Author: Joseph

Joseph Barber is a Senior Associate Director at Career Services serving graduate students and postdocs. He has a PhD in animal behaviour and animal welfare, and continues to teach these subjects as an adjunct professor at Hunter College (CUNY).

The big book of PhD career advice

Dr. Joseph Barber

Well…, it is not so much a big book of advice, but rather a whole bunch of books full of advice helpful to PhDs in the process of exploring careers and applying for them. You can find a great overview of some of the most helpful books out there right now by taking a look at Natalie Lundsteen’s post on the Carpe Careers blog. I’ve mentioned this blog a couple of times in my posts primarily because it is an entire blog written for PhD students and postdocs by career advisors who work primarily with PhD students and postdocs from universities and academic institutions across the US. You can’t get more tailored content than that! In her post, Natalie provides a short description of some of her favorite books, including:

  1. So What Are You Going to Do With That? Finding Careers Outside Academia
  2. The Academic Job Search Handbook
  3. The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job
  4. Give and Take
  5. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
  6. Networking for Nerds
  7. Zen and the Art of Making a Living
  8. How to Negotiate Your First Job
  9. Career Opportunities in Biotechnology and Drug Development.

Check out the comments section of Natalie’s post as well, and you’ll see a couple more suggestions for books, as well as a few of the authors popping up to say hello! Also, the newest (5th) edition of the Academic Job Search Handbook will be available in early March of this year, and once we have copies you can come to Career Services to pick up yours for $10 (discounted from the publisher’s price). You might recognize the names of some of the authors if you have stopped by our offices for an appointment or participated in one of our workshops! I know of two other books that are currently being written for the PhD/postdoc audience that will be focusing on career exploration and opportunities (and there may be more than I don’t know about). There are also plenty of older and newer publications available in the Career Services reference library – stop by and browse the next time you are in for an appointment. librarybooks With all of this information available, you should have plenty of reading material to give you a solid understanding of how you can leverage your PhD to find careers that fit your goals, interests, and skills.    

2015 Carpe Careers highlights

Dr. Joseph Barber

Over the past 12 months, members of the Graduate Career Consortium (GCC) from a wide range of academic institutions have been writing posts for the Carpe Careers blog on Inside Higher Ed. The GCC is the professional network of staff members and administrators who provide professional and career development for Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholars at their colleges and universities. Members of the GCC spend their time helping graduate students and postdocs to achieve their diverse and ever-evolving career goals — whether those goals are focused on faculty positions or on the many other career fields that value advanced degree knowledge, experience, and skills.

The “Carpe Careers” blog is an opportunity for GCC members to share some of their personal advice beyond the walls of their institutions. If you haven’t been keeping up on some of this year’s posts, here are some of the highlights, broken down by topic.

Seeking Advice

Every career path has to start somewhere, and at the beginning of the journey, one of the best places to look is internally. A bit of self-reflection can be helpful to understand your own goals and values, as well as the distinct skills and perspectives that you can draw upon throughout your professional life.

In “Attitude Adjustment,” James Van Wyck thinks about time traveling, offering advice that he would give to his former self at the beginning of his graduate program. He suggests that networking is something you can do close to home at any time in a graduate program, and that students should connect with their peers, faculty members and department administrators to learn from their experiences and about their career goals and journeys. Those students graduating ahead of you will probably be some of the best sources of information you will have to discover your own paths. He advises students to think of themselves more as professionals than students.

Professionals need to develop over time, which is why Tom Magaldi writes about the need to develop skills in “Professional Development on a Ph.D.’s Schedule.” From listening to podcasts and enrolling in MOOCs to gaining hands-on experience by volunteering for academic service, you will have continuing opportunities to learn new skills and apply them — something that will always look good on your application materials. After all, there is no better way to help you figure out which career path is right for you than finding occasions to get a taste for the work that you might be doing in the future.

And in “Developing Your Story,” Stephanie Eberle encourages students to develop a version of an Individual Development Plan to help coordinate skill-building and career-exploration activities over the course of a graduate school program or postdoc appointment. Getting advisers or mentors involved can be helpful, but not essential, to begin to approach professional and career development in a structured and strategic way.

Here are some other posts on the general topic of seeking advice:

Facing Career Doubts

Get Over the Guilt

When Good Advice Is Relative

Don’t Follow Your Passion

Vulnerability: The Most Precious Career Choice

Networking

If you think about networking as a goal-driven effort to obtain helpful information from people who are usually willing to provide it, and as a way for you to help your peers achieve their career goals, then you might find more energy to focus on it. It’s a far better approach than just meeting people randomly and without purpose, which usually results in a general feeling of uneasiness or terror.

