empathy map & problem statementa PhD student on the school-to-work transition

mj truong

problem statementA bright, wildly hardworking, stubborn, highly educated historian

from a middle class family in Denmark, seeks his PhD at NYU but is worried about his job prospects once he defends his dissertation. He needs help to reframe his outlook on post-PhD job prospects, because

even though he might, many PhDs who are qualified for them and want them never land desirable jobs in academia.

It’s a systematic problem, and it’s not only a problem in academia. The design fields are also notorious for graduating a much higher number

of students than there are jobs available in the field.

saya transcript of the interview

conducted and recorded with WeChat audio

Notable quotes are written in bold.

who are you?“I’m still in school, but being in a PhD program is slightly different. There’s a fluid transition space

where you’re studying and working at the same time. When you’re done with your coursework, your research work and your teaching assistance or

course design is basically a type of work. And most places give you a stipend and pay you for the services

you provide for the university.

So I’m transitioning from school to work but I’m also in both places at the same time.”

He also has a part-time job at one of the foreign missions to the United Nations, so in that respect he’s

currently both working and a working PhD student.

describe your school-to-work path“I think that my specific path has been somewhat unorthodox or irregular because I haven’t taken a straight path towards academia. I’ve done other

stuff along the way; I think it’s probably been good for me and provided some real-world perspective, having taken a year off to do actual work and not

do any schooling. It was good, and something I totally chose myself, and wasn’t necessarily a

prerequisite or a designed part of my education.”

how has school prepared you for working in your field?

“I think PhD programs, and mine in particular, are very good for preparing you for a very specific type of job - an academic

position at a big research university. I feel fairly well-prepared to do that. The problem is that it’s not that flexible. I’m not

necessarily well-prepared for other types of jobs; for instance, an academic position at a smaller, less prestigious institution where

there’s less time devoted to research and more devoted to teaching and other kinds of stuff. And I’m not particularly well

prepared for selling myself on the job market.

While I do think I have skills that could be useful in other jobs that I’ve gotten directly from my education, I don’t think that I’m particularly well-prepared for selling those to employers.”

in your field, how is school different from work?

“It depends on what the job is. If it’s an R1 university academic job, it’s not that different. It has more/different types of responsibilities, but ultimately it’s about teaching, and and it’s about

producing research, and producing research takes priority - just like being in graduate school.

However, the question is whether or not I’ll get that job. And if I won’t get that job, it will

probably differ somewhat more.”

what are the incentives and obstacles in the path you have chosen?

“I think there are a lot of incentives to picking the path that I did. Mainly: you have a lot of freedom, a lot of

intellectual stimulation; lots of interesting tasks - both in teaching and researching.

I think the main obstacle is that there are too many people competing for too few jobs. If you don’t get your

ideal job, which most of us don’t if you look at the statistics, we’re not that well-versed in selling

ourselves to non-academic employers.”

what are your general observations about the school-to work trajectory?

“It depends on what it is. I think 4-year college-level education has a basic function that is pretty equal across the board. It’s extremely important, and everybody might not get it because not all colleges

are great, but the basic idea is that you pick up some skills (and you will hopefully get to use those) but besides those you get the ability

to find data and consume data and be a critical user of data, regardless of what that data is.

And I think that that kind of ability to gather, consume, and be critical of information, and let that information form your view,

is an inherent part of a liberal arts education and I think it’s an extremely useful skill regardless of your field. If you do analytical or creative work - almost any job that requires the flexing of intellectual

muscles - it’s critical knowledge to have so you can be an informed citizen.”

following up on an observationMe: I want to ask about one of the things I noticed while you described

your school-to-work transition. For PhD students, it seems like you’re all getting on the same train, but when you get there, only 5 people can get a job. What does everyone else do? They don’t seem to prepare you for that eventuality. Even if half or most of you are qualified for a particular job,

only one of you is going to get it.

Him: Are you asking specifically about Humanities PhD programs, or are you asking about university degrees in general?

Me: PhD students who aim to get a professorship somewhere - I see how that’s mostly humanities PhDs because science and engineering PhDs have a clearer path into the corporate world. The problem that I sense is that

there is a very wide basket of people being prepared for a life of academia, and not enough proper jobs for these people who, by all

means, do everything they’re supposed to. It happens in the design field as well; the number of design graduates far, far exceeds the number of positions available in the field; so I think it’s a recurring theme across

different disciplines.

the myopia of academia“Doing hard sciences gives you options both within academia, and also a lot of non-academic job postings that simply require you to have a science PhD.

