Oh god, more title clickbait. I’m going to lose this guest blog gig if I’m not careful. But please, allow me a moment. Like the “campaign” slogan that I’m riffing on, I’m sure this title makes you wonder things like, wait, what exactly do you mean by “great?” And when exactly was the C.V. ever “great?” We should probably be answering those before we get to this “again” nonsense. And, like supporters of the referred-to campaign slogan, you’d probably be hard-pressed to come to any sort of consensus about when and why and where were the salad days of the CV. For many of us, I suspect, the CV is one of those taken for granted bits of technology, that more or less unreflexively (except when we’re being hounded by the furies of the career center or harassed by the specter of The Professor is In) gives a sense of who we are academically. And if we’re to follow Rex’s thematic, it probably always sucked in one way or another. Moreover it’s the thing that presumably allows a hiring committee to make a snap judgment about whether any particular person will get more than a fleeting review before joining the party in the trash can.

So, against this natural- and normal-ness I’d like to suggest that the CV as it currently works allows for two things that are anathema to open scholarship: a privileging of authority and seniority; as well as a credentialed elitism. I’ll also suggest a “Short-form C.V.” that should mitigate some of this. And again, yes, the C.V. is a bit player given the larger structural problems of the academy: the over production of Ph.D.s and the conversion of the academy into a majority non-tenure-track work place to name two. But the C.V. is the place at which we tell the professional story about ourselves which we think our colleagues should know. Perhaps for this reason, the not-so-humble C.V. deserves at least a blog post.

Seniority

I recently had the occasion to go through the C.V. of one of my mentors. This mentor is a very senior professor whom I quite like, with whom I enjoy working, and whose scholarship I’ve read a lot of and respect. This mentor also happens to have a 16 page C.V. To take one indicative section, “Professional Presentations,” it runs for three single-spaced pages and has North of 60 entries. What are we to make of this? Were we on a hiring committee or granting committee I don’t believe we would read all of these presentations. I doubt we even could get a hold of them without asking my mentor to dig through old files. But there they are, marching back into the past, one after the other, after another.

Let’s take another section, “Articles.” “Articles” runs for more than 2 1/2 single spaced pages and contains North of 40 entries. Academic, peer-reviewed articles are supposed to speak to our scholastic abilities. They’re written for an audience of scholars and have endured the blind scrutiny of our peers. And yet, can we conceive of a situation in which any review board would systematically read 40 articles and book chapters? We haven’t even gotten to whole books, lectures, and so on.

With both “Professional Presentations” and “Articles” we’re not so much faced with a list that allows for substantive review, but rather we’re faced with an argument by accumulation or enumeration. A review of ideas or scholarship would entail careful reading, logical analysis, and some form of criticism. Enumeration simply demands a respect for the judgment of others and the accumulated weight of symbolic capital. It also allows a backdoor to a number of inequities. Enumeration begets more enumeration–presentations rely on the resources to travel to conferences; granting agencies like that you’ve received other grants, and so on. Even a successful string of peer-reviewed articles suggests that you’ve found a place within a larger disciplinary conversation that will vouch for your work (and that is not threatened or confused by your ideas). Argument by enumeration, particularly in a C.V., takes all of these advantages and amplifies them. It also allows people to evaluate academics without ever actually engaging with their work. It is almost as though, from this point of view, we value tokens of seniority over intellectual vitality (not that they’re necessarily exclusive).

Elitism

In the past year, I heard an excellent lecture by a relatively junior scholar who is well on their way. I was curious about what else this scholar had published, so I went to their University profile. At the profile I found a link to a C.V. Take heart, this one only ran five pages. Unlike the senior scholar above, this anthropologist is only at the beginning of what should be a long career. It should be apparent by this point that C.V.s are formulaic. They all have sections on education, jobs, publishing, disciplinary participation, etc. They also tend to talk about grants. This junior scholar is one who seems to have won all the grants–external and internal; university, foundation, and government. And as I looked through this list I came across something I had never seen before: declined grants. In addition to the long list of of money accepted to fund research, were several multi-year fellowships declined.

