English 9217
Working Within and Beyond the University
Instructor: Professor Kate Stanley.
Winter Half Course.
This seminar will consider the varieties of expertise and experience that graduate students in the humanities acquire and administer as they progress towards their degrees, and will explore the wider range of paid employment that might offer viable opportunities going forward. We will investigate how and why higher education and the economy as a whole make it increasingly difficult for students to secure full-time tenure-track teaching positions. We will then focus on what students might do while in graduate school to become plausible candidates for different kinds of positions, both within and beyond the university. We will experiment with diagnostic tools towards discerning the preferences and priorities that govern what forms of life and work might best suit us. We will also invite guests who offer a sense both of work we might be interested in and of the soft and hard skills employers seek when looking to fill specific positions. Students will leave the class with a strong resume (and/or academic CV), a fuller understanding of how and why to cultivate professional networks, and improved wherewithal for identifying possible jobs and writing cover letters that will garner interviews. No single piece of the work-life picture can be considered in isolation from the others, and this course will encourage and employ a broad, complementary, and practical rubric for thinking about how career and life choices intersect. The course is designed to dovetail with Mary Helen McMurran’s Essential Skills & Methods course in the Fall term.
