The gap between graduate school and academia
The goal(s) of graduate school
In many fields, graduate school still focuses on preparing the next generation of professors and researchers. Linguistics is one of those fields. Very few permanent positions exist, so most graduate students won’t stay in academia. We don’t have precise and comprehensive data on the success rate of linguistics PhDs (the LSA’s annual reports track enrollments and job titles, not outcomes). Here’s one quick test, though: check a department’s list of PhD graduates over a ten-year period. Then google each one and see where they are now. You can do that in 5 minutes with an agent. I did that for some programs (MIT, UCLA, Berkeley; McGill, Toronto, UBC), for people who graduated between 2010 and 2019. The rate of graduates now in permanent positions ranged from 25% (Toronto) to 55% (UCLA), and at UCLA, MIT and Berkeley it was clearly lower for those who graduated after 2014. Needless to say, these should not be taken to be official and precise data, but they do give you a sense of the situation. You may think that 25% to 55% is actually pretty good (it is), but many of those positions came only after years of postdocs or temporary contracts, and these programs aren’t representative of the average linguistics program.
In recent years, programs have adapted to this mismatch by providing workshops and information sessions on jobs beyond academia. Valuable resources have also been produced by linguists themselves. What is interesting is that even those few students who go on to become professors will eventually realize that graduate school only prepared them for a fraction of what the job entails, and it’s this gap that I’d like to discuss here.
Let’s suppose you’re fortunate enough to be a fully-funded graduate student in linguistics at a competitive department in North America. Most of what you do involves (a) completing coursework to give you foundational knowledge, (b) developing research questions, (c) presenting projects related to said questions, and (d) writing papers to establish your findings at a respected journal in the field. If (a-d) work out, completing your dissertation/thesis should not be a major challenge. All of these components are directly tied to research. As any professor will tell you, research is only a third of the job if you’re lucky.
What academia is like in reality
Academia is a bubble with numerous smaller bubbles in it. Your graduate school is also a bubble. If you’re the student I described above, you may be tempted to think that the profession as a whole mirrors your own world, in your own department. That is rarely the case. Being at a competitive department makes you think that academia is mostly about research, grants, conferences, reading groups, etc. But that is only representative of a tiny bubble in academia: the bubble of highly competitive departments that do a lot of research. It’s a tiny fraction of academia, essentially. In other words, the more competitive your graduate experience is/was, the more distorted your view becomes of the average academic life.
Yes, you may be lucky enough to land a permanent position that mostly mirrors the experience you had as a student. But even in that scenario, you must understand what your life as a student is wildly different from your life as a professor. Most of the tasks you will have as a professor are tasks you haven’t been trained for during graduate school.
“As a grad student, you have no service expectations. You don’t serve on admissions, gen-ed, hiring, or other regular or ad hoc committees. You don’t have to referee papers for peer-reviewed journals. You don’t march in graduation ceremonies or help hire new faculty. […] you aren’t required to publish. You certainly should publish […], but publishing isn’t a requirement for you to graduate with a 4.0 GPA and glowing letters of recommendation. This brings me to some stark advice. If you find that you hate grad school, if you find everything you do to be a massive struggle, […] you should consider quitting. It doesn’t get easier. You will never have less expected of you and never face less pressure than you will as a graduate student.”
Brennan (2020, pp. 63–64)
Research. Even though graduate school is mostly about research, you may finish your PhD without having any experience applying for grants, managing subject payments and budgets around different projects. This is something you may acquire with post-docs, for example. Still, this is an integral part of your job in many scenarios. It is true that in most universities you won’t be expected to get grants in linguistics (this depends on different factors). But if you are expected to bring in grants, then your research pillar just expanded to include a series of tasks you now need to master.
When it comes to grants, universities have people that will help you with the application process, but your budget is still your budget. You will likely include student supervision and training to your project, maybe a technician, or a programmer, which also means managing a team of people. Preparing a grant application takes a lot of time, especially when you’re just starting out. And if you are successful, you will now have to work more than usual because you have a grant to manage and a project to carry out. Some universities will give you course releases if you get grants, but not all of them will. In some places, this essentially means that getting a grant will result in more work for you. Sure, your CV will get a nice bump too.
Whether or not you need a grant to do your research depends on what exactly you do. But even if you don’t technically need the grant for the research itself, you may need it to establish a lab or a team of students; or you may need it because it’s expected and without it your tenure may be in danger. Grants can be exciting, of course, and they can allow to develop projects and ideas that would otherwise not be possible, but it will be time-consuming, and it will add yet another layer to your duties as a professor. Again, this is a component that isn’t universal. In many places, very few if any professors will have grants, and the expectation will be very low. It all depends on where you end up.
