Navigating First-Gen Career Pressures

Helen Pho, Associate Director

First published in Carpe Careers for Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/02/18/advice-first-generation-students-pursing-their-phds-opinion

When I first told my parents I was leaving my job as an admissions officer to begin a doctoral program in history after just graduating from college a few years before, their first reaction was, “Why are you going back to school for so long instead of working to make money? And why aren’t you coming back home to California?” To immigrants who had spent years trying to make ends meet while raising three kids, the idea of not working so as to obtain another degree seemed, from their perspective, like a frivolous privilege.

Although I was committed to my own plan, I still understood their reaction. As I tried to come up with an answer that would satisfy their concerns, I fell back on a response that took advantage of their unfamiliarity with academe: “Well, I could make more money after I earn a Ph.D.!” Knowing that it wouldn’t likely be true, I felt it was the only way I could justify my decision to get a doctoral degree to my parents.

For some first-generation graduate students, the process of pursuing a Ph.D. can come with additional career and financial pressures from their families. Those expectations become more pronounced as they finish their programs and begin to transition to a career. In fact, whether you’re a first-gen graduate student or not, many doctoral students face pressures from their families to move closer to home; to provide support, financial or otherwise; or to pursue a particular kind of career that would guarantee stability, prestige or monetary reward. On top of that, some first-gen doctoral students also feel obligated to be in career roles that have impact on society, given their backgrounds. All of these pressures can make choosing and launching a career more stressful, since additional stakeholders are involved in one’s career decision making.

As someone who has navigated these first-generation family pressures personally and has advised graduate students in making career decisions under similar circumstances, I hope to offer some insights to help ease the process and perhaps lower some of the anxiety many graduate students feel. In addition to the first-gen career advice I wrote about previously, here are a few things to keep in mind as you progress throughout graduate school and begin to think about your next career steps.

Pursuing a career path you’re excited about and have worked hard for is not selfish. For first-gen graduate students, carving out your own post-Ph.D. career path will require you to persevere in ways your family may not understand. If you know you’d like to pursue a certain career, whether in academe or beyond, don’t feel guilty for that decision. Yes, it will likely require some personal sacrifices. You may have limited options in terms of where you live or how often you have to move. You may have to make sacrifices that affect your family — like not being able to visit home when you have conferences to attend or deadlines to meet. It will probably also challenge you in ways that your family may never fully grasp, like learning an unwritten set of rules in academic or professional culture to fit into a workplace. Depending on what your career goals are, it may take some time and a lot of hard work to achieve them. But life is long, and you’ll want to be happy spending the next few decades of your life at work.

Making a decision to pursue a different career than the one you originally planned for doesn’t mean you failed. On the flip side, sometimes the amount of sacrifice required for a career may turn out to be more than you’re willing to invest in. As Derek Attig wrote, it’s perfectly fine to build an endpoint in your faculty job search, for example. As you explore career options that value your Ph.D., keep in mind that many employers, both within and beyond academe, respect and desire the research, communication and analytical skills you bring to the workplace.

Just because you set out to pursue one career path initially and then decided that another path is a better fit — for any number of reasons — doesn’t mean you gave up on the first career. In fact, as I often tell the graduate students and postdocs whom I meet with, learning that you don’t want a certain path is itself an important thing to know about yourself. After all, you will have saved yourself so much time and frustration in not pursuing a career that will make you miserable! Being able to internalize this breakthrough as a positive step in your career process and to communicate this narrative optimistically to others, including your family, is key to deflecting some of the internal and external pressures you may face about your career choice.

Following a career path might bring some forks in the road; you’ll make choices that reflect your life’s priorities. Sometimes, graduate students feel that the career decision that they’re making is one that will determine their future for the next five to 10 years of their lives or even longer. The reality is that life circumstances change, and people change jobs multiple times in their careers.

Even once you land a job as a faculty member, that doesn’t mean that you’ll stay at one institution for the rest of your life. Many academics do change jobs and institutions for a variety of reasons — including for positions that fit better intellectually and professionally, for higher pay, or for geographic reasons. And outside academe, people change jobs all the time, often gaining promotions in the process. Whether it is the need to provide for your family financially or to be closer to home to help care for your parents, trust that you will pursue career options and make decisions that reflect what’s important in your life, including your obligations to your family.

Giving back to society can take various forms — both in your career and beyond. Many first-gen students often feel obligated to give back to their communities because of how much they have benefited from the help of others. If you are one of them, finding a career where you feel that you can make a small difference in someone else’s life may be an important factor. In certain careers, it’s easy to do that because giving back is part of the nature of the job. In other careers, it may be harder to draw the connection between what you do on a daily basis with the greater social impact that your role or organization has.

