What skills do Ph.D. candidates need to land alternative-academic jobs?
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Posted By: Hija Chang on November 21, 2014 Traditional Ph.D. Programs and Alt-Ac Careers By Joshua Kim I wouldn’t trade my current alt-ac career or my traditional PhD graduate degree for anything. My alternative academic (alt-ac) career in digital learning at Dartmouth’s Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) is endlessly challenging and constantly invigorating. The gig enables me to collaborate with the most amazing faculty and non-faculty educators on the planet. There really is no more exciting space in postsecondary education to work than the intersection of learning and technology. Coming to this digital learning alt-ac role from a traditional PhD program, and years of teaching (and some research - as well as a spell in the for-profit tech and publishing world), has proved a strong foundation for this work. I trained for a career as a traditional academic. Graduate school put the academic perspective deep into my DNA. Where many of the theoretical frameworks and methodological techniques that I studied to become terminally qualified in sociology and demography have grown rusty from disuse, I remain thoroughly socialized and acculturated into the traditional academic worldview. While getting a PhD clearly helps in our alt-ac efforts to interact with faculty as colleagues and equals, this is clearly a problematic and perhaps counterproductive state of affairs. Our best non-faculty educators on our campuses may come with other qualifications beyond a terminal degree. It is not clear to me that a PhD creates a better instructional designer, program administrator, or division head. A PhD is as much of a symbol as a qualifier. The ability to contribute to the knowledge of one's discipline may be a poor indication of the ability to make important contributions to one’s institution. Us alt-ac people may be doing research, but rarely the sort of research (in our day jobs) that our grad program prepared us. Would I advise those alt-ac professional in academe to pursue a terminal degree? No doubt. Do I think a PhD is any kind of guarantee that an alt-ac professional will be any more productive than those lacking this credential? Not a chance. The longer I spend in my alt-ac career the more acutely aware I am of the critical academic skills that I did not learn in my graduate training. These skills include: Skill 1. Finance, Budgeting, and Higher Ed Economics: A great deal of my time, and even more of my mental energy, is spent thinking about money. Where does it come from? How to spend it responsibly? How to plan effectively? I think about the various sources of revenue for my institution and higher ed as a whole. I worry about the growing costs of higher education, a worry that extends beyond paying for college for my two kids. How will we bend the cost curve? How can we improve learning while simultaneously increasing access and bending the cost curve? There seems to be a great deal to learn about higher ed finances and higher ed economics. Everything from how to create and manage a budget to how individual department and unit budgets roll up into the larger revenue and spending picture. All of this information and skills seem essential. In grad school I had zero training in higher ed budgeting or higher ed economics. How the university is funded, and how higher ed economics operate, simply never came up in grad school. It was a topic as foreign as learning Latin (or Klingon), as remote ballroom dancing lessons would have been in a traditional array of sociology and demography courses. I think that graduate students should not get out of graduate school without a basic understanding of higher ed finances, budgeting, and economics. Continue Reading: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/techn... If you enjoyed this article, Join HBCU CONNECT today for similar content and opportunities via email! |
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Hija Chang
Management, See Moss Interactive Bellarmine University class of 2021 Member Since January 2011 |
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