Episode 29 – How to turn your PH.D into a Job with Karen Kelsky

August 29, 2015 Podcast

Welcome to the 29th episode of the Graduate Job Podcast.

This episode I speak with author, blogger, and former tenured professor Karen Kelsky, who shares with us her secrets of how you can turn your PH.D into a job. Now you might be thinking ‘I don’t have a PH.D, this is no use to me’. But you would be very wrong indeed as Karen shares a wealth of insight that PH.D or not, will blow you socks off. Amongst other topics we cover why being yourself could be holding you back, why you should think again about stating how passionate you are for a subject, and why the job market is just like dating. Whether your academic experience goes up to a PH.D, or if it ended when you were 16 this is an episode you won’t want to miss!

You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Additionally, you can subscribe via Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher radio

MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • How to make the most of your PH.D
  • How to create an academic CV which will stand out
  • Why yourself is the last person you should be
  • How to ace an academic interview
  • Why the job market is like a prom date
  • Why your passion for a subject might need to be tempered
  • How to move from academia to the wider job market
  • Why as a PH.D student you probably have more skills than you realise

SELECTED LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Transcript – Episode 29 – How to turn your PH.D into a Job with Karen Kelsky

Announcer: Welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast, your home for weekly information and inspiration to help you get the graduate job of your dreams.

James: Welcome back everyone to the Graduate Job Podcast, with your host James Curran. The Graduate Job Podcast is your weekly home for all things related to helping you on your journey to finding that amazing job. Each week I bring together the best minds in the industry, speaking to leading authors, entrepreneurs, coaches and bloggers who bring decades of experience into a byte size weekly 30 minute show. Put simply, this is the show I wish I had a decade ago when I graduated.

In episode 29 of the Graduate Job Podcast I speak with author, blogger, and former tenured professor Karen Kelsky, who shares with us her secrets of how you can turn your PH.D into a job. Now you might be thinking ‘I don’t have a PH.D, this is no use to me’. But you would be very wrong indeed as Karen shares a wealth of insight that PH.D or not will blow you socks off. Amongst other topics we cover why being yourself could be holding you back, why you should think again about stating how passionate you are for a subject, and why the job market is just like dating. Whether your academic experience goes up to a PH.D, or if it ended when you were 16 this is an episode you won’t want to miss! As always, all links we discuss and a full transcript are available in the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/PHD but without further ado, let’s dive head first into episode 29.

James:     I am excited by our guest today.  We’ve gone global in our search for the best talent to speak to.  She’s a former tenured professor turned author who now runs The Professor Is In, the webs leading blog and website dedicated to helping Ph.D.’s navigate the academic job market.

Karen Kelsky, welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast.

Karen:   Thank you for having me, James.  I’m really thrilled to be here.

James:  So, I’ve given the listeners a vignette of your work history.  Would you like to tell us more about how you left the world of academia and came to write The Professors Is In blog and your new book of the same name which came out last week?

Karen:   Sure.  I’d be happy to.  When I decided to leave the academy and my tenured position as a professor of anthropology and the department head at a major research institution in the Midwest, I was trying to figure out what could I do that would have value in the world, that would have as much meaning as working as a professor and at the same time bringing in enough money that my family could live on.  And when I thought about — and I describe this in my new book — but basically, after thinking about it for quite a long time I realized that what I was most passionate about was graduate student professionalization and over all my years in the academy I had seen countless job applicants come through seeking tenure track positions in my department and absolutely making fools of themselves, bombing the interviews and in fact, I myself, back when I got my first job had crashed and burned terribly, humiliated myself in my first year searching for a tenure track job.  And all of this was because tenured professors who are the advisors don’t provide professionalization advising.  They only focus on the dissertation.  They don’t focus on job search skills.

So I realized I had a passion for that.  I realized I had an enormous knowledge base for that and so I started the business and I started blogging in 2011 and hung out a shingle to provide consulting services and had my first client in the first week, had a whole roster within about a month and pretty soon had so much business that it’s been my full-time job ever since.

