Tuesday, March 25
1-3 pm
Oak Hall 236
Workshop for grad students of all disciplines
Light refreshments will be served
Current conditions in higher education have made this historical moment a particularly challenging one for students. Institutions are working to reduce time to the Ph.D. Yet, the academic job market requires increasing professionalization on the part of graduate students in this shorter timetable-more teaching, more publications, more technical skills. At the same time, doctoral students worry they will need to add additional, non-academic skill sets to their profile-project management, library cataloging, metadata skills, statistical skills-in the event they fail to secure tenure-track employment (and they wonder when they will have time to learn these things). Understandably,students are feeling squeezed and frustrated.
Jenny Furlong, Ph.D. in Romance Languages from UPenn, Director of Career Planning and Professional Development at the Graduate Center of CUNY, will discuss some practical ideas and considerations for conceptualizing graduate work and expanding our career possibilities while in graduate school. She has seen grad students in the humanities and social sciences find work in many sectors, including higher education administration, non-profits, for-profits, libraries, museums, and secondary education. She'll discuss how we can investigate other career paths, how we can develop a network of mentors in a range of fields, and how we might conduct an academic job search and a nonacademic one simultaneously. We will learn how to develop a strategy that can help us to move forward in a positive direction.
Jenny will be joined by two practitioners: Jennifer Parker and Cindy Lovell will share their experiences about pursuing non-academic careers.
Jennifer Parker is a UConn Instructional Designer (ID) for eCampus' Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning with fourteen years' experience developing higher education online courses and programs. Four of those years she developed online education for the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she also earned her master's degree in Instructional Systems Development.
Cindy Lovell is the Executive Director at the Mark Twain House in Hartford. She has a Ph.D. in Education and has held two tenured university positions before taking the position at the Mark Twain House.
This event is sponsored by the Graduate Student Senate.
