Prologue: Our Hybrid Engagements

As a prelude to our conversation, we want to share some of our hybrid projects and the ways we envision weaving together our "academic skill set" with our other capabilities. These other skills include organizing community feasts, gathering digital knowledge, and building immersive online/offline game worlds. We hope that by sharing our passions, you as readers will be able to get a peek at how we, as junior scholars but senior dreamers, are working to carve out spaces for ourselves.

Alex has worked with young people across the United States on media production and social justice collaborations. In Los Angeles, she was an organizer of the Songs of the LA River Project, a songwriting competition for youth whose winners played their songs with the band Ozomatli after the LA River Day of Service. She co-founded Female Youth for Social Change, an afterschool program for teen girls in South Los Angeles. These young women learned participatory action research methods and digital media skills to conduct research about health and wellness in their communities. Currently in Providence, RI, Alex is collaboratively researching and designing an alternate reality game about local historical Black and Latina/o social movements with young people ages 16–25.

These projects emerged simultaneously with development of academic foundations for conceptualizing how to build community-engaged projects. Graduate school was the catalyst for adopting multiple identities: educator, researcher, and artist. About this experience, Alex says, "My ability to produce media exponentially increased because of affiliations with academic centers like the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at the University of Southern California. I entered graduate school to hone my skills as scholar; but as I'm almost emerging at the other end of the PhD, leaving graduate school not only as a scholar, but also as a community-engaged practicing artist and a designer."

Elyse has been engaged in multiple projects in and out of the university. Her work with Eat for Equity Seattle combines skills in creative philanthropy, community organizing, event planning, and cooking for a crowd to create sustainable community feasts for a cause. While this is not an academic engagement, per se, it relies on the listening and community-building skills she has developed through publicly engaged scholarship, as well as the organizational and writing skills she practices as a graduate student. Eat for Equity also creates spaces for community building, collaboration, learning, and merriment in a way that aligns with her own spatial politics as a geographer. Her work with Eat for Equity and her scholarship on philanthropy and politics enable her to network and partner with other creative philanthropy practitioners. Her latest project, in development, will develop a conference on creative philanthropy in Seattle during the 2014–2015 academic year.

Sarah has moved into a staff position at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, where she focuses on open access publishing, intellectual property, and data curation. She is a co-founder and editorial board member of the Atlanta Studies Network, a gathering place for scholars, students, organizers, and community members to share resources about the city of Atlanta. She is also the community and advocacy coordinator for the Open Access Button, a visualization project that maps pay walls that block access to research.

Devoted to developing and supporting arts programs, Johanna worked as an administrator at arts organizations in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and New York before seeking alternative pathways to advocate for the arts in social justice work. Now a PhD candidate, she unites her practices in social science research and the arts both through program management of arts initiatives and co-authoring academic articles with community arts practitioners. To Johanna, hybridity is essential because it enables her to become a nexus point of communication exchange between arts practitioners, academics, and community participants who may not share a common language even if they are united by a common goal. She continues to merge her scholarly practice as a researcher and educator with her professional arts practice working with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Together, this hybrid identity has become her creative-academic-activist practice.

Over the past two years of her PhD program, Janeke has attempted to engage with various publics around the ways that they interact with memory, history, and visual culture. Since fall 2012, she has worked on the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, which includes creating the digital means of connecting Guantánamo's long history to the post-9/11 surveillance of Somali Americans in Minnesota. She also works part time with the curator of African art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and, as part of her graduate assistantship, at the University of Minnesota's Digital Content Library. These activities have informed how she envisions her future career: as a hybrid one that incorporates engagement with various publics in both academic and non-academic spaces simultaneously and creates opportunity for variety, for learning new skills and sharpening existing ones, for commitment to activism, and for reimagining graduate education in innovative and creative ways.

 

Introduction

We are members of Imagining America's Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE) network, all doctoral students at various stages in our programs at universities across the country. While we are based in different academic disciplines, we are united in a desire to bring seemingly disparate interests together in future careers driven by scholarship, community, and social justice. This union brings us together to talk about ways to shift graduate education towards embracing hybrid career paths.

This text is organized into thematic sections that organically emerged through a series of conversations among the co-authors. The accompanying video highlights many of the main points in the text and serves as an abstract of each author's individual perspective.

