Graduate Career Allyship: How Mentors and Programs Can Support Students

Graduate students in music studies enter many lines of work. Often their entry into employment is accompanied by stress and uncertainty. Many musicians are attracted to graduate programs because work in the professoriate seems to be one of few financially stable ways to remain connected to the field of music. Most graduate students in the arts have been encouraged to make enormous investments of time in developing their skills in research and creative practice, and their teachers have emphasized their talent and potential in the arts. For these students, the declining number of well-paid college teaching jobs likely means not only a shift in their practical preparation for work but also a profound alteration of their identity. Indeed, people working in the arts and related professions often experience a sense of “vocational awe”: the belief that their work is a “calling” or a “passion” and a social good that is worth doing even for low or no pay. On the basis of this belief, arts students may persist in pursuing positions only in fields where jobs are rare or unavailable, and they may decline to look outside their specialization for work opportunities that would offer them stable financial support.1Faculty advisors experience parallel challenges to their professional identity as their students seek work outside the professoriate. Those who are paying attention to the quality and quantity of college-level teaching jobs are concerned for their students’ welfare. Many of them used to prepare students for careers just like their own and still wish to do so. Compared to most academic disciplines, the music fields are small and close-knit; faculty who teach graduate students feel a strong investment in passing along their knowledge and sustaining their areas of study. Many faculty also worry about the future of their graduate programs, especially in cases where their institutions do not recognize work outside the professoriate as a valued outcome. The promotion and tenure systems that reward faculty performance may reckon only academic jobs as “success stories.” And if university leaders count college and university teaching jobs as the only forms of success, faculty may feel that encouraging students to consider broader labor markets might jeopardize the existence of their programs and their disciplines. These factors, among others, have discouraged faculty from changing advising practices and graduate programs to support a wider array of career outcomes. But students’ well-being demands such a change.Even in cases where institutional priorities disincentivize career diversity, faculty, staff, and graduate programs have considerable power to prepare students for entry into meaningful work. Any mentor can support students’ career exploration, and the mentor need not be a career expert to do so: Small changes in advising can yield real benefits. To ensure that every student's career development is supported, though, reliance on individual advisors is not enough. The only way to ensure that every student in a program receives professional development is to integrate it into the curriculum. We will therefore begin by discussing small, concrete steps that advisors and other mentors can take to support students’ progress toward good career outcomes. We then describe what programs and departments can do, collectively, through their curricula.Perhaps the easiest change mentors can make is a shift in language. By choosing words that indicate more than one possible path, advisors can cue prospective and current students to think broadly about possible outcomes. In conversation with students and in departmental communications, “careers” should typically be plural, and we might choose to say “employment” rather than “the job market” (as if there were only one market).2 Work outside the professoriate isn't “alt-ac” (“alternative academic” or otherwise “alternative”). Mentors can choose language that consistently acknowledges and values more than one possible outcome.Likewise, mentors can ask open-ended questions like “What do you want to do after you graduate?”—making it clear early and often that the professoriate is not the sole presumed outcome of the graduate program. It's best if these conversations start even before students enter the program. Prospective students who had great experiences in college look up to their professors: For some, following in those footsteps seems both natural and possible. It is not always obvious to them that employment in the education sector is less stable than it once was. Even if students have read statistics or “quit lit” online before applying, many believe that because they are bright and hardworking, they can beat the odds. Frank discussion of the variety of outcomes that follow graduate study is an important form of transparency: It also usefully shapes student and faculty planning for the course of study.When Danielle started having these conversations with students considering grad school in musicology, she thought this kind of candor would be a liability, but it creates a virtuous cycle. She asks the “What do you want to do?” question in the first conversation with a prospective student. Most students are interested in professorships, but they have read something about the declining quality and quantity of these jobs. Many believe they will “work the hardest” and be the exception—that is more likely to be the case for applicants who are under extra pressures, such as first-generation or international applicants. This first conversation is an opportunity for faculty to reframe and broaden the purposes of graduate education and to protect the student from embarking on a multiyear investment with expectations that do not match the statistical reality. Danielle shares statistics about academic employment but also talks about students from her program who are working outside the professoriate.3 