In the seven years Andrew Green spent on the Berkeley campus earning his doctorate in political science, he never once visited the Career Center, or Career and Graduate School Services, as it was called then. “I didn’t even know where it was,” he says.
He does now, and he wants today’s graduate students to know as well. As the new full-time Ph.D. counselor, Green is determined to give the Career Center—located at 2111 Bancroft Way, a half block shy of Shattuck Avenue—a new visibility for graduate students.
Career Center Director Tom Devlin made graduate students a priority when he came here from Cornell two years ago to overhaul Berkeley’s career services. Given the sluggish academic job market, graduate students are anxious for advice on how to put their doctorates to use. Yet Devlin found that many graduate students, like Green when he was here in the 1980s, believe the Career Center serves primarily undergraduates. He’s charged Green with changing that perception.
Green knows what it’s like to be a graduate student at Berkeley and he knows what it’s like to look for work. He has experience in both academic and nonacademic job searches. And he has a welcome sense of humor, which is evident in person and in the helpful—and often hilarious—material he has written for the “Ph.D.” section of the Career Center Web site (career.berkeley.edu).
Moreover, he’s a good listener—and he wants to know what graduate students want and need from the Career Center.
The Academic Job Search
Green knows the academic job search from both sides of the desk: he’s been an applicant and he’s served on search committees. After leaving Berkeley in 1991, he taught for six years at Connecticut College. His sees his familiarity with a small liberal arts college as particularly helpful to Berkeley graduate students. Berkeley professors can tell them about what to expect at Stanford and Princeton and other top schools, but they often have less experience with smaller schools. And in today’s competitive job market, even small schools look attractive.
In an essay in the Ph.D. section of the Career Center Web site called “The Hiring Process From the Other Side,” Green gives job applicants an inside look at how a search committee works. It’s not always a pretty sight, but Green manages to make readers think—and laugh.
“Once you have seen it from the inside,” he writes, “any illusion that the academic job search is a wholly rational process designed to yield the best candidate for the position is burst asunder. This can be a good thing or a bad thing for your own chances, but you should not allow the results of your job search to dictate your sense of self-worth.”
There are parts of the process you do have some control over, and Green counsels you to make the most of them: how you present yourself in your cover letter and CV, for example, and how you conduct yourself in an interview and during the job talk. He dispenses such practical tips as how having a Ph.D. from Berkeley can get you in the door for an interview, but can also intimidate your interviewers, especially those at less prestigious schools. That’s the time, Green counsels, to show how collegial you can be.
Green eventually chose to leave his teaching job; among other reasons, his wife couldn’t find work that suited her, a lament familiar to other two-career couples. Still, he enjoyed academia. “I would never try to discourage anyone from pursuing it,” he says, “if they know that’s what they want.”
The Nonacademic Job Search
While he supports students who want to pursue academic careers, Green believes that a broad array of opportunities exist for Ph.D.’s outside academia. And it is in this arena that a career counselor may be especially useful to graduate students, who often complain that their own departments are sorely lacking when it comes to advice on nonacademic options.
Again, Green’s own experience comes to bear. When he moved back to Berkeley two years ago to look for a job, he started out with nothing more than confidence in his abilities.
But not all Berkeley graduate students appreciate their accomplishments, says Green. They are so used to judging themselves against the top people in their discipline that they see themselves as coming up short. Yet most people outside the few square blocks of campus don’t have a Ph.D., much less a Ph.D. from Berkeley. Similarly, graduate students dismiss experience such as teaching because every other graduate student they know teaches. They forget that standing in front of an audience and speaking in a coherent, concise, and professional manner is unimaginable, even frightening, to most people.
“The ability to think on your feet,” says Green, “and the ability to convey complex concepts to a nonexpert audience—what we call teaching—is a valued skill. This is something that will serve you not just in an academic career, but in a wide range of industries and nonprofits and government jobs.”
So a large part of Green’s job is to provide perspective and to help students recognize the abilities they have. In addition to individual (and completely confidential) counseling, he visits departments and conducts workshops. He, in turn, picks up pointers from the students he meets and shares his new knowledge with others, often via the Ph.D. section of the Career Center Web site. Prior to holding a workshop for the Department of English, he posted a list of 25 skills students developed over the course of their graduate education, skills many graduate students aren’t even aware they have. After the workshop, the Web list burgeoned to over 100 skills.
“The Web is a tremendous tool because it allows me to take information I gather and broadcast it widely,” Green says. “Graduate students have the answers themselves. But as long as they exist in isolation, their ability to move forward is greatly compromised. What I have the ability to do is to bring them together, gain from the collective knowledge, and then rebroadcast it.”
A Balanced Approach
Suppose you walk into Green’s office and ask him what you should do with your life. What happens next?
First, he’ll ask you to think about what you really want to do. You can approach this two ways. Deductively, you can list your skills and what you want from a work environment. Inductively, you can start browsing through job ads—Green recommends using job listings such as those linked to his Web site—not necessarily to look for work but to note what kind of jobs spark your interest.
Once you get an inkling of the kind of work you’d like to do, the next step is to start asking questions. The buzz words are “networking” and “informational interviewing,” but Green stresses that you’re doing nothing more than talking to people about what they do and how they got their job. You’re learning whether you’d really like that kind of work, and if so, how you go about finding it. You’re also learning the language and culture of an organization, information that will help you describe your skills so that they make sense to the person doing the hiring.
Volunteer work and internships are two other ways to test-drive a job, obtain information, and build networks. And no, Green doesn’t buy the notion that you don’t have time. “Graduate students may obsess about their dissertations for 80 hours a week,” he says, “but they don’t work productively for that amount of time.” Besides impressing a future employer, volunteering can give you a concrete sense of accomplishment that may even make struggling with your dissertation easier.
Green’s optimism is as welcome as his advice. If you like to teach, he’ll tell you that the classroom is not the only place you can use that skill. If you’re afraid that leaving academia means sacrificing any hope of autonomy, he’ll give you examples of Ph.D.’s in other fields who have creative leeway. And if the thought of asking strangers about their work intimidates you, he’ll assure you that people really don’t mind talking about their jobs, and fellow Ph.D.’s, especially, are willing to go out of their way for you. Green, in fact, is building a network of Berkeley Ph.D.’s that you can consult.
Such assurances make the graduate students he’s advised a little less desperate about the job market, even if they still intend to pursue academia.
“It’s no longer life and death,” says Green. “It’s no longer, ‘Either I get a job as an assistant professor or I’m flipping burgers or selling tobacco to 13-year-olds.’ If you’re more confident of your abilities, you’re more balanced in your approach to the academic job market and more likely to be successful.”
To schedule a counseling session or to offer ideas and suggestions about what you’d like from the Career Center, you may contact Green by phone (642-5207), or e-mail (aegre@uclink4. berkeley.edu), or drop by the Career Center (2111 Bancroft Way). You can also find more of Green’s pithy advice on the Career Center Web site (career.berkeley.edu) under “Specialized Programs: Ph.D.’s and Postdocs.”
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