Current trends in the academic job market paint a bleak picture. Data from U.S. universities reveal a drop in job postings in the Politics field over the past three years and a decline in tenure-track positions over the last decade. For 2021-22, APSA reported that...
I hold a PhD in history from the University of Virginia. Like many graduate students, I began my doctoral program hoping to become a professor. When I decided to pursue a different career, my university didn’t know how to advise me. Here’s what I learned about finding a non-academic job.
I excitedly read this recent tweet by Evan Perkoski of UConn, about a new article he co-authored that has been accepted in International Organization. Beyond being glad for a colleague's success, I...
How do colleges and universities go about hiring tenure-line (or the equivalent) faculty in politics and international relations? Back in 2013, I provided a short overview of the typical U.S....
Willardson and Sullivan’s recent article here provided numerous useful tips for Americans who want to “profess abroad.” They also asked scholars outside the United States to weigh in with thoughts. As a European, I thought I’m a good position to furnish relevant information for those who may be a considering an academic career in Europe. I am from Austria, although my entire academic career has taken place outside my home country. I taught for ten years in Switzerland, held a visiting Professorship at Columbia University, and am currently part of the faculty at the University of Bergen in...
Academics depend on slow processes subject to unfortunate slowdowns. And, unfortunately, academic timelines can make or break careers.
I had a kind of unique path to my current tenure-track job, straddling the policy-academia divide. So I've followed current discussions on "alt-ac" careers with interest, but found something lacking in them. Nathan Paxton's recent interview with APSA crystallized that; the bigger question is not how to support alt-ac PhDs but how to counsel people before getting PhDs in the first place. As I've discussed, I sort of followed the "alt-ac" approach in the first part of my career. For those who haven't seen it, "alt-ac" means "alternative academic," referring to PhDs who pursue jobs outside of...
Graduation Cap and Diploma on White with Soft Shadow. C/o Bluestocking, 2008 Uyen Le APSA is nearly upon us again, and I thought I should write something profession-related as I got back into blogging. My first thought was to make fun of annoying questions, but I already did that (six years ago...but still relevant). And there is a lot of advice floating around for grad students or others on the market. Instead, I thought I'd focus on an area where my experience is more unique: navigating academic conferences while working outside academia (or alt-ac*) and--in my case--trying to get back in....
The following is a guest post by K. Anne Watson, a PhD candidate in Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Georgia's School of Public and International Affairs. The academic job market is incredibly stressful. This is at least partly because so much of the process tends to be opaque. (The rest, of course, is because you will be asked to handle all of it while juggling your day-to-day life and feeling a vague—or not-so-vague—sense of existential dread settling in around you.) Leading up to my first applications, I asked question after question of my committee...
This topic came up on twitter--how do we get our friends and relatives to understand the academic job market? My first take: don't bother. It can get really confusing really fast. I consider my family well-educated, yet deep into my career, my mother thought that my appearances on TV and radio would help me get another job. Nope. Given that job market season is approaching (sorry!),* here's my listicle of things you have to explain: 1. The Adjusted Bar Closing rule: you can't go home, but you can't stay here. Few grad programs will hire their own products at all, and very, very few hire...
Seems to be the time of year when folks post their advice for aspiring professors on how to succeed at the job talk. While there are other parts of the process--being interviewed one on one by various members of the department or getting grilled by a committee (something that happens far more in Canada than in the US), the most important (and probably not deservedly so)* part of the "fly-out" is giving a talk based on one's research and responding in the Q&A. I tend not to be very humble here and offer all kinds of unsolicited advice, but I hesitate on this particular question because...
With all of the recent essays on the Duck this summer about the job market, citation indexes, and lack of confidence, there seems to be a brewing undercurrent about the anxiety of another academic year. Some of us maybe facing down a PhD defense and the job market for the first time, some of us compiling our pre-tenure review files, and some of us just generally feeling uneasy about a new area of research or a class we’ve never taught. Some maybe anxious about a new job they’ve recently arrived at. I can feel the collective tension reading through the posts and their comments. I’d like to...