Last week’s podcast was with Dr. Krista Scott-Dixon, a Ph.D. in women’s studies who is now a web editor, magazine editor and a research director (not to mention a woman who knows her way around the weight room at the gym). This week, I post two more podcasts with Krista, simply because she had so much great stuff to say that I didn’t want to deny your ears any of it.
Podcast two with Dr. Scott-Dixon gives you all this goodness:
- 1:00 – 3:40: Krista advises not to get preoccupied with the job title you want, but the job that will allow you to mobilize your values–and stay open to the awesome things that will happen to you.
- 3:40 – 5:00: why Krista was so afraid to leave academia. “I’m going to spend 40 years freaking out about what might happen when I turn 65. That’s a little bit stupid.”
- 5:00 – 7:00: how she became the editor-in-chief of a food magazine that supports a local non-profit.
- 7:00 – 9:40: how being a magazine editor uses the skills she cultivated in academia: finding cool researchers, collecting stories, doing research, doing talks, mobilizing her knowledge of migration, employment, identity.
- 9:40 – 17:20: Three of Krista’s four pieces of advice for academic-leavers: 1) how to know if you should leave or not, 2) how to know what you can do, 3) how to figure out what to do next, 4) recognize that you may come out of academia feeling really traumatized and you’re going to need some self-care.
Listen to the 19-minute podcast here (did you miss the first one? Don’t worry, it’s here).
Related posts:
- Podcast #3: “There is no provision in academia to care for or nurture the physical self.”
- Podcast #2: Hey! If you get tenure, you’ll feel this bad for 30 years!
- How to leave academia: Call a cab
- Podcast #7: “See what it feels like to wake up on Sunday morning and not have to grade papers.”
- Podcast #8: “I made the decision to leave because there were a lot of pieces that just didn’t fit together”
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
There are people who would walk over their own mother to hire me? Really? Where? I’ve been looking for a decent job for 3 years. I’ve applied for numerous policy positions, including with the Canadian government – nothing (an employment agent told me point blank that they prefer candidates with paid experience in government policy as well as policy degrees). Is there any actual job Krista can think of where a humanities PhD is the most effective way to get hired?
As far as I can tell, Krista’s magazine appears to be funded by herself, correct? It may have a grant behind it, though I couldn’t find any info on that on the site. That’s fine, it’s a great magazine, but I do think it’s a little misleading to invoke her authority as someone who successfully transitioned from a PhD to an Editor-in-chief position when the latter is a job she invented for herself and which likely doesn’t turn a profit.
Who can afford to do these startup projects when they have nothing and are $50,000 in debt?
Alexandra, I think that a lot of people who come to this site feel your anger. A lot of them, on the other hand, come here because they appreciate the message of it’s-hard-but-it’s-do-able. I know that my positive attitude, and those of the people who’ve been kind enough to let me interview them, makes some people feel even more isolated and pissed, because that attitude doesn’t reflect their reality.
However, I choose to still maintain my it’s-hard-but-it’s-do-able line about post-academic transitioning because I wish that that’s what I had heard from someone when I was making the decision to leave academia. This is not what all academics and former academics want to hear, and I understand that, but I also feel like the websites that those people need already exist elsewhere.
I actually completely stand by what Krista Scott-Dixon told me in her interview because her generalizable message–valuing creativity, valuing the body, valuing escaping a toxic environment–is something I wanted all my readers to hear. But of course, her own career path (as with anybody else’s) is completely unique, comprised of a constellation of experiences, supports, personality traits, networks, brain chemistry, etc. Her decisions are specific to her and are not at all generalizable. But a lot of what she said was generalizable, and eminently valuable.
So, I was absolutely invoking her authority, as you say, as someone who successfully transitioned out of a PhD, and into doing different kinds of projects as a self-employed person (Ed-in-Chief of Spezzatino, Research Director of Precision Nutrition, Head Mistress at Stumptuous, etc.). There are all kinds of take-away ideas tucked into her story about having the gumption to start up a non-profit and develop a magazine that raises funds for the non-profit, but one of those take-away ideas is not “Develop your career by launching a non-profit and an accompanying fundraising mag!” Rather, I thought the message was about how scary and gratifying doing what you love can be; how it might take time to figure out what you want to do with your career/life after academia; how you might not realize how toxic grad school can be until you’ve left, etc.
Not everyone can do what Krista did. And that’s why I interviewed lots of other people, including those who were facing major debt loads, feeling suicidal, feeling desparate, feeling isolated. And that’s why I have written–especially in my more recent columns at Inside Higher Ed–about how much harder it is for people who don’t have a partner or partner or someone financially supporting them to do this massive career/life change. So, in response to your final question, almost no one can become self-employed when they are desparate and broke. That would be a terrible idea. But that doesn’t make anything that Krista said any less vital. It just makes her choice of career path a terrible one for people who are not in her shoes.
Finally, regarding your question, “Is there any actual job Krista can think of where a humanities PhD is the most effective way to get hired?” Your intense frustration and anger here is palpable. And I think most of the humanities PhDs I’ve interviewed would say that their degree was not at all the most effective way to get hired. I think they would say, though, they were surprised at how much the skills they cultivated served them. But I don’t think anyone around here is saying, “Getting a PhD leads to a great job!” What I am saying, and what this blog is about, is, “Getting a PhD doesn’t have to be a barrier to getting a great job!”
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I believe Krista’s life narrative has a lot of useful nuggets in it, even for those who couldn’t/wouldn’t/shouldn’t choose the path that she’s taken.