SCS Newsletter - August 2017 (Career Networking)

Networking Update

by John Paulas, Director of Fellowships and Special Projects at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California at Berkeley

At the 2018 annual meeting in Boston, the SCS will host a set of career development events and meetings to help PhDs in classics and related fields explore career possibilities and to highlight the lives and livelihoods of PhDs who have already blazed trails in a variety of careers.

At the main event, up to twenty PhD networkers will engage in small group discussions with up to 100 PhDs, PhD students, and contingent faculty to explore life beyond the PhD. Represented areas of employment include government agencies, publishing, consulting, technology, academic and non-profit administration, and business management and entrepreneurship.

This event is based on models developed by the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California Berkeley and the University of California Humanities Research Institute’s Humanists@Work project. Many of the networkers are part of the Paideia Institute’s “Legion Project,” which reaches out to Classics Ph.D.s who now work in sectors represented in the networking event, among many others. The Paideia Institute is a co-sponsor of this event.

Participants in similar events have identified and articulated two distinct benefits.

For many PhDs who are seeking to start a career beyond the tenure-track and for many PhD students thinking about their futures beyond the PhD, the possibilities for gainful and satisfying employment are unclear. PhDs often lack knowledge of what areas might best suit their particular values, aspirations, and needs. For those PhDs, the event provides the first major benefit: exposure to a wide range of employment outcomes and models for how to develop one’s professional life.

The second benefit comes from the connections made. Because talking to people working in a particular area of employment and understanding and becoming visible to that community is a sine qua non of setting out on a previously unknown or unexplored path, the event enables PhDs to begin the process of building a network in a particular career field.

The event’s networking format has often been compared to “speed dating.” Every 10-15 minutes individual networkers move to a new table of PhD and PhD student participants both to present their unique career pathways and to listen to and answer the questions of participants. In two hours each participant will have had the opportunity to learn about the lives and varied careers of a group of PhDs and to explore and understand with greater clarity their own interests.

The SCS hopes the event will provide immediate leads for PhDs interested in seeking new professional opportunities and offer plenty of ideas and fruitful paths for exploration and action for students considering their futures post-PhD.

After the event featured networkers will meet with SCS President Georgia Nugent to share their life and career experiences and to advise the society on career-related matters and support. In a separate meeting, the networkers will sit down with chairs and directors of graduate studies of PhD-granting institutions. Networkers also are invited to attend the Presidential Reception as guests of the society. The SCS plans to record short videos of networkers so that SCS members and the general public will have access to their stories, ideas, observations, and advice.

All of these SCS career events make visible the lives, work, and impact in the wider world of PhD classicists and those in related fields. The events also highlight the SCS’s commitment as a professional organization to supporting and maintaining a diverse and vibrant community of classicists from as many professions as classicists have and will have in the future.

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