Advice for people who start graduate school in the midst of a pandemic

(This is a talk I am giving to the incoming graduate students at my department).

Welcome, incoming graduate students; I am so pleased you are joining us. I'm excited to see what lies ahead for you. I'm your placement director, and was asked to give a brief talk to you via Zoom, as we are still in the midst of a pandemic. 

If I had spoken to you last year, I would've talked in detail about my journey into philosophy. Everyone's experience is different, but it's often helpful to hear from a diversity of experiences, particularly if they are from people who don't fit the archetype of a philosopher, for example, someone who is (like me) from a working-class immigrant background, who is not a white man, whose philosophical interests are unconventional, etc. 

My trajectory to become a philosophy professor was unusual. When I started my second postdoc in 2013 I wondered if I would ever be able to land a tenure-track job. I turned to various mentors, informal ones and even a job market consultant, to try to learn the secret to job market success in academia. I then discovered there are many donts. Don't co-author in philosophy, certainly not with your partner if you are a woman. Don't publish in non-philosophy journals. Don't blog or do public philosophy, that is for senior people with the security of tenure. There were also many dos. Always have at least three papers under review (I did that! Now I think, wow that's exhausting!). Write the sort of paper you see appear in Mind or Philosophical Review. Hang out with important people. 

I've since learned you can't just distill success in grad school and on the job market into some formula. I know lots of people who fit all the dos and dont, and who have at the time they finish the PhD job CVs that would suffice for tenure at a research-intensive school. Yet they do not receive any offers for tenure track jobs. And I also know people who flouted the rules and did well.

So, my advice back in 2019 would have been this, and I think this advice still applies. It's important to cultivate good habits that help you be productive and to get your work out there (see here for an excellent list of tips by Liz Jackson). But also, you must do so in such a way that you can grow authentically into the person that you want to be. 

Bringing up the authentic self in the context of job market advice may seem strange, because the advice of job market consultants, advisers and many placement directors seems to be that you should not be yourself. Rather, they argue you should become a narrowly specialized candidate who is well networked and who writes papers that appear in top journals. They think you should fit your professional persona to the demands of the job market.

However, people with long-term high job satisfaction as academics tend to be people who are able to live and work authentically, to do the work they love and value, and teach and do service in line with their values. Obviously, there is a lot of work that you might not love as a professor. Examples may include grading, committees, admin (in the UK), or teaching that intro course for the nth time. Still, it strikes me that professors who are enduringly happy are people who have somehow merged their professional persona with their values, and who are doing things they delight in.

What does this mean concretely? In research, it means that you should do work that excites you. Writing a dissertation is difficult and a lot of job market failure lies in people who do not complete their PhD. You are in it for the long haul, you will be with us for at least five years, and you need enough love for the topic to be able to complete it. You must not lose your love for reading or other things you valued. Don't be tempted into the trap of "I will focus everything on being an academic and will make time for the rest of my life once I have tenure". That is counterproductive and unsustainable.

We are now in the midst of a pandemic. Among its many ramifications is a likely deep economic crisis, the extent of which we don't yet know as we're still grappling with the virus. The effects will likely be bigger and longer-lasting than the 2008 financial crisis. The philosophy job market never recovered to pre-2008 levels after the previous crash, as can be seen in this figure from IHE. We are not even countenancing the beginning of an economic recovery yet from this pandemic (after all, it isn't over), and what shape that recovery will take is hard to predict. In the light of this crisis mode that higher education undeniably is in, my advice needs to be adapted.

One way one could go is to emphasize, even more than before, features that successful job candidates tend to have, and to tell you about ways to be more competitive in an ever-narrowing playing field. While it's useful for candidates to get some ideas about the sorts of things committee members are looking for, I think that advice by itself will not serve many of you well.

There is something to Nietzsche's contempt for people who "set a price for oneself whereby one becomes no longer a person but merely a cog!" (Nietzsche, Daybreak, 206). Nietzsche thought that "vast sums of inner value are being squandered", by people trying to fit themselves into a capitalist economy. This is also the case for anxious job candidates who try their best to fit the elusive mould of the exemplary academic. Becoming an authentic self, of someone who can be happy and who finds her work meaningful, is now more important than ever. 

