Insights From a Peer Career Adviser

Despite the focus on return on investment in higher education, many graduate career offices are still small, some as small as a single person. Hiring graduate assistants as peer career advisers is one way to address the career support needs of the graduate student population. Peer career advisers are in a unique position to support graduate students because they are trained in career services but of course are still students themselves. The distinct perspective that comes from inhabiting both roles is especially valuable as the academic landscape changes.

Commiseration between students can produce different conversations than those held with an established professional. As a peer career adviser and current Ph.D. student, I am subject to the same job market trends, navigate similar competing obligations and run into comparable frustrations as the students I advise. Some of my most fruitful career advising appointments stem from sharing my own experiences. Because of that, below I share my personal experience supporting students as a peer adviser and the analogies that have most helped shift my peers’ thinking around career preparation.

Perspectives From a Career Peer Adviser

I’m currently a third-year Ph.D. student and have been a peer career adviser since I began my Ph.D. I’ve advised graduate students at all stages, including late-stage Ph.D. candidates. What surprised me most when I started was that Ph.D. students often did not have the level of career preparation I expected. The priority for courses and labs is to produce scholars, and career education often falls to career advisers outside the department. My discussions with students were sometimes their first formal exposure to career preparation.

As a new Ph.D. student with only a few years of prior work experience, I worried about my ability to offer valuable advice to advanced Ph.D. candidates or students with years of prior work experience and feared I’d be wasting their time. But despite my students’ intelligence and talent in their disciplines, I soon realized that my impostor syndrome was misplaced. The advising appointments that ultimately felt most transformative were the meetings I went into convinced that I wouldn’t be able to help. Many of the advanced Ph.D. candidates came straight from undergraduate degrees and had never completed a job search before, and many of the older students with decades of work experience were shifting careers and didn’t know how to approach a modern job search. My first few advising sessions gave me confidence that I knew more than enough to address most questions and concerns, thanks to my training and continued research about job market trends.

My advising appointments are open to students from every graduate program at the university, but most students seeking my advice are studying STEM fields. After a few sessions, I noticed a pattern of support needs for this student population. Many of the students I met with were narrowly focused on their research and dissertations. They relied on their research agenda to do the heavy lifting when communicating their skills to prospective employers. But especially when moving into industry positions, this approach had two major flaws:

1. They struggled to consider the bigger picture. While their research helped further their lab’s overarching priorities, some students had not considered how their work supported the mission of the university and the priorities of their department and field. Instead of considering how their experiences could support the missions of companies they applied to, they narrowly focused on their topic of interest. Therefore, their career documents did not adequately convey why they were a fit for the roles to which they applied.
2. They looked at their degree as a series of products rather than a process of skill development boosting their employability. They viewed the Ph.D. solely in terms of presentations, publications and dissertations. But the steps required to produce each product (e.g., research project management, writing and editing journal articles, presenting weekly updates to the lab) were where they built the transferrable skills most relevant to nonacademic jobs. I challenged them to expand their thinking by asking for a walk-through of their typical day in the lab. Surprisingly, many students struggled to reduce the large-scale projects into a series of daily processes. They overlooked such things as their contributions to lab safety, presentation skills and collaboration with research partners in favor of their research elevator pitch. A day in the lab was routine, and so they discounted and devalued the skills they built through the everyday grind, assuming that companies outside academia had the same priorities as their labs.

These two problems were prevalent enough with my STEM students that I found myself reaching for the same advice. Many students struggled with career-focused terminology and expectations, even though they nominally understood the concepts. It was often difficult for them to truly comprehend the expectations of industry employers until I simplified the language and provided more relatable examples. I essentially developed a script, a series of analogies to explain the importance of these concepts. For most advising meetings with STEM students, the advice they sought was already on my script. I also developed scripts for other student populations for whom I recognized similar patterns of support needs, such as for discussions of Optional Practical Training and Curricular Practical Training with international students.

But despite developing a script of ready answers for the most common student questions and concerns, I learned never to make assumptions about student needs. Students didn’t always have the language to ask the questions they wanted to have answered. In fact, I found that students sometimes wanted answers to an entirely different question than the one they’d put in their initial request for a meeting. Ultimately, the most important line of any script is my opening one, which I ask at the beginning of each meeting: “How do you want to spend our time today?”

My Career Advising Analogies for Graduate Students

With all that said, I try to meet students where they are and have found that analogies work well to convey career-preparation ideas. The analogies that resonate most with my Ph.D. students are:

1. Your dissertation is a blade of grass in the field of your Ph.D. The Ph.D. experience involves becoming an expert in a niche subset of your field. However, the expert lens often gets in your way. By narrowing in on your expertise, you’ve zoomed in on a single blade of grass. But while you focus on the single blade, the rest of the field has been growing with transferrable skills necessary to do research. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if a single blade of grass is green and well watered if the rest of the field is neglected.
2. Approach career preparation like a research project. “Carpe Careers” writers have previously shared versions of this idea for both STEM and the humanities. Ph.D. students are trained to do research. Utilizing your training as a guide is an effective way to approach job searches. Research projects involve literature reviews, development of the methodology and analysis of results. Career preparation can be similarly broken down. First, you want to gather information: explore career options, build résumés with career counselors and hold informational interviews. Next, you design and execute the project: choosing what jobs to apply to, tailoring documents, submitting applications and going through the interview process. Finally, you analyze the results: How far you get in an application process helps determine whether you are being effective in various aspects of the job search, providing data you can use to inform targeted changes to your process.
3. The job search is not a checklist. Ph.D. students often want templates and step-by-step guides on how to get a job, especially students who follow research protocols for experiments. But there is no single step-by-step process that can guarantee your dream job. Our role as career counselors is to help you help yourself. Each student has unique experiences, considerations and needs that influence the roles they apply to. Each company or university receiving applications also has different hiring needs, tools and processes. We can provide research- and trend-informed suggestions and focused support for your individual constraints. But at the end of the day, you know yourself best and must make choices that work for you.

While my advising meetings aren’t fully scripted and analogies aren’t universally helpful, I’ve found that most students appreciate analogies that translate career preparation expectations into more comprehensible concepts. The search process can be exhausting, especially in the current job market. But simplified explanations of career preparation, and the use of relatable examples, can lighten the burden of learning for students who are already constantly learning in pursuit of their doctoral degree.