Competition For Jobs After Harvard Difficult, Many Graduate Students Say

While College seniors know that they will vacate their rooms the day after Commencement, graduate students have no such definitive end to their Harvard days.

Because of a competitive job market, graduate often end up lingering at Harvard for years after their degree requirements are complete.

Graduate students agree that the University makes it relatively easy for post-doctoral students to get teaching jobs here, but say it could provide better services and strategies to prepare them for the job market.

Opportunities to stay in short-term teaching jobs are variable. They are based on the department, demand, and amount of time the candidate has been writing.

Overall, graduate students say that the system has evolved so that they can prolong their dissertations and stay at Harvard until they have a job lined up elsewhere. But, they say, Harvard does not always make life for job-hunting graduate students easy.

The Scheme

Philosophy student Aaron J. James, who will be an assistant professor at the University of California at Irvine next year, says that job interviewers prefer applicants who finish their dissertations within a specific window.

"There will be informal pressure not to finish too early; people will think you're not ready," he says. "There's also informal pressure once you get up around eight years. It gets difficult if you've been on the job market that long unless you have work to show for it."

Graduate students who have been working for about five years, however, have the option of remaining at Harvard to write and teach.

"Usually people just wait to defend [their dissertations] until they have a job, since you're only cutting off work opportunities, the possibility of teaching here," James says.

Institutional affiliation, extra time to publish, and more lines on a teaching resume can make the extra year worthwhile, says Shyon S. Baumann, a sociology student who will graduate in June and does not yet have plans for next year.

Spending an extra year working on a dissertation also reassures job interviewers who fear that candidates will not finish their dissertations by the time the job starts.

"Because you're not really sure when your dissertation is done, there's a subtle distinction between extending the dissertation [based on the job market] and spending more time to improve it," Baumann says. "You may decide you need an extra year in order for it to be a good dissertation."

The system has adapted to the modern norm, with many students not offered tenure-track positions. Colleges and universities often offer temporary positions that usually last one to three years.

"It's a kind of academic proletariat," Steven H. Biel, director of studies in history and literature, says of these "adjunct professors."

"Increasingly, colleges and universities--and Harvard isn't among them--are cost-cutting but essentially exploiting cheap academic labor that they don't have to pay real salaries or benefits to," he says.

The difference at Harvard, he says, is that lectureships are not new, pay better and include benefits like health insurance. But different departments offer different jobs which vary greatly in benefits.

Harvard Help?

Teaching Fellow positions are intended to help fund graduate students while they write their dissertations.

Most graduate students study debt-free. In humanities concentrations, tuition is paid by fellowships for the first three years, and funded through teaching jobs after that. In some science sections, students are expected to teach from the beginning.

Though it varies by department, tuition is often waived for students who teach--they also receive pay. Individual departments can cut off stipends after a certain number of years, and after ten years all students must reapply to GSAS.

The availability of Harvard teaching jobs for post-doctoral students is not guaranteed, students warn.

Still, Baumann says, getting hired for non-tenure track jobs at Harvard is easier than the general search process.

"They want to make sure you're a good teacher," he says, "but they don't go through the same screening process as when they're hiring someone for a tenure track or assistant professor position."

Resident tutors have an additional advantage, says James, assistant senior tutor of Cabot House.

"If you've already been here and you're a valued tutor, they'd love to have you back again," James says of House staff. "In fact, they're happy and sad when you find a job. Happy for you and sad for them."

"It does take the pressure off to know that you have security, a nice place to live, a nice community, and the possibility of teaching. It's still really stressful, though," he adds.

And that is where students want help from Harvard--in stress management and strategizing when they approach the job market.

Harvard offers other benefits. The departments' dossier services handle its students job applications for life, providing confidential recommendations and sending materials to potential employers, says GSAS Director of Fellowships Cynthia E. Verba. And an eager alumni network helps students get established in non-academic jobs.

"They can't be very helpful in academic jobs," she says, noting the merit system's reliability. "In theory nobody can call a department and say, 'Have I got a student for you, and here's my $10,000 donation to the department."

In departments like economics, students can spend a year or more working outside of academia while publishing and attending conferences, and can reenter the job market later.

But that is not possible in many departments, where the older one gets, the harder it becomes to land a job.

Biel says that lectureships, and the time they provide to turn dissertations into books, exemplifies how the University generally helps graduate students.

Still, he says, students would benefit from better advising about strategies for positioning oneself in an incredibly competitive job market.

And Eric Kurlander, a History graduate student at the end of his dissertation, says a more formal system that provides students with a timeline of options and deadlines would be beneficial.

"I would say Harvard does a good job in spite of itself, simply because it is so wealthy, vast, and decentralized that there are always opportunities cropping up which would not appear elsewhere," he says.

The Bureau of Study Counsel offers a Dissertation Writers' Support Group. And Kimberly G. DelGizzo, associate director for Ph.D. advising at the Office of Career Services (OCS), says that the aid and resources are available through OCS and the GSAS Student Services, and that it is up to students to take advantages of the resources.

"It's important to engage in career development as a process as they think about life beyond Harvard," she says.

She says that includes assessment of their skills and interests, "reality testing" in internships and informational interviews, and strategies in proactive and reactive job searches both inside and outside of academe.

The Results

For a 1996 study, and since, Verba has been tracking students for three years after they receive their PhDs from Harvard.

There is hope for the students working in the short-term academic jobs. As Biel says, "more the norm than the exception."

The major finding in Verba's report is that academic employment increased by up to 20% if it was studied three years later, rather than at exit time.

She says both sides benefit by employing Harvard Ph.D.s in short-term Harvard jobs.

"It keeps some of our best Ph.D.s employed why they try to publish and look for jobs, and they're also often our best teachers," she says. "It's a wonderful way to keep great teachers who may know the program very well."