James:  Wow.

Karen:   It’s been so popular that eventually it became clear after four and a half years of blogging and speaking around campuses around the US and elsewhere, that there was a need for the book so that people would have all the information in a handy reference guide on their desk and not have to navigate a blog.  And so that’s when I found an agent and we found a publisher and everybody was very excited about the project from day one and so I’m very pleased of how quickly it came out and now it’s out.

James:  Excellent and we’re going to base the interview around some of the content from the book.  So, starting at the beginning with academia, how is the wider academic job market looking in 2015?

Karen:   It’s a disaster.  It’s — the large context, of course, is the corporatized university and the UK is really leading the way in that, although the US is right there with it.  But basically there is an idea that the university has to be run like a corporation and you have to cut costs while at the same time vastly increasing the managerial class at the upper end who are the most expensive people in the business.  So you cut costs by cutting your actual staff, in this case professors.  So right now we have a case where its —  at least in the United States —  it’s 75 percent adjuncts and non-tenure track contingent faculty and only 25 percent tenure line or tenured faculty and those proportions are just worsening with each passing year and they have not improved since the economy has “recovered”  after the great recession.   Because of that there are precipitously fewer tenure track jobs for people to apply for and individual jobs often get, you know, 300, 500, even a thousand applications.  In a field like English you’re at the upper end like, in the, you know, 900 to a thousand applications.  So it’s pretty rough out there.

James:   Wow, and without wanting to depress people, I mean, how challenging then is it to stand out? It’s a silly question really but you know, if you’re one in a thousand applying for an English tenured job you’re really going to have to be struggling there.

Karen:   Yes, it’s very difficult and what happens is candidates feel desperate and their desperation leads them to approach it from a place of emotion.  And so they write job applications that are highly, what I call hyper emotionalized.  They think that they stand out by pitching their case on a basis of feelings and those feelings would be, I’m passionate about English literature.  I’m passionate about Jane Austin, you know.  I love to teach undergraduates.  I’m eager to work at your institution.  It would be a privilege and an honour to teach alongside you.  And that’s exactly the opposite of what you should do.  So that’s the primary mistake I see people making.  And what I work with them to do is switch over to focus on their substantive actionable evidence of their records and leave all the emotionalism and the rhetoric out.

James: Excellent, and what are the characteristics you would say then of a competitive candidate?  So, taking aside the hyper emotional side, what aspects should they be bringing out in their applications?

Karen:   It’s a pretty clear cut set of qualities that a competitive applicant will have.  They will have peer reviewed publications, ideally in high ranking journals; they’ll have major grants, typically national or international level grants; they will have attended, spoken at and led panels at major national and international conferences; they will have recommenders who are important in the field and well known and who write good and up to date letters; and finally, they will have job application documents as well as interviewing skills that showcase their actual accomplishments, as I was just saying earlier, rather than a kind of desperate neediness to be employed because in a way, I often say this, the academic job market is a little bit like dating.  If you come across as too desperate and needy, you’re not going to make them love you and so in a way you have to look a little bit like hard to get.  You have to look like, wow.  You have to make them feel like, wow, we really wish we could get that candidate but she’s going to be really hard to land because obviously she’s in great demand.  And if you can deliver that feel with a solid record in your application you’re going to do better.

James:  I love that analogy and whether it’s dating or job applications in the academic or non academic world, you can smell desperation a mile off.

Karen:   Yes, you can.

James: And it’s not attractive.

Karen:   In the book I use the metaphor of the prom.  I say it’s like the prom but I’m not sure that the prom translates to a UK audience.  Do you guys have proms?

James:  They’re slowly starting to creep in as the Americanization of the education system.  But we have them, yeah.  They’re appearing, though.

