Escape the Ivory Tower

Monday roundup

A weekly collection of interesting things I find around the Internet. Find something I didn’t? I’d love to hear about it the comments!

What people were talking about this week

Does the increase in quantity of academic research compromise the quality?

Richard Vedder argues that faculty should shoulder work loads like those in other professional fields: medicine, law, accounting. What I want to know, though, is how “not in the office” equals “not working,” since teaching takes place elsewhere and most faculty do research and writing elsewhere.

Paypal founder offers students $100,000 for two years to develop business ideas instead of going to college.

Advice for new tenure-track faculty.

It used to be that newly minted PhDs were advised to publish chapters of their dissertation as articles before publishing the whole book. Advances in technology and politics may be changing that dynamic.

There’s a new resource for navigating graduate school: Gradhacker.org.

Nicole and Maggie talk about the crappiness of the “when to have a baby” choices for female academics.

Responsibilities vs Accomplishments

When you’re sitting down to write a resume, it’s hard enough to remember every job you’ve ever worked and everything you did in each one, the better to pick out the relevant information for whatever you’re applying for. But the hardest part – and the most important – is turning those responsibilities into accomplishments.

Responsibilities are not enough

It’s important to start with what you were responsible for. Those job duties are going to give a reader a sense of the scope of your position, and if you’re applying to a company big enough to run resumes through a key word search, those job duties will, properly described, light up with keywords.

But responsibilities alone aren’t going to convince someone to take you to the next stage of the application process, because nothing in a list of responsibilities will tell the reviewer if 1) you actually did what you were supposed to do, and 2) were any good at doing those things.

This is where accomplishments come in

Given all of your responsibilities, what did you get done? Did you streamline the technical process so website downtime dropped 10%? Did you win a $2m grant to research personality type at work? Did you grow the program from 5 minors to 100?

These are the kinds of things that tell a reviewer all about your strengths and skills – both your skills in the hard and your skills in the soft. If you successfully came up with, proposed, funded, and put on a brand new conference that has since become annual, then the reviewer knows you’re a visionary and you can make things happen. They know you can fundraise and make good arguments and coordinate lots of logistics.

And while you can tell them these things outright, it’s always helpful when a reviewer can see how all of your tasks added up to something important. That helps them envision what you might be able to do in this workplace. And that’s the kind of response that gets you an interview.

Working on applying to non-academic jobs? I have resume-writing superpowers that I’d love to use on your behalf.

What you want to do depends on what you think is out there

When I was in high school, two friends of mine cracked up one day reading the Help Wanted section of the local newspaper, because a company was advertising the position of sausage handler.

What did a sausage handler do? They had no idea. But the very opacity of the position led to years of jokes.

You probably don’t want to be a sausage handler

One of the things we miss, being in academia, is the wide variety of jobs it takes to accomplish even the simplest of corporate, non-profit, or government missions.

Because we live in a world dominated by disciplinarity, we don’t see the ways those disciplines get combined, sliced, blended, and superceded out there in the working world. We don’t see the sausage handlers, or the market researchers, or the non-IT project managers, or the organizational trainers, or the strategy captains, or the investigators, or the user design experts, or the inventors.

Because we live in a world of strict credentialing and clear pathing, we don’t see the various serendipitous ways that people get and become qualified for jobs. We don’t see the ways jobs are more about skills and fit than they are about degrees.

But outside of academia, jobs are being invented daily that don’t have paths or credentials, because the jobs themselves didn’t even exist yesterday. But something changed and now we need someone to do this particular set of things. Voila – job.

Finding out what’s out there can be fun

You probably won’t run across sausage handling jobs very often (at least I hope you don’t!), but one of the best ways to explore your options is to actually go out and scan job boards, company job postings, and anywhere else you see jobs listed.

What jobs are out there that you didn’t even know existed? What jobs look interesting even though you’ve never even considered it?

One of the biggest challenges people have when they’re considering leaving academia is expanding their sense of the possible. There are far more opportunities out there for you than you know about, but until you go looking, you won’t know what they are.

Starting June 12, Jo VanEvery and I are leading a class designed to help you find out more about your own career possibilities. You can find out more by clicking here.

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