If you saw my column that went up yesterday at Inside Higher Ed, you’ll know that I claim to have never met “a single former academic who was able to apply their research directly into a non-academic job.” But in only the short span between writing that piece and the publication of it, my claim may now be untrue.
Last week I had the opportunity to meet Alexandra Samuel, the CEO of Social Signal, a company she runs out of Vancouver that helps organizations with their social media needs. She was making this presentation at a symposium we both were attending on health care organizations, knowledge translation and social media.
Turns out Alexandra has a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard, and wrote her dissertation on hacktivism. The company’s website (and it sure is a pretty one) actually says that their methodology comes from Alexandra’s dissertation research. Yes, you read that right: the scholarly work that this Ph.D. did is actually instrumental to the kind of work conducted by the company she runs. Here’s me, eating my words.
And, oh, yeah. Turns out she’s also worked with Robert Putnam (yeah, that one) and Angus Reid. And she’s got 2 kids. And her business partner is her marital partner. And she’s nice and funny, to boot. GAH.
Do you know of other scholars who’ve translated their scholarly research–and I mean their research, not the skills they’ve garnered–into their post-academic work?
Whenever I’ve fallen behind on doing something, I try as much as I can to avoid creating an apology and explanation that sounds like this:
“I’m sorry I didn’t ______; I wasn’t able to get to it because I’ve just been so busy.”
I dislike it when other people use that rationalization with me, so I try not to use it with others. Busy-ness, to me, is not an adequate explanation for not getting to something. Why? Because we’re all busy. We’re all pressed for time. We’ve all got a million balls up in the air that we’re trying to juggle.
But readers, I’m going to say it anyway:
I’m sorry I haven’t blogged here in over a week; I wasn’t able to get to it because I’ve just been so busy.
Okay, there is also the cold/flu that ran through my family home last week and had me dragging my ass when I wasn’t huddling shivering under a blanket (or alternately sweating it out). Don’t worry: it wasn’t THAT flu. But there were also some really great opportunities for meeting people that I took advantage of, like the day-long symposium I attended on social media and knowledge translation (and the half-day followup). And I also jumped through the hurdles of getting on to the Board of Directors for METRAC, an agency in Toronto that fights violence against women and children.
So the combo of busy-ness and the need for rest eclipsed blogging. Now I’m back, refreshed and ready for another week of adventures. Just thought you should know.
Doing the work that I do in my capacity as a writer and consultant around all things post-academic is interesting, valuable, and, often fun. The money? That’s a blog post for another day (though I can say that, like many of the self-employed former academics I’ve interviewed, launching my own business without the financial and emotional support of my spouse would be unimaginable).
Approaching university administrators and department chairs about working with their graduate students and faculty advisors to develop strategies around post-grad school employment can result in a number of responses, ranging from relieved enthusiasm to stony, defensive silence. Although faculty advisors do seem now to grasp that something needs to be done to help current graduate students, there is still reluctance to spend any money on the problem. There is still a prevailing attitude about it being better to spend $12,000 to bring in an unintelligible talk by the ruling hotshot of the day than to spend a fraction of that for a day-long workshop that could help steer people’s professional development.
But then there are interested, interesting people like those at University of Waterloo, who contacted me a while back about doing some work with them. Way to go, Waterloo, for living up to your reputation for innovation! Last Friday, I went down there to meet with some faculty and career centre staff to talk about how they’re already serving graduate students and where some of the gaps are. I’m going to develop a workshop for them that I’ll present early in the winter term, and we’ll see where that goes.
After my meeting in Waterloo, I jetted on over to Kitchener for another meeting with a whole other type of scholar–one doing community-based research. This was a totally different type of meeting, one that was more like an information interview, sprinkled with some exploration about how we could work together. This is an area that I’m putting my feelers into, as a way of returning to my social justice roots, as it were. I’m going to start blogging about this a little bit, sharing with you my own efforts to expand and grow my career into a new and different direction.
In the meantime, though, I am still working to spread the gospel of life on the other side of the academic divide. Contact me if you’re interested in finding out if your university or department would bring me in to run a workshop, or beam me in with a webinar. What is your campus doing to help grad students and faculty find non-academic work?
Some of you may already know the name Jamie Ridler from my website. She’s a friend of mine who is a creative self-development coach and, what’s more, is a former academic. I was a featured client at her site last week, and I’m putting my little video plug for Jamie here because, as I say in the vlog, Jamie is just so fabulous that I just want everyone in the world to know about her (plus, I was having a good hair day). If you need someone to really help you explore what you have inside of you that you want to offer the world–and that can’t be best expressed inside of academia–you might be interested in Jamie’s site.
My latest post at Inside Higher Ed is on the topic of using social media in your post-academic job search. I don’t want to repeat what I wrote there, but I am going to give some excerpts (with permission-and with important details changed) from an email I received from grey, a regular commenter here who happens to be a client. Grey has been having a lot of success with LinkedIn and Facebook for her post-academic job search. She says:
My experiences with networking & social media … in the last 3 days!
