Stanford Humanities Center
Picture a classroom on campus where you might have taught a discussion on close reading, helping undergraduate students understand layers of a Victorian novel or a Confessional poem. Now, imagine using those same skills to help students discover their career paths.
For English PhD students, this isn’t just a thought exercise. You can turn your valuable experiences into a role in career development.
While you’ve spent years studying the nuances of texts, you’ve also developed an impressive tool kit: the ability to trace patterns, craft persuasive narratives and mentor others in higher education. These aren’t just academic skills confined to the role of a professor. These transferable skills are exactly what make career development professionals excel at transforming uncertain students into graduates who are confident in themselves and their futures.
Whether you’re starting your dissertation, you’ve recently defended, or you are wishing to leave academia entirely, this article will show you how your doctoral program in English has prepared you for a role in career development. We’ll map out how your key competencies can translate into this field, and offer steps to develop these competencies further.
Who We Are
Drawing on 10-plus years in higher education and industry, Laura brings a unique perspective to her role as a career peer coach at Washington University in St. Louis’s Center for Career Engagement. In the classroom, she has honed her ability to help students share their stories, having taught courses on subjects from dark academia to citizen science. A PhD candidate in English at WashU, she serves in her spare time as an associate editor for RHINO, a poetry journal based in Chicago.
Emily, too, has a decade of experience in higher education. While pursuing a PhD in Victorian literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Emily taught classes in first-year composition, drama and 19th-century literature, while contributing to the public arts and humanities through fellowships and volunteer roles. After becoming a PhD candidate, Emily chose to leave UNC to pursue a career in academic administration. She is currently the program coordinator for career and professional development at the University of Michigan Medical School, where she encourages the growth and success of biomedical graduate students and postdoctoral scholars.
Professional Competencies
To discuss how experiences in an English PhD program prepare you for positions in career development, we turned to the Graduate Professional and Career Development Professional Competencies, created by the professional development committee of the Graduate Career Consortium. The committee identified 12 competencies found across 100 job ads for career development positions; for this article, we’re focusing on the four most common competencies developed within an English PhD program, based on our personal experiences.
Mentoring, Training, Teaching and Education
The first of the four competencies we’ll address relates to mentoring, training, teaching and education—the foundation of academic professional development.
Teaching opportunities for English PhD students provide a platform for integrating career development strategies. See where you can incorporate career strategies into the undergraduate curriculum. Most English PhD students teach undergraduate composition as part of their pedagogical training, so that’s a natural course to start with. Since a wide range of instructors deliver content, these courses often have predetermined class descriptions, readings and essay assignments. However, you can still weave career development into everyday classroom activities. For example, while teaching College Writing: Citizen Scientist, Laura invited guest speakers from across the university to speak with students about different professional writing skills. Guest speakers exposed first-year students to influential change makers at the university and expanded their network while enhancing the curriculum with perspectives other than their instructor’s.
Career Coaching and Advising
The next competency we’ll turn to is career coaching and advising. English PhD students often support students during their first year of college, a year in which they are navigating a tremendous life transition as they become more independent. Helping students to develop action plans and articulate their thoughts closely relates to career guidance and can hone your ability to listen actively and provide formative feedback.
Approach your interactions with students thoughtfully and with the knowledge that classroom exercises can have a profound impact on their trajectories. Emily often taught a mock job application unit in the Writing Across the Disciplines first-year composition course at UNC, guiding students through common steps of a job application: job searching and selection, résumé and cover-letter writing, and a mock interview. Emily became deeply familiar with these genres and confident in critiquing them. She also learned how to advise students through issues commonly encountered in the job search process.
If your teaching duties don’t offer flexibility, consider engaging in more casual career guidance with your students in office hours: ask them about their other classes, their summer plans and what they hope to do with their degree. Be willing to review job application materials or serve as a reference. Dipping into your students’ interests outside the English classroom can strengthen your ability to communicate with students about career exploration and planning.
