PhD students need better advice about non-academic career options

I knew that I wanted to find a non-academic job by the fourth year of my PhD programme in history.

I loved teaching. I loved writing. I loved working in the university. But long and lonely days in the archive and museums did not leave me feeling professionally energised or spiritually fulfilled. I had started the PhD programme convinced that I would go into academia, but this prospect seemed less and less appealing the further I burrowed into dusty documents.

So I began my search for ideas about how I could put my history PhD to use beyond the walls of the academy. And this is where I ran into major problems.

I wanted to seek advice from people with PhDs in history, or in any other humanities field, who had carved out an exciting career in business, government, non-profits or any other industry beyond the university. Given the enormous number of doctoral graduates who do not end up in academic jobs, I knew such people existed. The problem was that I didn’t know any of them. And I had no idea how to find them.

When I brought my queries to my department and advising committee, they were as helpful as they could be. Some graduate students fear that openly harbouring desires for non-academic pastures could lead to their advisers turning on them, their funding being cut and their academic network losing interest in their scholarly work. I am happy and fortunate to report that none of this happened to me.

To the contrary, my department and advising committee were excited about my plans to go “alt-ac” and supportive of ambitions to finish the programme regardless. But when I asked them to put me in touch with PhDs in non-academic career pathways, they ran into the same problem I did: they couldn’t name very many alumni from our programme, or adjacent programmes, who had charted the brave unknown of the non-university world.

Instead, I was put in touch with broader university alumni networks, which could connect me with alums in high places and were helpful in a general way. But I wanted to know how PhDs in history, specifically, could leverage their specialist knowledge and skill sets to build meaningful non-academic careers. I wanted to know how to land my first salaried job as someone with little to no experience in a corporate office. I also wanted to know about the challenges history PhDs face in climbing the corporate ladder and in making up for the time they “lost” in graduate school.

The academic and professional societies in my field were no better placed to help me. While they would be my first point of call if I wanted connections within universities in the US and abroad, they had surprisingly few connections (if any) with PhDs outside the tenure track. This was shocking to me: should it not be the role of a professional society to serve the broad interests of the profession, whether it be related to a university or not?

Some good work is being done by departments and societies to serve non-academically inclined doctoral students. For example, ever more seminars and panels are being held on “non-traditional” career pathways at conferences and professional meetings. But often these panels are made up of anxious graduate students bemoaning the difficulty of finding such careers and faculty-advocates raising the alarm about the lack of academic jobs. Missing are the PhDs who have succeeded in landing the jobs that we are all talking about landing.

There are lots of ways in which departments and societies can help graduate students through the transition to non-academic careers. But one very practical measure would be simply to keep track of where their PhDs go on to work and to maintain relationships with them. I say “simply” knowing this isn’t exactly a simple task. PhDs who leave the academy have little incentive to stay in touch with their departments, and departments have had little incentive to stay in touch with them.

But it is not just doctoral students in search of non-academic jobs who would benefit from diverse alumni networks. Departments would learn about the many interesting things being done by people with advanced training in their fields; as it stands, faculty and administrators have only vague ideas about what can be done with PhDs beyond academia and museums. And PhDs in non-academic careers – who are always “on the job market” – would become members of an extensive network and all the potential professional advantages that come with that.

That is the most valuable thing that my department could offer me in a non-academic career. It would keep me connected with it long after I graduate. And, I hope, I’ll eventually acquire valuable advice to bestow on all the history PhDs who come after me with similar questions about what the professional options are when your heart is no longer in academia.

Patrick M. Walsh recently completed his doctorate in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.