When he didn’t make either team’s roster, he set his sights on a career in law enforcement like his father, a police officer. He enrolled at St. John’s and soon found himself in a required first-year philosophy course.

“I approached my professor and I said, ‘Why do I have to take philosophy? I want to work for the FBI,’” Hughes recalls. “Lo and behold, I fell in love with philosophy. It absolutely grabbed me. And then, the same thing happened with theology.”

That passion for the humanities would not only inspire Hughes to pursue several graduate degrees, but it would inform the way he approached his non-academic career—first in the FBI and then as a lawyer. And that connection between studying the humanities and discovering a range of possible career paths is something he hopes to share with students as part of the Graduate School of Arts and Science’s GSAS Futures, a program that promotes career pathway preparation for Fordham graduate students across the arts and sciences.

Beginning Graduate Studies, and Shifting from the FBI to a Lawyer

After graduating from St. John’s, Hughes landed that dream job with the FBI, working in the agency’s foreign counterintelligence division, where he received a commendation from the agency’s director for “a security matter of great interest to the bureau and the nation.”

But he also had plenty of free time when he wasn’t working, and he decided to fill it by pursuing a master’s degree in theology at Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“It was a great school, a perfect place to study theology,” he says. “It was a very enlightening experience, and I had some great professors.”

He says Transcendental Thomism, a course taught by longtime Fordham philosophy professor Gerald McCool, S.J., who died in 2005, had a “tremendous impact” on him.

After completing his master’s at Fordham, and while still balancing his work at the FBI, Hughes earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Columbia, followed by a law degree from New York Law School. With his J.D. in hand, Hughes left the FBI and began his career as a lawyer, first as a law clerk to a federal judge, and then as appellate counsel for several law firms and as the deputy solicitor general for the New York state attorney general’s downstate appeals and opinions bureau.

Just over 21 years ago, Hughes began working at the Greater New York Mutual Insurance Company, where he currently serves as executive vice president & general counsel, corporate secretary. In that role, he oversees all of the company’s corporate legal activities and regulatory matters. He also finds himself working closely with, among others, the claims, personnel, and underwriting departments.

With all his success as an attorney in the public and private sectors, Hughes says his graduate studies—including an L.L.M. from the NYU School of Law and a second master’s in philosophy from the New School—have been essential to the way he approaches legal cases and his general counsel responsibilities.

“[When]  I wrote briefs and I argued them before the appeals court, there’s no question that the philosophical and theological framing factored into how I viewed and presented legal issues,” Hughes says. “Attorneys with whom I interact many times will tell me they appreciate talking to me about the law because I often frame issues and arguments from a different perspective. They like the fact that they get a different perspective on the law, and on other ways of looking at legal issues.”

Continuing to Study, and to Teach

Just last month, Hughes successfully defended his dissertation, earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from the New School.

He has also continued teaching his metaphysics class at St. John’s, where he continues to encourage students to keep an open mind about philosophy even though it is seemingly unrelated to their majors or career goals.

“I am heartened to see my students showing an interest in philosophy that they might not have otherwise shown had someone not told them that courses like philosophy could represent something more to them than simply an academic requirement for school,” he says. “I get a great reward out of seeing this realization in the students.”

One might wonder how Hughes has managed to balance his high-pressure, full-time legal work with his lifelong commitment to learning and teaching. He says it all comes down to passion and a sense of vocation.

“I don’t think you can do all this unless you truly love the things you are studying,” he says. “Over my career I’ve worked an average of 12 hours a day. It’s not just a nine-to-five kind of existence. I have a very loving family that always supports me, which has afforded me the opportunity to pursue my career goals and my studies.

“With the exception of the law degrees, I didn’t have to earn all these degrees, but I did it because I actually love studying philosophy and thinking philosophically. When you love doing something, it makes it a lot easier to do it.”

Fordham in the Family

Hughes’ connections to Fordham have only grown in the years since he studied at GSAS. One daughter, Kathleen, graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2014 and received her M.S.T. from Fordham’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) the following year. His youngest daughter, Brittany, is currently in her final semester of GSE’s five-year integrated teacher education track, which will result in an M.S.T. degree this May.

In addition to becoming involved with GSAS Futures, Hughes also serves on the GSAS Dean’s Leadership Committee. He says that when he spoke to GSAS Dean Tyler Stovall, Ph.D., about his involvement, he was struck by Stovall’s immediate grasp of the connections between studying theology and philosophy and a successful legal career—and that this shared view of academic pursuits only strengthened his commitment to being an engaged member of the GSAS alumni community.

