The Alt-Ac Decision (for PhDs)

by Robyn Byrd

Whether you have fallen out of love with your specific field, or have simply realized you don't want to spend your life at a university (darn kids everywhere!), there may come a time when you consider the alt-ac path. That is, looking for a job outside of universities, and maybe even outside of research. This might seem frightening and even disappointing to even consider, after years of work and best laid plans for the future.

Yet in this economy, a job that is a lucrative alternative to an academic career (hence, alt-ac) may be a prudent plan. I myself have considered looking for alt-ac work, probably for a temporary bridge between the doctorate and a tenure-track teaching position. After a decade of low-wages and part-time work, I am ready for a "grown-up" salary! But then I have to consider... how could this break with university culture and work affect a future prospective tenure-track opportunity? Woe is me! This is hard.

First, some things to consider about alt-ac:

Is alt-ac your long term plan? Are you ready to get out for good? Motivated by pay? Go for it. Your track record of project-management, working with teams (your committee), and stick-tuitiveness (not to mention your intelligence) make you a great catch for the corporate world.

Is this a temporary bridge plan, because of the poor academic job market? Do your research. Do the types of universities you wish to court consider alt-ac work to be a lowly thing or a shirking of your nobler projects? Or do they understand, as a community college or state school might, that financial pressures put people to work at all sorts of things? Seek a job that gives you experiences that could leverage you back into a highly-sought research/teaching position. Or even aim for an administrative role that would not have been open to you as a "merely" academic Ph.D.

Do you want to leave the university, but hate the idea of the corporate world? Research options in non-profit work, consultancy, and government offices. Depending on your credentials, you could work for a state-run food bank, a local housing authority, a non-profit counseling and psychiatry firm, or even the U.S. Geological Survey (there's an office right up the road from DeKalb...). Some of these positions would not pay as well as the corporate world, but they would allow you to continue your research and problem-solving in impactful ways, perhaps even more impactful than the classroom.

Are you looking for a job the way a normal person would? This isn't the academic job market! Reformat your CV as a resume. Seek out workshops now on how to maximize your LinkedIn presence. LinkedIn employers frequently contact people like us for non-academic work.

These are just a few problems and questions that have been on my mind, and a few ideas for where scientists, teachers, psychologists, and all manner of doctorate holders could find work outside of the familiar, yet sometimes growth inhibiting, landscape of the college campus. Good luck in your search! The Ph.D. may narrow your opportunities in some ways, but the payoff is in the specific and rewarding opportunities it opens up.

Graduate Students: University Assets, Underpaid Labor

by Robyn Byrd

On a recent Wikipedia journey, I ended up on the page defining graduate assistants. They got some of it right. But the page doesn't mention that many grad students are not exactly "assistants." We teach classes as the instructor of record, developing our own syllabus and lesson plans. We run labs by ourselves. We hold office jobs that keep the doors open. We are mandatory reporters, freshman advisors, and perform hundreds of other roles that carry the burden of a "real" job. Sure some of us spend a semester here and there "assisting," but many of us have regular duties that would fall under a full-time job description. 

The fact that people outside of academia continue to think of us as "little helpers" rather than workers and laborers, allows our low pay and lack of representation to persist.  

The real clincher on the Wiki definition? People also don't understand how little we're paid: "The stipend allows for the graduate student to focus on their studies instead of a full-time job, but pays a significant portion of the income of a full-time job." I laughed out loud at this. Perhaps if you go to Yale and are a member of Local 33. But such a tier of income is not accessible for most American graduate assistants, forcing us to work outside the university to make ends meet, compromising the studies the assistantship is supposed to fully support. At NIU, almost everyone I know who has a master's degree works as an adjunct (which is a whole other can of worms and exploited labor). This makes life extremely stressful, and puts studying extremely on the back burner.

What can we do to alleviate the suffering of grad students? It may be somewhat voluntary suffering, but for no other laborious job do we fault the workers for asking for more money, especially when they work for an enormous entity. What's different about our work? What's different about a university system with millions versus a corporation with millions?  Non-academics and administrators seem to perpetuate the myth that we don't do much but "assist" and that our lifestyle is easy. A chosen path of intellectual pursuit and austerity. But it doesn't have to be this way. We are academics. But we are also laborers.

There are ways to solve this imbalance!

A graduate nursing student conducts a patient exam

• Increase awareness and transparency about grad student labor, and improve the language we use to talk about it: First and foremost, any of the below suggestions will require a change in how administrators and tenured faculty talk about GAs, their work, and their pay, both to the public and to new recruits. For instance, perhaps "assitsantship" is an outdated word that does not accurately reflect the professional and valuable work that grad students contribute. Even "stipend" could use an update since we pay taxes on that as income!

