Why are we doing this?
There are more and more PhDs chasing fewer and fewer jobs
There’s a big and growing problem in academia, especially in the humanities. Well, there are many problems in academia, but that’s a different multi-volume project. The specific problem to which we’re referring is that there are too many humanities PhDs chasing fewer and fewer jobs. We’re not going to rehearse the details, because you’re either living them or you already know them, even if only intuitively. Departments know there is a big problem, deans know it, and your professors know it. Some departments and institutions are dedicating resources to “alt-ac” – the working world “out there.” There are many advisors in Career Centers who are doing a great job helping students think about and move into non-academic careers. There’s a terrific on-line community, Versatile PhD (shout-out to Paula Chambers, PhD, VPhD’s founder!), and in the last few years we’ve seen a handful of ex-academics who have started businesses advising PhDs on how to make a move toward a different life, job, career. If you are wondering about a professional life that doesn’t involve being a professor, or are already on the road to a career that doesn’t involve being a professor, we encourage you to tap into all of these resources, early and often.
If there are resources out there, what’s different about us?
Having just encouraged you to check out what could be seen as our competition, what is it that’s different about us? It’s quite simple, really. We’ve done it. We left, we transformed ourselves, we broke into fields that have no obvious connection to our academic training and experience, and we’ve flourished and gone in directions that we never anticipated. Brendon is a classicist who went into financial services and investing. He worked first at a big firm, then at a couple of hedge funds, and now has co-founded his own consulting firm (harborhousepartners.com) focused especially on helping businesses in Maine thrive. In addition to fairly traditional management consulting and capital sourcing, he and his business partner are branching out into e-commerce. Patrick is a music historian and performer who went first into healthcare consulting and then into financial technology at a start-up that in 2018 became the largest AI acquisition to date. He now runs their sales and business development. Everything that we offer you is informed by our experience in this exciting, difficult, often non-obvious personal and professional transformation from academia to, well, to whatever you want to call your next professional thing.
Since we first met some 7 years ago, we’ve been talking in kitchens, cafés, chat rooms, and on the phone with anyone who asks. Those conversations have usually ended with, “oh, you need to contact my friend Brendon/Patrick to talk to him about his experience.” So, there’s a bunch of recovering academics running around out there who have been subjected to our insight and advice. You’ll meet and hear from some of those people in future issues, once we strong-arm them into contributing.
Okay, but why not just keep on keepin’ on?
You might wonder, “hmmm, if you guys are so happy at your day jobs, why are you starting this business, too?” Simple: we’d like to share what we’ve learned with anyone who wants to launch from academia into something else. We can keep dishing out our insights one person at a time to whomever reaches out to one of us, but it feels like a good thing for us to try to get it all out there to as many people as might benefit from it. We’ve also both found that the business world is far wider and more interesting than we were able to see from within academia, and we suspect that many PhDs would think differently about their careers and their happiness if they knew more about what their non-academic options are.
So for those who are interested, or curious but unsure, we’re sharing our experience and our perspective. As Brendon – the older of the two of us — puts it, “I can’t remember anything anymore. I just want to get all of this stuff out of my head (along with the multiple voices)!” We’ve explored a few ideas along these lines: we thought about doing weekend “bootcamp” workshops or panel discussions or some kind of mini-lecture series. We found a lot of appetite for these ideas from grad students, departments, and even some Career Centers. What we didn’t find was a good way to make those events work. An online publication like this, though, is a perfect vehicle, and we think that all of what we have to share with you is worth the price of a fancy coffee drink once a month. We hope you agree, and that there’s a lot here for you. Take a look. If it seems like a bunch of overpriced jabberwocky, you can unsubscribe at any time and curse us as you lick the foam from your upper lip while taking down your next grande latte.