Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Professor Hale. If you're a current prospective PhD student or a PhD candidate, if you're ABD, maybe you're a newly minted PhD on the job market for the first time or you've been on the market for a long while, I made this video for you. I hope it's helpful. It's the exact kind of frank conversation that I wish I had had when I was first going on the job market in 2018. So, all right, I'm gonna talk about two things in this video. First, the brutal truth. There aren't enough good jobs in academia to meet the supply of PhDs. Second point, I'll talk about alt-act careers and why I think it's a great idea, but maybe not the best name. Okay, so first things first. If you're enrolled in or are applying to a PhD program, chances are that you aspire to be and have been sold the dream of becoming a tenure-track professor. Story goes something like this. You're smart and curious. You work hard, harder than all of your peers. You publish in high-impact journals, obviously for zero compensation, for major companies that then restrict and monetize access to your creative and intellectual work, but that's okay, that's the name of the game. You apply for awards and conferences, build up your professional network, to put your career first, often at the detriment of your physical, mental health, and social well-being. I know I did, at least. And at the very end of it all, of doing everything that you were supposed to do, that hard work and single-minded determination will be rewarded with a secure, well-paying, and illustrious career. Now, let me be clear here. The problem isn't that there are no jobs in the academy. There are, there just aren't that many of what I would call good jobs. What do I mean by that? Well, a lot of academic jobs are going to be adjunct positions. These are very often contingent positions. You will most likely not have job security from one year or even one semester to the next. Then there's compensation and benefits to consider. A lot of these adjunct positions and postdocs too, both of which make up the majority of faculty and research jobs that are posted on job boards, like higher ed jobs or Times Higher Education, they don't pay well and many don't include health, life, or disability insurance or retirement benefits. Not to mention that you probably won't get to choose where you live and that'll probably have consequences on your social life and whatever sort of romantic relationships you might want to have. After all, there aren't that many jobs and you have to go where the jobs are. It's also insane to me that a person with multiple advanced or terminal degrees could earn 30 or 40 or $50,000 a year and have no job security or that one might have to cobble together multiple adjunct positions at different institutions to make ends meet. So yes, tenure track jobs do exist, but they are few and far between. Yes, with enough hard work and preparation, you might land one of them and your PhD granting institution will surely use your story to sell other folks on their program and to perpetuate the PhD to professorate master narrative. But the truth of the matter is this, for the vast majority of PhD students, you're not gonna become a professor and chasing that dream with cruel optimism might prevent you from feeling accomplished, being happy, or living the life that you want to live. Now, this brings me to my second point. As I understand it, the term Alt-Act, short for Alternative Academic, originated in 2010 in a Twitter thread between Bethany Nowinski and Jason Rowdy. Here, I'm drawing on a 2013 Inside Higher Ed article written by Brenda Bethman and Sean Longstreet. I'll leave a link in the description box below in case you want to give it a look. It's a good read. Alt-Act is a term used to describe careers that exist outside of the narrowly defined and traditionally venerated tenure track faculty position at a four-year degree granting institution, or even careers that exist outside the academy altogether. I want to make two points here. Point one, I think that Alt-Act is the future lifeblood of advanced degree programs, and especially doctoral programs. If the academy doesn't evolve and doesn't prepare its students to succeed in a rapidly changing world of work, rather than training students for some sort of mythic life of the mind in a pure meritocracy detached from the icky material trappings of the real world, I don't understand how these institutions expect to survive. Point number two, I don't hate the term Alt-Act. Let me start with that. But I don't think it fits, not really. See, it's the word alternative that kind of rubs me the wrong way. If the vast majority of PhDs will never land a tenure track faculty position at a four-year degree granting institution, that means that most PhDs go on to have careers outside that incredibly narrowly defined and near unobtainable model of success. They might go into higher ed administration. They could teach at a community college or work in the government or in UX design and research or an NGO or get into politics or start a business. There are a lot of opportunities. A career outside of the professor at post-PhD isn't alternative or an exception or lesser than. That's the thing. It's the convention. It stands to reason. I think that PhD programs, especially those in the humanities or non-technical fields need to train students to do all kinds of work besides getting a PhD, becoming a professor and then training other people to do the same thing. It's a weird, unsustainable model that feels way too much like a multi-level marketing or Ponzi scheme. I think we need to reassess this whole alternative terminology and the ideology that it reflects back to educators and students and even potential employers. So, all right, before I wrap up here, a bit of transparency. When I was scripting out this video, I was originally going to cover four rather than two topics. In addition to addressing the lack of good jobs in the academy and alt at careers, I was also going to walk you through my experience of being on the job market, landing a tenure track job, why I left that job and what it was like going back on the market during a global pandemic to getting the job I currently have. And then I was going to offer some quick but actionable advice to grad students and job seekers. If enough folks are interested, I will make that video. I just wanna see how this video performs, if it seems helpful to people, that sort of thing. I didn't want those two points to get lost at the end of an eight or 10 minute video, hence cutting them. So if you want me to make that video or if you have any suggestions for other topics that you'd like me to discuss, let me know in the comment section. Please subscribe, like the video if you enjoyed it, share it with people who might get some value out of it and take care of yourself and each other. Bye. All right, before I wrap up here, a bit of trans... Stop it.