouldn’t draw an artificial distinction between academic and professional.”