I love the chapter in the book called, Why yourself is the Last Person You Should Be.  Why is this the case for Ph.D. students?

Karen:   Because graduate school is a very long process.  If you’ve done a Ph.D., typically it’s a minimum of five years and in many fields it may be 10 or even longer.  A field like History is often a decade long to complete the Ph.D. and what happens is you are socialized to behave in a certain way which is very, very deferential and in some cases almost obsequious.  Because of your position as a graduate student, a lowly graduate student, vis-a-vis the faculty and it isn’t that the faculty explicitly demand this of you.  It’s just — or that the faculty are, you know, egomaniacs typically who insist on this kind of behaviour.  It’s just the way graduate school is structured.  And so I write in the book, the better a grad student you are the worst job candidate you make because you have internalized the subject position of a supplicant for your professor’s time and attention and you have to overcome that subject position entirely when you go out on the job market.  You have to comport yourself like a peer, like a professional, like a fellow faculty member yourself and nobody has given you any training whatsoever in how to do that, or even told you that you need to do that.   And that’s where the gap comes in and that’s what I try to remedy in all of my writing on the blog and in the book.

James:  Just to go back to the previous point, as you mentioned, where you’re coming across as desperate if you’ve got that mentality that you’re lower than everyone else, is going to come across in the interviews and CVs as we’ll talk about.

So moving on to the different aspects of the application and starting with the CV, can you talk us through the nuts and bolts of a good academic CV?

Karen:   Sure.  A good academic CV will be quite different from a resume for the business world because resumes, typically, will have a lot of qualities that make them stand out like formatting, artistic flourishes, different kinds of fonts.  You know, basically you’re trying to make an aesthetic point as well as a substantive one.  But the academic CV is a profoundly conservative document.  It is unadorned.  It does not have any special aesthetic or artistic elements, outside of perhaps a field like architecture or art history, there may be exceptions in those two fields, but otherwise you’re using a classic font like Times New Roman and it is black and white and it is basically a list.  And the headings are the critical elements here.  Which headings do you have and what order are they in?  You always begin an academic CV with your education and you start with your Ph.D. first and then you go to your professional appointment.  Then you go to your publications, which again, are the gold standard of your academic record and then from there you go down to your conferences and your awards and grants and fellowships and your teaching experience and so on and so forth.

James:  Would it tend to have an executive summary at the top, or is it just straight into the academic experience?

Karen:   Absolutely not.  There is no executive summary in an academic CV.

James:  So in that case, how can you make yourself stand out then from the crowd in terms of a good CV?

Karen:   Again, a CV stands out from the crowd just by what’s on it and the professors are accustomed to reading deeply for content and they put in the work to do that.  So you can trust that if you have a finished Ph.D., you have a number of important journal articles, you have presented at major conferences, you have attained in significant grant support, if you have those things I just mentioned articulated on the first two pages of your CV or more — I mean there’s no page limit on a CV typically –- but the professors will find it and they will acknowledge that you are a competitive applicant.  You don’t need any kind of special appeal to make that case.

James:  And would you recommend two pages, or in your experience is it the more the better?

Karen:   The more the better in academia unless, of course, the application has said, has specified only submit a two page CV but that rarely happens for a job.  Sometimes for grants they will specify a shortened CV but in the United States, at least, there is no page limit on a CV and frankly, the longer the better.  But don’t fill it up with a bunch of fluff that is not competitive.  People don’t like to see it. We call it padding and we don’t like to see it.  So don’t artificially inflate the length of your CV to try to make a stronger case.  People really do read it line by line with that professorial scepticism to really see, are you making good choices with your time of productivity in terms of publishing and conferences and grant support and teaching.

James:  And the covering letter that will go with it then, does that scope for some of the flourishes?  Or is it again, a very dry factual document?

