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Upcoming Events
Dec. 24 & 25 and Jan. 1 Career Services is closed
Jan. 9 & 10, GTP Spring Conference - Using Multiple Modes for Teaching & Learning, 9am - 4:15pm, Hale Science Building
Jan. 9, PhDs in Non-Academic Careers, 10:45am - 12pm, 230 Hale
Jan. 22, Recruiters Tell Alll, 5:30-7pm, C4C S350
Jan. 27, Resumes Critiques, 1-3:30pm, C4C S350
Jan. 28 & 29, Spring Career and Internship Fair, 9am-3pm, UMC Glenn Miller Ballroom
Feb. 5, International Career Panel, 5-6:30pm, C4C Abrams Lounge
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46766 / Internship - Market Researcher, Jeppesen/Boeing
46758 / Assistant Superintendent, USD 490
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Career Spot Videos
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Department
Career Talk
Department specific career workshops are planned with graduate students and faculty.
Formats may be presentations, panel discussions or networking forums.
Topics:
career assessments, non-academic career options for PhDs,
CV & resume writing, job searches, interviewing, networking,
skills employers want, salary negotiation and identifying your talents & strengths.
Contact
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Wait! Not so fast!
Before you wrap up your fall semester and head out to enjoy the winter break, take a minute to check out December's issue of Future 411. This month, we bring you the best of both worlds: a career option that melds your work as an academic with opportunities to work beyond the classroom in the university setting. These jobs are often called "alt academic," and they are a growing trend in career opportunities for alumni with graduate degrees. Alt acadmic jobs are the perfect way to work in an academic setting without taking the tenure track. Spend a moment reading on to find out more!
This month, we highlight the guidance and skill building offerings of our partners at the CU-Boulder Graduate Teaching Program. They are an additional career resource on campus, and the go-to center for academic career training at our university. We are pleased to present an interview with the GTP's dedicated and innovative director Dr. Laura L.B. Border who talks about the path she took to her own alt academic career and what the GTP offers our graduate students. We also talk with a former member of the GTP team who used his experience in that office to take the alt academic path beyond the campus environment to a job advocating for faculty training on a national scale. This month's articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and Science Career provide additional information and perspectives on alt academic careers, how to prepare and search for them, and what to expect if you land one.
We at Future 411 and all of Career Services hope your semester has been a successful and fruitful one and wish you a safe and restful holiday season. Consider getting a jump on the new year by joining the GTP for their Spring Conference January 9-10, 2014 for two days of informative and inspiring workshops that will jump start your teaching, research, and career development for the spring semester. As always, the doors at the Career Services offices at the Center for Community are open, too, and we welcome you to visit us and take advantage of the resources, counseling, and support we have to offer to prepare for your job hunt in anticipate of graduation. It's never too soon to think about what's next!
From our Career Services family to you -- all the best for the season,
Annie Sugar and Annie Piatt
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Our Colleagues
The Graduate Teacher Program Builds Alt Academic Skill Sets, Too
Interview by Annie Sugar
Laura L.B. Border earned bachelor's, master's, and doctorate in French Literature at CU-Boulder. She also completed 60 credit hours of work in the School of Education, including the full course load in counseling psychology and licensure for teaching high school French. Dr. Border directs the Graduate Teacher Program, which offers graduate students the opportunity to learn to teach at the college and university level and supports research and creative work students who would like to transition to business, government, industry or the arts.
How did you make the move from traditional teaching to an "alternative academic," and what attracted you to the work?
My move from teaching French to serving as director of the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP) was grounded in my experience in the School of Education, in classrooms at the college level, in writing textbooks and educational materials, and in being trained as an educational counselor. When the position opened up at CU-Boulder, I knew it was the perfect position for my interests and the skill set I had developed. I knew that TA training could be improved and I knew that Schools of Education did little at the time to prepare graduate students to serve as future faculty. This vacuum provided me with the opportunity to create what has become a program recognized locally and nationally by several awards, the most prestigious of which was the TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Exceptional Faculty Development Programs in 2006. I have particularly enjoyed my national association, The Professional & Organizational Development Network, with which I have had continued professional development in faculty and graduate student development.
What are alternative academic jobs and why should graduate students consider that career path?