This is a curious artifact. Listing grants won is already weird as they suggest that you’re good at convincing people to give you money for research you plan to do. Keep in mind, because it is a grant, you haven’t done the research yet. Most simply, you’ve convinced a committee of mid- to senior-scholars (or administrators, or bureaucrats) that you will eventually do some good research. Put another way, winning grants, shows your symbolic capital, shows you can flex, as it points to how gatekeepers think about your career future. Declined grants emphasize this habit of thought. So many people think I’m going to be great, that I can’t even accept all of their money.

Enumeration of grants and other credentials introduces another curious oversight of the C.V. In anthropology in particular, we recognize that we cannot account for what we will discover across the vagaries of our research endeavors. At least in social and cultural anthropology, very often, the experience of doing long-term research makes any given proposal into a well-crafted lie. Perhaps more charitably, Robert Merton and Elinor Barber (2004) note that serendipity and chance discovery are often that which leads to intellectual breakthrough. You very often don’t know what exactly you are looking for when you’re doing research. Taken together, this contradicts the implicit narrative of granting agencies–proposal equals merit, then funding, and then discovery. It also suggests that, perhaps counter-intuitively, we ought to be more impressed with people who do good research without the consecration of grant money.

Biases towards seniority and elitism in the writing and reading of C.V.s gets at a more general issue in academia–overproduction. Publishing for the sake of having lots of publications. Applying to too many grants. Spangle a C.V. with anything that smells like merit. In turn, all this leads to a lurid embrace of audit culture, that is making ourselves legible to people who are incompetent in our particular are of scholarship. One might imagine a dean muttering, “I can’t evaluate the merit of these ten articles but I sure can count ’em!”

And so I offer the “Short-form C.V.” as a small, partial antidote to these tendencies. Here is what I think it should look like:

The Short-form C.V.

Reading the papers themselves! What a quaint idea! How medieval! I remember when I first heard from Jochen Shulte-Sasse that at the University in Bochum, West Germany, when a candidate for a job was under consideration the whole department would read all the candidate’s writings and then debate them. No wonder European universities have not kept pace with their American rivals! [Waters 2004:20]

The point of the Short-form C.V. is to strip away the accretions of elitism and enumeration as virtues in and of themselves and offer a reasonable way to evaluate the competency of an individual for an academic position. I hasten to add that, strictly speaking, I don’t even think this is necessary. Just about anyone with a Ph.D. in a relevant discipline could have a successful career, build a department, and collect any number of accolades. Many of my mentors did just that (I’m not even sure if their Ph.D.s were done when they started working). One in fact told me that at the start of his career in the late 60s, his adviser told him not to, “clutter up the journals.” Did someone order salad days?

Cover page

Please attach a cover page with your name and contact information. Please, do not put your name or contact information on the C.V. document itself, or on any page aside from the cover page. We want to review you and your work blind.

1. Education

Please list the degrees that you have earned as well as your major or area of concentration (for example M.A. Cultural Anthropology). Please do not list your school(s), your adviser(s), or your name.

2. Scholarship

Please list the titles of no more than two representative pieces of scholarship, preferably written in the last ten years. These need not have been published and can be of any length. One may be your dissertation, or representative chapters therefrom. Please also attach electronic versions of these pieces of scholarship. If your scholarship has been published, please attach plain versions, that list neither journal nor publisher. Also, please list your
name on a separate cover sheet so that we might read your scholarship blind.

3. Teaching

Please list the title and a brief explanation of 2 classes you are ready to teach or have taught. If possible please select a general interest course as well as a course in your specialty. Please also attach their syllabi, with your name on a separate cover page.

4. Service

Please list and briefly explain (no more than 2-3 sentences) two examples of service, either to your university or your community.

5. Miscellaneous

Please take this opportunity to list and briefly describe two or three things that may help you do the job to which you are applying (e.g. any relevant languages you might speak). Note, there is no need to complete this section.

NB: Should we receive more C.V.s than we can evaluate for the current position, we will select at random the maximum number of applications that we can review and proceed accordingly. If, after this first draw we have not selected anyone, we will repeat this process.

Again, the C.V. is a minor, though ever present, part of the academic universe. I have singled it out because I feel that it is a site that is both within our own control, and through which we can strive to be the types of scholars we would like to be. I also feel that, particularly for junior scholars and graduate students, the drive to accumulate lines on a C.V., in emulation of senior scholars, often motivates a careerism that eclipses the scholarship we wish to produce. If junior scholars could be assured that inane grants, or hypertrophied over-publishing will not be rewarded in the academic hiring process, perhaps we might feel a bit better about the actual research we do, and feel we have the time to develop it.