While some people might find ways to make a difference in their everyday roles, such as mentoring a junior colleague or participating in workplace volunteering events, keep in mind that you can have an impact on your community in other ways beyond your career. Depending on your circumstances, you can fulfill your desires to help others through volunteering during your time off or donating to different causes.

Completing a Ph.D. and embarking on a career afterward can change the relationship you have with your family back home; differences in socioeconomic class or life experience that may arise as you become more upwardly mobile can cause conflict or misunderstandings with your family. Now that I have my Ph.D. behind me, my parents still don’t quite understand the professional world I inhabit or how my doctorate in history is relevant to career advising, but I know they are proud I have achieved the highest degree in my family and that I am in a role that allows me to be happy, productive and helpful.

Many of the career-related pressures coming from family can be difficult to satisfy. But knowing you have the agency to craft your career path in a way that is adaptable to different circumstances and obligations can hopefully lower some of the stress that comes with making important career decisions.

Are you a first-gen grad student? We’ve got a new workshop on informational interviews for you!

Helen Pho, Associate Director

One of the most exciting collaborative projects that I’m working on this semester is creating a new video- and discussion-based workshop on informational interviewing for graduate students and postdocs. This means writing scripts of fictional informational interviews gone painfully wrong with my colleagues, working with actors who can perform the scenes, and collaborating with students and colleagues who can film and edit the videos, which has been and will continue to be a lot of fun leading up to our workshops in April!
Throughout college, I found the processes of networking in general and conducting information interviews in particular to be somewhat mysterious. As a first-gen student, I knew that networking was important but didn’t have any frame of reference. My parents didn’t work in offices, so growing up, I never saw them model what networking as a professional looks like. Additionally, informational interview meetings are generally private, one-on-one conversations between two people. Unless you’re already in the hot seat, you really can’t be a fly on the wall during someone else’s informational interview to observe how to do one well—or to observe what not to do!

When I work with graduate students and postdocs who are seeking internships and jobs, I often speak with them about why it is crucial to do informational interviews with professionals in the career fields they’d like to be in, brainstorm questions that students can ask during the actual conversation, and explain the whole process step-by-step from crafting an introductory email to staying in touch with the professional after the informational interview is over. With this new workshop, you’ll be able to get up close and personal with the do’s and don’ts of informational interviews and actually be a fly on the wall! By having students watch and talk about a filmed informational interview gone awry and another one gone well, with pauses in between scenes to discuss the good and the bad, we hope that you’ll learn to make the best first impression, ask the right questions, and come away with helpful information and a valuable professional contact as you venture off on your own to do informational interviews.

As a sneak peek into our workshops, here is a do and a don’t of international interviews that we’ll watch and discuss in details:

Do: Be curious and prepare a good list of questions: Being the student to request an informational interview with someone who’s more senior, sometimes it can feel uncomfortable to come to a meeting ready to drive the conversation with a list of questions. You may feel reluctant to do so for any number of reasons, but remember that professionals who agreed to meet with you are eager to help you as much as they can. Think about the goals you have for meeting. Are you interested in learning about how they prepared for their career? Do you want to learn about the employers they’ve worked with? Are you hoping to find out how they transitioned from academia to industry? Your goals can help frame the questions you devise, so you can get the most out of your informational interview, and the professional contact can be as helpful as possible.

Don’t: Stumble on the “Tell me about yourself” question: One of the common mistakes that graduate students make when they introduce themselves is to simply state that they’re a graduate student and then provide a 5 minute detailed explanation of their research. While discussing your research is a good idea, keep it short and talk about it in a way that someone who doesn’t share your expertise can understand why your research is important. It’s also helpful to relate the skills you’ve used in your graduate work and any prior work experiences to how you might apply them in a future career in the professional contact’s field or industry. By establishing common interests and shared connections, you’ll make a good first impression and begin to build a relationship with the professional at the outset of your conversation.

Come to one of our two interactive workshops (info below) to learn more about the other do’s and don’ts of informational interviews. You will laugh, you will cringe, you might even laugh-cry, but it’s sure to get you thinking about how you can present the best version of yourself in these important networking conversations!

•The first workshop (open to all graduate students and postdocs as part of the Job Search Series) will take place on Thursday, April 5 from 12-1:30pm in the McNeil Building, conference room 97. Please “Join the Event” on Handshake for updates and reminders for the program: https://app.joinhandshake.com/events/112840

•The second workshop (tailored specifically for first-gen grad students as part of our Generation First series, although all graduate students and postdocs are welcome) will take place on Thursday, April 12 from 3-4:30pm in McNeil Building, conference room 97. Please “Join the Event” on Handshake for updates and reminders for the programs: https://app.joinhandshake.com/events/112841