We see this multimedia article as a launchpad to build community among like-minded alternative job seekers within and outside of academia. It is a call to action to identify our commonalities, differences, hidden strengths, and unique qualifications so that we can better equip ourselves to forge new pathways towards hybrid career alternatives.

 

Defining Hybridity

Hybrid careers combine multiple elements of an academic career, but interested scholars either perform them in non-academic spaces, or incorporate publicly engaged or community-driven practices into the academy. Whereas careers outside of the traditional tenure-track path have often been deemed "alternative," we reject this framing as too hierarchical, constituting "alternative" careers as the "other" to the esteemed (but ever more elusive) tenure-track job. Much of the conversation around "alt-ac" or alternative academic careers has embraced this framework, premising the tenure-track job as the always-desired goal.

We wish to recognize the generative moment of "alt-ac," coined as a response to the term "nonacademic." As Bethany Nowviskie writes, "The 'alt' in 'alt-ac' was never meant to evoke an 'oops! Plan B' moment, but rather to gesture at the alternative academy that we must build together, from the margins to the center and back again" (Nowviskie 2010). However, "alt-ac," as it has often been championed, still presumes the academy as the focal point for action and change. Hybridity allows for more fluidity: multiple sites of engagement, various stages of one's career, and movement. It is this possibility for movement that excites us about hybridity, signaling to both the movement between collaborations and career goals, as well as the movement-building that we see ourselves part of as we reimagine the traditional tenure-track job route.

We believe hybrid careers are a natural outgrowth of those engaged in public scholarship, digital humanities, and the arts. Throughout this piece, we discuss hybridity as an additional but crucially relevant path to pursue and cultivate through PhD programs, creating possibilities for new and innovative careers as well as future trajectories of graduate education.

 

Why Are We Passionate about New Fields?

While an increasing number of humanities PhDs turn to non-traditional career paths when they find they are unable to land a tenure-track position, a growing number of doctoral students identify non-traditional or hybrid careers as their primary objective. Like many of the engagements described above, these jobs are not merely back-up plans, but viable and gratifying career paths that PhDs choose for themselves (Tuhus-Dubrow 2013). They include positions in alternative archives, libraries, and museums; as program officers or researchers at foundations; in programs organizing with community-based organizations, as cultural anthropologists at computer software and hardware companies like Intel and Google; and other hybrid positions still being dreamed of by people finishing their doctoral degrees.

Landing either type of job, within or outside of the academy, takes dedicated work, creativity, and perseverance (Wood 2014). People with PhDs have gained expertise and advanced skills such as close reading, analytical skills, the social processes of interviewing, project management, and the ability to construct and sustain an argument, that they bring to non-academic jobs (Tuhus-Dubrow 2013). Some PhDs decide that alternative tracks leave them with more control over their professional and personal lives, finding such paths more fulfilling (Polk 2013). This is particularly challenging in an American culture of labor fueled by growing precariousness in general (Ross 2009) and tenuousness within academic careers in particular (Martin 2011). We have observed and experienced this trend in our own graduate school careers.

Elyse: I'm drawn to a hybrid career in order to bring my best, whole self to the work I do. The environments and climates of many institutions of higher ed that I've observed seem to stifle creativity, engaged pedagogy, and hybridity in teaching positions. Instead, they valorize the three-pronged service-research-teaching model that assigns one's engagements to more rigid categories. Certainly, I've seen a few job postings that sound amenable to my vision for myself: they are interdisciplinary, encourage civic engagement among their students, and ask faculty to teach creatively and with community partners. For instance, a faculty posting at a progressive undergraduate institution sought candidates with public, interdisciplinary, and engaged scholarship.

Alex: I've had non-traditional experience and skill building alongside the expected research skill building through my PhD training. While completing typical theory and methods coursework, I executed events with musicians, museums, and schools, as well as co-designed digital media curriculums with high school students who were previously pushed out of the school system. And I'd like to think the process has been circular: academic PhD coursework has influenced how I engage outside the ivory tower and my relationships and work in the neighborhoods where I live have influenced how I think about utilizing and building my particular researcher skills.

Janeke: As a PhD student in history, I am invested in some of the basic premises of my discipline—particularly that pasts and histories matter and have material and discursive implications. However, I have often felt that my discipline, and academia on the whole, excludes, silences, and marginalizes those who produce knowledge outside of the academy even when it attempts to call these practices into question through community engagement. Therefore, I would like to create a career that bridges academia and various communities on a platform that is accessible to various publics.