UW's GA union marches

• Unionization: While some GAs at U.S. universities have managed to organize unions, faculty, admins, and former students I've talked to say it is quite difficult and discouraging. Yet grad students do not have the representation that many other university employees do, so how do we ask for what we need? How do we protest pay decreases, terrible work schedules, or a refusal to give us medical leave? We have to do this as individuals, each governed by a different handbook per the year we began our current program. It's quite a mess, and even if one of us can follow through with some kind of complaint or demand, we are all alone. No other university employee has to deal with this lack of security for such a long-term position. (But they make it not so long by giving out 9-month contracts, and not so important by not even lumping us in with employees.) Unionization would definitely benefit all GAs. Nearby universities with GA unions include UW Madison (which claims the first ever!) and UI-UC.

• University Reorganization: I fear the only way grad student unionization could become an accepted norm would be for universities to reorganize and reprioritize. If knowledge is the product of the university, then the teachers, including the rookies, must be treated well. The plights of the adjunct and the grad student (while university administration swells and football fields get built and re-built) show just how backward university priorities have become. I don't know what it would take for this to happen. Do you?

• Fewer GAs: Finally, one way to reduce the pressure on the university to provide a living wage to grad students, is to reduce the number of grad students. Since assistantships are usually awarded to only the most talented grad students, many others are paying full tuition and not receiving a stipend. If GAs were based more on enrollment than on growing a program, that would ensure that there is plenty of work to go round, and plenty of budget to cover it. While those doing the hiring would tell you they consider enrollment, I have seen cohorts come in with nothing to do, or having to snag jobs from more experienced GAs. Don't hire so many!

When it comes down to it, I don't have one good answer to our problems. But I know we are workers, not just assistants, and I know that we don't have to suffer the way we do just because people don't understand what it is we even do, or how little we actually get paid.

These views are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Thesis and Dissertation Office.

Explain Your Project. You Have Three Minutes.

 

You’ve probably heard of the elevator speech: a short summary of an idea that you can pitch to someone (a prospective business partner, for example) while waiting for and then sharing an elevator.  You may even have crafted (or thought of crafting) a variation on the elevator speech for your thesis or dissertation project.  But have you worked out just how long this short speech should be?  Length is part of the official name for an increasingly popular speech contest that challenges grad-student participants to craft such a presentation: Three Minute Thesis (3MT®).  Details behind the 3MT speech are well worth exploring.

Hatched in a Shower?

A decade ago, experiencing a severe drought, people in Queensland, Australia adopted several ways to conserve water, including limiting showers to three minutes.  During those parched days, it seems that Alan Lawson, an emeritus professor and graduate school dean, was glancing at a three-minute egg timer attached to his bathroom wall when he suddenly found inspiration for the Three Minute Thesis.  This account of the humble beginnings of 3MT, now an international academic speech competition, doesn’t stray too far from historical information provided by the University of Queensland, the birthplace of 3MT.  Contests are now held in 62 countries outside Australia.  The contest in a nutshell: grad-student contestants must present their projects in three minutes.  If a contestant chooses to use visual support, it must take the form of a single, non-animated PowerPoint slide, displayed when the contestant starts speaking.  (No other visuals or props permitted). Currently 237 universities in the U.S. participate, including the University of Kentucky, which shares several informative videos derived from their past 3MT events.  Currently there are only three institutions participating in Illinois: UIC, ISU, and SUIC.  Last year’s contest at SUIC was the first one ever held there.

Competition Aside...
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Competing is a primary goal in a 3MT event.  Ultimately, however, becoming a 3MT winner is beside the point.  Preparing such a speech is its own reward, valuable now and in the near and distant future.  How so?  Think of all those times over the past few months (or more) when you’ve found yourself explaining the project you’ve been working on to colleagues, friends, and family members.  Wouldn’t it be great to rattle all that off smoothly in three minutes (or less)?  Or picture your upcoming defense, an event that will be open to the public.  At the start, you’re going to need to summarize and rationalize your project to your committee members, your outside reader (if defending a dissertation), and other attendees in a meaningful and concise manner.  You’ll most likely have more than three minutes to do this, but why not practice so that you can capture your project’s essence in such a short amount of time?  Further, when you go on the job search and eventually become a finalist candidate, you’ll need to be ready to give a three-minute, one-minute, or 30-second summary of your project, depending on circumstances during interviews, presentations, and/or informal meetings at your prospective place of employment.  Why not pull together the longest of these short summaries now?  If you can explain your argument cogently and completely in three minutes (or less), you keenly demonstrate expertise in your field, familiarity with your areas of specialty, and a firm grasp of your project’s place in scholarship.  That is, you constructively crystallize the significance of your thesis or dissertation research.