There are more physicists working in finance than actually doing physics jobs in the US. But when it comes to the humanities and social sciences, you

can definitely use those skills in non-academic jobs - you know how to do research, you have a large knowledge in your subject, you know how to

communicate and write. But the issue isn’t that you don’t have salable skills, but that the top universities (NYU, Yale, etc) have taken too long

in starting to prepare people for non-academic plans.

So what they’ve started to do now, and it’s about time, is having workshops and courses and whatnot on what to do if you don’t want to, or if you're not able to, get an academic job. How do you sell those skills that you know you have, and how do you find a job that fits your profile? So they’ve started to

do that, but there’s not enough of it.

For too long, the idea has been, we teach you how to become an academic, and that’s what you should aim for, and we don’t really want

anything to do with it if you do something else.”

what do we do?Me: So you say these workshops are a possible

solution to this problem. Do you think that’s good enough? Considering the statistics of how many people are in the program, and how many people end up with jobs in academia, are those kinds of

offerings legitimately enough for the student body to be satisfied with the time commitment that

they’ve made?

Him: I’m not really sure what other solutions there are. It’s not like there are that many

unemployed PhDs out there - it’s not like people don’t get jobs. In academia specifically, there is a problem with the jobs that are being posted right

now, but that’s kind of a different issue.

the problem with university jobs“The major thing that is problematic in our job market is that the

universities have started offering more adjunct positions and fewer tenured positions. That means that instead of creating a new professor

appointment, you hire one or two adjuncts who are temporary employees with very low salaries whose only jobs are to teach courses that a professor would normally teach. That means that you have a lot of people with PhDs

doing pretty shitty jobs, for not very much money, without any great career prospects. And that’s a problem, but that’s something the universities

have to fix. It’s not something in the PhD program.”

Me: It is kind of a problem with the PhD programs though, I think. If you’re training all these people and telling them to expect that the best thing

they can hope for themselves is a tenure-track position - where actually there’s only like three of those - and then the only real option you give people is basically a shitty internship (adjunct), right? How is that justifiable? That’s

not sustainable, that’s not cool. And if you don’t have the money to hire tenure-track professors, what should you do?

a misunderstanding clarifiedHim: Are you asking if I think they’re educating too many

PhDs? I don’t think so. I think what you learn there is extremely valuable, and I also think you need a critical mass of people going through the programs in order to get the best

people in the best positions. If you just educate the exact amount you needed you wouldn’t necessarily get the best

people through. There’s a lot of people that don’t get R1 jobs who still end up teaching, they just end up teaching at slightly

smaller universities.

Me: I’m not at all saying that NYU should hire fewer PhDs. I’m wondering if there’s something systematic they could do to

make the job search feel less daunting, for when you start your job search and you don’t find anything that feels worthy

of the time and the research that you put into your dissertation and your education.

possible solutionsMe: Maybe they could develop some programming and coursework that really takes to heart the idea that a professorship is not the only good outcome for a humanities PhD. It’s really untrue that your only options

are to either get a kick-ass professorship, or get some shitty adjunct position, or just go home. There are so many cool jobs out there and so many cool jobs and companies that require really smart people to be

there. Why not institutionalize that possibility?

Him: Oh yeah, I definitely think it’s good that they’ve started doing workshops and things. And there’s been a wide debate in the last 2 or 3

years in History where they say non-academic jobs shouldn’t be considered Plan B or Plan C, it should be seen as reality that the schools have to

grapple with because it’s the future for a lot of their students. But they still need to do more. It seems obvious from where I’m standing that they need more institutionalized measures to prepare people. Most of all, they need

to prepare us on how to sell ourselves, and where to look for opportunities.

more ideasMe: Yeah. I think they should not only teach how PhDs should sell themselves, but

they should also build in certain opportunities... maybe it sounds corny, but you could build partnerships with corporations where your PhDs are working to actively solve problems and consult on things that just require really smart people. It just seems so condescending - oh, if you can’t make it as a professor, I

guess we should give you this workshop so you don’t feel like a total loser. I mean, it’s like, come on. That attitude needs to change.

