The path to tenure begins in the first year of graduate school

Indeed, your chances are best if your parents get you into the pre-PhD day care center when you’re four.

The right pre-PhD daycare center. Don’t be fooled! Not all day care centers guaranteeing eventual tenure are able to make good on their promises.

You are right that most people have no clue whatsoever what to do ahead of time. Some people are more savvy than others, but I wonder if this is because the savvy people knew what was coming or if they were simply luckier, and had better skills at navigating the academic terrain (e.g., networking) that served them later.

I think this is a great idea and has the potential to help some students–if they read The Chronicle of Higher Ed. That is another thing grad students don’t tend to know about.

When people describe to what’s going to happen later, it doesn’t quite make sense while you are still a grad student. It is hard to put things like tenure into context. I think it is precisely what you mention in your column: There are many implicit practices that no one is making explicit but people often assume you know what these are. A part of doing well in academia are knowing-how rather than knowing-that skills. I think it’s brilliant that you are bringing the implicit practices to light.

This has to be the most depressing thought in ages. I hope I was stupid enough to have missed the sarcasm.

I am with MattL. I think Eszter’s advice is probably all completely right, and yet another body of advice is probably needed for (a) the interlopers into academic culture, the people who were first in their families to go to college and now want a graduate degree, and (maybe even more) (b) the people who are good at intellectual work but profoundly (with good reason) discouraged and demoralized but for some dysfunctional reason are sticking with their plan to get a Ph.D. Planning for tenure is great, but then most won’t even get on the tenure track, and then there is planning to pay the bills too.

They are smart, motivated and curious, but they are not acquainted with the habitus of academic life.N/i>

Some of the books I read against professional advice later became fashionable, for example Nietzsche. But at that time the future wasn’t now yet.

Familiarize yourself with the careers of Theodore Streleski, Valery Fabrikant, and Gang Lu, and figure out where they went wrong.

Eszter,
This is a great service. Thanks on behalf of anyone who also mentors junior faculty.
For me, finding a mentor made all the difference. Ideally, this will be your dissertation advisor or post-doctoral supervisor. I broke from my advisor’s work and didn’t do a post-doc. So it was critical to find a senior colleague who could help me with the critical task of securing my first NIH grant. This is an impossible task without guidance from someone who has already done it.

Agree with MattL and RM. The Conference do’s and don’ts column is probably good advice, but only particularly useful for people familiar with the culture and mores of academic life. If I’d read that as a second year grad student, I’d be terrified to go near a conference, or (as was my actual experience) if I went, gave my presentation (a very good and well prepared one!) and didn’t open my mouth again for the rest of the conference.

Figuring out how to navigate academic culture entirely from the outside simply can’t be helpfully taught by people who didn’t have to travel that path, I think.

The consistency of this type of career advice columns is quite remarkable and disturbingly so: it always sounds as if there is one obvious best way to get tenure, finish a dissertation, collaborate with colleagues… which I find quite hard to reconcile with the huge variance in personal styles, career types, networking skills, etc. observable among successful academics in any discipline. I won’t deny that there is such a thing as an academic habitus, or even discipline-specific habituses (habiti?), but I do believe that the symbolic market for career advice creates a selection bias both on the demand side and on the supply side… you only read advice columns from people who like thinking and writing about career advice for people who like reading them…

Jesus, who would go to grad school after reading Rojas’s links?

I did/am, for one.

…

Looking forward to more of these, Eszter.

One thing about conferences that didn’t get explicitly mentioned: at a conference, the graduate students are feeling each other out. Early in your GS career, don’t go to any conferences unless you’re prepared to be prodded: expect that you will be expected to arrive with better than cursory familiarity pertaining to the topics to be presented. Do not, under any circumstances, admit to a lack of familiarity; you should have read and understood the papers to be presented in advance, should be more or less sufficiently competent to present the material the papers contain yourself, and should have prepared a list of questions to ask the presenters, largely pertaining to applications or open questions identified in the paper.

You will be expected to discourse fluently and intelligently about the topics to be presented, and you will be expected to be bored and not learn anything new for the first half of each talk (and failure to express this boredom with preliminaries, in any casual conversation outside the presentations, will be noticed and noted).

Conferences, at the graduate student level, are not where you go to first learn about what’s being presented; it’s an opportunity for those who fluently understand the presenters’ papers to obtain answers to questions. An individual who asks you what talks you plan to attend is interested in what questions you have prepared for those speakers.

