PhD induction talk

A real email exchange with a humanities PhD studet. I used this in the induction session last week.

Dear Careers Adviser,

 As my PhD comes to completion, I will be applying for teaching posts at various colleges and universities in the USA and UK. Towards that end, I have three questions:

First, could you take a look at the attached resume and list of references to give suggestions for any way they might be able to be improved?

Secondly, do you have any advice on what type of information to put in a cover letter when I’m writing to universities?

Thirdly, do you know of any agencies or directories that may be able to help me locate those institutions that have openings in my field/s?

Dear PhD student

A lot of problems here in the CV in terms of applications to Higher Education Colleges.

Issues:

No apparent experience of teaching / tutoring at Higher Education level. This a major barrier to be considered seriously for lecturing positions.

No apparent evidence of scholarly (peer-reviewed) publication. No conferences, conference presentations, seminars etc.

Description of PhD and methodology sketchy.

A reliance on bullet points of ‘topics’ with no attempt to develop them into evidence of relevant skills and knowledge.

A lack of training / professional development in the area of teaching and learning (such as GCAP)

Cover letters. They should answer two questions:

Why am I interested in this post in this institution?

Why will this department / institution be interested in appointing me. 

Agencies. I am not aware of any institution using agencies to recruit staff for HE teaching and research roles.

You should try to remedy some of these gaps. The curriculum you developed shows promise, but the only thing we are told is the number of pages it takes up. How relevant is this?

Regards,

Dear Careers Adviser

It’s becoming clear that the problem is not so much with my CV as with me. I have NOT had experience teaching or tutoring at a Higher Education level, and I have NOT been published in

peer-reviewed publication, and I have NOT spoken at conferences and seminars etc. For some  students working on their PhDs, the actual doctoral program includes a significant amount of teaching experience, so that when they graduate, they can put on their resume that they have taught, but that option is not available to me. Hence, it will be a major challenge to get the experience I need to be able to produce a better CV. Nevertheless, you have given me some ideas and do let me know if you have any further suggestions.

Academic publishing

A talk by Josie Lawrence about academic publishing – with principal reference to Humanities and Social Sciences.

Books are more important than journals in these fields and are being threatened by restricted university library budgets. The inter-library loan system for instance and ‘consortium purchasing clearly diminishes the market for books. Library spend on ‘books’ is currently about 30% of their purchasing budget.

More titles have been produced to ever dwindling markets. The print run for many books is now in the low hundreds  -very much on the margin of viability. Editors who used to take 40 books to press per year are now being asked to do 100.

The problem is the imbalance between supply and demand. Academics ‘need’ to publish more than the market appears able to absorb.

On-line and open access publishing have not solved the problems. What is the status of research by an academic on a publicly funded scholarship? He / she may both want the widest access for his/her work and fair recompense for their contribution.

In the online world the Rights issues have not been solved. One notion is that lecturers might buy individual chapters, individual pages even to go into course packs.

The commercial landscape is changing two. Major players like Blackwells and Wylies have merged. Routledge is now part of Taylor and Francis.

Google have been getting involved in on-line publishing and Bloomsbury are dipping their toes into this field with ‘Bloomsbury Academic’

Printing on demand has some benefits  -ruling out any need to warehouse physical copies of books though the product is basically a  Xerox. It rules out the notion of a book being ‘out of print’

Science publishing is very different. On the whole it is journals that are the key players and these have been left to commercial publishers. University libraries have felt the need to subscribe to these and prices have been high. University presses have been left with Humanities and Social Science.

The key questions for authors and publishers remain;

What is the contribution of this study

Why is it important/

Who needs it?

All very tough though Josie Lawrence felt that this field of scholarly publishing has for ever been in a state of crux and has found new ways out of continuing changes in the technology and the market.

BMJ Fair and other matters

Weekend spent doing ‘Rapid Reviews’ at this Fair for doctors. Initial terror at not knowing much about the area was moderated when lots of the queries were about choice making, or leaving the profession, or -a surprising number of these – going into research or medical education.

Still I did begin to pick up some of the medical language and the commoner issues ( how to choose specialty training.)

Although we take the view that ‘Information’ is not essential in good guidance practice, I do think that a familairity with the framework within which clients operate is essential.

Go to the launch of ‘Stet’ the new online journal for English Postgrads. It was in the old anatomy building on the 6th floor.

Last month  I registered the highest number of  career discussions with the graduate school since I started this work some 4 years ago. 30 clients half of whm were PhD students and half were staff.

Group sessions

Am doing fairly regular ‘Careers Education’ sessions with PhD’s. I will have done 5 half day sessions in February. 1 on writing skills, 2 on assertiveness, 1 on PDP (personal development planning) 1 on Career planning.

At the moment about half the people who sign up, show up. and average atttendance is about 10. They seem to like the content mainly – there are always one or two who do not – and occasionally someone absolutely takes against it.

 

My method is to start with an icebreeaker introductions thing – nothing ‘creative’ just who they are and why are they here -  a sort of informal agenda setting. Then a bit of a lecture from me. I am moving more towards power point as its a good way of assembling diverse material and ensuring the structure is coherent and consistent for when I do repeat sessions.

At some point i will do soemthing practical – it may be a group exercises or presentatation of some kind – just to mix it up, stop them falling asleep and—– I guess I should say —- providing something for the kinetic learners.

There is sometimes an issue about integrating Humanities and Science students – though I think it is a good thing to do. One problem is that the Humanities people often come single and are outnumbered by the scientists. So getting the material right across disciplines  is a challenge.

I had this idea of getting careers colleagues involved so that they could have a go at delivering at least part of these sessions – but the staffing of this is difficult to achieve. And anyway, as soon as I identify likely colleagues they get moved on to different allocations in different colleges.

I would be keen to do more groups doing what we might call ‘Employability’ work. However I still do quite a lot of Guidance: 1-1 stuff. The trend here has been increased numbers of staff – postdocs, research assistants and administrators who come to see me.

RMA Research Student’s Conference

Kate and I did our talks to a group of about 30 Music PhDs. We followed up 3 King’s alumni who were taking different tracks: one a successful freelance composer, one an Arts Adminstrator for a small midlands music group and one a music academic.

I also attended a presentation on getting published with Vicki Cooper form Cambridge University Press on the history side, Sally Groves from Schott who published scores ( the ‘dots’ as she described it) and Christopher Wintle who had got invlolved in various publishing enterprises including setting up his own journal.

You realised that in all academic areas there are small specialist presses producing small runs of books for specialist markets. The new ‘print-on-demand’ technology meand that nothing now need never be out of print.

Vicki Cooper gave interesting advice on how to submit to a publisher like hers: A letter with an outline -possibly one paragraph per chapter; a chapter; the links to other books on the Publisher’s list. An assessment of the competition and an indication of how your work is differentiated from existing titles.  Vicki was interesting on the ‘products’. These are prodcuts that no-one needs – it would not matter if there were no more books on Mahler – nevertheless there is a steady and reliable demand for new works on composers- you just need to make the case about what is different about this book.