First, one has to understand the traditional academic career path, which entails being hired as an assistant professor, being promoted to associate professor and tenured, and eventually being promoted to full professor in one's academic area of expertise. Alternative paths that occur on the Boulder campus essentially include instructorships, directorships, or perhaps academic librarianship. Some academics prefer to spend their careers as full-time instructors, while a quick glance at program directors on the Boulder campus will reveal individuals who opted to run an academic program, for example, Joan Gabriele in Special Undergraduate Enrichment Programs (SUEP) and Corinna Rohse in the Student Academic Success Center (SASC).
What fields of study are well suited for the alternative academic career path? How should graduate students prepare for such jobs?
Because such jobs tend to be interdisciplinary, what is important is a skill set that involves management, budgeting, and developing services that the institution needs, matched with a sincere commitment to provide appropriate support to undergraduate or graduate students.
If someone is considering transitioning to a management type job, he or she needs either to take courses or to work in positions that build appropriate skills. All jobs at CU Boulder are posted through Human Resources. The best way to network is to provide service to a campus unit.
What role can the GTP play in training graduate students for alternative academic jobs?
The GTP offers many types of workshops -- some for academic positions, others for careers outside of academe. Teachers have a particular skill set that melds well with management: they are good problem solvers and good organizers. They know how to manage and evaluate groups. Their communication skills are excellent. We offer the opportunity for graduate students to engage with faculty and staff and discuss a variety of positions.
Our staff is available in ATLAS 201 to answer questions, assist with letters and CVs, and provide general guidance for interviewing. Feel free to contact us at 303-492-4902 or gtp@colorado.edu to arrange for an appointment or come by and visit.
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Our Alumni
Hoag Holmgren received his BA in English and Philosophy from Muhlenburg college before moving on to earn an MA in Library Science at Wesleyan University and an MA in English/Creative Writing at CU-Boulder. He is currently the Executive Director of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Nederland, CO.
What brought you to your current position at POD and what do you do in your job?
My ten-year position as assistant director in the Graduate Teaching Program (GTP) at CU-Boulder brought me to POD. POD is the central professional organization in the field of faculty development. Laura Border, the director of the GTP, made sure I was a member of POD and that I attended the annual conference and also presented at the conference. When the position of POD's Executive Director opened up, I applied and got the job. It's gratifying work in that I'm helping to run an organization that supports the advancement of teaching and learning at hundreds of colleges and universities. Almost everyone I work with is passionate about teaching and sees it as a mission to change the world, so that makes it exciting.Tell us a little about your past involvement with the CU-Boulder Graduate Teacher Program. How did your work with the GTP as a graduate student and alumnus prepare you for your career beyond CU-Boulder? I started as a Lead Graduate Teacher in the English Department and was immediately struck by the unique and interesting nature of the GTP program. I did a week-long training with about 35 other Lead Graduate Teachers, each from a different discipline and experienced a unifying sense that teaching was an underground revolutionary activity not fully appreciated in academia. I had a composition teaching position waiting for me in Mongolia after I graduated from CU-Boulder's creative writing program, but my wife's sudden pregnancy inspired us to stay in the United States. The assistant director position at the GTP became vacant, and I applied and got the job. I worked with graduate students across the disciplines doing video consultations, setting up faculty mentorships, and helping to organize trainings on the CU campus. While in the assistant director position, I gained a great deal experience and learned how to work with graduate students, faculty, and administrators from a wide variety of academic backgrounds. How can the GTP help current graduate students prepare for their careers, and what resources does it provide for students seeking both academic and alternative academic careers? The GTP is a tremendous resource that has grown to university-wide and national prominence under Laura Border's visionary direction. The skills one learns to become a teacher -- working with groups, organization, writing, assessment, working to meet deadlines, collaboration, mentoring, being creative while nurturing creativity in others, and tracking and using data -- are skills that are valuable in any field. The GTP is a unique academic melting pot where poets and physicists train together. Also, because CU-Boulder is a research university and has a research culture and environment, the GTP's mission to prepare future faculty and train graduate students to teach tends to attract people who are interested in swimming against the stream of convention. What additional advice or resources do you suggest graduate students use to prepare for and find work in alternative academic careers? Take advantage of every opportunity available to you while in graduate school, both in and out of your department. Doors tend to open and just keep opening.
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Professional Advice
Chronicle of Higher Education/
The #alt-ac Track: "Negotiating Your "Alternative Academic" Appointment
By Bethany Nowviskie
By now, avid ProfHacker readers will have encountered the cipher "#alt-ac:" a neologism and Twitter hashtag that marks conversations about "alternate academic" careers for humanities scholars. Here, "alternate" typically denotes neither adjunct teaching positions nor wholly non-academic (what-color-is-your-parachute, maybe-should-have-gotten-an-MBA) jobs-about which, in comparison, advice is easy to find.
