January 24, 2001: Features

Graduate alumni seek careers outside the classroom

by Ann Waldron

This is the way it used to be: A young man earned a Ph.D. from a prestigious school like Princeton. Everybody expected him to get a teaching job at a university. If he didn't, his adviser wrote him off, his parents worried, and his contemporaries wondered why he wasted all that time and money on graduate school.

That's not the way it is now. Only 44 percent of the 300 alumni who received Ph.D.s from Princeton in 2000 have jobs in academia (including 15 percent who have postdoctoral fellowships, which are temporary), according to a survey conducted by Beverly Hamilton-Chandler, director of Career Services. Twenty-nine percent are in industry or business, and 25 percent work for nonprofit institutions. (For the record, 136 graduate alumni returned the questionnaire.)

The options for Ph.D.s are plentiful and exciting, says John Wilson, dean of the Graduate School, and graduate students need only know that the opportunities are out there.

A new book by two recent Princeton graduate students makes it plain that Wilson's enthusiasm is on target. The authors of So What Are You Going To Do with That?: A Guide to Career-Changing for M.A.s and Ph.D.s, Susan Basalla *97 and Maggie Debelius *00, both have Ph.D.s in English from Princeton. But Basalla works for the Motley Fool, a Washington-area online financial advice company, and Debelius works part-time for another online firm, Life-Minders, while teaching part-time at George Washington University and other area colleges.

When Basalla realized in the middle of her quest for a Ph.D. that she didn't want to teach, not anywhere, not even if she had offers from Stanford, Yale, and Harvard, she began to panic. What should she do? First, she decided to finish her dissertation on American writer Zora Neale Hurston anyway. Her parents agreed to support her totally for almost a year while she did nothing but write and get the dissertation out of the way. Her adviser, Elaine Showalter, Avalon Foundation professor of the humanities, also supported her decision, while Lee Mitchell, the English department chair and Holmes professor of belles-lettres, found her a list of all the holders of Ph.D.s in English from Princeton who were not working in academic jobs.

Basalla began calling names on the list, asking, "What are you doing? Do you like it? Could I do something like it?"

She often discussed her findings with a friend, Debelius, who also had Showalter as an adviser. Debelius, who was an editor at Time-Life before she went to graduate school, had discovered in the midst of writing her dissertation on images of the Sphinx in late 19th-century British literature that she hated writing alone. She also realized that though she liked teaching, she did not want to live entirely in the academic world. Nevertheless, she too decided to finish her work for the degree.

As they learned more about what English Ph.D.s were doing outside the classroom, the two women realized they did have other options. The people Basalla talked to were happy with their choices. And in spite of the fact that they weren't in academia, they were all glad they had pursued a Ph.D. By and large, they found that the skills acquired in graduate school - research, critical reading, serious writing, completion of a mammoth project - were useful no matter what they were doing.

Like the good graduate students they were, in addition to talking with alumni, Basalla and Debelius checked the literature. They found, however, that available career books didn't apply to them. So they decided to write their own, putting together an outline and a proposal, which they sent off to literary agents who listed Ph.D.s among their credentials. ("It's like a secret handshake, the Ph.D.," one of them says.)

"An agent called the next morning," Debelius says. "I thought he was a telemarketer. I never expected to get a call so soon."

Soon armed with a contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, they set to work, starting with Basalla's list of Princeton English Ph.D.s. From that point, word of mouth took over. Everybody knew somebody else who was doing something else.

One of their most interesting case histories came from Stacey Rees, a Princeton comparative literature graduate student who wasn't getting very far with her dissertation on the image of motherhood in French medieval literature. Rees began to suspect that she didn't really belong in graduate school; she preferred her part-time job at a birthing center in Princeton. When she talked to a friend of hers who was an obstetrician, she realized suddenly but clearly that she wanted to be a midwife.

"Stacey uses her graduate-school skills every day," Basalla and Debelius write. "Instead of teaching undergraduates, she teaches mothers, one on one and in groups, at a critical point in their lives." Rees uses her critical reading skills to evaluate current research and has written scholarly articles since she became a midwife - something she never did in graduate school.

While other examples are less dramatic, they are numerous, and include Ph.D.s with careers in television, a woman private detective (serious research was apparently great training), a house cleaner, one of NPR's Car Talk guys, and a writer of marketing proposals for Christie's, the art auction house.

Elaine Showalter, Basalla's and Debelius's adviser, is also interested in careers for Ph.D.s. When Showalter was president of the Modern Language Association in 1998, she arranged for the two of them to join her at the annual MLA conference to speak about the topic. While Showalter herself drew criticism - even protests - from those who thought universities should provide more teaching jobs rather than push graduate students out of the classroom, Basalla and Debelius caused less controversy. "People came up to us and wanted to know more," said Debelius. "It's easier for graduate students to talk about career choices in a positive way than for a tenured professor to deliver the same message."

Princeton is slowly tackling the issue. The Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni (APGA) holds alumni brunches at the Graduate College on occasional Sundays, seating current students alongside alumni with jobs outside academia. Career Services has also started working with graduate students, offering résumé and interview workshops and including graduate-student opportunities at job fairs.

In short, "alternate careers" for Ph.D.s is a hot topic.

"That's a terrible phrase," says Robert Weisbuch, director of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in Princeton, a private nonprofit that has recently begun a program to develop opportunities outside the academy for humanities Ph.D.s. "Alternate is pejorative, it assumes that one career is best and all others are alternate. If you can't get a job where you're a clone of your mentor, then you're second best." The Ph.D. should be the goal of bright students, no matter what they plan to do, Weisbuch says, adding, "If every Ph.D. could get a job at Stanford, we'd still have this program."

After all, Woodrow Wilson himself was one of those Ph.D.s who managed to find a career outside academia.

Ann Waldron is a freelance writer in Princeton and frequent contributor to PAW.