Merton, Robert K. and Elinor Barber. 2004. The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Waters, Lindsay. 2004. Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, And the Exlipse of Scholarship. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm

Wondering what to wear to the AAAs? We’ve got you covered. For women: throw a few scarves in your suitcase, a suitable range of black clothes, a kick-ass pair of shoes or boots, and some anthropological “flair,” and you should be good to go. Men need to pack their nice jeans, a good buttoned shirt, and the pièce de résistance: a stylish jacket. Unless you’re an archaeologist. Then all you need are jeans.

Anthropologists around the world are packing for the annual American Anthropological Association meetings (“the AAAs”) being held this year in balmy Chicago from November 20-24. What, you might wonder, are they packing? What look do anthropologists go for at the AAAs where thousands of anthropologists gather each year? We’ve turned to our social media networks to find out, posting this question on Twitter and on multiple Facebook accounts to learn just what fashion choices anthropologists are making this week.

We’ve identified six categories of anthropological fashion and/or fashion concern:

• Wearing one’s fieldsite, or, the “anthropological” flair requirement.
• Looking professional, but not too formal or business-y.
• Capitalism, consumerism, & fashion for the critical anthropologist.
• Stages of one’s career: from grad student to job market to professor.
• Differences across the subdisciplines.
• Scarves. (Yes, scarves get their own category.)

Here’s what our friends and colleagues had to say about all of these:

ANTHROPOLOGICAL FLAIR

I dress like my people even though they don’t dress like this. This is the anthropological fashion credo as witnessed by Ken Wissoker, Duke University Press editorial director, and veteran of more academic conferences than he can count.

Academics, according to Ken, have different disciplinary standards when it comes to conference fashion. Artists and art historians have the edge over the rest of us with their “ability to align colors and patterns far above the average scholar.” But, he cautions, a hip and spectacular wardrobe does not necessarily indicate interesting scholarship. Given the longstanding anthropological tendency to “wear something signifying their fieldsite” and the “change in what sort of ethnographic locations are worth thinking about,” Ken predicts things are about to get more interesting in anthropology—in both fashion and scholarship.

How do we signify our fieldsites? “Anthropological pieces of flair!” one female postdoc exclaimed on Facebook. Her response was echoed again and again. As she explains it, “You’re required to have at least one piece of flair, but the more pieces the better. The catch is that you can’t actually go all out in ‘ethnic wear.’ Just pieces of flair.”

Carefully curated markers of where one does research were frequently mentioned: “I don’t want to be a walking stereotype of what other people think anthros look like (wearing black with huge ethnic jewelry) but I want it to have some anthro-flavor—whatever that is.”

Jewelry is a big part of the “flair” category, and for many anthropologists, carries deep meaning. As one grad student explained, “When giving papers, I always wear this power necklace I made” that brings together different symbols from my fieldsites. Having clothes and jewelry from our fieldsites on our body while we are presenting our research is a tangible form of memory, and for some, power.

DRESSING UP FOR ANTHROPOLOGISTS

The AAAs: the one time each year where anthropologists can get dressed up in front of each other without being made fun of. Instead, as one tenured male professor shared, it’s fun to dress up for the AAAs.

Anthropologists, one now-tenured female professor was told as a grad student in the 1990s, always have good shoes. This reputation continues today, at least among anthropologists as we talk about ourselves to ourselves. As one male professor offered, “To my eyes, for the ladies, it is all about the boots/shoes. The guys, it is all about the jacket.” Finding the right jacket is key as one anthropologist lamented: “I never feel like my clothes fit the bill. I either feel overdressed (black pants and dress shirt) or underdressed (jeans and dress shirt). I am missing the perfect jacket that distinguishes those jeans and dress shirts enough to elevate me from slacker to professional.”

Despite the overwhelming response that a jacket was the “It” item among male anthropologists, there were some dissenters. One professor stated that he “leans ‘teaching casual’: jeans or cords and a collared shirt with no coffee stains. No blazer, no tie.”

No tie. It seems redundant to even mention that.