Drafting and Organization
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When you set out to create an effective three-minute thesis speech, consult the guidelines and judging criteria that Queensland provides.  As emphasized in those materials, a successful presentation centers on listeners’ needs: it starts off by creating a bridge to their interests, avoids jargon, summarizes important research outcomes, and ends by inspiring a desire to know more about the topic or to take some kind of action.  To meet these goals, arrange your presentation so that it answers the following questions:

     * Why is your research important to your listeners?
     * What brief examples best illustrate your project’s outcomes?
     * After hearing about your project, what should listeners do next?

An effective visual-support slide supports your message clearly, simply, and concisely.

Stand on Shoulders 

A famous speaker once responded to a request for a formal speech by saying, essentially: “If you want me to talk for three hours, I’m ready today.  If you want me to talk for only three minutes, I’ll need two weeks to prepare.”  Mark Twain is commonly associated with this quotation.  Words to the same effect (with variations) have also been attributed to several other celebrated orators: Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, Will Rogers...and on and on.  In short, plenty of sharp wits are popularly linked to an important communication principle, which the 3MT contest underscores: expressing big ideas compactly requires careful thought and planning.  As you progress toward completing your program, follow the footsteps of accomplished speakers.  Give yourself ample time to prepare a good—and short—presentation of your thesis or dissertation.

Images: CC0 and Public Domain

In the News (3)

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across the strangest article about dissertations and the Russian black market. After reading the piece, I knew that it was time for another installment of graduate degrees in the news!


"The Craziest Black Market in Russia" by Leon Neyfakh (click here)

Last year, a prominent member of President Putin's United Russia party was accused of plagiarizing his dissertation. Neyfakh comments that "more than 1,000 high-achieving , well-heeled Russians . . . have recently been caught plagiarizing large parts of their dissertations." And the majority of these individuals . . . are politicians!!

Apparently, these individuals -- politicians, judges, doctors, police officials!! -- are paying ghost writers to write their dissertation for them. In some cases, the ghost writer copies and pastes someone else's work, passing it off as an original piece of research, and then hands it off to the person who hired them. Neyfakh reports on a number of companies advertising their services as dissertation ghost writers. Apparently, it is big business.

A volunteer organization known as Dissernet is responsible for exposing instances of high-profile plagiarism. Thus far, the group has uncovered 5,600 cases of suspected plagiarism. Consequently, Dissernet has been the target of reprisal by the individuals accused of plagiarism.

The article is brilliant. You might think that this is a spoof, but it is not. Published in Slate -- not The Onion -- I started off shocked while reading, but by the end I was laughing my head off. This is perfect beach reading.


"PhDs Embrace Alternative Dissertations" by Vimal Patel (click here)

In 2014, Nick Sousanis successfully defended his dissertation on visual thinking at Columbia University. The remarkable aspect of this story has to do with the fact that Sousanis wrote his dissertation in the format of a comic book. According to Patel's article,

"For a variety of reasons, humanities programs at many colleges have started to allow dissertation formats to veer from the traditional book-length monograph. These projects have taken the form of a suite of three or more papers, a documentary, an interactive analysis of a text, or even a comic book."

Despite this fact, many departmental hiring committees continue to prefer candidates who write traditional dissertations. They are considered the "gold standard" for tenure track teaching jobs. However, for graduate students not interested in pursuing work in academia, an alternative dissertation may be ideal. For instance, Jesse Merandy, a Ph.D. candidate in English, is creating a "game for mobile devices that tells users about the life and work of Walt Whitman as they walk Brooklyn Heights, where the poet lived." His project proved invaluable in landing a job helping professors and students with digital projects.

I was fascinated by this discussion of alternative dissertations and started to wonder what a non-traditional dissertation might look like in fields other than the humanities. Also, Patel includes an invaluable piece of advice for graduate students -- speak with your thesis or dissertation director about your career interests before you start writing your thesis or dissertation. Your career hopes may be an important factor when deciding to write a traditional or non-traditional thesis or dissertation. 
 

In the News! (helpful hints)

I stumbled across a three part series by David D. Perlmutter in The Chronicle of Higher Education a few weeks ago. The series is titled “The Completion Agenda.” I want to note at the outset that these articles are based in part on Perlmutter’s own experience as a graduate student and a professor, which made the content that much more credible. 