Alex: As Janeke said, why does what we want have to be the alternative? We have broad skill sets to think critically about things, and we have research skills that can translate in many different ways into many different things. For example, knowing how to collect and utilize qualitative data has usefulness outside of academic research reports. I've been working with a youth arts program to collect youth-generated qualitative data about the program's impact in order to strengthen grant applications to foundations and other funders.

Johanna: I seek a way to use my abilities in both nonprofit administration—specifically, in the areas of curating, programming, and development—and in academia—in the areas of social research, theory, and community engagement—in order to advance social justice on a local level. I believe that research, community engagement, and planning can jointly achieve justice and equity.

Sarah: I came to my PhD program in American Studies at Emory University's Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts in 2009 with an interest in public scholarship, and I knew I wanted to learn more about how knowledge is created with, by, and for the public. My dissertation research focuses on how public histories of human rights are produced and reinterpreted in the US and South Africa, which led me to question distinctions between "public" and "academic." At Emory I found a cohort of graduate students who are also interested in critically engaging the demarcation between public and academic. I have become deeply skeptical of any conceptualization of public scholarship that does not foreground a dialogic relationship between "the public" and "the academy." That is, public scholarship that presumes a role of expertise for the academic and a role of passive recipient for "the public" is not the kind of scholarship I wish to engage with. I am far more interested in the ways that publics can be active participants in making knowledge, not just receiving it.

At the same time, my work on various digital projects at Emory, including our open access journal Southern Spaces, led me to want to rethink scholarly publishing—including what academic scholarship can look like and how to make it more accessible.

 

Emotions and Obstacles

We are simultaneously excited and frustrated by our choice to pursue a non-traditional path. Those who have successfully navigated a hybrid career in areas like Digital Humanities still find themselves mixing traditional management and research work with technological components from coding to design, which often leads to double the amount of work (Dunn 2014). While we are angry about these obstacles, we are excited to know what we want and to be able to plot the direction of our own futures.

Alex: I have four general emotions around the state of "traditional" academic jobs and alternative/hybrid careers: terrified, excited, and sometimes cheated and angry. This feels a bit like feeling sorry for myself sometimes. My general thought process is—why are so many PhD students accepted into programs if there aren't jobs after graduation? But I don't think that's entirely fair because the PhD skillset is not just training us for professorial positions, but also to be inquisitive, critical thinkers with the ability to make connections with people and to enact change. This is especially important for us as community-engaged researchers. So potentially the center of my anger is in the institutional capping of our imaginations, such as the expectation that we enter PhD programs solely to become tenure-track university professors. PhD students often have to be cautious about who they tell within their departments about their non-academic aspirations and anything but a tenure-track job can be considered a failure. Creative career mapping is not encouraged, although imaginative thinking is what is going to keep us, as graduate students, afloat and salient in the future.

Elyse: There is anger associated with being leaders in this new movement of scholarship, for example, as part of Imagining America's PAGE Fellows. While it's good to bring us together, it's not going to be enough to fuel the movement going forward. But recognizing some of the collective skills we do have that unite us is more imaginative and has the potential to keep me excited, motivated, and moving forward. While anger is a starting point that we can all buy into, it can build into a more generative conversation around what skills we all bring and how to move forward.

Johanna: It is exhausting to constantly re-evaluate and re-frame my work in hybrid spaces in a way that can be understood by different audiences. I find that in discussing my work and how I engage with both academic and arts practitioner communities I have to carefully select language that a specific group can understand. I hope to find a space that understands this hybrid identity and values imagination in my future career.

Sarah: I think it's healthy to dwell on the anger for a second because there's a lot to be angry about! I get frustrated sometimes by what I see as an assumption that graduate students are constantly complaining. You see these sentiments every time an article about graduate labor or job placement comes out in a venue like the Chronicle of Higher Education—responses often seem to contend that "the job market has always been rough" or that academia is a meritocracy where "good people get jobs." This kind of pushback can make it hard for graduate students to see their concerns as legitimate; in effect, these arguments can silence students. But labor and working conditions are part of really big issues that are part of higher ed, and also part of our economy at large. We can also be limited by disciplinary conventions that prescribe narrow career paths. Though we want the academy to be a place of generative, imaginative work, we don't always see that.

