Stacy Hartman earned her PhD in German Studies from Stanford University in 2015. While at Stanford, she ran speaker series related to alternative careers for humanities PhDs, the public humanities, and humanities education. She also wore a number of hats that let her try out different types of connected careers within the university, such as academic adviser, academic skills coach, teaching consultant, and instructional designer. She holds an MA in German from the University of Manchester and a BA in Literature and Feminist Studies from the University of California-Santa Cruz. She is thrilled to be serving now as the Project Coordinator for Connected Academics, and she welcomes all questions and inquiries about the program at shartman@mla.org.
In addition to the Connected Academics sessions and events, there will be a number of other sessions dedicated to careers both on and off the tenure track at the 2016 MLA convention in Austin. Descriptions of these sessions appear below; please follow the links to the Program for the most up-to-date information on each session’s participants, time and date, and location.
Each academic year until 2018, the MLA is running a proseminar on careers for twenty graduate students and recent PhD recipients in the New York City area. Proseminar participants explore the full range of careers open to humanities PhDs, from tenure-track positions to employment in business, government, and nonprofit organizations.
We are delighted to introduce our inaugural cohort of Connected Academics proseminar fellows.
Connected Academics project coordinator Stacy Hartman reflects on the difficult process of selecting this year’s cohort of 20 proseminar fellows from a pool of 245 applicants.
“Help! Everyone I’ve talked says my PhD isn’t enough—I need work experience. I came straight into grad school from my undergraduate program, and I’ve never worked full-time. How do I get work experience? What kind should I get? And how am I going to fit it in and still get my research done?”
Q: I finally screwed up the courage to talk to my adviser about my decision to leave academia. She was really supportive, but she also said she had no idea how to help me. So now I feel kind of stuck without any kind of mentorship in my new career path. What should I do?
“There’s a lot of advice out there for people making the transition into alt ac (or what we at the MLA call “connected”) careers,” says Stacy Hartman. “Most of this advice assumes that those considering an alt-ac career have abandoned their first career goal of becoming a faculty member. This assumption is very often true, but not always.”
By Stacy Hartman In 2013, in the third year of my German studies PhD program at Stanford, I started telling people I didn’t want…