other lives possible in alumni data

Sun Dec 07 2025 19:00:00 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)

It’s 2025 and too many of those enrolled in humanities PhD programs[^1] still think they’re going to land a tenure-track faculty position in higher education. Yes, Faculty[^2] members have been slowly facing the crisis of the academic job market, but even the most supportive ones are strapped for the resources, field knowledge, and the time needed to effectively help PhDs navigate this landscape. Graduate curricula rarely includes comprehensive career training or coaching. This task falls almost entirely on faculty advisors, many of which barely have time to keep up with their own work. How will they have time to educate their students about non-faculty careers? What happens if the tenured advisor isn’t even interested in engaging with the core issues of this challenging landscape? Who is going to support the PhD worker then?

Part of the academic job market problem is that we struggle to rethink the meaning of a successful PhD graduate in our times. We[^3], especially in the humanities, don’t know enough yet about non-academic networking to know or show what kinds of jobs, lifestyles, and interventions the humanities can do beyond the university. This is a challenge that haunts me, personally, as I’m soon-to-be in the job market for non-faculty academic jobs. It is also one that feels fundamental to answer for all of us who worry about the future of humanities scholarship and pedagogy.

One of my internship tasks this semester was updating the alumni data for two programs sponsored by the Scholars’ Lab: the Digital Humanities and Praxis fellowship programs, both yearlong DH-training opportunities for PhDs at UVA. Though there were preceding initiatives, the current structure of the Digital Humanities Fellowship is in place since 2007, and the Praxis Program since 2011. By now, there’s 121 combined alumni, many of which have graduated and taken on different positions. Some of those make great departing points for re-envisioning what success looks like for PhDs.

For example, humanities PhDs, did you know you have been gaining project management competencies all this time? I’d never heard about this field before I joined DH, but it turns out all that invisible work you put into completing your program gives you transferable skills that are highly valuable in project managers. Critical thinking, independent research, writing, pedagogical training, communication, and problem-solving are some of the core abilities we develop over time as we comply with the graduate and hidden curricula.

There's also people who work as digital librarians/specialists within academic libraries. They engage, on different levels, with the training and education of known and emerging technologies, particularly those on the web. Think curriculum development, workshops, mentorship, library guides, project consulting, archival research, research assets creation and management. Are these abilities not akin to the training we acquire throughout the PhD?

Curators, consultants, artists, freelancers, programmers, developers, faculty, teachers, life coaches, housemakers, writers, editors, program directors. Those are some of the other careers and pathways of Scholars’ Lab alumni. Faculty jobs are only one genre of options. Why do we romanticize those positions and disproportionately teach PhDs to prioritize them? There’s so many things a humanities PhD can be. Why do we insist on feeding the neoliberal academy with our own?

[^1]: I refer to them as PhD workers, not students.

[^2]: Faculty vs faculty conversation with a dear friend.

[^3]: I include myself, as a 6th-year PhD candidate in Spanish, Scholars’ Lab alumna and intern, managing editor. An insular Puerto Rican female that has now spent more than 10 years in higher education as a first-gen student and worker.