Janeke: But what gives me a lot of hope is that we are actually able to talk about this. I can't help but wonder what it was like 20 years ago for people who were in the same situation. I don't necessarily think that this is a new thing. The kind of pressure that we've come under, that academia has come under, and certainly the economic pressure might show themselves in new ways. But I'm pretty sure that many years ago, there were people who had really interesting ideas, wanted to do different things with a PhD, and couldn't necessarily find ways to express that. Or didn't have the kind of platforms that we have now, like PAGE or "alt-ac," that attempt a conversation on non-academic career paths. So while there is frustration, it helps knowing that there are avenues out there, even though you have to work hard just to identify them.

Elyse: I want to talk a little bit about money, even though I don't want to talk about money. As someone who is committed to social justice, and specifically about making Seattle and the Northwest more equitable through social justice philanthropy, I want to fuel the conversation about what it means to give and do philanthropy and how that can be for more than just really wealthy people. We all have a stake in giving and voicing what kind of work we want to see organizations and communities doing for social change. I think that's really exciting. I also know that my really small income is a barrier to me making meaningful inroads into that conversation.

Did any of you read artist Molly Crabapple's article on Vice (2013)? It is about the myth of meritocracy, and how having money allows us greater access and success. After constant struggle, the author finally got some recognition, clawed her way to get money, and is now making amazing paintings. Gallery owners recognize this and ask why she hasn't made them before and she answers that she never had money before but now she can make the work as she wants. I resonated with this—the impact that we're all capable of making does take resources. And stability. Not being able to think long-term because you don't know where funding for the next project is coming from can stifle imagination, but it also requires it because you always have to be thinking creatively about the next project. It is a constant tension.

I was recently offered a well-paid position that I am qualified to do and passionate about. It was incredibly exciting and validating to learn that my skills are worth money, but it made me realize that we all should be making a lot more money. I don't say that from a greedy perspective, but that if we want to make impact and change the conversation, resources help [agreement from others]. That's my little rant about money.

Johanna: The academy is in constant communication with foundations and government agencies to secure support for university programs, and also can serve as a funding platform for community organizations. Our hybrid skillsets, such as critical writing, program evaluation, and creative technologies, are relevant to the shifting priorities of foundations and government funders who are increasingly interested in creative approaches and broader scope of work.

Alex: I am emotionally prepared to always be on a money hustle or to be a hybrid intellectual consultant. I've been calling myself a fearless dreamer academic mercenary for a while in preparation for an unpredictable job market.

I've also been thinking about what kinds of narratives we absorb as graduate students that are either imposed on us or we embody through this process. On the topic of money, one of these narratives is the performance of poverty. The romantic notion of the "starving graduate student" sacrificing everything for the production of research is ridiculous. But this identity seems to be a constant narrative we hear, and then we start to wonder if it is expected that we're always broke. These questions lead to a performance of poverty that upholds the justification of severely underpaying adjunct lecturers—and PhDs who will accept those paltry salaries. We become conditioned to believe that something will turn around if we're relentless and work hard. The death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, an 83-year-old adjunct who taught French for twenty-five years with no benefits and died from cardiac arrest (Anderson 2014), shows how entrenched we become in this narrative.

 

Pursuing Alternative Jobs and Employment Paths

We are excited and scared of our desires to pursue paths within and outside of academia. We believe in our choices to reconceptualize post-doctoral career paths and see ourselves among the growing cohort of graduate students who are leading the conversation and movement in this evolving, hybrid landscape. Connecting with peers reinforces that you are not alone in this journey. Identifying mentors is also valuable in highlighting possible pathways to follow and providing inspiration. In figuring out our own personal paths there are a number of current initiatives that we find worthy of further consideration, whether they are providing services and resources towards alternative careers or are models for rethinking graduate education. A few of these resources are Versatile PhD, Alt-Academy: A MediaCommons Project, Collaborative Futures, and The Praxis Program at the Scholar's Lab.

Johanna: There are existing career paths that serve as hopeful, encouraging beacons of hybrid possibilities for me. Social researchers at foundations can address critical issues of the contemporary moment. NGOs and think tanks employ people responding to needs they identify on the ground. For example, Maria Rosario Jackson has moved between both of these worlds. She spent nearly two decades leading research on arts and culture at the Urban Institute where she was able to develop immediate research interventions that responded to what she observed across the country. She now serves on the National Council on the Arts and works at the Kresge Foundation.