I went through my resume and checked to see if anybody I worked with anywhere was on LinkedIn. Two people (both senior to me) from my tech days at [Big Time University] were, and they not only accepted my connections but immediately sent notes asking what I was up to, etc. (I wish I had done this *before* applying to work at the same company!).
I also looked up the companies I applied to or am applying to to see if I had connections. Turns out a friend from high school’s younger sister was at [Cool Company] for years; he and I are Facebook friends, so messaged him and asked him to put me in touch with his sister, and he said he would.
I found someone else through joining alumni groups at LinkedIn–my high school and college groups. I also discovered that my cousin turns out to have a couple friends from college at [Big Name Company], so I asked him if he would put us in touch.
Facebook has been really useful too. I learned from LinkedIn that a high school friend (my junior prom date, actually) has a job doing what I want to do. I sent him an email (and I got his email from being Facebook friends).
Another high school Facebook friend has been enormously generous. I had messaged him re: selling bike shoes & mentioned I was looking for work. He’s a director of [Doing Nifty Things], which is another way in to the kind of stuff I’m interested in. He immediately offered to do whatever he could – and has been unbelievably helpful – brainstorming ways I could come up with ways that would be valuable to hirers and offering strategies & reading my resume!
By the way – I heard back from my advisor and he’s putting me in touch with [So-and-So].
I also tried a cold email last week to [Wowza Company] in [my city] re: an info interview. The guy I emailed sent my address on to someone else who transitioned from a doctoral program to [that sector] – and he wrote me the friendliest email ever offering to chat about his experiences.
I’m also curious about what others are doing for money during the career search. I started a mini-business doing cleaning, errands, organization. But I’m curious about whether people have creative one-shot stuff.
Job hunting software: Brazen Careerist also has some comments about various software programs for job hunts – I’m following up on your suggestions to put something like this in place to track contacts.
This is fun! And, overall, people have been *enormously* responsive. The *only* thing I’ve sent out and not gotten a response on was a cold email to a radio producer at the local NPR station. But people have been SO generous and happy to talk.
How have you been using social media, dear readers? Do you have a LinkedIn profile yet? How have you leveraged Facebook? Are you networking with your fellow post-academics at the Leaving Academia Ning site? Are you following me on Twitter (sabinehikel)?
(P.S.: I like my social media to be very compartmentalized, so I only use Facebook for in-the-flesh friends and connections and LinkedIn for people I’ve worked with or am angling to work with, so if I turn down your request to connect, know that it is not at all personal. It’s just, as the kids say, how I roll).
I was tumbling down the rabbit hole of a Google search the other day, going from one link to the next, when I landed at Tara Hunt’s HorsePigCow blog. You might be familiar with Tara if you’re at all interested in social media, social marketing, social networks and other related social hoo-ha. Basically, Tara’s great. And she had a post the other day (and another great one the day after that) that I think will resonate with Leaving Academia readers, including those of you who are scratching your heads, thinking, “Social WHAT?”
Tara’s post included a link to a TED talk given by Alain de Botton, whom the philosophers among you will be familiar with. de Botton is speaking here about success, what is is and how to measure it. I felt genuine surprise to think that someone as successful as Alain de Botton–successful by my standard, or what I think I mean by success–cries into his proverbial pillow about how successful (or not) he is. His talk, I think, will resonate with those of you who are worried about the whole failure thing (which we’ve discussed before, but it’s worth discussing again).
Hmm. I’m not sure if it’s worth the nearly $300 price tag, but this event, hosted by Idealist.org, has extra credibility for me because one of the partners is the Centre for Social Innovation. If you’re drawn to both social change and grad school, this fair will be stacked with grad school programs aimed at do-gooders. If you’re in Toronto, and you want to meet up with me there, I’m thinking about sneaking in to talk to people who are *already* grad students about their options.
An interview with Doug Peers, associate vice-president graduate and dean of graduate studies at York University, on why academics should consider the life of an administrator. […]
Talk of ending journalism school at CU-Boulder is latest effort to transform such programs, suggesting the only way to build them anew is to tear them down. […]
A large California community college district has gotten rid of all of its emergency notification boxes to save money -- a move not yet commonplace despite boom in cell phone usage. […]
RT @brianlbaker: Seriously, I'll take ANY full-time job, with benefits, within a 100-250 mile radius of Fresno, that pays $35,000+. Cont ... 2010/06/14
What is it with the past couple of days and all this, like, EMOTION? 2010/06/11
RT @alysonschafer: LGBT students hear anti-gay slurs an average of 26 times a day. 30 % of suicides are LGBT. Support is here: http:// ... 2010/06/08
If you saw my column that went up yesterday at Inside Higher Ed, you’ll know that I claim to have never met “a single former academic who was able to apply their research directly into a non-academic job.” But in only the short span between writing that piece and the publication of it, my claim may now be untrue.