We need urgently to galvanize graduate school as a time where one can develop flexible, generalist skills. A lot of these skills are useful for university professors. Ecologists and paleontologists (see e.g., here) know that in times of stability, hyper-specialists do well. But in times of flux, in times of great climatological uncertainty, generalists do better. A lot of the advice graduate students receive is advice that would work well in times of stability and plenty, when a job at a research-intensive school was the gold standard for any person who went into philosophy grad school. The problem is that we don't live in such a world anymore; we haven't for a long time. The advice to hyper-specialize is risky. 

Graduate school should be the place where you can develop a skill set and experience that is tailored to you and that will serve you well, but that are general enough that they will be useful in a wide range of contexts. Philosophy PhDs can work in a variety of fields outside of academia. I've interviewed software designers, TV producers, novelists, consultants, who went to philosophy grad school. Obviously, there are alternative paths to any of these professions. So, it is worth considering: what is the value of philosophy grad school for the non-academic job market? I think the answer lies that you can, more so than in other forms of postgraduate training, develop skills that are both tailored to you and that are useful in a generalist sense. 

One can conceptualize doing the philosophy PhD in terms of clusters, which you develop if you are proactive to take the opportunities: 

Writing persuasively. Writing crisp, understandable prose that distills difficult ideas is not easy. You will learn to do this, and moreover, you'll learn to do it in a persuasive way. If you can write persuasively about, for instance, why we should not accept Anselm's satisfaction theory of the atonement, you can do this about a wide range of topics, such as writing creative briefs or project proposals.

Public speaking. Learning how to make a presentation is useful for many fields. Learning to speak confidently, with a PowerPoint or other materials that aren't horrible to look at and overwhelming, is in itself no mean feat. You learn to dose the information, make a compelling narrative for your audience, and engage your audience. 

Organizing events. In your case, this will mainly be helping out with organizing workshops or receiving guest speakers from other universities for colloquia, and hopefully this will happen again soon. Being involved in event planning helps you to think both about the logistics and practical aspects (food, accommodation, moderating questions etc) as well as the correct etiquette to observe with guests, important for public relations. 

Bringing a complex multi-part project to completion in a timely manner. Writing your PhD is an obvious candidate for this skill, but you'll find that in grad school there are several smaller sized-projects you can be engaged in. You can bid for grants from organizations such as the Templeton Foundation cross-training fellowships, the APA and others. Such small grants often allow you to work on a more constrained, time-sensitive project than your PhD. They also often involve collaborations.  

Teaching. By being involved as a TA or teaching a solo course, you will learn the skills to train other people and to communicate effectively with them about expectations (of exams, assignments). You will learn to transmit complex skillsets (e.g., intro to logic) or difficult and obscure ideas in an engaging manner (e.g., a history of philosophy course). You will also need to make decisions on such things as allowing extensions for courses, penalizing plagiarism, conflict in the classroom, perhaps Title IX reporting, and other difficult interpersonal situations involving students. All this is very valuable for any work that involves working with people. 

Leadership: graduate students can become leaders in many domains, including the graduate student council of academic organizations (such as the APA), MAP (Minorities and Philosophy), the graduate student council at their own university, and in co-organizing or organizing initiatives for students. 

Networking with peers and senior persons: at conferences, or through email and other channels, you learn the correct ways to engage with people of various levels to establish ties of collaboration, friendship, and support. This skill is essential in any industry.

I haven't exhausted all the skills you will learn, and as you may notice, I've deliberately framed them in such a way that they are not specific to being a professor. That being said, they are also useful for professors. Professors really don't by and large correspond to the stereotype of the person who lacks people skills and who is only interested in their research. Being a professor requires juggling a lot of different elements. It isn't just the life of the mind with some teaching. 

You will need to be proactive and seek out opportunities to help you grow in those roles. Also note that your training in each of these skill clusters will be mostly informal. Importantly, there is no single right way to do these things (alas, obviously there are many ways to do them suboptimally, hence it is a learning process). You need to learn to develop your own approach and style to all these different skills. 