Color also matters. Black. Shades of the earth. Bright colors. These are what we think of when we think of anthropology. Some anthropologists’ wardrobes reside in just one color family, others traverse the rainbow. Yet, there are still rules, as one male professor who does research in Central America offers:

“One thing I learned flying in from the tropics for several years was that my bright colored shirts were definitely not the norm. Blacks and browns dominate (reflecting Grandma’s admonition to not wear bright colors after Labor Day … Summer’s over). As well, I would say that bourgeois, urban intellectual rules the roost. Nice enough to distinguish, not so nice that you look like a suit.”

But color rules are cultural. One American teaching in Europe wrote that “Last year I dressed as a “Danish” anthropologist: that meant jeans, t-shirt, bright shoes, sport coat all in the style of the type of hipster outside a gallery in Chelsea or Williamsburg.”

What it means to “dress up” is, of course, not singular. One European correspondent advocated the acquisition of classic pieces, including suits although perhaps worn as separates (as well as a tending to the physical self): “Be fit, then the secret is in the classics. Invest in high quality shirts. White and light blue. English derby shoes. A Zegna suit. A pair of nice dark denim jeans (i.e., Diesel) and a quality shirt. Also a good quality peacoat shines everywhere. A grey cashmere scarf lasts a lifetime.”

The classic look trends more male than female in anthropology. As one female grad student put it: “I do think there is pressure to look professional (as in, you have to demonstrate that you want to be there and that you respect everyone else enough to not wear jeans and a t-shirt on Thursday) but you can’t look like you put too much money or effort into it. Hence the trend towards “ethnic flair” – it comes from a place that is important to you and is a little different from what’s mass produced at most US clothing stores.”

“There is a way in which disheveled chic is the perfect style for anthropologists. It can match any situation.”

CAPITALIST CRITIQUE: WHAT’S A STYLISH ANTHROPOLOGIST TO DO?

You don’t have to be a Marxist to have issues with fashion. Here are two anthropological takes on this:

“I do think that we struggle probably more than most disciplines with the contradictions of capitalism – it is nearly impossible to put together a professional looking outfit that isn’t causing some kind of damage, somewhere, whether it’s to the environment or to workers. Maybe you could do it for a day (especially if you were wearing clothes that you got somewhere else) but for five days I wouldn’t know how to do it. Hence the shabby chic – because you bought secondhand, so at least the damage is already done, or because you’re broke, or because you don’t want to look like you spent a ton of money on your clothes even if you did. There’s a very real financial pressure. But there’s also a social pressure to downplay how much money you spend on material objects, whether it be your phone or your clothes or your bag. For example, the only people I know who are proud of not owning smartphones are anthropologists – it’s like a badge that you’re not buying into conspicuous consumption.” (female grad student)

“The question you might want to ask is: do anthropologists know the conditions under which their clothes were produced? Go to the MLA or ASA meeting and you will see serious high-end brand names, extreme fashion consciousness, and clothes pretensions all around. That this really doesn’t happen at AAA to any really noticeable degree is one of the more refreshing aspects of these gargantuan gathering of the tribes. Besides most of us are already dropping $1200 or so to attend, not including registration and membership fees. Perhaps I will walk around the meetings and query people if they know where their clothes were made and how much they spend on them. Do you think they would throw me out?” (male tenured professor)

No, we don’t. Most anthropologists are on this, we think; we have our students do projects on consumption and conditions of production and discuss it in our classes, but how far are our collective critiques going? Here are two more grad student perspectives:

“There are subtle clues about class and region. People pretend to want to hide upper class, but want others to notice their expensive shoes and other articles.”

“I feel like I am a radical. I go to figure out how to challenge and change the system. I feel like I need to look a certain way to fit in. And then I feel like they do change the way I am a little bit, they assimilate me.”

FASHION OVER THE COURSE OF ONE’S CAREER: Grad Students

How do you dress like an anthropologist when you don’t have any money? Shop second-hand stores and/or buy your clothes in the field are the most common strategies.

“Being a poor graduate student, almost everything I wear is second hand. … I was reflecting recently that I think it has been a lack of money for new, high-end brand clothes that has allowed me to develop a sense of personalized style because having a wardrobe full of odds and ends from different eras and designers means that you develop a sense for creative combination.”