Karen:   In The Professor Is In philosophy the cover letter as well, is fairly dry and I have found that that works and that that’s effective.  That’s what I work on, is helping people to understand that putting the facts of their record first and foremost, is the most effective appeal they can make for a tenure track job.  I have an idea that I talk about in the book.  It’s called the Academic Scepticism Principle.  And basically what it means is, if you’ve gone to graduate school and you’ve been in your seminars and you’ve gone to conferences and you know absolutely categorically that you could not make a point through any kind of rhetorical flourish or emotional appeal, by which I mean if you want to say, but Jane Austin was a feminist writer and I believe that just because I really, really, really believe it.  I’m telling you.  It’s true and you should just agree with me, that kind of rhetoric will not work, at all because academics don’t accept that.  What they require is evidence.  Well then show us. Give us some citations from Austin’s work and give us the page number and we will investigate it ourselves and see if we agree with you.  So the same principle of scepticism applies in job applications.  You need to provide them evidence so they can weigh it, evaluate it and say yeah, I agree.  This person is quite competitive and they need to be moved into the short list pile.

James:  Interesting.  So quite different to some of the CVs that you might see for a non-academic work but we’ll come to that and some of the differences later on.

Karen:   Sure.

James:  And moving then on to a teaching statement.  What is a teaching statement and what should it  include?

Karen:   A teaching statement is the document that you submit sometimes, not always but typically, with your job application, along with your CV and your cover letter that explains your teaching philosophy and your teaching experience.   And it should ideally be one page long and it should sketch out what you’ve taught by name, the names of the courses, and how you approach teaching them and where you see your teaching fitting in to the discipline at large. How does your teaching advance the core theories and methodologies, and the principles of your discipline?

James:  And would the same then be true for the research statements; one page statement saying all the research that you’ve conducted?

Karen:   No.  A research statement typically will would be longer.  In the humanities it’s typically about two pages.  In the hard sciences it typically goes to about four pages and that’s because they often have a lot of tables and figures to illustrate their work and that document has to articulate a trajectory of scholarly work.  So it describes the work that you have done for the dissertation.  It describes the publications as well as the contribution that that work makes to the discipline as a whole.  Then it moves on to your next, your planned next project.  And that next project is really important because it shows that you are forward thinking, that you’re someone who is looking at the long game, past tenure and I’ll just pause and say that when you’re applying for a tenure track job, the question in the back of everybody’s mind who’s reviewing your application is, is this person tenurable.  So it isn’t just, do they look good right now.

The other question is, do they look like they’re going to look good in five years.  And so you have to show with evidence that you’re a good bet, that you’re a safe risk for the committee to, and the department to hire you because you’re going to keep moving forward with your research in the long term.  That’s what a good research statement will do.

James:   Okay.  That’s clear.  So, imagine then that we’ve got an amazing CV, we’ve got a brilliant cover letter, the teaching and research statements are all spot on, and we move on to the job interview stage.  What can a candidate expect from an academic job interview?

Karen:   They can expect — well, there are two kinds of academic interviews, typically.  The first one is the conference interview or the Skype interview.  This is the preliminary stage and it’s typically about 30 minutes in length.  And then if you pass through that one you get invited to the campus visit and that is a two day extravaganza in which you are kept on your toes from about seven in the morning to at least seven at night, if not later.  And so your approach will be a little bit different depending on which of those we’re talking about but basically you will be asked to describe your research, to describe your contribution to the field, describe your next project, describe your teaching, propose a couple of classes and how you’ll teach them and talk about how you see your work fitting into the work that the department is already doing.  And the trick with those is that academics have a little bit of a tendency to pontificate and lecture.  This is encouraged in graduate programs and you have to learn to discipline yourself to speak very briefly.  And that’s the primary thing when I work with candidates on job interview preparation, we work on helping to control the length so that they can speak and deliver a three minute version of their dissertation research as opposed to a 30 minute version.

James:   And when you get to talk to the Dean, how should you approach the dean interview?  When you get to that stage is it more of a, does your face fit, or there’s actually going to be an in-depth interview?

