Recently, at a beyond-academia event aimed at preemptively-despairing grad students who very much still want to be profs, I learned that one alternative possibility for a humanities PhD is: unpaid intern. Fair enough, I suppose, that if you're changing careers - which is what it means to go any route other than the academic job market - you'd need to start at the bottom. But the bottom used to be paid. Nothing wrong with administrative work at a for-profit business, if it's compensated. Our program is compensated. I didn't get the sense that there was much enthusiasm among the advanced-degree-holders present for taking an unpaid internship at 30-give-or-take, which, to her credit, the woman making this suggestion preemptively acknowledged.
Anyway, while I've had a fairly set Plan A (and B, C...) for some time now, I agreed with the general principle that it never hurts to see what's out there. So I figured out, after however many years, how to access my college's alumni career services network. Once properly logged in, I put in "French" as a search term, what with that being one of my theoretically marketable skills. Among the first entries to appear: "Fry Cook."
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Marketable skills
Posted by Phoebe Maltz Bovy at Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Labels: Grad-Student Anti-Defamation League, on the intermittent appeal of those subway ads to become an air-conditioner repairman, tour d'ivoire, unpaid internships
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2 comments:
Well we still need people to teach history here in Ghana. We do not have any French specialists currently.
That's funnY! Stand up comic?
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