Instead, the #alt-ac label speaks to to a broad set of hybrid, humanities-oriented professions centered in and around the academy, in which there are rich opportunities to put deep-often doctoral-level-training in scholarly disciplines to use. Recent #alt-ac conversation online additionally tends to focus on thedigital humanities, a community of practice marrying sophisticated understanding of traditional disciplines with new tools and methods. The digital humanities constitute, in my opinion, the best gig in town-attracting scholars who exhibit restless, interdisciplinary curiosity, mastery of relevant research tools and methods (old and new), and uncommon comfort-in a world that defines expertise like this-with a general assumption that practitioners are jacks-of-all-trades.
If they are to serve us well, academic IT, libraries, publishing, humanities labs and centers, funders and foundations, focused research projects, cultural heritage institutions, and higher ed administration require a healthy influx of people who understand scholarship and teaching from the inside. That our culture for many years has labeled these people "failed academics" is a failure of imagination. Those who gravitate toward #alt-ac positions during or after completing graduate study are often driven to set things in motion in the academic environment, and to set things right. Couple the attractive #alt-ac mission of building systems (social, scholarly, administrative, technical) with an exceptionally sorry academic job market, and it becomes clear that more and more graduate students, post-docs, junior faculty, and underemployed lecturers will be stepping off the straight and narrow path to tenure. Read more
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Inside Higher Ed
The Jobs We Want?
By Miriam Posner
As digital scholarship takes hold at steadily more universities, I want to raise a few questions about a discourse about labor that has emerged from and become identified with the digital humanities. The term for this work is "alt-ac," which stands for "alternative academic."
Jason Rhody, a senior program officer for the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities, coined the term in 2009 to describe the scholarly work performed by many of us in and in the orbit of the academy who do not hold traditional faculty jobs but do perform scholarly labor. The neologism touched a nerve. Since 2009 we've heard the voices of a great many people who identify with the term, and we've seen steadily more interest in the alt-ac job market from universities, philanthropic organizations, and scholarly societies. "Alt-ac is the future of the academy!" declared Elliott Shore, Bryn Mawr College's library director, in 2012.
Alt-acs need not be digital humanists, but digital humanists have found the term to be particularly congenial, since many of us happen to hold these hybrid jobs, and since a founding principle of digital humanities work - that one can think through and articulate humanistic principles in unconventional ways - complements the nontraditional, praxis-based scholarship that many alt-acs perform. Alt-acs need not be Ph.D.s, but given the current status of the academic job market, many Ph.D.s have seized on the alt-ac movement as a beacon of hope in an otherwise fairly depressing situation. Read More
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Science Careers
A Career as a College Science Teacher
By Vijaysree Venkatraman
When, sometime in the 1990s, Malcolm Campbelltold his doctoral adviser at Johns Hopkins University that he planned to teach biology after his Ph.D., his adviser said, "don't do it, you'll go brain dead." If you want a real career in science, his adviser told him, you should focus on research.
Advice like this is common, but it's also wrong. Campbell is now a full professor at Davidson College, and he says he has had plenty of job satisfaction in his nearly 2 decade long career. He did not abandon research in his discipline, but these days he publishes mainly-not entirely-in pedagogy. His primary responsibility is teaching, which he reckons takes up 75% of his time.
It's common to encounter Ph.D. students and recent graduates who want to focus solely on their students, on teaching and advising. They picture themselves in college faculty roles, but teaching is their first love. Unfortunately for them, tenure-track faculty posts pretty much always come with research requirements, and that goes not only for large universities but also for primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs).
So Science Careers wanted to know: Are there positions out there where science Ph.D.s can earn a good, secure living by teaching? Are there teaching-focused positions that include a professional salary, benefits, reasonable working conditions, and the equanimity that can come from job security? Do positions like that exist? Read More
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Contact Us
Annie Sugar, Editor, PhD Student, Media Studies, Journalism and Mass Communication
Annie Piatt, Graduate Student Program Manager and Career Counselor
Center for Community, N352
Appointments: 303-492-6541
Office Hours:
Fall & Spring: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Wednesday, 8 a.m. - 7 p.m.
Friday, 8 a.m. - 4 p.m.
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