Christine Kelly gives the advice to “Always Talk to Strangers” and describes how a chance meeting on a bus helped her be more effective in her work with graduate students. Chance meetings are great, but they are not going to happen as often as meetings that you have actively arranged with your network of faculty members, advisers, alumni, family and friends.

And if you are looking for ways to break the ice when reaching out to contacts, Paula Wishart provides a great summary of “Writing an Introductory Email” to get your networking started. Giving a little careful thought to the greeting, the context, the ask you are making and the subject line can help you maximize the number of people who respond to you.

For more on networking you can also read:

Use Your Words

Networking Gone Bad

Sounding Smarter = Being Smarter

Exploring Career Options

Networking can help you to explore careers. Exploring doesn’t mean you have to decide that academe and a faculty role is not for you. In fact, it could strengthen your desire to be a faculty member at a certain type of institution. Indeed, meeting with faculty members at colleges and universities other than your own is a great idea. Networking will expose you to other career opportunities and might well open a door to a new career path that you had not previously considered or even known about.

In the list below, several writers for the “Carpe Careers” blog have talked about specific nonfaculty career options or the process you can use to explore diverse career fields. And Melanie Sinche talks about plans that are being developed to track career outcomes for Ph.D. students more effectively and consistently in “Tracking Ph.D. Career Paths.”

What’s Next?

The Backup Plan

The Federal Option

Doing It My Way

How to Land a Nonprofessor Position After Grad School

Job Search Advice

The advice that people give students or postdocs applying for faculty positions can, on the surface, seem very different than the advice that they might give them when seeking a variety of nonfaculty positions. However, aside from some industry-specific differences, the main goals are the same. The reader of your application materials and any interviewers must be able to see your potential to add value to their institution or organization. They have to be confident that you know what skills, knowledge or experiences are valued, and they need be confident that you will be a good fit.

In his “Tournament of Bad Job Searching,” Jake Livengood lists some of the approaches that you can take that won’t help your cause when it comes to your nonfaculty-job hunting. And yes, many of those are applicable to the academic job market, too. But don’t get caught up focusing too much on the approaches that you’ve taken that haven’t helped, says Sue Levine in “Self-Talk and Job Hunting,” because you want your inner voice to be supporting your job hunting, not hindering it. A little bit of mindfulness can good, as all job searches can be frustrating at some point.

Here are some of the other posts on the general job search process:

Verbal Origami

Timing Is Everything

The Right References

Tech Tools

Grad Student: You Are Your Own Spokesperson

Interviewing

Your application materials don’t get you the job; they get you the interview for the job. And, in that interview, you still have a lot of work to do to share your story, your skills, your passion and your fit with the organization where you are interviewing. No two interviews are identical, and the type of question and style of the interview will differ depending on the nature of the position and the type of organization.

Graduate students and postdocs can be fairly sure that someone at some point in an interview will ask them about their research. Long, in-depth discussions might be much more appropriate during campus visits for faculty positions, but that doesn’t mean you won’t still need to describe your research in ways that nonspecialists can understand, too. You may not have the benefit of talking about chickens in your answers to questions about your research like I do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find your own captivating narratives that will help people connect with you and your skills. This is a topic I cover in “Do You Have Mysterious Dragons in Your Research?”

While some interviews are positive experiences, others can turn a little awkward — especially if people ask inappropriate questions. Read my piece “Searching While Pregnant” and Natalie Lundsteen’s “They Aren’t Supposed to Ask That” to learn how to handle some of these questions in an interview.

And not all interviews are super-formal occasions that require weeks of preparation. Stephanie Eberle provides great advice on how to deal with more conversational interviews in “Acing Informal Interviews,” including suggestions on answering “Why do you want this job?” and “Why are you a good fit?” questions.

