Why You Should Pursue Passion Projects in Grad School

In a previous "Carpe Careers" piece, “From the Basement to the Dome,” James M. Van Wyck, professional development program specialist at Princeton University Graduate School, wrote, “Find ways to work on passion projects. Maximize the value of these extracurriculars by intentionally working with graduate students (and with all kinds of partners) outside your area of specialty.”

This is an excellent idea, no matter what career track you may be considering. And in this article, I’ll explain why.

My doctoral program in religion at Syracuse University was a great place to pursue passion projects, given its interdisciplinary curriculum and the strong culture of student involvement and leadership on the campus. I had a lot of interests, took a wide range of classes and always wondered what would happen if all the fascinating faculty members from across the university found themselves in the same room. So, working with my department, I set out to do just that: to actually get them in the same room.

Working with other students from my program, I led the organization of an interdisciplinary symposium on the meaning of “theory,” a concern that touches every academic discipline in some way. This experience helped me discover and develop skills I now use every day as a graduate career coach at the University of Utah.

To make the event happen, I had to tackle a range of challenges at once. The first was narrowing the topic down and communicating it in a way that an interdisciplinary group of students and faculty members could understand. The second was securing the funding, which I had to justify using in this specific way. The third challenge was logistical: working with different faculty members and campus agencies to schedule participants, secure space, order and pay for catering, and get the word out. I also learned a valuable lesson about limits on individual time and skill and the need for teamwork.

In my current job, I draw on those experiences in communication and organization to create and promote graduate student events and gain faculty buy-in for an expanded range of graduate student career paths. The symposium also turned out to be a great experience in dreaming up and carrying out a large project involving different stakeholders and navigating the relationships and regulations that make universities run. (Chris M. Golde, assistant director of career communities for Ph.D.s and postdocs at Stanford University, discusses those here.) As an added bonus, I actually got to organize and experience some of the open-ended interdisciplinary exchanges that I found so intriguing when, as part of my research, I learned about the 1960s and ’70s prehistory of mindfulness and contemplative studies.

For someone who never quite identified their niche as a future faculty member, it was important to experience putting my skill set to work in a different role. I could not have landed my current job without such experiences on my résumé. More important, I would never have known I wanted a job like this in the first place.

So, why should you pursue your own passion project while in grad school?

1. You get to experience yourself accomplishing things in a role other than instructor and researcher. (I owe this insight to Teresa Mangum of the University of Iowa’s Obermann Institute for Advanced Studies.) That is vital for anyone considering nonfaculty careers, as your résumé will begin to accumulate important evidence that you are effective outside the classroom and the library.
2. As Van Wyck writes, you get to meet and work with students, scholars and administrators outside your discipline, honing your (already strong) skills in articulating and solving problems in a range of domains.
3. You get to (re)discover other passions outside your research or in relation to it. As Robert Pearson, director of professional development at the University of Texas Dallas Graduate School, recently wrote here, you may find that you can still do the things you cherish most outside of academic research and teaching.
4. You become better at translating the complex goals and subject knowledge of your discipline into terms nonspecialists can understand -- a highly valued skill in any career.
5. You get to build very useful connections for academic and nonacademic career paths, as Pearson noted in a recent "Carpe Careers" piece.
6. Faculty roles increasingly require more than teaching and research, Van Wyck points out. Leadership, service, administrative and fundraising/grant-writing experience are especially valuable additions to the profiles of new or aspiring faculty members, who often face high expectations for service as part of hiring, tenure and promotion.
7. Extracurricular passion projects may, in fact, make your research better in unexpected ways. Brian Alberts, American history Ph.D. and program director at the Chicago Brewseum, tells me his forays into popular history commentary (including in The Atlantic and The Washington Post) gave him new energy and new writing practices that actually made his dissertation better and helped him complete it faster. Branching out can bring you new perspectives, deeper interest, better time management practices and a way to recover the mental and emotional energy you need to complete your research. Brian adds that grad students should seek projects that motivate them -- not just those for which they are technically qualified.

Making Your Own Passion Project Real

If you pursue your own passion project, I offer the following recommendations.

Figure out what you’re passionate about. What would you like to see done or built on your campus? Whether it’s a symposium like mine, a graduate student conference, a social event or a three-week occupation of an administration building, what you really want accomplished probably has some connection to why you’re there in the first place.

Make the case to people with the power to help you make it happen. That might include fellow grad students, student leaders, faculty members, campuswide grad groups, community groups, your graduate school and whatever campus-level office is responsible for grad students’ professional development. (If you can’t find one, default to career services and pitch it as a student professional development opportunity.)

Do it!

Keep a log of every challenge you had to meet, how you met it and what the results were. In my current role in career services, we call this the Problem-Action-Result formula, and it’s equally useful for giving concrete evidence of your skills in résumés, CVs, cover letters and job interviews. Review this log with a career services professional, an academic mentor and maybe a good therapist to identify what skills you have gained, what you’ve learned and what you’ve accomplished.

Stay in touch with the people you met in the process. Learn more about their jobs by conducting informational interviews. (See best practices from "Carpe Careers" here and here.) You never know what new ways you may find to use your talents and live out your values in different career fields.

One final note: your passion project might be off campus. That’s OK, and it can still help your career. Throughout graduate school, my other passion project was radio. I hosted music programs at student-run and regional public radio stations. It never directly fed back into my academic work, except that it acted as break from that work. It helped me have a life outside grad school and to refill the reservoir of creativity and energy I needed to finish my degree.

It was self-care: time-consuming, sleep-depriving, profoundly caffeinated self-care. Being an academic made me a better DJ, and being a DJ showed me a fluid, improvisational side of myself that seems to be the source of my best professional work.