The present of Academia and the academics of the future.
Professor Julie Sanders explains ‘why doing a PhD in 2017?’
At the RoF conference last 16th March, we realised how valuable the skills we acquire during our PhD are in the most diverse career paths. We now have more options in mind, face a broader horizon, but are still unsure. So, we may now wonder, ‘what is there for me after the Viva?’ We met with Professor Julie Sanders, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, to ask her how we should look at the future and make what she calls “an informed choice”. Key words are: openness, interdisciplinarity, opportunity.
We as students need to understand that the world is changing, and with it the job market too. New global skills are required, we’re in the digital era, we need to be flexible and to adapt. In the future we will have not just one but many and multiple careers, and need to be prepared for that and try not to ‘limit’ ourselves. We need to understand that the PhD needs to be a full experience, it is not just feeling the pressure of needing to be at our desk all day long focusing on our own work, but “actually, it’s looking at posters, it’s going online, it’s going along to things. You need to make sure that for all that stress you don’t narrow down your options.”
And listen carefully: this does not only apply to students who wish to develop various skills and use the PhD “as a springboard for other kinds of careers”, but also to those aiming for a job in Academia. “Academics will need to have much more stretch and openness than in the past, certainly we’ll need to work in teams”, learn to adjust and ‘be open’ to the different institutions and discourses. So, do not assume that because you want to be in Academia you only have to engage with what looks like the pure academic stuff. The world is in transition, and “academics need to transition too.” Interestingly, the Research Councils are in fact beginning to encourage students to pursue work placements and cross-disciplinary activities, for instance. As Prof. Sanders says: “We need a little bit of that more diversity into the actual Doctoral experience.”
If we compare the UK system to that of the US, for instance, we see that timing here is very tight. Students should perhaps be given more time to ‘explore’ and should more easily find opportunities for cross-disciplinary encounter. The HaSS faculty itself is so “diverse”, ranging from Creative Practice to Business, from ‘traditional’ Humanities to STEM subjects such as Physical Geography. Students should be able to take real advantage of that and be ‘exposed’ to interdisciplinarity, by for example gaining digital literacy and understanding statistics, to be able to more easily navigate in today’s changing world. This means shifting mind-set, realising that we should not just concentrate on our specialism but fully engage in the transition. “And it’s not a crisis, it’s an opportunity.” And, mindful that “things change”, we need to seize it.
Sometimes PhDs tend to assume that they master their narrow discipline and know who they are, what they want. Here is what Prof. Sanders does not agree with: “you might go to a seminar given by somebody from another discipline, or you might do a work placement or you might do something around impact that completely blows your mind and you just didn’t know it was there. We need to keep enough light in there, in the Doctoral experience, to help it be an informed choice. You don’t know what you’ll be surprised by.”
And this is exactly why doing a PhD in 2017: it’s for the opportunities, whatever your plans are and whatever career path you’ll take. “Because of the massification of HE, the undergraduate degree is far more common and so some of the defining things become the next qualifications. These are also the spaces where we can start to build global competencies”, says Prof. Sanders. “The PhD is actually brilliant” because, if done well, following the right training, exploiting the right opportunities, it teaches us to work independently and collaboratively, to manage our own time, to manage projects. Thus, it prepares us for this time of ‘transition’.