Karen Kelsky's The Professor is In: The Essential Guide to Turning your Ph.D. into Your Job is intended to be practical advice for job-seeking graduate students.
Kelsky left her tenured position as an anthropology professor and department head in 2010, in order to begin a new venture -- "The Professor is In", a counseling service and blog aimed at helping graduate students mount a job search.
Aware of the current competitive job market, with colleges and universities increasingly trying to save money by staffing departments with part-time adjuncts, Kelsky offers smart, frank, and often witty advice to lead applicants through the complicated process of securing a tenure-track position. She has no illusions about her readers' ability to do this on their own. But she does offer these job seekers wisdom through a process that is often infantilizing -- one that leaves former students "insecure, defensive, paranoid, beset by feelings of inadequacy, pretentious, self-involved, communicatively challenged, and fixated on minutiae".
Advisers, at least in graduate programs, come in a variety of stripes -- some are helpful, others aren't. They may not have any idea of the realities of the market into which they are sending students, which Kelsky thinks is "terribly, patently unfair, in that several generations of Ph.D.'s are now victims of an exploitative system that trains them for jobs that no longer exist, and denies that fact".
The Professor is In covers every aspect of the job-seeking process for academics: Building a strong record through carefully chosen publications (prestigious peer-review journals are the gold standard, and in the humanities and social sciences, a book contract is crucial); going after grants; presenting at national conferences; honing a CV; writing a succinct, sophisticated cover letter and teaching statement; presenting oneself in an interview and during a campus visit; and negotiating an offer. "Grad students remain in an extended juvenile status long after their peers outside of academia have moved on to fully adult lives." For such folks, The Professor is In is essential reading.
I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.
Kelsky left her tenured position as an anthropology professor and department head in 2010, in order to begin a new venture -- "The Professor is In", a counseling service and blog aimed at helping graduate students mount a job search.
Aware of the current competitive job market, with colleges and universities increasingly trying to save money by staffing departments with part-time adjuncts, Kelsky offers smart, frank, and often witty advice to lead applicants through the complicated process of securing a tenure-track position. She has no illusions about her readers' ability to do this on their own. But she does offer these job seekers wisdom through a process that is often infantilizing -- one that leaves former students "insecure, defensive, paranoid, beset by feelings of inadequacy, pretentious, self-involved, communicatively challenged, and fixated on minutiae".
Advisers, at least in graduate programs, come in a variety of stripes -- some are helpful, others aren't. They may not have any idea of the realities of the market into which they are sending students, which Kelsky thinks is "terribly, patently unfair, in that several generations of Ph.D.'s are now victims of an exploitative system that trains them for jobs that no longer exist, and denies that fact".
The Professor is In covers every aspect of the job-seeking process for academics: Building a strong record through carefully chosen publications (prestigious peer-review journals are the gold standard, and in the humanities and social sciences, a book contract is crucial); going after grants; presenting at national conferences; honing a CV; writing a succinct, sophisticated cover letter and teaching statement; presenting oneself in an interview and during a campus visit; and negotiating an offer. "Grad students remain in an extended juvenile status long after their peers outside of academia have moved on to fully adult lives." For such folks, The Professor is In is essential reading.
I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.
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