Dean John Stevenson received his BA in English from Duke University and earned his PhD, in the same from the University of Virginia. He joined the faculty of the English Department here at CU-Boulder, in 1982 and was appointed the Dean of the Graduate School in 2011. 

Why did you choose to pursue an academic career? Did you ever consider an alternative path? 

I have been a member of the faculty here at CU Boulder since 1982, right after I finished my PhD.  So, I have been here my whole career.  I chose an academic career (after flirting with the idea of being a journalist) because I was drawn to the kind of work academia involves-teaching, writing, and working with students and faculty who shared my interest in and love for literature. The job market for English professors was very bad when I graduated, and I have always felt most fortunate to have been offered a position here, in a wonderful university in a magical location. Later, I became interested in the administrative side of things-universities are very complex organisms and very interesting objects of study in their own right!

What is Beyond Academia, and what was your inspiration for it?

I think that there has been a growing recognition for some years that the universities that provide doctoral education needed to do more for students who might want or need to pursue non-academic careers. I think we have been aware for a very long time that many PhDs pursued careers in lots of different areas -- in business, in consulting, in foundations, in non-government organizations, in the arts, and in government, to name just a few. But universities never really tried to follow the careers of those alumni -- to see where those graduates were and what they were doing, and to learn what kind of path they had followed. How did they get those jobs? These questions have become particularly pressing for disciplines outside the STEM fields, where many graduates have always gone on to work outside the academy, and they have taken on a new urgency as the academic job market has become more and more difficult. I wanted to provide help for students seeking alternatives to academia, and I thought one good way to do so was to allow them to hear from students who had taken an alternative path so that they could, I hoped, learn from the experience of those graduates.

Who did the Beyond Academia program bring to campus last academic year, and what can graduate students look forward to this year?

We sponsored three speakers last year:  one is a Professor who is an expert on the academic job market and its possibilities and pitfalls. He helped students strategize how to approach a job search. Two other talks were given by alumni of our graduate programs, one from Comparative Literature who has become a film-maker, and another from Education, who now leads a Foundation. They talked about how their graduate education had helped them succeed in the non-academic careers that they chose. 

This fall, we heard from a literature PhD from CU who now works as an IT officer at a major scholarly organization a few weeks ago. Next month, we will hear a talk by Maren Wood, a History Ph.D. (not from CU) who has become very prominent as a speaker and writer on non-academic careers; she heads up a consulting firm she founded that runs career development workshops and her columns appear frequently in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I am working on some more speakers for the spring semester. Stay tuned!

Beyond Academia events can help any graduate student, whatever their career ambitions. They are designed to open up the wide world of opportunity that lies out there on the other side of graduate school. Graduate students who attend can expect a lively and helpful presentation and an audience made up of graduate students from across campus.

Scott Schafer received his BS in Physics and Psychology at Arizona State University, and then completed a Master's in Neuroscience at New York University. He is a PhD candidate in Cognitive Psychology here at CU-Boulder and currently serves as the CUSG/UGGS Liaison in our student government. 

Why did you choose to pursue your PhD at CU-Boulder, and what is your career plan after graduation?

I initially came to Colorado to work as a lab manager for my current advisor, before deciding to continue my education and get a PhD. I'm extremely interested in the presentation and usage of statistics, and how psychology can be used to improve clinical outcomes. Ideally, I'd get a job where I could fuse those two interests, but I plan to look into a variety of jobs related to data science.

What is UGGS? How did you get involved, and what is role in the organization?

UGGS is the United Government of Graduate Students at CU-Boulder. Their primary function is advocacy for graduate students for a variety of issues ranging including mental health and wellness. My primary role is to facilitate communication between UGGS and the University of Colorado Student Government (CUSG), and to ensure that both groups get what they need from each other. Campus climate is one of the big issues concerning UGGS right now, and I'll be collecting data from graduate students, analyzing that data, and then working on solutions to any problems we find.

I initially got involved with UGGS and CUSG because I wanted to work with the university to help graduate students find jobs outside of academia. As someone who hopes to graduate soon, I had been thinking more about what I'll be doing after graduation when I realized I had little more than a vague understanding of what I'd like to do, with no real plan for how to achieve that. Despite studying and working on campus for the last four years, I had very little idea of what services where available to assist with that, and I suspect many graduate students are in a similar position. Given that, I hope to improve graduate student awareness of career assistance opportunities on campus.

What does UGGS do to assist graduate students with career development while they're working on their degrees?

One of the primary ways UGGS assesses graduate student satisfaction and identifies issues is through a campus climate survey. The last completed survey in 2012 found that only 40% of graduate students are planning to continue a career in academia, and 25% of graduate students said their advisor or program does not assist them in finding employment. Given these responses, it seems that some departments and advisors may not provide adequate guidance in finding employment, and we'd really like to work with Career Services to make graduate students more aware of opportunities that exist outside of their department.

How can graduate students learn about UGGS career-related events? What organizations does UGGS partner with to offer these events?

The primary method would be through their UGGS representative. Any information we have about events will typically go to the representatives first, so they can disseminate that information to their respective programs in the most effective way possible. While we don't have any events of our own planned yet, we've drawn up several plans for programs with both CUSG and Career Services that we hope to see come to fruition around Spring 2015.

How can graduate students get involved with UGGS?

Come to the assembly meetings! The meetings are open to all graduate students, even if you already have a representative from your department. If you don't know if you have a representative or not, it's entirely possible your department doesn't have one, and you could be it! We meet every other Wednesday from 5:00pm-6:00pm in ATLAS 229. Our next meeting is October 1st, and all graduate students are welcome.

On a personal level, what are you doing to prepare for your career after graduation?

First and foremost, I'm trying to publish several manuscripts detailing how changes in brain activity correspond to clinical symptoms and other measures of health. I'm collaborating with labs in Arizona and New York (though not at the same schools where I studied) working on neural correlates of treatment for both PTSD and depression. Here at CU-Boulder, my work focuses on pain and pain relief, and how changes in the brain can reflect that. All of my research relies heavily on statistics and is of clinical relevance, so I'm hoping that other employers will look favorably on that when I begin to apply for jobs. Additionally, I'll be participating in a Big Data training camp in mid-October to expand and enhance my capabilities.

Thus far, my work with UGGS and Career Services has been invaluable for networking as I've been able to generate contacts that would have otherwise been difficult to obtain. This work has been excellent for getting some hands-on experience not directly related to science. I've been consistently involved in solving problems outside my academic area of expertise and have found that most of my skills adapt readily to the change.