Notice how I have said little about the dissertation itself. The dissertation is of course, of supreme importance. Above all, you need to complete it. As my colleague Eleonore Stump often mentions to our students, there's something distinctly joyless about writing the dissertation. If you continue in academia, you will likely write much larger volumes (e.g., larger book projects) than your dissertation in a shorter timeframe and with more other commitments to take your time away. In spite of this, the dissertation is the writing project many academics look back on as something that took a lot of grit, willpower and determination to finish. So you need to set yourself realistic writing goals and work steadily at the dissertation.

At the same time, you need to realize your dissertation is not a magnum opus. It is just an entry ticket into the lottery for academic jobs, or the line on your CV that shows you have the determination to complete a PhD when you go for the non-academic job market. It can be the focal point around which you develop all your skill sets, but you must be careful not to let it consume everything. This is a balancing exercise.

Let's briefly review, for instance, your other interests and life goals not related to philosophy. Sometimes people ask me, on the Cocoon, or elsewhere: is it OK for me to write fiction? Develop a video game? Have a child? (yes, really. To my horror, many senior folks seem to think it's still ok to advise grad students to put that off until tenure). I'll now focus on related interests that are not clearly private life but don't clearly fit into your work as a grad student either, such as creative writing, I think the following may be helpful. Companies such as Google have popularized the model of granting their employees 20% of their working time to work on anything of interest. You might consider doing this too. Do you enjoy writing fiction? Well, it makes sense to devote 20% of your time to this. Do you like coding? Or drawing? You can give it a shot for a designated percentage of your time. This helps you to still prioritize your dissertation but also do other things. 

This diversification makes sense even if you become a full-time academic. As a postdoc and non-tenured person, I continued blogging for fun, and also honed my skills as a visual artist. I also play the Renaissance lute, and write some fiction (though publishing success in that is as yet quite limited). As a tenured person, I used to be an activist for citizen's rights when I lived in the UK. Unexpectedly, some of this life did spill over into my professional life. For example, two philosophy edited volumes are appearing that have a drawing my me on the cover, and a book with 42 drawings of philosophical thought experiments I drew is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Note, I don't mean with this that you should always seek to monetize or otherwise capitalize your hobbies. It's perfectly possible that some of your pursuits will never amount to anything else but time pleasurably spent (for me, this is music. I am simply not a good enough musician to ever see this become anything but a hobby). Still, it's important to try to keep up some interests beside philosophy. If nothing else, these interests will help you not lose your love of reading or discovering new ideas. If philosophy becomes your only thing, it might become a joyless endeavor. 

In conclusion: my advice to graduate students beginning their study in the time of a pandemic is to be a generalist, to be a seeker. Seek out multiple opportunities to hone your skills in grad schools, and conceive of those skills broadly, as also useful outside of academia. Try to become the person you want to be, doing things in line with your values. My experience is that grad students often worry that things that are perfectly innocuous and enriching to philosophy would harm them on the job market: blogging, writing fiction, remarkably even parenting. Now, more than before, I would urge grad students to not give up on the rest of their lives at the expense of academia, but to consider themselves as whole persons. Doing so does not guarantee you an academic job, but it does not hinder you from getting one, either, and may prepare you for alternative career paths as well. 

Comments

[M]

It should be pointed out how badly misleading that IHE graph is. While it may be that there 700+ philosophy faculty jobs *of some sort* posted in 2015-16, a quick search of expired ads at PhilJobs for that year shows that there were only around 215 junior faculty, "tenure-track or similar" jobs posted that year... and even that is misleading because many of those were actually open rank (which typically means a new-ish PhD cannot seriously compete for those). And I'd predict that the coming years will have only 50-100 such jobs posted each year, if that.

So, sad as it is, my advice would be for new grad students to develop side skills like programming or something else very practical, so that by the time they've finished coursework, they can leave with an MA for a career outside academia, if they want. Doing something like that may be the only way to find long-term employment in the near future...

[S]

This year seems extremely hard for international students. I am supposed to start my phd program this fall, but I couldn't get my visa due to the pandemic (and some political reasons). I can't stop thinking that I might not be able to pursue a doctoral degree in the u.s. It is depressing me.