One way to handle different types of interviews is to feel comfortable with adapting your message to the situation. Jake Livengood talks about how taking an improvisation class can actually help you to “prepare for the unexpected, build confidence, develop self-awareness and add details to questions” that you might face in interviews. I have met with a couple of Ph.D. students at the University of Pennsylvania who have also reported that they found an improvisation class useful. It may be a little outside of your comfort zone, but so is an interview in most cases! Read about “Learning From Improv” to see if this approach might help you, too. And don’t forget to take a look at these other posts on interviewing too:

Interview Like Rembrandt, Not Picasso

Job Applicant Pitfalls

Sexual misconduct and your career development

Dr. Joseph Barber

There has been an on-going focus on topics related to sexual violence and misconduct prevention at Penn. This is a topic that can affect students, staff, and faculty on campus and beyond, and there are readily available resources for each of these populations to use if individuals have experienced these negative situations. Here are a selection of these resources:

From a career development perspective, it is good to be aware of the types of situations where the potential for sexual misconduct, or confusion over whether there is sexual misconduct, is increased. That is not to say that you will experience this on your career path, and so this is not meant as a post to put you off effective approaches such as networking and seeking internships (it is going to be hard to avoid these if you want to be successful in finding the job that matches your skills and career goals). It is important to know how you can respond to any form of inappropriate behaviour or sexual misconduct in these situations.

Networking
The great benefit of networking is the ability to make new contacts who can share information and advice with you that you can use to be effective in your job or internship search. It goes both ways, and so by networking with professionals you will be able to present your skills, experiences, and future potential to them too. Compared with the lively, career-focused, in-person conversations you can set up through your networking efforts with people in different industries or at particular organizations you like, no amount of online research will help you get the same critical insight into a particular career, role, or organization. The people you can meet will also be incredibly helpful in sharing opportunities with you – opportunities you might not have been aware of before you had that conversation. Take advantage of resources like the Penn alumni database (QuakerNet) and LinkedIn to find people happy to share their advice and experiences with you.

Trying to find a perfect contact at your preferred organization can take a lot of hard work, research, and other networking to achieve. When you finally make a contact, or have a meeting, what happens if your interaction with this contact doesn’t quite feel right, or worse, that the contact you just wanted advice from asks you if you are single and interested in dating? Natalie Lundsteen provides some great advice in her post on the Carpe Careers blog (on the Inside Higher Ed website). She states:

“He or she has absolutely no excuse for unprofessional behavior, especially if you have presented yourself as a student or recent graduate seeking advice and assistance.”

And concludes her advice-filled post by saying:

“Negative or awkward networking experiences certainly will not occur often, and may not ever happen to you. Don’t let this discussion put you off the idea of informational interviewing or chatting with a stranger at your next conference. Just be conscious that networking can at times veer unexpectedly from the professional to the personal — and know that you are able to exit those conversations and find better opportunities.”

If you have a negative experience during a networking interaction, then heed some of the advice that Natalie offers, and remember the on-campus resources available to you (listed above) if you need them. Advisors at Career Services can also help you to successfully navigate your networking attempts, and to develop strategies to hopefully avoid these types of situations arising in the first place.

Interviews
Having an interview for an internship or job is a great achievement, and most people will spend a significant amount of time preparing for these events. In any interview you are pretty much guaranteed to be asked these questions:

  • Who are you/tell me about yourself
  • What do you know about our organization?
  • Why do you want this position?
  • What can you bring to our organization/what are your strengths?
  • Do you have any questions for us?

Everyone should be prepared to answer these questions. But these aren’t the only questions you will get asked, and sometimes you will face unusual ones (e.g., what kind of fruit would you be?), negative ones (e.g., what is your greatest weakness?), and even inappropriate ones. These inappropriate ones are sometimes described as illegal questions (see also here), but it is not illegal to ask them. What is illegal is to discriminate against people based on their answers. And this is why it is inappropriate to ask them. Examples of these types of questions include:

  • What does your spouse do?
  • Where were you born?
  • Are you an American citizen?
  • What language do you speak at home?
  • How old are you?
  • Do you take any time off work for religious purposes?
  • Are you planning on having children soon?
  • Are you married?
  • What will your partner think about all the travel you would be doing if you got this job?
  • Do you take any prescription drugs?
  • How many sick days did you take last year?

There is a lot of different advice given about how to handle these types of questions, but this approach might be a good starting point. You can practice how you might respond to these questions by setting up a mock interview with an advisor at Career Services.