It all seems so obvious in retrospect, but I did not know any of this, and it would have saved naive and sensitive little me some significant embarrassment to have been told this in advance.

What exactly do you mean by “graduate student”, Salient? “Graduate student in philosophy”? “Graduate student in history”? “Graduate student in sociology”? Your comment has nothing to do with anything I’ve experienced.

Do you worry at all that this is basically a zero-sum (or potentially negative-sum) game though, in as much as these sort of career tips involve things which one wouldn’t necessarily want to do anyway as a researcher? In particular, isn’t there a danger of the sort of thing James Heckman used to worry about with respect to Freakonomics – that although it might be sensible career advice to tell people that they ought to finish their dissertation in X amount of time, and that they ought to adopt Y and Z strategies for getting the right number of the right kind of publications, this does end up having an effect on what questions get addressed, and that this effect isn’t neutral?

Salient Said, about conferences, you should have read and understood the papers to be presented in advance
For most philosophy conferences (and at least some law school conferences, and at least some political science conferences) that I’ve been to this isn’t possible, as the papers are not distributed before hand (and are often being written right up to the time of presentation.) I don’t know about other fields, though, so don’t want to say anything about them. (There are some conferences where papers are distributed first and people are expected to have read them in these fields, but they are an exception, I think.) I should also say that I’ve generally found people at conferences to be quite friendly and kind. This isn’t always so, of course, but most people are genuinely pleased when people are interested in their work, and even many quite famous philosophers have been friendly and willing to talk with me, a completely inconsequential person in the field, about their work. Grad students can sometimes be worse, in part because the tend to have more complexes and insecurities, but people should work on letting this sort of stuff roll off of them, as it will make life happier at no cost. (I think I’m more or less agreeing with Eszter on what seems like quite sensible advice.)

At the same time, we shouldn’t ignore to the things that Streleski, Fabrikant, and Lu did right.

I second the remark @20 about not creating illusions.

I can give advice about how to not finish a dissertation, but to do it in a way that it is much more work than you’d think possible.

FWIW, my preferred method of conference attendance is to drive all night, attend my single session, talk to no one, and drive home. I am introverted, hate traveling, and know from long experience that attempts to chat and network in person can only result in humiliation. (Virtual spaces may be okay, but possibly only because other geeks are there). By attending conferences this way, I get to write a line on my CV. If the social schmoozing is necessary for advancement . . . well.

rm, so that was you that I was fruitlessly chasing all this time. Somebody told me that if I get your reference, all gates will open for me. What a bummer! Next time please stick around for 15 minutes or so, I’m desperate to get my tenure before my retirement.

Well, nonacademics are just as ruthless about the performance of social bull as well – look at the MSM, for example. It took collosal failure on the part of the right in the USA before it became politically acceptable to really question them. Even now the leading critic and analyst of right-wing bull is John Stewart. The second leading guy is Paul Krugman, who’s salient characteristic is that he *has* a day job; being better than almost all MSM professionals is just a hobby.

40- that was a very helpful Max Weber quote you linked to, thanks.

39 – you say:

Is it unfair that brilliance and productivity in and of themselves won’t necessarily get you a great job and tenure? Maybe. But realistically speaking, being in academia is about much more than writing research papers so other skills are indeed important to the job as well.

Well, being able to breathe will also help, realistically speaking. But, puns aside, how is it possible you can live with the “Maybe” there. I mean, realistically speaking, at some point in time it was also about the type of your genital equipment. That wasn’t good so how can one uncritically say ‘more than merit’ and, more than that, flatly encourage a type of conformism that is directly at odds with the creative and critical thinking that, unrealistically speaking maybe, should be at the heart of tenure. Why else have people invented a concept like tenure but to protect an independence of mind which, it seems, has to be abandoned well before the time you can benefit of its protection?

In fact, it should be less than merit because ‘merit’ is too much dependent on some non-essential feelings of well being that the current level of meritocracy is addicted to.

I find that Salient @ 19 exaggerates, but not by much.

I can accept that. Wasn’t intending to exaggerate at the time of writing, but rereading the comment, I used some strong / unnecessarily dramatic language, which still seems unavoidable.

What exactly do you mean by “graduate student”, Salient?

Mathematics, though in post-conference conversation with a philosophy Ph.D. student, I was reassured “it’s much the same way in philosophy.” That’s purely anecdotal. I was also careful to include the details of my personal experience to emphasize the anecdotal nature of my advice (and I was hoping to hear from others, as happened here, about how universally this advice obtains; thank you for sharing.)