She continues this conversation in subsequent visits with prospective students. Recruitment is enhanced because students feel supported and trust the faculty and the program more, and students arrive for their first year better informed and already thinking broadly about a variety of paths. Mentors can then cultivate open-ended exploration throughout the student's time in the program, helping them build relevant expertise and networks so that by the time they graduate they have plans, including backup or alternative plans.Those who advise graduate students hold the power of storytelling. Faculty and staff can tell advisees stories about alumni who are succeeding in a variety of kinds of work. They can highlight the one who wrote a dissertation on refugees who is now working in a philanthropic organization that serves them, the one who is running a record label, the one who is applying their ethnographic skills in the medical field, the one who is analyzing assessment data for a public school district, and so forth. They might also consider telling these stories in departmental news outlets, websites, and elsewhere on campus. When faculty or departments brag about alumni, students notice: If they can see a variety of models for professional advancement, they can more easily imagine themselves on those paths. By contrast, if they see faculty pretending that alumni working outside the professoriate don't exist, they assume those outcomes are not approved; they may decide that they cannot risk discussing jobs outside the professoriate with their faculty mentors. Choosing whom to brag about is another virtuous cycle: If faculty stay in touch with alumni, the faculty themselves become more aware of how the skills they teach translate in different workplaces, and they can connect current students with former ones who are working in relevant professions.Faculty advisors and staff who serve graduate students need not be expert career coaches to be effective supporters for students. Every student needs more than one mentor: Faculty can encourage students to connect with people who have experience in relevant professions. Faculty can share their own networks, introducing students to alumni from the program, friends and friends-of-friends, and other contacts they have made along the way. Students can also find people who hold degrees like theirs on LinkedIn; often those leads suggest viable career paths. Students should grow their personal networks, talk to people in a variety of careers that might fit, and conduct brief informational interviews to learn informally about fields of interest and gather advice about what skills and job-hunting strategies apply in a given field. (Faculty don't need to know how to do that, either! The ImaginePhD tool includes detailed instructions for informational interviewing.4) Most universities have staff career coaches: They can be valuable partners who help the student with the imaginative work of learning about possible careers and the practical tasks of developing a résumé and interviewing. The faculty member's role here is to encourage exploration; to prompt the student to build a network, assisting where possible; and to keep that conversation going throughout the student's program.In every setting where they work, faculty can actively affirm the value of planning for careers outside the professoriate. As advisors, they can say “yes” to a variety of experiences that help students translate their skills. For some professional paths, a course or certificate that builds a particular skill set can meaningfully enhance the student's chances at a first job. For others, a summer internship or a job-shadowing opportunity might be recommended by mentors in that field. For most, informational interviews in that field are a necessity. Faculty may have mixed feelings about protecting the student's time for academic work, and that conversation is worth having. When faculty acknowledge the value of spending time to develop skills that are appropriate to the student's professional interests, and help students build those skills, students feel safer and more at ease to explore.5Outside of their advising relationships, faculty can ask their universities to count diverse careers as good program outcomes in graduate program assessment, in promotion and tenure guidelines, and in their conversations about the curriculum. Individual advisors can do a lot for their students, as we have just established. But if we want to ensure that every graduate student in music studies receives adequate professional development, it must be integrated into programs. Employers value critical thinking, the ability to analyze and interpret data, speaking and writing skills, and the ability to integrate disparate ideas—all of which (and more) are skills already cultivated in arts and humanities graduate programs.6 Trained musicologists are using their skills in the music software industry, as experts in digital humanities, and in a variety of administrative roles—and in many other places. Programs can strengthen students’ understanding of how their skills transfer and encourage them to consider building skills toward their preferred career outcomes as they plan their paths through graduate education.Two examples of how this can be done come from the anthropology PhD program at the Ohio State University and the English PhD program at Brandeis University.7 These programs offer models for how a department might consider revising the PhD program to support students’ professional development while continuing to fulfill their academic mission. Disciplines can and should look to each other for inspiration and information, rather than attempting to reinvent the wheel.Knowing where alumni are already working helps us see possibilities for our current students. At Ohio State, changes to the anthropology PhD program began with an exploration of their alumni data, which revealed that while the program was