Graduate students might face a different type of situation when applying for academic jobs, as many fields conduct multiple interviews at annual conferences, with the interviews themselves taking place in hotel rooms. In an ideal setting these interviews might be in a professional-looking hotel suite. In some cases, the interview is conducted in plain sight of the interviewer’s bed (and usually there are multiple interviewers in the room), in a setting that seems far from ideal or professional. Cheryl Ball and Katherine Ellison describe some of these conditions in an article on MLA interviews:

“…one major drawback in hotel-room interviews is that you’re in a hotel room. This can be awkward, not the least of which because the size of the department’s budget often determines the size of the room you’re interviewing in. And it has been said that sometimes candidates end up sitting on hotel beds during their interviews. Awk. Ward. Thankfully, we’ve heard of this happening less and less over the last decade, as departments strive to show their professionalism”

Internships
Like most interviews, internships usually happen off campus. During your internship you have a wonderful opportunity to learn new skills, apply the knowledge you have gained from courses and research you have completed at Penn, and discover for yourself whether you can see yourself working in this field in the future. When employers are trying to fill full-time opportunities, they will look closely at the internships you have had, and will value your exposure to the work that they do. In most internships, these are some of the skills that will be helpful as you try to make the most of the experiences:

  • Time management
  • Effective communication skills, especially asking good questions
  • Learning new skills quickly
  • Taking initiative
  • Prioritizing work projects, especially when these come from several different supervisors
  • Managing ambiguity and conflict

Some internships will be part of formalized internship programs. Some internships you might create just for yourself by establishing an effective professional relationship with a contact at an organization you are interested in. Whatever the type of internship, whether it is paid or not, there is never an excuse for unprofessional behaviour. There have been several recent cases where this has happened in different contexts, and these articles describe some of challenges faced in these situations:

If you experience any form of sexual misconduct during an internship experience, make use of the campus resources listed above. The advisors at Career Services can be a great resource to talk about any aspect of networking, seeking internships, and succeeding at interviews (everyone should set up an appointment to have a mock interview – they are incredibly helpful). Career advisors can offer useful suggestions for how you can make any of these experiences as positive and productive as possible, so that you always know how to handle yourself professionally when faced with any of the situations described above. Please take advantage of appointments and walk-in hours to meet with your career advisor – call 215 898 7531 or visit www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices.

Sounding smart = being smart

Dr. Joseph Barber

The stepping stone approach to networking means that while the first people you meet who are relevant to your career interests might not be the best people for you to communicate with, they will probably have a much better idea of who you should be talking to (at least compared to you!). Take career fairs, for example. You might find yourself talking to a recruiter representing an organization that you are really interested in who turns out to have no information about the types of positions you want that match your experience. They might be there talking about sales positions, while you might be there looking for R&D positions. Rather than seeing this as connection fail, see it as a great opportunity to take a business card and follow up after the fair to see if that recruiter can point you in the right direction to someone more relevant to the career path you want to follow.

“Would it be OK if I reach out to you after the fair to see if you can point me towards someone at your organization who could answer some of the questions I have. It would be fantastic if you could share some of your institutional knowledge, and would definitely be of great help to me.”

There is another benefit to the stepping stone approach, and that is that if you follow the trail you will sound smarter and smarter as you progress. So, let’s say you are interested in careers in science communication. Through a close friend of yours, you set up an information interview with someone (contact#1) who works at a medical communications company. Before you meet you read up all you can about the field of medical communications, you jot down some of the questions you have, and you practice talking about yourself, and why you are potentially interested in this field. Here are some good informational interviewing questions you might use:

“I know that your position title is XXX, and I have been reading up about your role, but I would love to hear more about what you do on a day-to-day basis”

“Can you tell me a little about your career path and how it led you here?”

“What skills would you say are most valuable in your role, and which one do you rely on the most?”

“This position sounds really interesting, and from what I have heard, people really enjoy the process of translating complex science to the different audiences you mentioned. What are some of the most challenging aspects of your role?”

These questions give you insights into the position that are hard to find on a website. What’s more, you get to hear the language contact#1 uses to describe their role – language that you might one day need to use to describe your experiences if you apply for these types of positions. You also get to hear what skills are most valuable. These should be the skills you focus on in your application materials and in the answers to interview questions you might be asked. The “challenges” question can be a useful one, as you’ll see below. You don’t want to spend too much time focusing on negative experiences, because the more your contact talks about negative experiences, the greater the chance that they begin to associate the negative feelings they are having talking about these negative experiences with you in their mind. Challenges don’t have to be negative, though, and so this is certainly a much better way to phrase the question than asking: “what don’t you like about your job”!

The very final question you should ask can be a variation of this one:

“This has been a very helpful meeting, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me. I was particularly interested in hearing about the XXX position you mentioned. Do you know anyone in this role that I might reach out to for more information on this?”