Knowledge of Population and Disciplines
The third competency we’ll discuss relates to knowledge of different student populations and disciplines. While PhD students in English develop expertise within their own fields, expanding knowledge across disciplinary boundaries and engaging with different populations enhances your generalist persona as a scholar and a collaborator.
In this spirit, familiarize yourself with other disciplines and their student populations at your institution. Opportunities to do so can arise in a variety of ways. Emily had the opportunity to teach a discipline-specific section of the first-year composition course Writing in Business, which explored common genres in business discourse. Interacting with 36 pre-business students for a semester gave Emily insight into their unique motivations, strengths and career goals, as she learned to teach specific genres of writing, such as a business proposal, and coached students to prepare for a Shark Tank–like final project. Though it was overwhelming at times, Emily leaned on vetted course preparation materials and the knowledge of her MBA-student graduate assistants. Later, when Emily began her role at the University of Michigan Medical School, she similarly relied on external resources and the knowledge of her colleagues to help her develop familiarity with the discipline-specific needs of the trainees and postdocs with whom she works daily.
As Emily’s experiences illustrate, experiential learning opportunities outside the humanities can be extremely enlightening. Interdisciplinary range—bringing the arts and sciences together—can only strengthen your understanding about how universities serve students. As another example, Laura’s work as a 2023 Pivot 314 fellow allowed her to engage with the St. Louis entrepreneurial community and offered exposure to programming centered around leadership and communication. Since humanities training often focuses on teaching, Laura leveraged her experience with education to secure a part-time summer internship with an education technology start-up. Through participating in this program, she also witnessed how to plan, execute and assess a yearlong PhD fellowship program. That exposure was an unanticipated experiential learning opportunity that made her curious about the logistics of fellowship and scholarship programming for PhD students, leading to her current work as a peer career coach.
If your institution does not offer interdisciplinary PhD fellowships, you can still connect with nonhumanities graduate students and learn more about the inner workings of your university by attending events and programs offered by other schools.
Program and Event Administration
The fourth and final competency we’ll address here is program and event administration. As a member of a career development team, you’ll likely have opportunities to facilitate both large and small events. Being comfortable with administrative duties, such as program evaluation and needs assessment, will allow you to support your team’s efforts as you work together to provide resources for students’ career success.
If your schedule allows, aim to get involved with the management of various programs and events. These programs could be hosted by your department or other groups on campus. Emily chose to participate in the Jane Austen Summer Program, a North Carolina–based public humanities symposium, and served as the program’s registrar for four years, gaining experience in stakeholder communication and working with large groups of people. This experience helped prepare Emily for her current role, in which she hosts events for graduate students and postdocs weekly, with duties ranging from advertisement to facilitation.
Ask your department administrators if there are any opportunities for you to help facilitate an event, or get involved in a student organization. Showing your future employers that you are eager and willing to take on responsibilities like planning and marketing an event will highlight your willingness to be a team player.
Conclusion
Our examples show that an English PhD program can provide many opportunities for the development of transferable skills. As you consider your next step after your PhD program, we encourage you to capitalize on the expertise you’ve developed as an instructor, storyteller and careful reader. Do not self-reject—your skill sets are immensely valuable in career development, and such a career field would allow you to continue to impact students’ growth outside the classroom. Remember that your path from your PhD program to career development professional does not mean you must leave behind your academic training. You can use it to help students across disciplines—from humanities to science and business—discover and share their stories.
Join the Colloquy
Join the Colloquy
Reframing the PhD: Centering Students in a Changing Humanities Landscape
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I write this introduction as a faculty member who advises and teaches graduate students but primarily as the director of a humanities center who works closely with graduate students in a variety of non-curricular settings including supporting public humanities and community-engaged projects. We have known for a long time that students need to develop capacities beyond those traditionally acquired in graduate school as well as be able to articulate their skills and value to a wider range of employers. Over the last decade or so, the structures in place for graduate school in the humanities have been rethought and reworked, assisted by major grant funding, and a slew of writing has been produced on the topic.
