What I Tell My Graduate Students

This author realizes that an important part of his job is to make sure his graduate students get their own jobs. What that means is talking about job placement as soon as they walk in the door and tell him they want to do a Ph.D. First he informs them of the current job situation, whatever that is at the time. He makes it clear that the first thing they need to do is start thinking about the minimum requirements for going on the job market. The next thing he does is set the bar for the minimum requirements in his field. To even get into the race, he tells students, they will need three published articles, two or three book reviews, attendance and paper presentation at professional conferences, and, ideally, a contract for the publication of the dissertation. He tells his students to plan their dissertation committees with the job search in mind. They should pick professors who not only are skilled in the field of the dissertation, but who also have national and international reputations. Letters from those professors will count a great deal. He advises students to attend professional conferences for a number of reasons. First, there is the inevitable networking, which helps them not only now but also later in their career. Second, by attending sessions at the conference, students can learn the latest scholarly insights circulating, well before the publication of those ideas. Third, the book exhibits of such professional organizations will let students browse the newest texts and even unpublished page proofs before the material is filtered through the review mill and enters the consciousness of scholars and critics. Another important reason to attend professional conferences is that often the editors of presses are there looking for new books to publish. Getting to know those editors, and even pitching a book idea to them, is an important part of career development. At the end of the academic day, having a job is really what should be the outcome of spending years in a Ph.D. program.