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Sincerely ours
The author of "Dewey Defeats Truman" selects five great collections of letters.
By Thomas Mallon
[12/13/99]

Bedside salivating
Some cookbooks make such great reading (and such lousy guides to fixing dinner) that you never need to take them into the kitchen.
By Ann Hodgman
[12/10/99]

Reviews
"Swaggart" by Ann Rowe Seaman
A thorough biography of the disgraced televangelist drops a bombshell about his Louisiana childhood.
By Virginia Vitzthum
[12/10/99]

Ivory Tower
Play "Misty" for me
When a student turned her affections on me, I learned the values of professional boundaries.
By David Alford
[12/10/99]

Reviews
"20th-Century Dreams" by Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert
The writer-and-artist team's new bout of cultural nausea is like a tabloid that might be sold at the Whitney Museum.
By Charles Taylor
[12/09/99]

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Welcome to the new world of graduate career development.

The course, designed by JoyLynn Reed, a perky Ph.D. who also works as a consultant, offers a potent cocktail of remedial business education, guest lectures, interview assignments and pitch practices. The class is part of the innovative Graduate Professional Development Program at the University of Texas, which has begun to garner attention from educational media and administrators across the country because it's the first program intended to help young scholars sell their skills outside of the university. Other courses include grant writing, professional communication and advanced teaching methods.

Though we come from diverse departments, we're all bored with our disciplinary monocultures. We're also aware that Austin, our high-tech city, booms around us while we scrimp, save and give away our specialized training. A generation ago, graduate students who shared discontents would have formed solidarity committees and conspired in pseudo-revolutionary plots. In 1999, the response is different: We're striking out individually to grab our piece of American capitalist pie.

Nowadays many graduate students take for granted that planning life beyond graduation means empowering your entrepreneurial self. Some, like me, are writing dissertations; most of us will be on the job market within the year. But the question is, which job market? Sure, the academic job market sucks, but other sectors value Ph.D. skills, too. Unfortunately, "professional development" in the traditional sense -- lab time, library time, papers, conferences, attempts to publish -- presumes you want nothing but a job in academia. It also perpetuates the notion that a job in government or business is "alternative," an accidental substitute for the professorship you desired most of all.

Our first speaker is Chad, a strategic consultant with Boston Consulting Group who takes the stage and begins talking about cookies. To a roomful of B-school undergrads, he's just another trim, confident young guy in khakis and polo shirt, but to a roomful of graduate students peering beyond the walls of academia, Chad is Marco Polo, full of tales about exotic lands and fabulous riches. His talk is particularly grabbing because he has a Ph.D. in math and left academics when he realized "I didn't want to spend the rest of my life working on my small set of abstruse math problems." Nevertheless, these analytical skills, honed by years of problems sets and conference papers, were immediately applicable at BCG where, among other tasks, he helped Nabisco executives set the price of Chips Ahoy cookies. For a moment the ivory tower shadow of incredulity and snobbery overwhelms me. This guy thinks about cookies all day! He rattles on about how his job offers "challenge and variety." But I remain unconvinced; we believe in teaching, research and Ideas.

Then he mentions that a Ph.D.'s first-year salary at BCG can top $100,000.

Next page | Show me the money!