By Matthew Woodbury Dr. Pierluigi Erbaggio received his PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Michigan in 2016. He is an Administrative Assistant at the Consulate of Italy in Detroit, MI. He spoke as part of U-M’s PhD Connections: A Career Conference in April 2018 and agreed to share some more perspectives about his own…
Author: Admin
A Classical Studies PhD follows her love of teaching
By Matthew Woodbury Dr. Jacqui Stimson received her PhD in Classical Studies from the University of Michigan in 2017. She is a Postdoctoral Teaching Consultant at the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Education Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Stimson doesn’t have a typical day at the office. After just one year consulting at Carnegie…
Teaching Career Diversity Through Informational Interviews
The content and format of career diversity within humanities departments follows no single model. As curriculum committees and graduate program chairs consider whether or not to make coursework or training mandatory, where to situate it within the arc of the program, and how to connect students with resources beyond the unit or department, it…
Humanities for All
A project of the National Humanities Alliance, the Humanities for All database showcases “higher ed-based publicly engaged humanities initiatives, presenting a cross-section of over 1400 undertaken over the past decade from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.” Projects are organized by discipline, theme, geography, and type of institutional and community partners. There’s…
Where Historians Work
Created by the American Historical Association, this database of 8,515 historians who graduated from US universities between 2004 and 2013 “provides the fullest picture of PhD careers available for any discipline.” The tab displaying information for careers beyond the professoriate is particularly interesting. It details the occupations – ranging from a single “pest control officer” to…
Synthetic Thinking: An archivist’s journey from dinosaurs to Du Bois
By Matthew Woodbury Dr. Robert S. Cox is Head of Special Collections at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. He received his PhD in History from the University of Michigan in 2002. Dr. Cox began his PhD to learn about the past. Initial training as a paleontologist, however, meant that the materials he consulted were…
Mobilizing the Humanities for Diverse Careers
This piece from Anne Krook encourages humanities graduate departments to focus “on two problems whose fixes are within our own control.” She identifies the problems as as, first, training “students in too narrow a range of dissertation lengths and types” and second “most often implicitly and explicitly devalu[ing] non-academic job outcomes.” Departments and advisers…
How Graduate Advisers Can Bolster Their Career Guidance
This piece by James M. Van Wyck encourages graduate advisers to actively develop their knowledge of where humanities PhDs work, to look to their own networks as a resource for connecting students with possible post-graduation options, and to adopt a perspective that understands career advising as a team-based approach rather than the sole responsibility of…
Where do humanists work?: Organizational Profiles
Graduates of humanities PhD programs finish their degrees with wide-ranging abilities in research, communication, instruction, and project management. For students who have spent many years at research-intensive institutions, however, it is can be difficult to imagine contexts outside of the professoriate where they might apply their training. As an assignment for English 630: Professional Humanities…
How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty
Developed by the University of Michigan’s graduate school in 2018, this guide is a “resource for faculty members who seek to improve their relationships with their students and their effectiveness in working with them.” Featuring ideas for how to communicate expectations and responsibilities, examples of how departments at Michigan frame mentoring and supervision, and suggestions for campus…