Sarah: I consider myself fortunate to have amazing mentors. Women including Miriam Posner, the Digital Humanities Program Coordinator at The Praxis Program with UCLA, and Franky Abbott, an ACLS public fellow with the Digital Public Library of America, have worked in the digital scholarship center at Emory. They have both been incredibly generous and candid about their experiences as hybrid academics and the strengths and shortcomings of these kinds of positions. While many of these jobs offer flexibility and a higher quality of life (no tenure clock!), they may also be contingent, grant-funded, or marginalized in the academy. These jobs are also not always legible to tenure-track academics; that is, some faculty refuse to recognize these positions as intellectually productive, or that the people in these positions hold PhDs. Issues of academic hierarchy can still predominate.

Elyse: I can pinpoint the exact moment that I started taking alternative or hybrid careers more seriously. At the 2012 Imagining America conference in New York, I sat in on a session with organizers Sylvia Gale and Miriam Bartha. Sylvia, one of my professional mentors, had applied for academic jobs when she finished her PhD, but all of them felt a bit too rigid and lacked space to creatively imagine the position and role. She found her current job in the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond where she wears many hats: connecting students and faculty to community partners, teaching her own courses, facilitating community-engaged research, advocating for full participation initiatives on her campus, and doing administrative and management tasks.

I realized that this type of job may suit me better. That's not to say I've given up on traditional academic careers. Rather, when I'm honest with myself, I see that the competition, stress, and pressure to publish and do cutting edge research might not be the best fit for me. I connect with people, I like projects, I do well when I have multiple types of work to do, and I love to teach. It's my favorite part of what we do. I also love to write, and I think that a hybrid job could creatively implement education and writing alongside more project-oriented collaborations and public work.

Alex: The one person who's shed some light on my potential hybrid career trajectory is Rick Benjamin. He's a Fellow at New Urban Arts and the State Poet of Rhode Island. When we first met in a youth art space—a non-academic zone—we shared in common that we both had affiliations at Brown University. He said to me, "Yeah, I have a PhD, but you don't need to lead with that. Having a PhD means that I learned how to look at things critically." He teaches college courses, advises artist mentors at a youth after-school program, teaches poetry in community and assisted living centers, and enjoys life with his family. Not leading with the PhD was something key to think about for me when imagining my future trajectory. I don't want my PhD to be the starting price for admission when we as engaged graduate students have so much more to offer than what we are asked to display as we jump through institutional hoops.

Sarah: My friend and fellow graduate student Joey Orr—a practicing artist and member of the collective John Q—co-founded the Emory Visual Scholarship Initiative (VSI) to provide a community for graduate students and faculty who work with hybrid and/or sensory methodologies. VSI has been able to provide financial and administrative support for students trying to advocate for a place for "non-traditional" work in the academy.

Johanna: I am glad that we have aspiring mentors and role models to look towards, particularly when there are many ongoing challenges in these paths. How do nontraditional, hybrid job candidates present themselves? How do they engage with a traditional workplace and carve out a space within it for creative community partnerships or technological research methods or whatever they see as valuable?

Alex: The future is also exciting. I'm thinking about all of this constantly to feel ready to go on the job market this fall (2014) for traditional jobs—and to feel secure about not expecting interviews or offers—while also thinking about other possible positions. What do I want to do? Where do I want to live? What am I passionate about? What would make me happy? These are not questions traditional tenure-track job seekers usually get to ask themselves.

 

Achieving Balance Within the Challenge of Multiple Identities

As doctoral students interested in public scholarship and community engagement, we are constantly working to balance our professional, scholarly, and teaching identities while also connecting with community groups and organizations. Meanwhile, we must save space for self-care and personal relationships. Some nontraditional jobs offer advantages over many academic positions: higher pay, more public engagement, as well as a balanced lifestyle that academia does not always encourage (Tuhus-Dubrow 2013). We do not seek to create a binary between nontraditional and traditional jobs, but rather to create a view of holistic possibilities at a range of organizations and institutions as we establish our own personal hybrid paths.

Janeke: Given that my training in history is largely academic, I actively seek out opportunities to develop skills and knowledge that do not come with my program. This often leaves me feeling overwhelmed and overworked as I try to be engaged with different communities and connect with digital humanities and public history working groups, while still trying to write seminar and conference papers that conform to the academic conventions of the discipline.