Karen:  You know, that’s a big wildcard in any campus visit because deans a very variable and the role that they play in searches.  Oftentimes they play no role at all.  Other times they’re quite important and they also may see their job in very different ways.  So, in the book I talk about three different kinds of deans:  the informational dean; the budgetary dean; and the intellectual dean.  And the informational dean views their role as simply explaining to you the retirement benefits and the sabbatical policies and things like that.  The budgetary dean is going to be asking you very pointed questions about how you’re going to save the institution money and they might say things like, we’re planning on merging your department and another department in the next five years.  How do you see yourself working in such a merged situation?  And you have to not be too startled by that and be prepared to respond in kind.  And then the intellectual Dean might take a view of examining where you fit in the field and whether you’re a leader or not.  And they might say something like, what do you see as the most important book published in your field in the last five years, and why?  And then you have to give a big overarching answer about what you view as most important in your discipline writ large.  Those are the  challenging interviews, by the way.  All of those are challenging interviews.

James: Yep, I can understand that.  And, are there any stages after the dean interview or if you pass that, is it good to go?

Karen:   Well, the dean is not the ultimate interview in a campus visit for a tenure track job.  There are all sorts of elements and they all sort of intersect.  So you have to — to tell you the truth, the most important element of a campus visit is actually what’s called your job talk and that is where you stand up in front of the entire assembled department and present your research in a 50 minute talk, followed by about 30 minutes of Q&A.  That is the cornerstone of any campus visit at a research institution and you can’t get the job unless you absolutely ace that job talk.  The dean’s interview, by contrast, is quite less important than that.

James:   It sounds quite daunting, facing the full staff and having a Q&A.

Karen:   It is.  It is daunting and I do, in The Professor Is In I do read-edit and also do mock Skype job talks and I can tell you that it is a difficult genre to do well because graduate students, Ph.D.’s have spent, like I said before, five to ten years on this work.  They know it inside and out.  They’re obsessed with it and they get to the point where they can’t really see the forest for the trees and they become fixated on minutia and this is very natural.  I don’t blame them for this.  I was the same way.  This is just what graduate school does to you.  So the trick is to learn to step outside yourself, remember that this audience is hearing this work for the first time and learn how to present it in a way that can reach a first time audience and be appealing and yet at the same time still be intellectually sophisticated.  So, it does, it takes some, it takes some work and some practice.  Campus visits are things that usually takes people practice to learn how to do well.

James:   Definitely.  I mean, being able to consolidate down a whole Ph.D. into a snappy three minute summary is certainly a good skill to have.

Karen:   It is.

James:  Which leads us naturally on to, you term one section in your book on leaving academia, leaving the cult.  In your experience, do Ph.D.’s find it difficult to break out into the non academic world?

Karen:  It depends on the field because there are fields that have a porous membrane between the academy and industry.  So engineering would be one of those. Architecture is another.  There are several.  But aside from those fields — chemistry is another — but aside from those fields, many people who get Ph.D.’s do not go into the program expecting to do anything other than become a professor.  And in past eras, in the high growth era of the sixties and the seventies when graduate education was expanding and a lot of public money was being poured into it, you could expect that.  And that’s when many of our graduate programs were created and they were created around that expectation, that people going through the Ph.D. were being trained to be professors.  But you can’t make that assumption any more.  There aren’t enough jobs.  In some fields only 12 or 15 percent of the Ph.D.’s will actually get a tenure line job to be a professor.  So, you have a problem.  You have Ph.D.’s who expected to do one thing, who invested a decade of their life toward that goal and then who find out that that goal is not available to them but who have not trained to do anything else.  So it’s a conundrum.  It’s a dilemma.  Luckily it’s a dilemma that more and more programs are talking about in a really explicit way but that’s why I have a section on it in the book, to help people with Ph.D.’s understand that they have an enormous number of marketable skills.  They just have to learn how to identify them and market those on a different job market than they expected.