Him: Yeah, for sure. That’s totally right - it’s one thing that people are trying to change. There’s still a predominant culture that sees academia as the first

priority; but not everyone wants to be a professor. I think it’s particularly hard for those in the humanities - history, art history, comparative literature. It’s never

been a place where many conversations about non-academic jobs took place, because they’re seen (both from within and by others) as fairly narrow academic

fields. So if you compare it to social sciences like poli sci or sociology, where there’s always been more interaction with the “real world” - there’s always been

poli sci people getting government, policy or think tank jobs. Therefore it’s always been part of their education, something that’s been talked about there; ‘Of course

some of us are going to do this, because it’s actually what we want.’

questioning foundations“It’s also more of a challenge for those in the humanities to sell

themselves, because people’s perception of them is fairly limited. You don’t have any very very marketable skills; for instance, if

you were a sociologist, at least everybody knows you’re good at quantitative analysis and statistics. Whereas in history, you don’t

have that kind of certificate skill. What you’re good at is qualitative analysis, which might be a hard sell for companies

and non-academics. I guess the issue then becomes - if what people hire you for is being a really smart guy who can write and communicate and do research, do they really need you to

have a PhD? Isn’t a master’s degree enough? The difference there might be harder to spot.”

what are the options?Me: So what would it look like if the PhD-level humanities outlook looked more like the Political Science and the Sociology outlook?

What kinds of jobs would humanities people be well-suited to, and be more groomed for? How would universities make it so that their

students looked more attractive for those kinds of positions rather than less attractive (“PhDs are out of touch, they’re too esoteric,

they have their head in the clouds, etc”).

Him: That’s a good question, and difficult to answer. PhDs are so different from person to person. I see two types of jobs. One is the

very obvious alternative: either a museum job (e.g. a museum curator at the Met); archivist at university libraries or the Library of Congress, or historical archives. The second is the less-obvious,

where you would need to do more salesmanship. Editorial jobs, publishing jobs, journalism (especially long-form journalism), communication, government positions and policy positions.

- END OF INTERVIEW -

think & feelmy inferences about what my subject thinks and feels

about the subjects we discussed

“I’m not really sure what other solutions there are.”

My subject seems so invested in the system as it currently is (despite understanding its many flaws) that it’s difficult for him

to imagine it being any other way.

Despite his knowledge of its current state of brokenness, and his saying that he knows there needs to be change, he probably

would feel resistance to any proposals to change the system.

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“PhD students need to learn how to sell themselves.”

This thought assumes that the programs should stay the same, but the students should also learn how to spin their skills and

experience as useful in a non-academic context.

It doesn’t consider the possibility that PhD programs should change to incorporate any kind of non-academic professional projects or

partnerships.

This belief also tacitly complies with the underlying attitude that academia is the best and most important career goalpost, and other

pursuits would require the student to spin his or her expertise because it was originally intended for academia. From this, I can

infer that he still feels like getting a professorship is the best possible outcome for him or any PhD student, despite his

acknowledgement of other possibilities.

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“Are you asking me if I think they’re educating too many PhDs?”

He jumped to this conclusion, despite my never having said or thought this. What I said was: “There are too many PhDs who are trained to expect

to get a professorship - and not enough professorships. And it’s unfair.” The part I was criticizing was the “trained to expect a professorship” part,

not the “too many PhDs” part.

This misunderstanding indicates that, despite saying otherwise, he still thinks that all PhDs should ideally expect/attain a professorship.

His response also shows that he feels strongly that PhD-level education is important for its own sake, and also that it’s good for the field to train

more PhDs than it can hire in its top positions.

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“The problem of professorship shortages and undesirable adjunct professorships isn’t related to how

PhD programs should be run.”His thinking is somewhat paradoxical; he knows the academic job situation is bad, but he also seems resistant to the idea that PhD programs need to change in a substantial way (though he

seems to approve of the smaller adjustments that are happening). He doesn’t acknowledge a big picture connection

between PhD programs and University job offerings.

He probably would feel like if the system changes, it could undermine his experiences and the work he has been doing.

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Problem statementStakeholder

NEEDS A WAY TO

(describe person using empathetic language) (needs are VERBS)

DO

SAYTHINK

FEEL

BECAUSE

InsightNeed

STAKEHOLDER

Insights

Design Thinking Action Lab 2013

PhD students are told that their best possible outcome is a tenure-track professorship, but there are many more PhDs than professorships.

The best job for a PhD is always a tenured professorship.

If the system changes, it could undermine my experiences and the work I have been doing.

The problem with the academic job market is that the universities hire fewer professors and more adjuncts. This has nothing to do with how the PhD programs should be run.

Prioritizes getting a tenure-track professorship above all other jobs, at the expense of nurturing other possibilities.

Bright, ambitious, highly educated,

stubborn historian.

Bright, ambitious, highly educated,

stubborn historian.reframe his outlook

on job prospects

not all PhDs land desirable jobs in

academia.