Where I come from (UK, History) this is dangerous advice, given that it means you risk getting labelled as a bullshitter.

Only if you speak up in the first place. “Wise fools keep silent,” or something like that. My overall point was: know thy place, and if you don’t belong, don’t try to belong.

“The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.” Wily Loman

Salient,

There seems to be a pretty large difference between the conference culture in mathematics (that you’re describing) vs physics (in which I attended conferences as a graduate student).

My sense is that most of the physical sciences are closer to physics than math in this regard. I’m curious; is the culture of mathematics conferences closer to that of the humanities than to that of the (physical) sciences?

Matt, actually, my negative experiences were in philosophy. My main reason for leaving was inability/unwillingness to cope with social aggression.

The only conference I ever attended took place at my own institution. At dinner, a group of my peers and I shared a table with an epistemologist whose work we’d all been studying. Instead of talking substance, she went around the table and asked each person for their background. This was awkward for me because I was already used to being the outlier, from a small conservative religious school, among all the Ivies etc. But what happened next was really awful. She got to me last, and when I named my alma mater she launched a 5-minute rant on how shocked she was that anyone from such a stupid school could have made it into a top program. I parried as best I could, but seriously, at age 23? As she went on and ON (in front of my peers, with whom I had already struggled for credibility) about how much my school sucked, it was really a big victory not to just break down on the spot. Sure, she ended up looking like an ass to some extent – make note of who doesn’t play nice, advises Eszter! – but my peers had their doubts about my qualifications confirmed by a senior academic, and no amount of social grace on my part could gloss it over.

The one time I *did* break down on the spot was the first time I went to a professor’s office to discuss my work in his course (which was excellent – I had far deeper preparation in the relevant history of philosophy than the Ivy kids, who knew virtually nothing but recent trends and styles). But no matter – I was low man on the totem pole, and he didn’t miss the opportunity to let me know it. I ended up blubbering, not out of weakness or lack of schmooze skills, but because he overtly and methodically drove me to it, with a grin on his face. I dropped out at the end of the semester.

So yeah, after experiences like that, advice like Eszter’s, or breezy assurances that it just takes a little trial and error, seem like a cruel joke.

I’m sorry to hear that, EMG. There are, of course, jerks in every field, and sometimes you get a bunch of them. I’ve seen similar things inside and outside of the university, and I don’t think it’s anything special about grad school. I’m from a decidedly un-fancy background, having done my BA at Boise State University back before it was even known for football, so I have some idea of what it’s like coming from a less-than-prestigious background. But in general my experience at conferences and in all sorts of interactions with academics in philosophy (and in related fields, though perhaps a bit less in law) has been supportive and kind, with a no larger, and perhaps a bit smaller, percentage of jerks and the like than in the rest of the world. (Some departments, of course, get a reputation for being full of jerks, and some philosophers as big-time jerks, and it’s best to avoid those places and people if you can, but I’ve been around enough and know enough people now to feel fairly sure that the jerks are a clear minority.)

matt, so what about “The path to non-jerkness starts in the first year of tenure.”?

I think it has to start before that! (Or maybe I don’t get the joke.) One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that lots of big-shot lawyers are huge jerks- much bigger jerks and jerks in larger percentages than you find in universities. But when I was in law school, the number of real jerks was not that great- perhaps slightly higher than average, but not much. I’m not sure if it’s hard to become a big-firm partner without being a jerk, or if the path makes you into one. Thankfully I’ll never know first hand.

Reading over folks’ responses I’m reassured and emboldened, and thank you for that.

Also, reading over my own comment, I want to emphasize it’s not a criticism of Eszter’s essay. If anything, Eszter’s advice has amplified and further informed the “trading post” advice I mentioned above. Perhaps that didn’t come through, so let me clarify.

The most important thing I learned from Eszter’s essay was a variation on the theme of “don’t arrive empty-handed” — if you’re going to introduce yourself to a presenter, or a researcher, have a conversation planned out in advance, or at least have specific questions planned. Then, contact the person in advance to arrange for an appropriate meeting time.

It seems like a very strangely orchestrated way to say “hello, I’ve enjoyed reading your work,” but makes complete sense in context; it fits the conference-as-trading-post model.

What I want to know, very generally speaking, is when I would potentially be wasting someone’s time. Generally, how do we keep the people in academia more or less happy with us and not irritated by us?

That’s the core oh-god-what-am-I-doing question of the lost or disoriented graduate student (or at least it’s the one that gets the most discussion in the office). How we determine the answer is difficult, but the do’s and don’ts essay provides some useful insight.