preparing all its students for tenure-track jobs, only about one-third of them were working in such jobs. Another third were in academic-adjacent jobs and the final third in industry. Recognizing that fully two-thirds of their graduates were not entering the career the program was preparing them for, the program's faculty decided to redesign the program to deliberately prepare students for a much wider range of careers.Programs can work backward from a variety of valued outcomes to shape their programs to prepare students. To achieve this at Ohio State, the anthropology program's faculty engaged in a process of designing backward from the outcomes they wanted to see. A core group of three faculty members created a “curriculum map” to help them decide what they wanted to keep and what they wanted to change, as well as how to integrate new elements of the program, such as a portfolio model. The resulting program is designed to prepare students for careers both in and beyond the academy. Features of the new program include: A heavy emphasis on foundational skills and research methodology, with five required courses. Skills and methodologies travel more easily beyond the academy than content expertise. Research skills include collecting and managing data, ethnographic practice and ethics, and communication to a variety of audiences, all of which are transferable to many sectors.An ongoing professional development seminar, which students may take for credit multiple times. The seminar introduces students to alumni working in a range of fields, opening their eyes to possibilities and helping them see the steps they could take to enter these fields.A transformed qualifying exam that requires students to develop an application for a grant. This positions students to apply more easily for fieldwork funding; it also prepares them for countless workplace situations where they must justify a budget.Portfolios that are updated yearly and provide the basis for advising conversations. By highlighting concrete achievements, these portfolios can support the student's development of a CV or a résumé, and they allow the program and advisor to identify skills that need development.If a student takes an interest in a job requiring specific technical skills, those skills can be developed during the degree for a smoother transition.This process of curricular revision was not a quick one. It began in 2017, and the revised program went into effect in 2022. The faculty continues to make changes as they integrate feedback from students and faculty. Mark Moritz, director of graduate studies, says that the program has been helpful for recruiting new students because there is a clear story that the department can tell about what it teaches, how it teaches it, and why.A realistic look at where students with graduate degrees are finding employment can and should inspire change. The overhauling of the English PhD program at Brandeis started, similarly, with concern about the program's graduates and where they were landing after they finished. Faculty had noticed that due to the state of the academic job market in English, students were taking much longer to complete the program, which was resulting in higher levels of debt.8 In 2020, a team from Brandeis, led by Ulka Anjaria, then-director of graduate studies, attended a convening on the future of the doctorate organized by the Modern Language Association. Inspired by what they learned there, they returned to Brandeis and began a process of thoroughly revising the English PhD program. Over the next year, every faculty meeting was devoted to this process, and the result was a suite of substantial changes. These changes intentionally prepare students for both university teaching and other kinds of work. They include: Several required courses, including one focused on pedagogy and one on writing for multiple audiences. These courses develop skills usable inside or outside the academy. Oral and written communication are highly valued by employers. Pedagogy encompasses many transferable skills—not only communication but also organizing information, assessing whether communication has worked, and aligning one's own work with the needs of clients and institutions.A required internship. Thus far, students have completed internships with academic presses, translation projects, lifelong learning programs, archives, and more. Internships are an opportunity to “try out” fields of work, and often they help students build a portfolio of work products that can be shown to prospective employers.The opportunity to teach a specialized course as instructor of record on a topic of interest to them. The record of independent teaching assists students in applying for faculty positions, but it also demonstrates the transferable skills listed above.The ability to count transferable skills from other fields toward coursework. This feature supports the development of truly interdisciplinary scholars and allows students to pull practical skills into their degrees, including (for example) nonprofit budgeting, community-engaged research, or social media marketing.An exam process that connects to tangible projects and helps move the student through the degree program efficiently. The field exam is limited to 70 texts and requires the outline of a broad intellectual agenda and two original syllabi. Limiting the number of texts moves students through the exam process faster, and the intellectual agenda offers the student a head start on the dissertation proposal. The two original syllabi support faculty job applications but also form the basis for the course the student will eventually teach as an instructor of record.A broad approach to the dissertation that allows, in addition to the traditional proto-monograph, a suite of related essays, a work of creative nonfiction, an annotated critical edition or digital archive, or an equivalent scholarly work. 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