Monday, February 7, 2011

Survivor's Guilt


While perusing the Chronicle of Higher Education's website, I came across an interest piece titled “They're Mad as Hell” by Leonard Cassuto, an English professor at Fordham University. He was writing to explain further the implications of an article he had recently written about the importance of providing professional development skills to doctoral students before they enter the job market, titled “Changing the Way We Socialize Doctoral Students.” Both pieces are very interesting and discussing the various points Cassuto makes could certainly take up multiple blog entries.

However, what I found to be truly interesting was a term Cassuto used in his piece, “They're Mad as Hell” - the term being “survivor's guilt”. As a tenured professor in one of the most competitive fields of academia, Cassuto explains that he is flooded daily with questions from graduate students asking him what is his secret to success, and how these students might work to emulate him. Reflecting on his own experience searching for a job after receiving his PhD, Cassuto writes, “Like so many graduate students, I didn't start thinking carefully about the job market until it was upon me. When I got a good job, it felt less like an achievement than an improbable success in the lottery.” This certainly indicates a major issue about how an institution of higher learning might go about fostering career development for graduate students. When potential graduate students, such as myself, find themselves faced with professors who are unable to particulate any real reason why he or she got the job, then that to me is a problem.

Cassuto sees this as being a problem as well, and he finds himself unable to give the advice his students need from him because he himself never received such information as a graduate student. He managed to “survive” without it, and miraculously landed a job. But graduate students today can no longer just settle to survive. In an age where there's an increased percentage of students pursuing higher education after college, students need to be able to have access to resources that will help them conceptualize their graduate experience as another step in their overall career development, and that the degree itself doesn't guarantee a job.

Now, I have totally caught myself prodding my advisors and professors for insights on how to manage the path to securing a career in academia, and I've been given responses that reflect this feeling of survivor's guilt. Like, “Things were different twenty years ago-” or “I got this interview purely because I knew so-and-so.” Frankly, I think professors are selling their students short by this sense of nostalgia, and I feel as if professors should be held accountable for knowing how to navigate the job market in today's higher education system. I certainly don't want to be another jobless person with a PhD, and I don't intend on being one. I am slowly starting to educate myself as to what role my PhD will play in my career development, but not having professors who are mindful of how the PhDs function in students' career development today robs me of a potentially vital resource.

Articles referenced:

http://chronicle.com/article/Changing-the-Way-We-Socialize/125892
http://chronicle.com/article/Theyre-Mad-as-Hell/126199/

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