One thing I’ve had reinforced by Eszter’s essays is the idea that everyone’s time is very precious, and one should be sure to offer a conversation that contains a reasonable amount of substance per time unit. Don’t just say hello; really, that’s wasting 30 seconds of someone’s time to make yourself feel good. Instead, say hello, and proceed to share something potentially useful. Also, to ensure that this contact will be both feasible and welcomed, contact the person in advance and make arrangements to meet, not immediately before or after their talk. Better to get a terse email “no thanks” than a face-to-face rejection.

That’s good advice, especially the advance-contact advise — it would be insane, outside of academia, to do this, but within academia, it’s apparently good form. (And I can see why: folks’ time is precious; don’t waste it.)

matt, yes it should start earlier … and with respect to the survival of the jerkiest: either way is bad, which makes me react to this post as it kinda assumes you have to join ’em, then pause as if you for got something, then shake off the thought and proceed to make sure nobody else beats you. I don’t doubt it helps to be polite, prepared and stuff but if you click on some of the links that were produced during the conversation here: Argh!, and moreover being polite and well-prepared does not so much help to get tenure than that it helps you with not being a jerk.

One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that lots of big-shot lawyers are huge jerks- much bigger jerks and jerks in larger percentages than you find in universities.

Philosophy is now marketed as preparation for law school. The ones who stay in philosophy are the runts and weak sisters who couldn’t cut it in the legal environment.

Part of the problem with giving general advice to grad students is that it’s a competitive musical chairs environment where someone has to lose. Useful advice is given to select individuals to give them a competitive advantage. Broadcast advice just transforms the competitive environment without helping any particular individual. I call this the efficient meritocracy hypothesis.

Oh ya, making what was once privileged information generally available has no effect on generating a more merit based system. Brilliant analysis.

There will still be privileged information. For example, apparently Kripke circulates his papers privately now, giving selected insiders a leg up. Eszter’s effort is well-intended and will do some good, but it’s still musical chairs. and the same players are still playing.

close tag

I’ve been stopping over at the “brow” threads too, and was just reminded of a link posted awhile back telling how you should eat, drink, dress, entertain yourself, and comport yourself if you’re trying to suck up to an English department.

@61: someone who had come up from an unexpected and unsupportive background

There does seem to be an assumption in some quarters that most students (or potential students) one meets have heard nothing but positive feedback all the decades of their life, and now need to be bashed around a little bit. This isn’t always the case and it needs to be considered as a possibility.

@68:
As it happens, I enjoy this more or less, but I feel I have at least as much to lose by appearing aggressive as you have to gain by showing you’ve got game. Especially in blog comments as opposed to a more freewheeling forum: Usenet is dead (a candle lights its head).

Come off it, Bianca. I’m from a mediocre mackground too, which I refer to occasionally as Last Chance U. Did you read the post to which I was responding?

Our school was mediocre, no question about it. It’s not top-50 on any list for anything, as far as I know. “Mediocre” may be flattering the place; it’s in the bottom 20% of PhD-granting schools.

My friend should not have been penalized for his alma mater, but he was. he specifically commented on the topic, without my asking. The grad student pecking order initially was based on what school you graduated from and who you studied with there. And the higher you started on the list the better things were.

@73: “mediocre” is a meaningless word, without even adequate signaling content. It casts your opponent as destined for life to never achieving much. First you call someone “mediocre,” then you and the rest can band together in the happy knowledge that you’re not, without having to worry that you’ve really hurt anyone’s feelings (mediocre probably describes at least half the population after all).

Bianca, “mediocre” is not meaningless. It means something like “just OK in a place where excellence is demanded”. There are ironies in this. For example, a mediocre major-league athlete usually was a champion at every lower level.

Second, I didn’t call an individual mediocre, but a background. Third, it was not an “opponent” background, by my own background and that of my friend. (In the big time people sneer at “state schools”, but my school was a bottom end state school.)

Now, EMG says that his own background wasn’t mediocre, which is decisive, so I guessed wrong based on the information given.

Basically, top-twenty schools regard everything else as mediocre, and top ten school regard second-ten schools as mediocre. And in general, the upward mobile come from environments that are regarded as mediocre or worse.

John, EMG offered evidence that he’d been subjected to social aggression, and you seemed to be interpreting his feeling victimized as evidence that his failure to complete the program was due to his inadequate earlier education (your reference to “a similar mediocre background” most obviously implied “similar to EMG’s,” for example). Your comment reads as if you can’t believe he could have been subjected to social aggression that had not been simply the rightful and just expression of the truth that he didn’t belong. Of course, if what you meant was that you are on his side, I misunderstood totally.

