So What Are You Going to Do with That? A Guide to Career-Changing for M.A.'s and Ph.D.s

University Business, June, 2002 by Jennifer Lack

By Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. 167 pages

Leaving academia is not always easy. The professor or grad student who decides to change careers faces confusing choices, unfamiliar procedures, and the emotional labor of extricating himself from an engaging, satisfying --albeit occasionally dysfunctional--way of life. Now that process has its own guidebook in So What Are You Going to Do with That?

The authors (both earned doctorates in English from Princeton, and now work outside academia) offer a series of nuts-and-bolts chapters on choosing a "postacademic" career, researching potential employers, writing a resume, and handling job interviews. They weave in stories of well-adjusted former academics now working successfully as Internet entrepreneurs, policy analysts, high school teachers, Hollywood scriptwriters, producers--even a detective and a midwife. Though in the book, Ph.D. and ex-teacher Tom Magliozzi (who with his brother, Ray, hosts National Public Radio's Car Talk) proclaims, "Teaching sucks," Basalla and Debelius don't seem to want to go I that far. They do say, however, that "`depressed graduate student' is redundant" and that they've never talked to anyone who regretted leaving academia.

The practical advice in So What can be distressingly similar to the jokes, and there are times when the "guide" seems to cross the line between self-help and recovery as if a scholarly career were a pathology or addiction. But the book points to foundations and universities that are aiding postacademic career-changing: Harvard and the University of Chicago, for example, have set up career advisory departments geared specifically toward graduate students' searches. The authors also present Web sites and other resources for job searching--and soul-searching. All that's left is for universities to figure out what's really gone wrong with graduate school, so they can fix it.