“I was so taken aback—in a good way—when the dean told me why he had set up a meeting with me,” Hughes says. “I think what Dean Stovall is doing is fabulous. I immediately told him that I’m willing to put in whatever time it takes to do whatever I can for Fordham, for the dean, and for the students.”

The panel, “Putting Advanced Degrees to Work in the Twenty-First Century: Academic Associations on Recent Trends in Career Pathways for Humanities and STEM Fields,” was organized by GSAS Futures, a professional development initiative sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Fordham’s Office of Career Services.

It featured Emily Swafford, Ph.D., director of academic and professional affairs at the American Historical Association, and Corrie Kuniyoshi, Ph.D., senior program manager at the American Chemical Society’s (ACA) education division and graduate and postdoctoral scholars office.

Real Value in a Ph.D.

As part of her presentation, Swafford highlighted Where Historians Work,  a new interactive online database developed by her association that has tracked the career outcomes of more than 8,000 historians nationwide. While she did not discount the challenges that graduates are finding in the job market, she noted that the there are some encouraging trends for students pursuing Ph.D.’s in all the humanities.

“When you learn to think like a historian or humanist or a scientist, in addition to the content knowledge you have picked up along the way, what you have learned gives you the ability to have an impact on the world that many others do not,” she said.

“These are ways of thinking and seeing that become reflexive over long periods of training. They enhance and complement what people might call transferable real-world skills.”

As proof, Swafford cited date from the American Council of Learned Societies, which has been helping Ph.D. students get jobs through its fellowship program, and has followed up in surveys. In their responses, employers said that the Ph.D. the students had earned was exactly what made them so attractive.

“It was the depth of thinking that a Ph.D. brought, it was the ability to quickly acquire knowledge, process information, and consider problems through new angles,” she said.

That’s because a Ph.D. bestows what she called “career diversity life skills”: communication, collaboration, quantitative literacy, intellectual literacy, and digital literacy.

Through the Where Historians Work database, the association found that 60 percent of participants went onto tenure and non-tenure track teaching positions. For everyone else, a dizzying array of positions await: general and operations managers, chief executives, education administrators, secondary school teachers, lawyers, editors, librarians, curators and writers, to name a few.

Swafford said it’s incumbent on students to recognize all these possibilities.

“Once we articulate these skills, what we realize is, actually, you need them to be a faculty member too. So, thinking broadly about how to get the most out of your doctoral degree is not just preparation for a career beyond the professoriate. It’s preparation for a career as a faculty member too, which is to say, there’s nothing to lose,” she said.

“It’s not a distraction and it’s not keeping you from finishing or doing what you want. It’s letting you craft it in a more empowered way.”

New Opportunities for STEM Degrees

Kuniyoshi said that when it comes to STEM fields, opportunities for employment are overwhelmingly in the private sector. In fact, 71 percent of students who earn a Ph.D. in engineering or one of the sciences will go onto to work in the corporate world, while 18 percent will work in academia, and 11 percent will work for the government. The outlook is very optimistic, she said, as STEM graduates currently have a lower unemployment rate than the general population, and demand is predicted to continue.

Of special note is the fact that there is a demand for graduates with science degrees in fields such as policy, law, media, communications, the nonprofit sector, and government.

“There’s a real push in our scientific community as a whole to really get away from referring to nonacademic jobs as alternative or nontraditional when in fact the more nontraditional jobs are the academic jobs,” she said.

She noted some overlaps between the humanities and sciences, in that the skills that a STEM doctoral program bestows are science and technology literacy, leadership, communication, project management, business management, teaching, mentorship, entrepreneurship, and intercultural team skills. The goal at the American Chemical Society, which is the world’s largest scientific society with 150,000 members, is to help graduates leverage all of these into what she dubbed “the sweet spot.”

“We tell students, career chemists, and faculty in every workshop we have that the reason this all matters is we can help people find that place where your values, your personal strengths, and the job market opportunities overlap,” she said.

“The sweet spot is a very dynamic thing, and it’s not something that is going to stay in place, because as you know, the job market opportunities aren’t the same as they were 10 years ago. Your personal strengths will also continue to move as you grow and develop different types of skills. This is the heart of everything we’re trying to communicate to the students, and what all of our programming is built on.”

Organizer Christine Kelly, a history Ph.D. candidate and GSAS Higher Education Leadership Fellow, said the forum exemplified the group’s commitment to fostering meaningful dialogue about the value of graduate education in light of shifting trends across job markets.

“Futures is organized by and for the graduate student body, and recognizes the many possible professional outcomes that graduate education can facilitate,” she said. We’re proud that we’re able to connect students with resources to fully prepare for their next professional steps.”

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.