As regards your definition of mediocre: Excellence is called for everywhere–and many people whose background is mediocre would be able to do excellently well in many environments if they have effective guidance. Mediocrity seems like a red herring, in fact, w/r/t the OP, unless you are trying somehow to tie lack of information about the academic habitus with the inferiority of some undergraduate programs with respect to others.

EMG- my reference to other disciplines was in reference to conferences in particular, not about being jerks. (I can say that in my experience jerks are no more common in philosophy departments than in law school, but that’s compatible with there being some pretty big jerks, and it’s well known that some departments are particularly toxic. It sounds like you got a bad one and that’s obviously too bad.) But the environment that Salient, rightly, for all I know, described for math conferences just isn’t like the environment for philosophy conferences at all- I know- I’ve been going to them and presenting at them from my very first year in grad school and have been to all different sorts. That was my main comparison with other departments. And, I think that saying that the level of bad behavior you suffered is out of the ordinary isn’t minimizing it. (If, as you say, anyone who suffered it would drop out, we have to assume it’s pretty out of the ordinary, I’d guess.) But given that most people don’t, thankfully, suffer such bad treatment, it doesn’t seem at all unreasonable to me for Eszter to focus on the more normal cases if that’s what she wants to focus on.

I find this comment thread fascinating. I am curious about how such a well-meaning project could elicit such a complex set of responses.

I think EMG nails it with the sugarcoating comment. The reason I think everyone is so up in arms at straightforward advice about how to navigate the academic power structure is due to the ugliness within it. Straightforward advice appears to conceal that ugliness. An analogy would be a handbook, written in the 1950s ‘advice to women on how to succeed in the work world’ that never mentions sexism.

(Let me reiterate that I actually think that there’s nothing wrong with straightforward advice. It seems a bit hysterical to read it as a kind of ideological cloak over the dark abyss of academia. People do have to navigate this world. I think that delving into all the dysfunction within it would muddy the waters. Also, the person who doesn’t analyze the hierarchy too much will be much better off in the long run.)

Part of the difficulty of handling the professionalization part of graduate school–aside from all the in-group garbage people mention–is that some of us didn’t even go to graduate school in the professional mode. I personally thought it was The Ideas that mattered. If I had wanted to sell myself, I would have gone into law or business. (Now I have accommodated myself to the sad truth that you always have to sell yourself, at least a bit. It helped to have mouths to feed.) I was always taken aback by the people who knew who did what where and the standing of these within the profession–those people who had the hierarchy down cold and were dead set on climbing it. (Also, I looked down on those people–most of whom also looked down on me.) Some of us in graduate school were utter purists, full of scorn for the pragmatists who had their eye on the profession. At the time, I could not will myself to adapt to the professional academic mode. I eventually manged to do just enough to get by but I know a bunch of people who never got over their disillusionment.

There was a Life In Hell cartoon about the bitterest person in the world: the grad school dropout. The difference between law and business and academia is that the competitiveness, etc. is an inherent part of law or business. Whereas in academia it looks like the professional/competitive culture is unnecessarily created by a bunch of climbing unimaginative hacks. That’s probably not the case. But it can embitter because that culture seems like an unnecessary (and sometimes insurmountable) obstacle to getting to do what you love.

nona mouse: “The reason I think everyone is so up in arms at straightforward advice about how to navigate the academic power structure is due to the ugliness within it. Straightforward advice appears to conceal that ugliness. ”

‘everyone’? My take on straightforward advice is that it reveals the ugliness, and this is necessary because it helps to level the playing field, which is currently stacked against those (many of whom are idealists like Nona Mouse) who take academia’s protestataions of liberal fair-mindednesss at face value, and lack existing connections or powrful patrons. I was lucky in that exposure to (not especially toxic) academic politics at BA level and (rather more toxic) at MA allowed me to realise that this was a system that I might need to have to game. Not everyone is that lucky, so advice is good to have. Stick at it, Esther.

I can’t help thinking there is a Prisoner’s Dilemna hovering somewhere in the background of this discussion…

I don’t blame Eszter at all for posting what she did and have no particular criticisms of the content. I said what I always say in such situations.

Someone else address Matt’s 84 and 88, we’re not speaking.

Just remember, Bill Kristol made it through Harvard, so everyone should be able to.