“The trick is to look like you are wearing different clothes everyday, while actually wearing much of the same.”

Grad students attending the meetings for the first time might be interested to learn that the AAA actually has a dress code! What? A dress code? Who knew?

“Is there a dress code?
The AAA Annual Meeting is a professional academic conference. Business casual attire is strongly recommended, particularly for those presenting research during the meeting.”

But, should you wear business casual? Some say yes, depending on what your goals are at the conference and who you’re going to be meeting with. Others say, “Business Casual? I’m not sure what that is, but I don’t think its anthropological.”

Many students go for the Teaching Casual look. What you wear to teach often works well at the AAAs. As one grad student explains it, she wears her teaching clothes and then steps it up the day she is presenting her paper: “The day I present I usually dress up a little more—pants that have to be dry cleaned, possibly heels—partly because people have to stare at me for an hour and a half and dressing up in my power heels makes me feel more confident. By Sunday I have definitely switched to jeans. If I could wear my Merrell mocs the entire time, I would do it. I’ve given up on trying to wear impressive shoes and go for comfort instead.”

In the field, many of us wear clothes different from those we wear at home. In India, skirts are worn at longer lengths than is common in the USA, and in Cuba, skirts are much shorter than those worn in the States. In other fieldsites, anthropologists need to budget for clothes into their dissertation research grants as Gina Athena Ulysse did when she was a grad student doing research in Jamaica in the 1990s. She had to dress properly and learned quickly that her grad school wardrobe did not suit the professional researcher image she needed in the field. Instead, as she discusses in her book Downtown Ladies, she had to “cross-dress across class.” This disjuncture between how one dresses “at home” versus in “the field” trends both up and down, depending on one’s research and fieldsite. A male anthropologist also spoke about his need to trend up in the field:

“I’m a post-fieldwork student going [to the AAAs] for the first time to “network” and hopefully find an outside reader for my dissertation. As an anthropologist, I’m hyper-aware of the ways in which sartorial choices are gendered, raced and classed. Coming from a position of relative privilege, I’m trying to look professional while maintaining some deference to Mary Douglas’ observation that academics belong to the “shaggy professions.” The two things I want to avoid are 1) looking like an avatar of white male privilege who is oblivious to the ways in which the clothing of certain kinds of people is highly policed while others can wear whatever suits their notions of comfort and individuality, and 2) looking like a very lost Mormon missionary. To me, that implies khakis, collared shirts, leather shoes, and sweaters–all clean and neat but not pressed. Ironically enough, this is a step down in formality from much of my fieldwork, where I would not dream of showing up at an office in the Arab world in anything less than a pressed shirt and trousers (perhaps even a suit) and freshly shined shoes.”

FASHION OVER THE COURSE OF ONE’S CAREER: Being on the Job Market

What to wear to your job interview? This is the million dollar question: will your outfit make or break your interview? Here’s our advice: wear something you feel great in, look great in, and in which people would look at you and say, “Yes, s/he is an anthropology professor.”

Don’t lowball it. Wear something nice. That said, do not dress in a corporate style. Retain an anthropological sensibility but shoot for one rung higher than the outfit you would wear when you present your paper. If you are too casual, they will notice, potentially think you are not that interested in the job, and possibly be annoyed. If you are too professional, they might think you are nervous and/or not well advised on job interview attire. Which side would you want to err on?

(For more on what to wear—or not—to your job interviews, check out the fabulous information from anthropologist-turned-academic consultant Karen Kelsky at The Professor Is In.)

FASHION OVER THE COURSE OF ONE’S CAREER: Postdocs and Professors

Post-PhD—and especially post-tenure—fashion starts to involve more comfort. It’s all about looking good, looking your rank, and being comfortable.

