CANCELLED: Creative Careers: Get Support for Your Open Future: Graduate Student Workshop with Jason Puskar


 History     Apr 24 2020 | 8:00 AM - 8:00 AM TBD

In an abundance of caution and to ensure social distancing during the COVID-19 outbreak, we're sorry to announce the cancellation of this event.
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Surveys of graduate students have revealed a troubling fact: graduate students want to get information about a wide range of careers directly from their advisors, but most advisors report that, though they are willing, they simply do not know how to help. This may change in the decades ahead, but until then, how should graduate students advocate for themselves? In this workshop for graduate students only, students can talk candidly and privately about issues that often don’t get aired: How to tell your advisor you want to explore non-academic jobs? What can you do to get experience outside the academy? How do you translate the abilities you already have into terms that non-academics understand and value? What other kinds of satisfying careers do humanities PhDs enter? And most of all, how do you do anything extra on top of finishing the dissertation? Brief pre-circulated readings will help anchor the discussion in current practices and a lively national conversation.
Bio:
Jason Puskar is an Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He works on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture, and has written widely on the literary, intellectual, and cultural histories of chance and risk. The Principle Investigator for a Next Generation Planning Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2016-17, he has continued that work with a broad-based faculty committee at UWM to create publicly engaged concentrations in PhDs spanning the humanities, social sciences, and professions. In 2019 he co-organized a one-day pre-seminar workshop on curriculum and career diversity at the Summer Seminar of the Association of Departments of English. Previously, as the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in English for four years, he revised the department’s job market preparation to address a wider range of possible careers. Employed by a state university system that has sometimes expresses a narrowly instrumental and vocational view of higher education, he has come to believe that PhD programs that train students for only one vocation—the professoriate—are the most narrowly instrumentalizing of all.