Tag: transition
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Alexandra Guerson, Part-Time Faculty, Transition Q & A
About Alexandra Guerson Alexandra Guerson earned her PhD in history from the University of Toronto. She’s currently a part-time faculty member at New College, University of Toronto, and occasionally takes up sessional work at U of T’s history department and at York University. Find her online and follow her @AEGuerson. A tenure-track job at a research…
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Manifesto
There’s a big, and growing, problem with academic labour and the job market. What makes it worse is that there hasn’t been an attendant shift in attitudes within the academy about the purpose of a PhD. Although I’m most familiar with the situation in history and the troubles faced by the humanities in general, a…
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Scholarship and life
Scholars are almost always academics. We assign the designation to professors and researchers with university posts who get paid to research and publish. The term “independent scholar” only proves this: The qualifier is necessary because “scholar” by itself implies an academic position. I think this is why I’ve been uneasy about my desire to continue…
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A job interview
I had a job interview a couple weeks back. I wasn’t offered the position, but I still consider it a success. A celebration, even. Here’s what happened: Earlier this month, after talking with Natalie Zina Walschots, I started to be much more active on social media. That Friday, I mentioned Jessica Langer in a #FF…
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The importance of blogging
Reading an interview with #altac blogger Liana Silver got me thinking about the importance of blogging in my life. I first started to blog in June 2006. Life was pretty good: I was nearing the end of my second year of my PhD, was finishing up a stint as president of our graduate history society, my comprehensive exams…
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“I’m a loser”
A lot has changed since the fall. Back then, my dissertation defence was several months old and the final version was long handed in. But I felt I’d barely progressed. My post-PhD job prospects seemed poor, and I felt pretty low. When friends and acquaintances asked me what I was up to, I would tell them,…
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Transitions, transitions
On Monday I conducted an interview with a guy I’ve decided to write about. It’ll be my first real stab at a non-blogging, non-work, non-academic writing project, and I’m excited to see where it will go. Shandy Brown is a great subject. We met in 2006 on a plane leaving Toronto for San Francisco, and…
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CV to resume
It’s a standard exercise advice columns and career centres assign post-PhDs seeking non-academic employment: turn your CV into a resume. Unfortunately, doing so isn’t straightforward. And completing the exercise isn’t necessarily the best way of going about things. Trouble is, one’s academic path is only that. What it leaves out may well be the aspects…
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Informational interviews
All the “how to get a job” books emphasize the importance of networking. Informational interviews, they say, are a great way of meeting potential career contacts and learning about job options. For an academic seeking post-PhD work, or anyone transitioning from one career to another, networking is often essential but it’s not always obvious where…