From correspondents:

“I shoot for “nicer than everyday” outfits; not formal but not informal. My go-to conference outfit is usually a nice shirt, skirt, tights, and boots/nice shoes. With all that said, my #1 outfit requirement in comfort. If it ain’t comfortable, I don’t wear it. Period.” (female postdoc)

“My conference-wear is pretty commensurate with my teaching-wear: Presentable enough not to be mistaken for a grad student; not so formal as a corporate type” (female professor, untenured)

“Its going to be 20 degrees over there [in Chicago]. It’s all about comfort in my happy gear splashes of colorful sweaters. Leggings abound and the same darn black boots. Hoodies galore, gotta keep me ears warm in the Windy City.” (female professor, tenured)

“I’m going to wear cowboy boots. Because I’m 45 and sure enough of myself to wear what I like.” (female professor, tenured)

ARCHAEOLOGISTS

“I try to dress well enough so that no one will guess I’m an archaeologist.” (female archaeology professor)

Archaeologists are the most challenged in discerning between a fieldsite and a meeting site. According to our archaeology informants, archaeologists do spruce up some for the AAAs as compared to the SAAs. Yet, as one archaeologist put it, “While making your way through crowds of anthropologists may feel like a jungle, it is actually not necessary to wear hiking boots and Royal Robbins pants to successfully navigate the crowds. This bit of wisdom has not been widely circulated among some colleagues.”

Then again, as one archaeology grad student confessed, “Part of choosing to be an archaeologist is a commitment to not being fashionable. We do our best to uphold this historical standard.”

SCARVES

The only place that scarves are more popular than at an anthropology conference was at an airline hostess convention in the 1970s.

Scarves received more commentary than any other fashion item. Here are some gems:

“I refer to the AAAs as The Scarf Show. It seems like everyone wears scarves, wraps, and the like. Very chic, very anthro.”

“Yes, some form of ethnic scarf is a requisite for the ladies (and many of the men).”

“There is a difference between functional scarves and silky scarves that float around every which way.”

“Scarf culture is attached to coast elite academic culture.”

“I just don’t understand the scarf obsession. I want to want to wear scarves, but I [really] just want to wear jeans.”

“I’m also ambivalent about the scarf–they’re so cliché for anthropologists, but they are warm and pretty and useful and I have a lot of them, so… it will be a game time decision.”

“I have a collection of probably not so PC “hand made” cotton and wool scarves—made in India, bought in Rome, a few from Tibet. The wannabe hipster male needs a scarf!”

“The unisex pan-ethnic scarf is a must.”

“As a biocultural anthropologist is it appropriate for me to wear scarves?”

“This conversation proves (yet again) that I am the only anthropologist who does not wear/own any scarves.”

“Only cultural anthropologists maybe. Biological anthropologists are not as scarf and ethnic jewelry focused.”

And, a final paean to archaeologists: “NB: Dear Archaeology Male, a bolo tie is not a scarf. Sartorially yours, Archaeology Female.”

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL COUNTERPOINT TO ALL THIS FRIVOLITY

In conclusion, we turn now to anthropologist of fashion Carla Jones for some insights into our disciplinary clothing fetishes:

“I suppose it is unsurprising that anthropologists are invested in what we wear at AAA, after all this is our social community. Who better than we understand that social meaning is generated through symbols? Who else understands our specific cues and clues? We are the ones who have worked so hard to explain the importance of culture, ritual and human bonds to those outside our field.

What is surprising is that we somehow persuade ourselves that because we analyze symbols, we see through them. Nowhere is this more apparent that anthropologists’ ambivalence towards their own clothing. We deny that clothing matters even as we know it does. Why else insist on wearing jeans, the ur-garment of working classes, even as we expect those jeans to be a respectable (i.e., expensive) make that most working class people couldn’t afford? Why else eschew clothing that accountants might wear, unless we appear like capitalist tools or lacking individual genius? Why else expect accessories to do all our stylish heavy lifting, conveying cosmopolitaneity, political consciousness, and personal good taste at once? Such familiar, modernist anxieties lurk under our carefully chosen scarves and jackets, worrying that by acknowledging the importance of surfaces we are therefore superficial, which must mean we aren’t intelligent. The bigger the earrings, the smaller the brain, so we seem to think. Georg Simmel was on to something when he claimed that adornment is the bridge between the general and the intimate. He argued that fashion concentrates an individual personality into a “radiance…as if in a focal point, (which) allows the mere having of the person to become a visible quality of its being,” and it does this not in spite of the fact that style is about surface but because it is. When we get dressed, we aren’t just differentiating ourselves among finely shaded distinctions of cultural capital, or protecting ourselves with the use-value of garments against the freezing Chicago winds, we are being human.