Our students, for the most part, enter graduate school with a different mindset than many of the faculty advising and teaching them. In part, of course, this mindset is shaped by the realities of the faculty job market and now by the intensified attacks on both the university and on the principles upon which 21st century humanistic research and education rest. But our graduate students are also informed by a different set of research interests and methodologies (digital, community-engaged, collaborative, equity-driven) that often exceed the boundaries of traditional academic humanism and seek to engage with what Stacy Hartman calls “the humanities ecosystem”: an expansive area of research and praxis that includes the purely academic but that is not limited by it.
A large subset of our graduate students wishes to root their research in collaborative and community-engaged practices and public humanities methods that, with exceptions, many previous generations of scholars did not pursue. This does not imply a dilution of scholarly rigor—a frequently aired preoccupation amongst some faculty members—but rather speaks to an expansion of publics and interlocutors beyond the academic, a praxis of co-creation and collaboration, a reparative and equity-driven mindset, and an engagement with new archives and sources and methods. Even when students are permitted to pursue such work, it is often perceived as an “add on,” something that a student must do on their own time, which has, of course, major implications for equity across graduate student populations. But programs rarely require students to train in these methods, thus implying—wrongly—that public engagement and collaboration are divorced from entrenched ideas about what constitutes research.
This compartmentalizing may be because faculty often believe they can only teach and advise in the same way they were trained. But we have, in fact, all the necessary tools to adapt to this already long-standing reality: we know how to research new topics and learn new skills, how to convene conversations and exchanges of ideas, how to invite experts of many kinds to campus. Using these tools, we can invite our students to be active participants in developing the new capacities many of them are clamoring for.
Faculty must also train students to navigate and understand the university and its operations—the “hidden curriculum”—so that they may be full partners in shaping their own research projects and outcomes but also in acquiring the skills to enact needed change in the academy. At best, this training could take the form of internships or shadowing in the university’s many administrative spaces that would also serve as career development. But advisers can also take it upon themselves to give students a wider sense of how the humanities ecosystem functions. Mentoring is, of course, key to this understanding, but faculty—who primarily fulfill this role as dissertation advisers, committee members, and directors of graduate studies—need more systematic training in best practices. Students, who are often disadvantaged by the opacity around these relationships, need to be made aware of what they can and should expect from a faculty mentor and, significantly, how to build a broader network of mentors, including peer mentors, alumni, and non-scholarly collaborators. Indeed, more formal structures for graduate student mentorship that include a wider array of those within the humanities ecosystem can only serve to better apprise students of the many possibilities their degree may lead to, and how.
Graduate students increasingly turn to spaces within the universities beyond their departments to access a more robust and expansive humanities education. What Katina Rogers calls “central” and “nonevaluative” spaces, such as humanities centers, writing centers, libraries, outreach centers, and career centers, have experienced staff members with the expertise to expand students’ training and capacities (Putting the Humanities PhD to Work, 79). Hartman and Strakovsky argue that these and other spaces fulfill a broadly conceived curricular function that they call “acculturation,” of which “coursework is only part of the process” (Graduate Education for a Thriving Humanities Ecosystem, 22). This expansive conception of graduate student education should not, however, lead to overloaded students or advisers who grumble about their advisees’ time away from academic research. Instead, a humanities ecosystem mindset can only serve to enhance our students’ trajectories and their well-being.
Here I have curated a list of writings and a video that promote the idea of enabling students to advocate for themselves and their research, praxis, and methodological interests and for their well-being and futures. The texts collected here speak to the limitations of the traditional academic job market but also to the exciting and generative possibilities of a future within a broader humanities ecosystem. They offer creative and, above all, collaborative ways of thinking about the PhD and its outcomes, breaking down the binary thinking that divides public and community-engaged research and practice from the more traditionally understood academic humanities, and emphasizing the importance of an expansive view of mentoring that speaks to a new way of thinking of graduate education as a co-creation.
