My Advice for PhD Students on the (altac) Job Market

Like many soon-to-be PhDs, I entered my doctoral program with all the hopes, dreams, and intentions of landing a tenure-track professor position after graduation. Like more soon-to-be PhDs, I actively pursued — and landed — a great ‘alternative’ job outside of the ivory tower. For those in the academy that know me personally, most were surprised at hearing of my decision to not sacrifice everything in order to become a professor. Most professors that I know told me that I would likely land a tenure-track job given my publication and presentation record, service to the field, and doing all the other things that I was ‘supposed’ to do in order to have a ‘strong’ application on the academic job market. But I chose to look elsewhere as I entered my 5th year of graduate school.

My decision to actively pursue altac jobs (alternative academic jobs, or non-professor jobs) was made in consideration of three primary factors: Living where I wanted to live (rather living where random University X was located), solving the two-body problem (rather than either one of us making a major career sacrifice), and the odds of having a job following graduation. Each of these factors pointed to the solution of being open minded and seriously exploring what the altac job market had to offer. Because aside from a massive dose of luck, I knew that it was extremely unlikely that I would land a tenure-track position coming out of a R2 state school PhD program given geographical constraints.

Graduate students, professors, and anyone with any connection to academia knows how outright dismal the tenure-track market is for those of use not coming out of an Ivy League or top-ranked R1 program. The fact of the matter is: There are not enough jobs. Each year, thousands of PhDs are awarded for only a few hundred tenure-track jobs per field worldwide. Then, it comes down to fit with the department, program, and university. There are many(ish) tenure track jobs in psychology, for example, but the majority are looking for someone who does research outside of my specific area.

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This post originally appeared on my Medium account on 3 January 2020.