4 Steps for Mindful Job Search exploration as a PhD Student

4 Steps for Mindful Job Search exploration as a PhD Student

By: Gabby Tapia, PhD Student, English

At this point, most PhD students have heard some doomsday bell or another ringing for the academic job market. The tapping of doom-scrolling over horror stories and abysmal statistics usually drums along to the ringing, capping off the end of over-caffeinated days with another spike of heightened pulses. Once in this cacophonous state the imagination runs rampant in search for potential ways out of academia, only to quickly find itself running in the circles of limited experience – a byproduct of the immense commitment each of us has dedicated to academia to get into our programs. More often than not there’s no notable resolution to the episode; instead, we’re left waiting for another, hopefully more pleasant spiral of emotions to draw our attention away.

This blog post will not provide the resolution for the justified anxieties we experience as aspiring academics (probably nothing will until we all collectively organize to demand a more just and transparent labor system, but that’s certainly its own can of worms). Instead, what this post will be offering is a potential way to help alleviate the intensity of the anxiety – to provide a way or two out of the panic-limited-experience-circle illustrated above. For myself at least, I have found that the act of mindfully exploring internships provides more concrete ways for contemplating work (and life) outside of academia. At the same time, I have also found that doing this exercise (seemingly paradoxically) helps make committing to academia a little less scary.

Now when I say ‘mindful exploration’ I mean just that: MINDFUL. Have you ever done a job/internship search for nonacademic jobs and experienced something between disappointment to the panic depicted above? For myself at least, this has been my experience with most searches, which has usually just led to an even more exasperated version of the anxiety that I was trying to dissuade in the first place. After taking the InternshipPhD class, I’ve since realized the main issue with this approach has been the lack of intention and focus I brought to such job searches. In the short list below, I will provide a few of the most helpful guiding questions/prompts I was given before poking around the internships listed on Handshake.

  1. The first step is less of a question and more of, well, a first step: pick the field and job type that you want to learn more about. I ended up mostly looking into internships with the title “Environmental Analyst,” though it was important that I kept an eye out for similar positions with different names, such “environmental consultant.” If you’re having trouble getting to this first step, the website Imagine PhD has a few questionnaires you can answer to help you get started for parsing through various industries and job positions.
  2. Go to the ‘required’ skills and knowledge section of the internship job posting. Which of these do you have? Which of these don’t you have?
    As you answer these question, do your best not cut yourself short in terms of the skills you’ve developed as a PhD student. Keep in mind that things like leadership, public speaking, organization/management, and writing skills are all competencies you’ve had to develop as a researcher, TA, and/or teacher. Once you take the time to consider  how these skills translate outside of academia, there’s a good chance you’ll be surprised by how many required skills in many job postings you do actually have. Despite this potential pleasant surprise, there’s a high chance that there will be skills/competencies that you don’t have – which is okay! In fact, this is probably where the greatest comfort of the exercise starts for me: figuring out EXACTLY what it is that I’m missing. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of skills and knowhow that I don’t have, I identified specific areas I could learn more about if I needed to.
  3. What can you do to learn or improve upon any ‘missing’ skills?
    The knowledge set that clearly stood out to me for the Environmental Analyst position included the need to be well versed in SEQRA, NEPA and SHPO regulations and review processes. Now although I had little to no background knowledge on these regulations, having such a clear and defined area mapped out made potential goal setting so much easier and straightforward. I knew that I could always take a class or even use the research skills I have a PhD student and self-teach myself about these regulations myself. What’s more, because it’s an internship, I didn’t feel the pressure to come off as an expert in these regulations; I could easily imagine myself being transparent about this in an interview by demonstrating an awareness of and an eagerness to learn the regulations. What was most important for me as an overanxious PhD student was finally having that something clear and achievable to chew on when hitting those inevitable panic moments about academia. Even though I plan to still shoot my (statistically near impossible) shot in the academic job market one of these days, there’s been a deep comfort in knowing that academia isn’t the end all be all for me, and that if/when the time comes to move on, I know that I’ll have a set of tools and practices ready to go.
  4. How will you demonstrate that you have acquired skills/competencies?
    For some, the answer to this question may be doing the internship itself. For those who would need to prove these skills for the internship, I highly recommend scheduling an appointment with the Greene Center. There they can help give you concrete advice – or connect you with someone else who can do so – about the kinds of classes, certificate programs, volunteer opportunities, etc. where you can gather proof that these skills have been gathered. Whether you decide to take on an internship or not, the intentional, focused act itself of exploring what internships are out there goes a long way: it provides the concrete materials that any panic induced contemplation of academia needs to not unfold into an amorphous mush of nerves. I hope, if anything, anyone reading this can walk away with a new strategy to get them through the day.
By Gabby Tapia
Gabby Tapia