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

Advice from a hiring manager

Turning a life lived in academia into something else can feel overwhelming. But there are strategies that work, and more resources than you can begin to imagine. Want to see all of the ones I’ve talked about so far? Click here for the job-search archives.

A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of sitting down with my friend Kara, who works as a hiring manager for a small company, and picking her brain about the dos and don’ts of applying to jobs after academia.

Here’s what she had to share with me.

Don’t make her do all the work

She’s seen many applications that were “inside baseball.” In other words, these applicants assumed that she knew and understood the world they were coming from — instead of translating their skills, experience, and usefulness to this new context.

That means explaining your background in terms an outsider would understand, instead of relying on titles or job-specific rankings or arcane terminology.

That means explaining what you actually did and what you actually achieved and how those things would help the organization you’re applying to, instead of assuming that everyone knows what bench work or assistant professoring or “doing research” entails.

Don’t take things personally

Having done this for many years, Kara has seen as many searches get called off as filled. Sometimes the economy tanks and the company decides it can make do with the personnel it has. Sometimes the company’s plans change and they no longer need that position. Sometimes they’re running a search to prove to INS that they can’t hire a citizen for this position in order to help a current employee earn a green card and no one was ever going to get hired anyway. (That last one makes my toes curl, but I know it’s true.)

In other words, the vast majority of the time, people don’t get hired for positions for reasons that have absolutely nothing at all to do with them, their skills, or their credentials, much less their worth as human beings.

By not taking it personally, you’re less likely to get discouraged. Remember: Every single application is a new opportunity. Your odds have nothing to do with what’s happened so far.

Be able to explain why you’re leaving

Every candidate is going to get asked why they’re leaving their last position — it helps the hiring manager figure out if the candidate is going to be a good fit. That goes double for people who are changing careers.

Have an answer that doesn’t throw anyone under the bus. Whatever your situation, however you actually feel about it, your answer should depict you as a thoughtful, conscientious person who has a lot of goodwill for everyone you’ve previously worked with.

Explaining the change in terms of the job market, in terms of new discoveries about yourself (so long as they don’t appear to arrive every six months), in terms of exploration and excitement, in terms of wanting to apply your skills in a new arena, will get you much further.

Assume you have things to offer

No one wants to hire Eeyore. Figure out what your transferrable skills are, and be confident that those are skills not everyone has and that companies really love to see.

If you’ve successfully made it through a PhD — hell, even the coursework of a PhD — you obviously have piles and piles of transferrable skills in the form of critical thinking, ability to analyze, ability to define questions, synthesizing information, and the ability to write. If you spent any time teaching, you’ve also got public speaking, instructional design, and management.

And those are just the “general PhD” skills. You’ll also have content-related skills and knowledge, and you might well have skills related to other academic endeavors, like running conferences or editing a journal.

And on top of those, you’ve also got all of the skills you’ve developed in all the other areas of your life.

In other words, you are literally bursting with skills that employers desperately need — and that not everyone, despite the attitude of people in academia, actually have. So go into every application knowing that you have a lot to offer that company.

The big picture?

Most of all, Kara said, research the company you’re applying with, make a case for why you can help them achieve their goals through this position, and keep the faith.

October 15th, 2010 | % Category: Turning Your Calling Into a Job | 4 comments

The problem of professionalism

Turning a life lived in academia into something else can feel overwhelming. But there are strategies that work, and more resources than you can begin to imagine. Want to see all of the ones I’ve talked about so far? Click here for the job-search archives.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks I see when people are leaving academia and searching for new careers is an unhealthy focus on the concept of “professional.”

It’s usually implicit rather than explicit, but it goes something like this: Academia was a high-prestige, high-professional career, so if I’m leaving that for whatever reason, I have to find a career that is at least as high-prestige and high-professional as academia. If I do anything else, it will be a sign that I have failed.

It’s as though getting that next high-prestige, high-professional career will somehow “make up for” “failing” in academia.

There’s only two problems with that

First, you haven’t failed.

Whether you’ve decided it’s not for you, not found a job, or hit some other roadblock, you haven’t failed. You’ve learned a ton, and life isn’t working out as you’d hoped and planned.

Yes, it’s disappointing. Yes, it can be hard as hell. Yes, we might even be able to describe the situation as having not reached a goal you were striving for. But “failure” is something else entirely.

That means you don’t have to make anything up — to anyone.

Second, focusing, even implicitly, on high-prestige and high-professional careers both limits the field (there just aren’t that many) and subordinates your happiness.

High-prestige, high-professional careers tend to have long training programs, limited opportunities, and strongly kept gates. They (just like academia) aren’t that easy to get into, and they bring along with them all the stress and panic and everything else.

And focusing on them means you’re likely ignoring all of the other careers that would really fulfill you because they aren’t shiny.

The problem of selling shoes

So often, in academia, we tell this story that if you don’t get tenure somewhere, the only other thing you’re qualified to do is sell shoes (or whatever) somewhere.

It’s such crap. By virtue of having gotten to graduate school at all, much less through it, it’s clear that you have tons of transferrable skills that hiring managers all over the place would be happy to have. If you leave academia, you can take those skills and do just about anything.

But sometimes, when we have that “you can do anything” conversation, it leaves out an important piece: What if you would really, really, deeply love selling shoes?

It all counts

The only things that matter in terms of your career — really matter — are whether or not you’re happy in it and whether or not your bills are getting paid one way or another. That’s all.

That means if you deeply love animals and want to open a doggie day care, that is a legitimate alternative to academia. If you’re passionate about changing the world one person at a time, being a hotline operator for a suicide line is a legitimate alternative to academia. Selling real estate, running a landscaping business, designing brochures, caring for children — they are all legitimate alternatives to academia if they make you happy.

In fact, this is so important I’ll say it again — whatever makes you happy is a legitimate career alternative to academia.

So as you’re figuring out how to translate your calling into a job, try not to narrow your own field. Try not to exclude fields just because they aren’t in the same tier of prestige and professionalism. Investigate your own fears and assumptions around prestige and professionalism.

And at the end of the day, know in your bones that success and deep contentment with your life are two ways of saying the same thing.

A few comments about comments

The whole question of being unhappy in academia — no matter what stage you’re in — can feel fraught. If you’d like to comment but are feeling shy about “being out there,” feel free to make up a persona or comment anonymously. You can also email me directly.

First-time commenters are always moderated (because you wouldn’t believe the spam I get), so if your comment doesn’t show up immediately, hang tight! Chances are, I’m not right on my email.

And most of all, let’s all practice compassion for ourselves and others in this difficult time and space.

October 8th, 2010 | % Category: Turning Your Calling Into a Job | Leave a comment

Turning your calling into a job

Finding your calling is an important first step towards creating a life that will make you honestly happy, whether you’re refining your academic career, leaving academia, or a few jobs out of higher education.

But it’s only a first step. The next step is turning that calling into something that actually pays you money.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be focusing the blog around ways to do just that. (I’d say that’s October’s theme, but you’ll notice August took two months. Oh well!)

We’ll be talking about

  • How to imagine what kinds of jobs would fulfill your calling — and your personality.
  • How to find job opportunities
  • How to create excellent job application materials
  • How to negotiate all of those pesky post-academic issues and questions, like why you left and what skills you really have to offer.

What questions do you have about the job search process that you’d like me to incorporate? Leave them in the comments, and I’ll be sure to cover them.

October 1st, 2010 | % Category: Turning Your Calling Into a Job | 2 comments
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