James:   And how can they begin then to match their skills to the wider non academic job market?

Karen:   Well, the first task is actually to identify your skills and that’s a challenge for people with Ph.D.’s because they have spent so many years among people with a similar skill set that your skills become very much taken for granted.  The example that I like to use is I’m a Japan anthropologist by training.  I lived in Japan for many years to do my research and even prior to entering graduate school I lived in Japan and I’m fluent in Japanese.  As a Japan anthropologist every one of my colleagues was fluent in Japanese.  So we didn’t go to conferences and brag, well you know, I am fluent in Japanese.  That would be preposterous.  You never mentioned it.  I mean, it would be de passé to mention that but if I had to make the transition out of the academy, suddenly my fluency in Japanese would become a very, very marketable skill but I have to learn how to present it as such and that’s just one example.  There are countless others.  There’s public speaking.  There’s writing, editing, statistics, survey methods, interviewing, all of these skills and I’m speaking from an anthropologist perspective.  Those are skills we typically have but no matter what your field, you have other skills.  So the first thing is, identify them, tally them, brainstorm.  Don’t sensor yourself.  Really free your mind.  Liberate your mind to realize how multitalented you really are.

If I could add one more point to add on to that, one of the things about graduate training is it constantly tells you what you’re doing wrong and where you’re lacking.  It is a critique based experience and the outcome of that is enormous insecurity and you’re very accustomed to thinking of yourself as what you’re lacking.   Well, I haven’t really finished reading that book.  I haven’t really finished chapter four of my dissertation.  I haven’t finished that article yet that I was supposed to get out.  That’s the world that Ph.D.’s live in.  You have to overcome that negative self talk and that negative self image and reverse it.  I am capable of speaking Japanese.  I’m excellent at speaking Japanese.  I’m excellent at statistical analysis.  I’m an excellent writer and editor.  These are not things we are accustomed to saying to ourselves or to anyone else.  So that’s the big obstacle for anybody moving from a Ph.D. out into the non academic world.

James:  It’s a really good point and I think it’s very true for all types of job application.  People often focus on their negative instead of what they can do.

Unfortunately, Karen, time is running away with us.  So one final question before we move to our staple of weekly questions.

Karen:  Sure.

James:  Would you recommend people applying for jobs while still doing their Ph.D., or would you recommend that they finish and then start applying?

Karen: That’s a great question. Thanks for asking that. I absolutely recommend that people start applying while they are still doing their PhD. You are competitive when you are an ABD status which is what you are called when you have ABD means all but dissertation and it means you passed all of your requirements of the program and you have now been released to do your research and write your dissertation and you won’t come back to the fold until you actually defend that dissertation. During that ABD period you are typically quite competitive as long as you have those publications, those conferences, those grants and references that I mentioned before and so do absolutely put your toe in the water of the job market, it will show you what you now need to learn. You may not succeed in getting a job that first year, that’s fine you are still in the grad programme and you have another year another several years to keep trying, but getting that early experience is very clarifying experience and usually you its gonna help you make better choices over the coming one or two years to be marketable when the stakes get much higher after you’ve actually finished.

James:  That’s great advice. You can’t get too much practice. Excellent, so Karen moving on to a standard weekly questions. What’s one book that you would recommend to our listeners that they should read?

Karen: Well. I think your listeners should read Ta-Nehisi Coates “Between the world and me” because the whole black lives matters movement is absolutely the most important thing that’s happening right now in the US and I think in a way globally and I would urge everybody to read that because it is a blockbuster, it’s mind blowing, it’s a transformative book for our time.

James: Well, that’s not one I come across but I will check that out and links to everything we’ve talked about on the show today can be found on the show notes at the GraduateJobPodcast.com so I’ll link to that book. Shifting gears a little bit, Karen what one website would you recommend?