I suppose it would be easy to say that all our curated outfits at AAA are tentative borrowings of others’ ethnic or class identities or worrisome avoidances of other identities. Another, more charitable, interpretation would be that they are so many security blankets, mediating our ambivalence between surface and depth. No wonder the stakes seem so high!”

AND REMEMBER…

One nickname for Chicago is The City of Big Shoulders which brings us to our final piece of fashion advice: When in Rome…. Or as a grad student put it: “Oh. And shoulder pads. Always accessories and shoulder pads—80s armor for the academic battle field.”

Another, of course, is The Windy City. This does not refer only to its politicians and it is not an exaggeration. Plan your hair and jacket options accordingly. Hold on to your scarves.

 
Many of us find the transition from graduate school to the world of the gainfully employed to be a challenging one. One moment, you’re happily ensconced in a library carrel, surrounded by your beloved field notes and cranking away at your dissertation. The next moment, you’re lecturing to two hundred first year university students who may be in the room solely for a general education credit, and who could care less about your deep and abiding affection for kinship theory. Or maybe you’re sitting across the table from a nonprofit interviewer who wants to know whether your experience studying the effects of globalization on Ilongot gender roles will make you a good candidate to work with a team of social entrepreneurs promoting fair trade coffee in Indonesia.

How are graduate students trained to make the transition from the apprenticeship model of academia to settings that may be very different from our expectations?  Since receiving my PhD in 2004 from a research university, I have wondered how other graduate schools prepared students for Life After PhD. During my graduate school years, my professors were always generous with their knowledge whenever I approached them with questions about academia. Yet at that time, there was no formal instruction on what happened once the dissertation was defended, bound, and stored away on acid free paper in the university library.

Given that jobs at research universities are few and far between, what are contemporary graduate programs doing to prepare students for settings other than the research university? I sent out an email to fifteen different colleagues, at various stages of their professional careers and in both the United States and overseas, to learn more about their experiences.

One colleague, who received his PhD slightly over a decade ago from a university in the California state system, mentioned that while his program had prepared him for a job in a research university, it did not address the realities of teaching in any other setting. Further, there was no attention given to jobs outside academia, except among the archaeologists.  Another woman, who attended the same school several years later, said that by then, the university had amped up its efforts to professionalize students, offering classes on how to submit conference abstracts and write grants and cover letters. However, the emphasis was still on grooming students for jobs in research universities. For this colleague, the most helpful connection she made was with the Society for Applied Anthropology, which she cited as very useful in informing her about careers outside academia.

Many graduate programs are now offering more intensive training in academic professionalization. Lisa Wynn, who teaches in Australia at Macquarie University, directed me to this thorough blog post by Greg Downey on the academic job search, which also contains a link to a workshop that Wynn offers on academic publishing. In her research methods class, she requires the students to submit a paper to an academic journal, and she reports that many have published their first articles this way.

One friend, currently writing his dissertation at the University of South Florida, known for its strong applied emphasis, told me that his program offers seminars on job talks and grant writing. For those who want to go into applied careers, another student from USF described his school’s strong internship program, with internships in both non-profit and corporate settings. Those internships, he said, often lead to jobs for students following graduation.

Overall, most of my respondents felt that graduate students had to be both proactive and creative in figuring out how to professionalize themselves. Asking professors directly for help, creating informal groups for practice conference talks, and getting to know scholars from other disciplines seemed to be the most common ways that graduate students built stronger CVs and networked for positions. Many mentioned learning a great deal from post-docs they held in other departments, where they worked among colleagues in fields such as public health or population studies.  In those fields, one person commented that students were receiving more rigorous training in publishing, giving conference talks, and networking.

My respondents are not necessarily a representative sample. Most of them attended graduate programs without an applied emphasis. However, I would guess that the majority of cultural anthropology programs in the United States still assume that their students are going to become academics. While traditional anthropology programs seem to be doing more these days to prepare their students for academic jobs, in most non-applied programs there is still little guidance in how to get jobs that are not in academia.

How much did your graduate education emphasize professionalization for careers beyond academia?

An associate professor of anthropology at Rollins College, Rachel Newcomb is a regular contributor to Huffington Post and writes book reviews for The Washington Post.  Her books include an ethnography, “Women of Fes,” and a novel, “The Gift.” For more information, you can visit her website.