Putting Your Professional Development to Work

Here’s a question for you: Why did you decide to go to grad school?

I’m going to make a big assumption. I’m going to assume that for most of you reading this essay, at least part of your reason for deciding to attend grad school was so that you could make the world a better place by helping people know more and better.

If you’re reading "Carpe Careers," your desire to make the world a better place probably also plays into the reasons why you’re thinking, at least a little, about a career outside academe where you and your ideas might have a greater impact. That was certainly one of my reasons for leaving the tenure-track career path. Publishing my ideas in a journal article that maybe six people would read seemed a supremely ineffective way to make change.

For those of us who embarked upon a graduate degree because we thought that knowing more, and sharing that knowledge with the people in our field and beyond, could make positive change, now is our time.

Things are, to put it mildly, a disaster. An overwhelming, terrifying, life-altering, stupefying disaster. COVID-19 and everything that has come along with it: loss of income, of childcare, of psychological and physical and financial safety, of homes, of loved ones. The threat of deportation for students studying online this fall, when it won’t be remotely safe to go back to face-to-face learning. The terrifying reality of being Black in North America -- which currently means facing much higher chances of contracting and dying from COVID-19 and spurring a hopeful but emotionally fraught antiracist movement while dealing with the everyday realities of systemic racism.

It’s a lot.

But it’s also, for graduate-trained people like us, an opportunity to do what we set out to do when we decided to go to grad school: to make the world a better place. And we have been educated in the professional skills that will let us do just that.

So, let’s talk about how we can put our skills and knowledge to good use in this critical moment. A huge caveat here: I mean this mostly for my fellow cis white settler people born in North America -- we’ve got serious work to do, and we’re more likely to have the resources, privilege, money and energy to do it. 

As a grad student, here’s what you’ve learned to do and how you can use it:  

• Persuasive writing. Since high school, you’ve been refining your skills in using evidence to make a convincing argument. This is true no matter what field of study you’re in. So how about using those skills to write to your elected representatives, to companies that are failing to make or keep commitments to stop oppressive practices, to your university administration? Pick an issue and start hammering out emails.
• Research. You know how to do it. You know how to share it. Lots of the people in your life or who follow you on social media don’t. Use your research skills for good -- find the good information and get it out there. You never know whose mind you’re going to change. (I’ve managed to convince a conservative aunt about prison abolition! It can be done.)
• Oral arguments. A.k.a. conference presentations and posters. You know how to use your voice to convince someone of something. If you’re like me, you hate picking up the phone, and the idea of calling an elected representative is terrifying. But you can do it. (If it helps, the more people you call, the more likely it is that you’ll go to voice mail and can just leave a message.)
• Protest. This one is for those of you who are unionized. As a unionized grad student, I went on strike twice, and I got very good at walking picket lines, making signs and loudly protesting in front of our provincial government buildings. Maybe you have, too. So brush off those sign-making skills and head over to your local Black Lives Matter/no evictions/defund the police protest.
• Do the work. I don’t know about you, but I’m a very different person that I was when I started grad school. Being there exposed me to people, ideas and perspectives that I just didn’t have access to -- or rather, hadn’t known or tried to access -- when I was an undergrad and in my first, pre-grad-school job. In grad school, I learned how to seek out information, to read it with a critical eye and, most important, to allow it to change my mind and how I acted.

That training and practice is hugely important now as I do the work of learning how to become a better antiracist, anti-ableist, anti-oppressive person and professional -- in my life, at my job and as the president of my professional association. Grad school has trained you to do that work, too -- so go do it!