In Part 1, Perlmutter's thesis is the following: Just finish your dissertation. There is no such thing as the perfect dissertation. Perlmutter reminds graduate students that their written work is not a dissertation until it has been defended and submitted. Until you have reached these final stages, your document is nothing more than a word file saved on your computer or USB drive. Do not put off completing the work because you have discovered some new study related to your topic, a new piece of secondary research that may or may not be relevant to your thesis, or because you found out about a class offered in some other department that you think might offer a new perspective related to your field. Simply finish the dissertation! Do all the requisite research, but remember that your dissertation is a work in progress that can be revised and updated over several years after you have completed your graduate school program and moved on to the next phase of your professional life.

In Part 2, Perlmutter reflects on the defense (previously written about on this blog). He shares an entertaining anecdote -- one that, I must admit, reflects the concerns that I have about my own future defense experience:

I recall being startled at the dissertation defense when professors in the young man’s department began delivering scorching assessments of his theory, method, cases, and conclusions. As the incendiaries kept flying I grew concerned about his health. He whitened, started sweating visibly, and several times laid his forehead on the table. When it came my turn to speak, I froze and ended up sputtering, "Well, you have answered all my questions!" and fell silent.

But then something incredible happened: The candidate was asked to leave the room, and the committee briskly and unanimously voted in favor of passing his dissertation with minimal revisions. He was ushered back in to the accompaniment of back slaps, clapping, and exclamations of "Welcome, Doctor!"

Turns out that the scene was a norm in the department, a version of some tribal coming-of-age ritual, except the scarring was mental, not physical. Misery and stress were inflicted to test resolve and fortitude. Survival meant passing.

I read this passage and all I could think was, “Not cool, dude. Not cool.”

Perlmutter does offer some invaluable advice when it comes to prepping for the defense. First, constant communication with your committee. Provide them with copies of the complete dissertation a month before the defense. Follow this up with emails or face to face meetings in order to get each instructor’s reaction to your dissertation. 

Second, Perlmutter’s advice is: “Know your material cold.” Apparently, it is not uncommon for graduate students to walk into their defense and completely blank out. You may know one section better than another, or you may have forgotten some content because it was written a long time ago. Make the time to re-read your own dissertation in its entirety before you step into your defense. 

Third, remember what you learned in your undergraduate communications class – speak clearly, precisely, and provide handouts. Consult with your director and make sure that you know how much time you will have for the defense. Do NOT read from your dissertation. Rehearse. And if you are going to be using technology during your defense, make sure that you have a back-up plan in case the tech does not work the day of your defense. 

Always remember: Defend your work, but do not become defensive about your work. 

Part 3 addresses the post-defense stage. Recall that you will receive one of two responses from your committee – Pass or Fail. If you pass your dissertation defense, you will receive one of two marks on your results form:  Pass: The Thesis/Dissertation Requires No Further Review By The Committee or Chair OR Pass: The Thesis/Dissertation Requires Revisions or Corrections Which Must Be Reviewed.

Perlmutter indicates that this latter response is more likely. Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect dissertation; therefore, do not freak out if your committee asks for additional revisions after the defense.

The article advises that you take detailed notes when receiving feedback from your committee. Make sure that you create an itemized list (if necessary) of changes that need to be made to your dissertation. Afterwards, be sure that the entire committee concurs with the needed revisions. Remember that even after you make these final changes, you will need to show another clean draft of your dissertation to your committee. The question you need to ascertain is: will it be acceptable if you only deal with your director when updating your dissertation? Or do you need to work with each member of the committee individually? 

Most importantly: Do not leave your committee without getting a due date for the final draft of your dissertation. Many jobs will expect you to have finished your dissertation prior to starting your employment. If you are still revising your dissertation as you start your new job, it will be possible for you to fall behind in revising your dissertation as you prioritize projects required at your new job.

One final note: I want to remind NIU graduate students that it is still possible that after you revise your dissertation/thesis for your committee, your document may need further alterations to ensure that your work has been formatted according to publication standards as outlined on the NIU Thesis and Dissertation Office website. If any of the content on our website is unclear of if you have any questions about writing, formatting, or editing your dissertation/thesis, please feel free to contact us or speak with the director of your committee. 

The message that I took from each of the three parts was this: Finish the dissertation. Just finish. That is the hardest part. Finish!

I found Perlmutter's articles to be insightful, easy to read, and they helped me realize that my own situation as a graduate student is not all that different from his own and many others. While Perlmutter's articles focus on doctoral student experiences, I highly recommend master's and doctoral students read each of these articles. Links to the three part series are provided below.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to post them to the blog or on our Facebook page.

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Part 1 (click here)

Part 2 (click here)

Part 3 (click here)