Karen: I really like the website Music for Deck Chairs which is written by an Australian academic Kate Bowles and is about the academy and is a very astute critical blog about the productivity surveillance regimes of the new liberal university and for anybody particularly in the UK where this has become a real crisis for universities under the REF system so on but anywhere. Australia, the US, these forces are re-shaping the university as we know it and her take on the way that faculty and student time is being surveilled and manipulated is really important for it.

James: Sounds an interesting website, I will check that out. And Karen was also far too modest to mention her excellent blog The Professor Is In. I will make sure that one is in the show notes as well. Finally Karen, what one tip can listeners implement today job search?

Karen: If they are seeking an academic job, take your CV, go to my column in The Chronical of Higher Education which is called ‘Graduate School is a Means to a Job’ or you can do the same in reading part two of my new book and line by line and word by word go through your CV and see if your record matches up with the things I articulate are essential be a competitive tenure track candidates and every time you find something that is missing make a plan right now to change it and give yourself a time line for the next 12 months to either get a referee journal article out, apply to present a paper to major conference, apply for a major grant and so on. If you wanna be competitive for a job make sure that you have actually correctly understood what the criteria are for a tenure track hiring. That’s my advice.

James: That’s a brilliant advice and I will definitely echo that. Karen it’s been a pleasure to have you on the show. What is the best way for people to get in touch with you and the work that you do?

Karen: Sure. Email is this : gettenure@gmail.com

James: Excellent, I will link to that and your Twitter and website in the show notes.

Karen: Wonderful

James: Thank you very much for appearing in the Graduate Job Podcast.

Karen: Thank you James. I really enjoyed it.

James: Thanks again to Karen Kelsky, for what was an early start over on the west coast of the states. I really enjoyed that one and whether you have a PH.D or not I hope you found it useful. For me 3 things stood out. The first is on how you see yourself. Karen talked about how being yourself is the last person you be, and I think this sentiment is a really important one.  No matter what the job is, you need to go in there not only believing that you can do it, but that you can do it well. No matter what job you are going for, be it in academia, or a graduate role, you need to walk in with a mindset that the person interviewing you is a peer. Because on the other side of the fence the interviewer will be thinking can I see this person doing my job, could I put them in front of clients, or students, or whoever. If you walk in deferentially believing that they are above you then this isn’t going to come across. I’m not talking about arrogance but confidence. You’ve earned the right to be at the interview, so act like it.

The second point for me is on the difficult task of recognising your own skills. I loved Karen’s analogy of being able to speak Japanese. Often it can be really difficult to look at our skills objectively and we take for granted things which come really naturally. That is why it is really important to get honest feedback from those who know you well, friends, family, co-workers, fellow students whoever. But spend the time and think about the skills you have, and as she said, don’t be focussing on what you don’t have.

Finally I loved the metaphor of looking at getting a job like the world of dating, and be it dating or jobs everyone always wants what they think they can’t have. Now I’m not suggesting you start negging the interviewer, but as I said in the first point, you need confidence that you deserve to be there, that you’d be great at the job, that you’re ready for the job, and that you’re in demand. Think of the nightclub and the last blokes on the dancefloor at 2 in the morning, nobody likes desperation. Make sure that’s not you.

There you go, episode 29, wrapped. For a full transcript of everything that we’ve discussed and all the links check out the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/PHD.

If you’ve enjoyed the show let me know on Twitter, my handle is @gradjobpodcast, and please do leave a review on ITunes or Stitcher radio, as I say every week it’s the best way other than sharing us with your friends to show appreciation for the podcast and it helps massively in the ranking on iTunes. Do you want to make sure that you get each episode delivered to you for free so that you don’t miss a thing? Course you do, so get over to Itunes or Stitcher radio and click subscribe. Join me next week when I speak to financial expert Kim Stephenson and we discuss the topic of money. It’s a goodie. I hope you enjoyed the episode today, but more importantly I hope you use it and apply it. See you next week.