Elyse: Most importantly, regardless of the job I find, I want to be able to do meaningful work while maintaining overall health and wellness. For me, this means time for friends and family, for exercise, to cook good food (regularly), to organize events, and to have for myself to reflect and slow down. This balance is HARD, and it is imperative to me that I maintain it, even if it means the work goes slower or I have to say "no" to projects or commitments. I have found that since expanding my own aspirations to include a more hybrid position, I've felt less pressure to maintain the rigid, endless work habits that are all too common in graduate school. My measures of success include wellness; I couldn't maintain my multiple commitments without the energy that comes from a balanced life.

Alex: There is a crazy underlying idea of being made to feel guilty for taking care of yourself. What benefit comes from overworking yourself until you're absolutely burned out?

Sarah: The more time I spent working on a balanced life, the more I saw the potential of hybrid jobs that would make meeting my priorities possible. Concurrently, I watched friends on the academic job market endure endless rejections. Stories abounded of positions for which there were 800, 900, 1000 applicants. I heard faculty urge students to just "hang in there" with stopgap contingent jobs, willfully ignoring the psychic and physical stress of contingent labor. My friends worked in jobs teaching five or six courses a semester, feeling fortunate if they had partially subsidized health insurance. It became clear to me that I could not advocate for self-care and a reimagining of our institutions if I was not willing to give the same to myself.

Elyse: In thinking about the CV and moving between different sectors, while I know that a traditional tenure-track job may not be my goal, I play the game a little just to make sure that I leave that option on the table. I still care about publishing and conference presentation, which I'd want to do anyway. But I feel that I still need to play the game, if only to maintain relationships with my advisers. Has anyone else has felt that tension?

Johanna: I strongly believe that conference presentations and papers are also relevant in sectors outside of traditional academic career paths, such as working in a research space, foundation, or even a community organization. Similarly, project management, grant writing, and other professional skills benefit our academic resumes. I have seen friends start their own hybrid organizations that rely on their ability to connect with both academic and professional sectors.

Alex: Maybe we all operate at a higher frequency and maybe that's what draws us to this kind of activity. The performance of work . . . I don't want that. I like the combination of participatory research, teaching, and community-engaged projects so I am not stuck in only academic spaces. That's the point. To have different passions, whether they're research or art or youth-led civic projects, which inspire other work.

 

Leadership in an Emerging Field

Finding community with other doctoral students and PhDs who have followed alternative paths is essential. Together we are leaders in this professional movement, carving pathways for others to follow, led by the actions of those who came before. Discussions about changing the structure and content of PhD programs to accommodate a changing economy, particularly with more focus on skills relevant across industries, are also taking place (Lubar 2013). Networking and building relationships with people is essential (Wood 2014). We hope that building this conversation by first establishing connections between people interested in countering the traditional academic path will encourage interrelated action to expand future opportunities.

Alex: I'm terrified because imaginative thinking has not been part of our critical training and it's up to us to make sure we're getting what we need to prepare for future hybrid careers. We have each other, other former graduate students and PhDs who are using their training for non-professorial tracks, and the internet. I read a lot to try fill the gaps where my "institutional" training has fallen short, such as learning how to maintain an academic CV and a different job skill resume.

Janeke: I think we really need to broaden the conversation on "alternative careers" and graduate education by entertaining the possibility that there are PhD students who actually think of what has been framed as the alternative as their first choice. These are students who recognize the value of having a PhD for potential employment outside of academia and who also challenge the academy to re-evaluate its approach to graduate education, thereby also cultivating different ideas about what it means to be successful as a PhD—that this can no longer be defined by landing a tenure-track job (Pate 2014).

Johanna: Creating a hybrid path means being a constant advocate for your own unique position within a university, foundation, community organization, or nonprofit. It is tough to be a leader in a new movement. We must figure out how to become advocates for one another, even if our own disciplines do not align; to build awareness and support for ourselves, and an accessible path of understanding for potential employers, whether within academia or beyond.

Alex: It would be so great if introductions to PhD programs addressed these complexities, and told us, "Be prepared. It's going to be hard. You will spend the next couple of years figuring out how to do what you're going to do," instead of, "We're putting you down this little chute, and success means getting a tenure-track job." It would also be helpful to hear, "You need to figure out your future career yourself, but you'll learn skills in the meantime and that will help you decide what you want to do." Having an open conversation would support us in being leaders in the field.

 

Work Cited