The Job of Helping Ph.D.'s Find Jobs

By Jennifer Jacobson

James A. Howley became an assistant professor because he wanted to work with students. But after sitting through a three-hour faculty meeting in which they were never discussed, he realized that the professoriate was not for him.

So three years ago Mr. Howley decided to take his doctoral degree in sociology and his master's degree in student affairs and put them both to use as a graduate career counselor at the University of Chicago.

The job of helping Ph.D.'s find jobs is an integral, if somewhat hidden, part of graduate-school life. Doctoral students traditionally have relied on faculty members for career advice. But a tight job market has forced more Ph.D.'s to look for jobs outside academe. Faculty mentors have little expertise in that venue, and campus career centers usually focus on undergraduates. As a result, many universities have expanded their career services for graduate students and created new positions for graduate career counselors.

Although no clear career path leads directly to, or from, the job of graduate career counselor, one thing is clear: The field is growing.

A decade ago among top institutions, "there were less than 10 of us in the country that had such a job," says Mary Morris Heiberger, associate director of the University of Pennsylvania's career-services office. Now about 30 to 35 graduate career counselors work with doctoral students at universities affiliated with the Association of American Universities, a group of 62 major research institutions, says Virginia Steinmetz, assistant director for graduate students at Duke University.

A few institutions, including Penn, Chicago, and Harvard University, have had more than one counselor working exclusively with graduate students for years. Others, like Rice University and the University of California at Santa Barbara have just this academic year each hired a graduate career counselor, and the University of Maryland at College Park is in the middle of its first search to find one.

The position, often housed within the university's career center, goes beyond helping Ph.D.'s with their CV's and cover letters. Graduate career counselors, who can earn $30,000 to $50,000 a year, bring corporate recruiters to campus, work one-on-one to assess student skills and interests, and hold workshops and seminars on topics like preparing for interviews.

The job requires good interpersonal skills and plenty of empathy, says Mr. Howley, who advises graduate students in the social sciences, while his two colleagues at Chicago counsel students in physical biology and the humanities. "People have invested a lot of time in the Ph.D.," he says, "and to come to the realization that they're not using it the way their adviser expects them to use it -- sometimes that can really cause people a great deal of psychological angst."

Mr. Howley says two kinds of people typically become graduate career counselors: those who have Ph.D.'s in an academic discipline and have some experience in counseling and those who have master's degrees in student affairs or counseling and learn about graduate-student life on the job.

While you don't need a Ph.D. to do the job, Mr. Howley says it can boost a counselor's credibility. "If you haven't done the Ph.D., some people in our client base think you lose some of your cachet," he says. Not everyone feels that way, however: "A lot of our students are happy to have any help at all."

As a graduate-career counselor at the University of California at Berkeley, Andrew E. Green thinks having a Ph.D. himself gives him an insider's knowledge of graduate-student life. After earning a Ph.D. in political science from Berkeley in 1993, he landed a job as an assistant professor of government at Connecticut College. When he and his wife moved back to Berkeley in 1996, he began looking for positions in academic administration and the nonprofit sector. "There were very, very, very few academic jobs in the Bay area," he says. "The likelihood of getting one wasn't high. I'd done it and enjoyed it, but I was looking to do something new."

In 1997 he landed a part-time, three-month appointment as a graduate-career counselor at Berkeley and parlayed it into a full-time position, which he's enjoyed ever since. "Graduate students are grateful for anything you can do for them," Mr. Green says. "Often undergraduates have a strong sense of entitlement. Undergraduates feel they're someone just by the fact they're at a prestigious university."

But life as a graduate student, he says, humbles you. "I talk to graduate students who feel insecure about going out on the market. I say, 'You've got a Ph.D. from Berkeley.' They say, 'All my friends have a Ph.D. from Berkeley.' I provide perspective. Most of the world does not have a Ph.D. from Berkeley."

Kimberly G. DelGizzo was director of career services for 11 years at Stonehill College, a small liberal-arts institution with no graduate students, when Harvard University's career center came calling. It was looking for a graduate-career counselor and preferred a Ph.D. with a strong science background. Ms. DelGizzo says she felt unqualified for the job -- after all, she had only a master's degree in counseling from the University of Vermont and had never worked with graduate students. Even so, Harvard hired her.

Ms. DelGizzo, associate director of Ph.D. advising, says having a doctorate in her job "would be a wonderful bonus," but not having one has not hindered her and has not been an issue with the students. She advises students of every discipline as does her fellow counselor, a Ph.D. in neuroscience hired just over a year ago.

While counselors at Harvard, Berkeley, and Chicago work out of their campus career centers, the University of California at Santa Barbara has taken a different approach. In January, the university hired John M. Hajda to fill a new position -- director of student services in Santa Barbara's graduate school. He refers students to the regular career center on campus only if they're starting their search from scratch and are "totally lost" about the process.

Mr. Hajda says being situated in the graduate school allows him to have the ear of faculty members on career issues and gives him more visibility than his counterparts in career centers. He thinks it also gives him better access to students.

It's a job he never planned to have as a doctoral student in music at the University of California at Los Angeles. But he was bitten by the administration bug when he became active in the graduate-student government at UCLA. He held a variety of jobs after earning his Ph.D. -- teaching at a private school in Los Angeles, pursuing a songwriting career, and working for a dot-com in San Francisco -- before landing a job in September 2000 as interim director of financial support and academic appointments at Santa Barbara. That position led to his current one. He hopes to remain in academic affairs but will teach a graduate course this year at Santa Barbara in music perception and cognition.

Mr. Howley, the career counselor at the University of Chicago, plans to build his career in student affairs and academic advising, although he too teaches in his spare time -- in his case, a sociology course at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Many graduate career counselors, he says, remain in the counseling field or go into academic administration in some form. Others, he says, move on to different nonprofit institutions or run job-skills programs for people outside of academe.

Although the position of graduate career counselor has no obvious jumping-off point, it does have its advantages when it comes to advancement, Mr. Green says. "You do interact with lots of other units on campus," he says. "I know of a number of people who've moved to special assistant to the chancellor or working for the dean of the humanities division."

While he's not sure about his next career move, Mr. Green says he has no desire to leave the university and would like to continue working with graduate students in some capacity. He adds: "They can use advocates."