UCI Next Gen PhD White Paper: Throughout the 2016-17 academic year The Humanities Commons, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, initiated an exploration into the future of graduate school with a project called Next Generation Humanities Ph.D. University administrators, faculty, graduate students and the national educational system have observed for decades that increasingly fewer Ph.D.’s find stable careers on the tenure track. The drive behind much of the exploration was to evaluate the potential opportunities for graduate students in a variety of careers. The project investigated the strengths and weaknesses in the following areas of graduate education:
- The nature of the mentor relationship between faculty and graduate students
- Graduate curriculum
- Partnerships with community institutions and potential industry employers outside of academia
- Documenting alumni career experiences and integrating them back into the campus community
At the end of this exploratory period, the Humanities Commons, with input and support from a diverse community of faculty, grads, administrators and alumni, produce a white paper. This white paper outlines the take-aways from the project and proposes steps for future development.
This report produced by the Modern Language Association (MLA) outlines ways that faculty can help their students cope with the rigors of academic study and prepare for careers beyond the academy. Modules 1 and 3 would be most helpful for faculty in need of strategies to engage their students about future plans and how to make the most out of their time at UCI. Module 5 is most helpful for those faculty and administrators who would like to bring a wider vision for post-doc careers into the seminar classroom.
Campus Resources
One of the larger lessons of the Next Generation project was that faculty and graduate students are typically unaware of the vast resources offered by UC Irvine. Here is a list of helpful resources that students have expressed a desire for, but often under-utilize.
The Graduate Career Center helps grads evaluate their skills and use this information to strategize their job searches, draft CV’s and resume’s, and connect with a community of like-minded job seekers.
UCI’s Graduate Division works with grad students on a variety of issues, from writing assistance, pedagogical strategies and development, and leadership development.
The Center for Engaged Instruction (CEI) provides workshops, tutorials, and certificate programs that assist faculty and graduate student instructors with enhancing their teaching skills and strategies.
Online Resources
The Graduate Career Consortium helps gradate students take the important first steps to connecting with a variety of employers outside of the tenure track.
Letters of Recommendation for Non-Academic Jobs: Rather than simply emphasizing your student’s intelligence, research skills and interests, these letters should explain how they have helped to save time, money, labor or face.
The Career Diversity Five Skills: were first identified in focus groups of historians with PhDs who found careers beyond traditional academia—five things they hadn’t learned in grad school but that they found they needed in order to succeed beyond the academy. These five skills are also essential to succeeding as professors.
Articles of Interest
In Training Graduate Students to Be Effective Teachers, Vimal Patel draws on the work of Leonard Cassuto and others to track a developing trend among some graduate programs: “bootcamps” designed to produce more confident and skilled graduate TA’s. As many of us know, incoming graduate students receive very little training prior to their arrival to graduate student teaching. A handful of universities are attempting to change this.
In Imagining Ph.D. Orientation in 2022, The American Historical Association’s Jim Grosman envisions how graduate education might look just a few years from now. For one, he imagines that graduate education will entail more than a grad student’s immediate department and its discrete discipline, but involve the whole university as integral to graduate curriculum.