Book Review: You Majored in What?

There are thousands of career, job, and calling books on the market. Some of them are useful. Some of them are good mostly for propping doors. I’m going to call out the ones that are most likely to be interesting and useful to you as you explore what makes you happy and how you can turn that into a career.

What’s this book about?

Katharine Brooks is a career counselor at the University of Texas at Austin, and You Majored in What?: Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career is focused on the particular struggle faced by undergraduate students in non-preprofessional majors: English, history, comparative literature, sociology, and every other major that doesn’t come with an obvious entry-level position.

But many of the problems she addresses are equally challenging for post-academic career changers whose field of study doesn’t obviously cross over from the ivory tower to the business world: figuring out what career to pursue, mapping out what you have to offer, and translating what you have to offer into terms other people understand.

What makes this book different?

Although the topic isn’t necessarily new and different, two things stand out here: a focus on chaos theory and a visual style of brainstorming and thinking.

When I first encountered the bit about chaos theory, I’ll admit to rolling my eyes. You know, fad topic, applies to everything, yadda yadda. But if we think about chaos theory as a way to describe and interact with systems that are both ordered and too complicated to model, well, it’s true that looks an awfully lot like a life.

Brooks applies chaos theory in an interesting way, too, by boiling its lessons down to three actionable questions: What do you know? What do you not know? What can you learn? Asking — and answering — those three questions can help you take all of that panic and uncertainty and wrestle it into something you can work with while simultaneously expecting the unexpected. Because after all, you really do have no idea how this will unfold.

The other thing that sets her apart is a visually-based style of brainstorming and thinking about career choices. Most of the career books out there are based on linear thinking models like lists, but Brooks relies on mindmaps and other graphic ways of clustering and connecting information, which is nice for those of us who have to see how things connect and yet don’t like drawing messy lines unless we’re supposed to be drawing messy lines. (Why yes, I am a recovering perfectionist. Why do you ask?)

What makes this useful?

In addition to the chaos-theory and visual-brainstorming angles, I appreciated this book for its passionate belief that non-preprofessional degrees are hugely valuable — without falling into the “you can write!” trap that so many books and websites find themselves in.

For example, she talks about “mindsets” as soft skills that are hugely valuable to employers, and mindsets, because we’re so familiar with our own, are precisely the kinds of things we often don’t think to include as we inventory what we can offer.

Not all of it will be useful without some translation — listing what you’ve learned from the different classes you’ve taken is probably not something you’re going to do, but thinking about the big-picture skills and abilities you’ve learned and demonstrated while knocking out a research manuscript while simultaneously tapdancing on the desk to keep those undergrads engaged should be.

But it’s a far more interesting, lively, readable, and doable book than us than most of the ones out there –even if it is aimed at undergraduates.

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November 7th, 2010 | % Category: Book reviews, Turning Your Calling Into a Job | Leave a comment

Book review: Do What You Are

It’s one thing to decide that your job is a problem and you need another one. Difficult, sure, but you know the process: search job ads, write job applications, twiddle thumbs, lather, rinse, repeat until you get an offer you like. It’s tedious, it always takes too long, and it’s stressful as all get out, but you know what you have to do.

But what if you decide that it’s the career that’s a problem, and you want another one? Where the hell do you start?

With yourself

Your skills change. Your interests shift. Your passions morph. What doesn’t change is your basic temperament. Starting with understanding how you tend to engage the world can help you better narrow down the field of possibilities from “gee, I don’t know, what could I do?” to “hey, this set of things would really suit me — what’s appealing to me?”

Enter Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron, authors of Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for You Through the Secrets of Personality Type.

They argue that knowing your basic temperament can help you focus your attention on careers and jobs that are likely to match you well — making it much more likely that you’ll be satisfied in your work. They walk you through a pretty comprehensive process for finding your Myers-Briggs Type, and then they use those type categories to illustrate career possibilities you might not have considered.

What’s great about this book

There are a number of things I love about this book.

First, I’m an unrepentant personality test dork. I love them all. And this is the best practical walk-through of the Myers-Briggs I’ve come across. It’s detailed without being overwhelming and deep without being wonkish. After reading this book, I think I might actually know my damn type, which has been eluding me for years. (INTJ, if you’re interested.)

Second, they make the point over and over that any type can love and be successful in any career — it’s how that particular job is set up that makes the difference. We think about sales as an extravert-friendly, high-pressure sort of thing, for example, but they profile a seller of fine wines who is introverted and quiet.

Third, they outline a solid ten-step process for finding a next career. For those of us who like direction, it’s incredibly helpful.

It’s not perfect

For each type, they list possible career matches, but the list is both somewhat conventional and limited largely to the for-profit sector. Sure, the lists include education, health care, and counseling, but I kept wanting a broader range of career listings to help spark more brainstorming. Where are the civil service jobs? Where are the non-profit jobs?

But really, that’s a pretty small complaint all told.

Let me sum up

I’m really excited about this book because it gives people a place to start that is more personal and personalized than “list your skills.” People coming out of academia are largely going to have similar skills (public speaking, researching, writing, etc.), but we aren’t all suited to the same types of careers.

In fact, I’m so excited about this book that I’m developing a several-week, small-group telecourse based on it for later this summer to help leaving academics begin imagining what direction they might go next. Stay tuned for that!

Have you read this book? What did you think? Do you have another favorite find-your-new-career book? Share, please!

June 3rd, 2010 | % Category: Book reviews | Leave a comment

Book Review: Leaving the Ivory Tower

Barbara Lovitts left not one, but two doctoral programs. The experience of those leavings led her to this project, which formed the basis of the PhD she did complete.

The standard assumption is that graduate students leave PhD programs because they can’t hack it, whatever “it” is: the research, the self-motivation, the professionalism, the networking, the requirements of the job search. What Lovitts found through extensive surveys and interviews of graduate students, faculty, and administrators, however, is that there are few differences between graduate students who successfully complete the PhD and students who don’t. In the main, the application process does a good job of weeding out those who are inappropriate for graduate study. Those who get in, in other words, are all good enough to finish.

The real determiner of who stays and who goes has everything to do with organizational structures: of disciplines, of institutions, of departments. Those disciplines, institutions, and departments who do a good job of integrating students both socially and academically have a low attrition rate; those who don’t have a high attrition rate.

The bottom line, for Lovitts, is that the structures of graduate education are responsible for graduate student attrition — not the graduate students themselves. And that’s a point I’m glad someone has proven. It’s something most students who leave PhD study need to hear: It’s not you, it’s them.

That being said, this book very much reads like a social science dissertation — lots of analyzing the data in multiple directions and then spelling out the results in excruciating detail. If you want to know the details of how and why departments fail their graduate students, this book is worth reading in its entirety for that very detail. But if you, yourself, have left graduate school, all you need to take away is this: Your leaving wasn’t entirely or even mostly about you and your talents.

September 2nd, 2009 | % Category: Book reviews | Leave a comment