The Professor Is In

The Essential Guide to Turning Your PhD into a Job

By: Karen Kelsky

Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley

Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their PhDs. And each year only a small percentage of them will land jobs that justify and reward their investments. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts and many more who simply give up in frustration.

Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help job seekers join the select few who get the most out of their PhDs. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any PhD, including writing a foolproof grant application, cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV, acing the job talk and campus interview, and making the leap to nonacademic work when the time is right.

©2015 Karen Kelsky (P)2015 Tantor

Critic reviews

"For those students - and anyone who cares about them - [t]his cogent, illuminating book will be indispensable." ( Kirkus)

Listen early

Doing a PhD is a unique animal of sorts and there isn’t an abundance of literature dealing with the specific subject. This book, with its ever important goal of getting PhDs into jobs, also helped me to take the long view of my degree. That what is important now, in my second year, will be a distant memory by the time I enter the job maker gives me solace and reminds me that I’m in training for a job, not writing my life’s work (yet). A tome with many helpful tips. Read it early in your program.

Useful for junior scholars

This book is definitely useful for junior scholars in a variety of disciplines who are seeking tenure-track academic positions. Just keep in mind that the author’s occasionally semi-apocalyptic tone (geared towards scholars in the humanities facing a very difficult job market) may or may not apply to your discipline.

Invaluable information for all PhD students and early career professionals

The information she presents is genuinely invaluable. (Even for a STEM major such as myself.) However, I can’t help but mention how pretentious she sounds throughout the book. While this may be a tactic to get us to shape up and stop talking/ acting like grad students, 99% of professors I have observed and interacted with speak like normal people. Perhaps the “professor talk” is more prevalent in liberal arts and social sciences, or it may be a bit dated.

Vital advice for any PhD, great for humanities

Highly recommend for anyone getting a PhD and considering a career in academia. However, the book is rather focused on humanities. lots of advice is not relevant to Computer Science, so you have to be vigilant about what applies to your field. If you are considering a career as a professor but havent taken any steps other than what's required by your PhD, you won't be ready. this book shows you why. Covers how to properly do a 5-year plan, how to be marketable in academia, how to interview and negotiate, and more. I was not considering a career in academia and viewed it as a "back up". Now I see the true rigor and complexities of applying to academic work and how you must mold your PhD for it.

No real insight here.

The book is targeted only to humanities and contains rehashed material free on highered blogs.

Helpful overall

Helpful, but somewhat discouraging and at times offensive.
The author harps on poor application writing to the point of mockery rather than helpful criticism.

Mostly useless and potentially harmful

The book appears to be as much about the author's own validation of their career path, as it is a guide for others. Much of the content could be removed for a clearer statement of the potentially required procedures to land a job as a tenure track faculty member. While the discussion of the plight of the adjunct is useful for those in that situation (more as a coping strategy), statements about the academic order as a "white male" construct, are both irrelevant and sexist. Depending on who you are, the book may be seen as a service or disservice. The author also places many steps of the job hunting process prematurely, as it is not realistic to be adjuncting before one defends. This, however, is more excusable because of the trend of one upmanship in the current overcompetitive climate of the academic job market. it would have been better to rebuff that approach than to opine at length for a good twenty percent of the book in order to persuade some to simply stop pursuing a tenure track position entirely.