Thanks Engels. That’s a plausible enough reading, I guess. (I’d be pleased if Eszter would say what she thinks of it.) I’ve been taking it a bit differently, more along the lines of, “you can be really smart, but if no one knows because you don’t give them any way to find out, you’ll never get anywhere. And, interacting with people is not only a way for people to find out about your work, but in a world where much work is collaborative, it’s necessary to make contacts.” That is, I took Eszter to be giving advice to people as to how they can show they are qualified, where the alternative is much more purely looking to pedigree, connections, and the old-boy network.

Well, leveling the playing field is all right I guess, and I don’t doubt Eszter’s intentions, but what is discussed here is in fact not at all leveling the field but leveling the players; making them more like each other. Same goes for prisoners dilemma: fair reading but it’s much more a prison-takers dilemma; “We know we are driven to the non-essential criteria for selection so let’s make sure everybody has the same chance of meeting the non-essentials.” Kind of a ritual thing, which in fact it is. Not the worst discrimination, but discrimination nonetheless; and the disclaimer needs to be put!

Steve, I wondered about that but I think that since it is impossible for people to become equally good at those things it is still unfair. You end up with a system that judges everyone on a combined score of academic ability + careerist maneuvring. Better than judging some people on the first summand and others on the sum, but still unfair.

The behind the scenes advantages (like having Irving Kristol for Pa, or having access to Kripke’s unpublsihes papers, or just knowing people) will still be there.

I want to step back from the anti-Eszter interpretation of what I started off saying, which is not an unreasonable one on the face of it. I’m saying what I always say when this kind of thing comes up. Everything she said was good and it will make the world a marginally better place.

But grad school is an abbatoir designed to decimate the entering grad students (actually worse than decimate, which is only 10%, according to some interpretations at least), and a lot of people don’t realize that when they go in and have trouble getting used to it.

But grad school is an abbatoir designed to decimate the entering grad students

Insofar as you’re correct (my university’s program really does seem designed to be supportive and help every student succeed), I agree that this is a fairly stupid way to design an educational system.

There’s a lot of expertise (even just “how to learn a specific way of thinking” expertise) being gained by graduate school students that I imagine goes to waste. You’d think our society would be able to put those people to good use so there isn’t this absurd overcrowding for academic jobs, but nooo…

You just can’t tell me the world doesn’t have any use for lots of people with the skill set developed by pursuing a doctoral degree, who have developed strategies for learning a “way of thinking,” for familiarizing themselves with existing research and contributing specific new research, etc.

Maybe market economies just suck at human resource allocation. :P

Even though I didn’t ultimately stick in academia, reading this thread is making me very grateful that my Ph.D. program (at Northwestern, in what was then the recently formed Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology on the Evanston campus) was infinitely more humane and supportive than some of the ones being described here. I can still look back on that time in my life with genuine pleasure.

I know an ABD who seems to be doing well in this context.

That would describe me also (for certain values of ‘doing well’).

I actually talked to my ABD friend and she verifies that things are going well, though not perfectly.

As I remember (I’m sort of merging several stories) she went to one of the head-hunting agencies and was interviewed, where she explained what she could do in terms of what she had learned in the past. She got credit for being fluent in Arabic even though it was irrelevant to the job she eventually got, because it showed motivation and persistence. Being able to research, organize material, and make effective written and oral presentations was valued.

She had to throw herself into the new job — it was quite demanding, she wasn’t just dropping down to something easier. She had to reeducate herself in terms of the needs of the job.

I think that one key is convincing the headhunters that you really want the new job and aren’t just desperate. Giving yourself credit for what you’re able to do is important — for example ability to write effectively is really quite rare, and while computer literacy is pretty widespread now, not a lot of people have mastered some of the sophisticated software packages. One guy used his Pol Sci stat-computer skills analyizing billings his clients received to find overcharges.

Not to put words in his mouth, but Dsquared works in the business world and has said things somewhat like what I just said.

I think I wasn’t clear. Matt, I was trying to ridicule a dumbass attitude I had in my early twenties. I wasn’t endorsing that attitude. I reported it as another obstacle for some in using Ezster’s good advice. It might have been mine, besides my professional ineptness. (Most likely, I had this view because I wasn’t able to adapt to the professional aspect of the academic world very well. If I’d fleshed out the story I would have explained I was concealing a motive less pure back then–it was a way to cope. I was terrified in the first few years of grad school and light years away from thinking about tenure).

Chris, I think people need the advice Eszter’s offering. Certain comments here suggest an interesting thing about good advice: For some, there are various unfortunate barriers to making good use of it. That was my main point.