Teaching is the first major task the moment you arrive on campus, even if you do get the typical course release(s) as a new prof. Most graduate programs won’t prepare you for teaching. You may be fortunate enough to have some teaching experience as a PhD student (either as a TA or as a course instructor), but that isn’t guaranteed, and it won’t necessarily help you understand how to improve your teaching skills, since you likely won’t have had feedback on your classes, or the chance to do it again just to see if a new idea works better. Speaking in public matters in teaching (it also matters at conferences), and it’s basically up to you to work on that.
The thing about teaching is that even if you don’t have experience and don’t necessarily learn how to do it, you at least know about it; you know it’s part of the job, so it won’t be a surprise.1 It’s a known variable that you may have little to no experience in. There are workshops and short courses on campus you can take as a PhD student, and universities often have faculty training available. These matter because most academic jobs care about teaching. Even competitive research-intensive programs may care a bit about it. And since you can’t count on getting a research-only position (e.g., CNRS), you should care about improving this component of your CV.
As a new assistant professor, you will teach multiple courses per term. You could teach 2-4 courses a year, or you could teach 8-10 courses a year. It all depends on the job you land. Preparing course materials requires a ridiculous amount of time. This is something you’ve never experienced, because until now your main focus was your thesis, your papers, etc. This will take a toll, and your time will be compressed, which means less time for research exactly when research is essential: your first years on the job (your tenure depends on several factors, but research is a big one, of course). It is true that the more you have to teach, the less research you’re expected to produce. No one teaching 4 courses a semester is expected to publish papers every semester. But you will find places that require 3 courses per semester that do require a considerable amount of research — of course, what “considerable” means varies a lot, and depending on how productive and efficient you are, your reality will be vastly different from the reality of others. Still, the first years will be much busier than your years as a graduate student. You will, however, get better and more experienced, so the whole process will soften a bit as you go through it. Learning how to be efficient is key, and many academics don’t.
With teaching comes grading and students’ emails. Maybe you will have a TA, but maybe you won’t. You may have grading experience, but when you grade tests as a graduate TA you have a manual job, where the criteria have been set by the instructor. When you are the instructor yourself, you have to think about assessment and feedback, both of which are rarely discussed in graduate school, because you’re in linguistics, not education. There will be a gap, and you will have to spend time thinking about what options are more reasonable. Then you will need to revise and adjust those once you’ve taught a class for the first time. Remember: your course evaluations are often (almost always) part of your tenure dossier. In most academic jobs, you can’t afford to treat teaching as a “minor” task, despite what many people will have you believe. It matters, and it’s time-consuming. You have to learn to adapt, and to combine your research interests and your teaching. I assume you don’t hate teaching, because academia in the 21st century wouldn’t be for you if you did.
Supervision. You will probably have zero experience supervising students, RAs, TAs. Whether or not this is tied to your grants (point above), chances are you will have to supervise students. If your department has no graduate program, that means undergraduate supervision. If your department is very competitive, you will supervise multiple graduate students, and while this means more output for you, it also means extra time in meetings and feedback. Good supervisors meet with their students quite often; they also give constant feedback. But good supervisors also need more time to do that. Everything has a cost, and the cost is time.
Service is the big surprise. You’ve heard about it; you know it exists. You may have had the chance to organize an event in graduate school. You will likely have reviewed papers and abstracts. But there’s a wide range of tasks you’ve never even knew existed before you entered the profession. Service also tends to become more time-consuming the more senior you become (take being chair of a department, for example), especially since certain service expectations exist for you to become full professor at many universities. This all means that the amount of time you have for research gets reduced in general.
In your first years in the job, as you publish papers and present at conferences, you may be invited to do several things. Your tendency will be to say “yes” to everything, because that improves your CV, increases visibility, and ultimately adds to your tenure dossier. You have to balance two things here: you need to say “yes” a lot at first, because you’re building your own academic path. But you have to know what to prioritize and when to say “no”. This is an essential “skill” on the job.
So
There’s an irony in all this. The years in which you’re least prepared for the job are, on average, the years in which professors publish the most. In economics and finance, the number of publications drops by about 30% in the two years after tenure, and by a further 15% after that; highly cited papers peak in the tenure year itself (Brogaard et al., 2018). Averages hide a lot, of course. In a study of over 2,400 computer science professors, only about one in five followed this rise-then-decline pattern (Way et al., 2017). And once you account for how much people publish, a scientist’s most influential paper is equally likely to appear at any point in their career (Sinatra et al., 2016). Still, the overall picture holds: your first years on the job, when teaching, supervision, grants and service are all new to you, are also the years when you’re expected to be at your most productive. That’s yet another gap.
Copyright © Guilherme Duarte Garcia
References
Footnotes
But you may be surprised at how much you need to adapt to your student needs.↩︎