The answer is usually “yes”. You can ask contact#1 if they could introduce you, or if you could use their name when you reach out to their suggested contact. Using this approach you should be able to reach out and set up a time to meet with the new contact (contact#2). In this meeting, one of the questions you might ask is something like:

“I know that some of the challenges you face in roles similar to yours are X, Y and Z [information you are parroting back from your previous informational interview], are these the same challenges that you face in your role?”

As contact#2 is listening to you, they are thinking to themselves “Oh my…, this person knows what they are talking about, they have done their homework here”. That’s not a bad thing to have circulating in their brain while you are talking. Of course, when you eventually ask contact#2 for the names of people they think you should talk to in order to gain additional insight into something they mentioned, you can take the information shared by contact#1 and contact#2 and integrate this into your questions for contact#3, who will also think to themselves that you sound awfully smart. And you know what…, you don’t just sound smarter at this point, you are smarter!

 

Why do you want this job?

Dr. Joseph Barber

Job interviews can be a little on the unpredictable side. After all, you don’t know that much about the people who will be interviewing you, you can only really guess at the type of person they are actually looking for, and you don’t know what questions they are going to ask you. Or do you? Well…, you certainly don’t know all of the questions they will ask, but I think you can be fairly certain that a handful of common questions will be coming your way. Surely the most obvious, and the most important, is a variation of “why do you want this job?”

At some point in the interview process, someone will ask you this question. You should never be surprised by this question, and never, ever be unprepared to answer it. It is a question that will usually come very early in the interview, and it is a question that can certainly make or break your interview. When I do mock interviews with students and postdocs, a common answer I hear sounds a little like this:

“I’m excited about working at this company because it is a great opportunity for me to work on projects that I really enjoy. I’m looking for a challenging and varied environment where I can grow and develop as a professional, and I see this a great place to use my skills and experiences”

In essence, this questions answers the question: “why do YOU want this job”. Look through the answer above and see how it is all about the candidate and what they would get out of the deal if they were offered the job. This type of answer usually misses the point of the question, because as the employer listening to the answer, you don’t learn much about whether the candidate would be able to offer anything. Employers need to figure out very quickly whether a candidate can actually do the job. So, I encourage people to think of the question a little differently, and to change its emphasis slightly:

Why do you want THIS JOB?

This means that talking about you and your goals can be part of the answer, but priority should be given to demonstrating to the employer what you bring to the position. In the previous answer you can see that “skills and experiences” are mentioned in passing, but there are poorly defined. What skills? What experiences? How can these be helpful to me the employer? Without some context, the listener might walk away with the sense that the person speaking doesn’t actually know what skills they have that will be most useful for the job. Or, even worse, that the person speaking doesn’t really understand the nature of the job itself. A better approach is to first speak about what you can contribute in terms of specific and relevant skills, and then to mention what you gain – this is still an important part of the answer. Here’s one approach you can take – by no means the only one:

“Why do you want this job?”

“Well, based on my research into this position, and having talked to a couple of contacts I have in similar roles, what I think you are looking for is someone who can find new ways to connect your technology with researchers in the field, and who can help clients troubleshoot when challenges arise. And this is exactly what I have spent the last few years doing in slightly different environments. The software my lab uses for analyzing proteins is used by several of the large labs at Penn, and I have become the go-to person whenever anyone has an issue. Over the last 3 months I have been contacted by 4 different researchers, and have already been able to help 3 of them solve the programming issue they were facing. The fourth issue is a tough one, but I am pretty sure I am close to fixing this one too. When I first started my PhD, I didn’t have any specific knowledge of this software, and I have gained most of my expertise by connecting with other experts in the field, speaking with vendors at conferences, and I even arranged for a tour of the headquarters for the company that developed it. This was really helpful as I was able to chat with their chief engineer. So, I’m comfortable reaching out to new people, and have been successful in establishing great working relationships over several years.

 Overall, I am very excited about using my problem-solving and networking skills in this way, and I’m looking forward to learning more about your technologies. The broader range of products I’ll be working with in this role will certainly add the variety that I am hoping for, and I do see a great opportunity for me to grow professionally here – especially because I know that your company puts a strong emphasis on mentoring”

Different types of jobs need different narratives, but you can use a similar formula:

  • Demonstrate to them that you understand the nature of the job
  • Show them what you can contribute, and give examples
  • Talk about why the job will also be a good fit for you

If you are looking for more resources on interviewing, then click here.