Smart Women Write
Marginalia

Leaving the Seminar Room: What the Writers Learned About Life After the PhD

Eight posts on the job question underneath a writing blog: too many PhDs, the first years out, the economics of unpaid service, mentors, networking, and the applications that come after.

Smart Women Write began in 2016 as a blog about writing, but under many of its posts sat a job question. What do you do with a doctorate when the tenure-track market cannot absorb you? The writers answered it differently. One built a business and left the blog to run it. One built a career around a digital archive, a postdoc and public history. One taught high school history and loved it. One went from graduate student to lecturer to a postdoc at Fisk University. Read side by side, their posts give you something better than a career guide: several honest accounts that disagree with each other in the right places.

Is the degree worth it?

Start with the provocation. In Too Many PhDs? Angela Sutton pushes back against the idea that universities should stop admitting doctoral students because the jobs are not there. Society gains, she argues, from people trained to examine a source and build an argument, wherever they end up working. Then she separates the public question from the private one. For an individual a PhD may be a poor financial bet, and if you treat it only as the road to a professorship you will have a miserable time. Treat the degree itself as the prize and it can pay off in ways you did not plan. For her that meant funded research in Ghana, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and England, then a job with a digital archive and consulting work on the side.

The first two years out

Bryna R. Campbell’s From PhD to Here is the most practical post in this group. Written nearly two years after her degree in art history, while she was still adjuncting, it lists what helped. She talked to people who had already crossed over. She found online communities on Twitter, such as the #withaphd hashtag and its chat. She tried a free online workshop to test whether she was burned out or simply finished with academic writing. She cut the strain of adjunct teaching by stating email response times in her syllabus. And she treated experiments as information. A free online workshop showed her she liked editing other people’s work more than her own project, the kind of thing you only learn by trying.

Her follow-up, Lost and Found: A Post-ac’s Book List, is reading for the in-between months, among them Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Artist’s Way, Stephen Covey, and a book about starting a business for a hundred dollars. Six months later she wrote a farewell post explaining that her business, which involved materials for family hiking, had begun to take off and was hard to balance with blogging. The striking part is about identity. While she was adjuncting, the PhD sat at the center of every conversation about her future. Running a company, she found it had drifted to the edge, one kind of work experience among several.

The farewell post also names a habit that makes the move harder than it needs to be. Doctoral training, Campbell writes, conditions people toward perfectionism through committees and peer review, and it took her a long time to get comfortable with experiments. Starting a business meant leaping, then leaping again, and building the bicycle as you go, because there is no way to plan for every contingency. For anyone who has spent six years polishing a single argument, that may be the hardest adjustment of all, and the one most worth practicing early, with small projects that are allowed to fail.

The economics of saying no

Sutton’s Looking Out For Yourself in the Academic Gig Economy should be required reading for adjuncts. She sorts academic labor into what you must do to keep a salaried job and what you should do for the health of the field: peer review, committee work, hosting visiting speakers, answering email from strangers who want help. The salaried do the second list on their own time. Someone paid per course, per hour or per word cannot, and her advice is to stop feeling guilty about that. Choose the unpaid tasks that build skills valued inside and outside academia, such as grant writing, management, presentations and digital work, and decline the rest until the profession has invested in you.

Mentors and generosity

Raquelle K. Bostow’s post on feminist mentorship describes finding a mentor by accident, in the office across the hall, during a year as a short-term lecturer when no formal mentoring was on offer. The colleague read her articles, coached her through campus visits and helped her absorb a rejection. Bostow’s practical advice: look for someone who recently went through the job market, invite them for coffee, and give the search months rather than weeks.

Sutton’s earlier networking guide makes a related point from the other side. Networking feels fake when it is purely transactional. It works when you come to people with real enthusiasm for their work and an offer of help, drawing on whatever makes you different; her own example is a working-class, bilingual upbringing that helped colleagues trying to support first-generation students. The post does not cover cold emails, but the same logic applies to the first message to a stranger: keep it short and say specifically why you are writing and what you can offer. If you freeze at the blank screen, an email builder that lays out greeting, purpose and sign-off can at least get a first draft in front of you.

When the next step is another application

Not every route out of a doctorate leads straight to a job. Some people retrain: a library science degree, a teaching credential, a master’s in a field closer to where the hiring is. Bostow’s own move to a Mellon postdoc at Fisk shows how quickly a scholar can be drawn toward special collections and digital exhibits once she starts working with the librarians who run them, and some people drawn to that kind of work may go on to earn the professional degree that matches it.

Those programs ask for a personal statement, and it is a different animal from the research statement written for faculty jobs. The committee wants to know why you are changing direction and why your old training makes you a stronger candidate rather than a refugee. A guide to the career-change personal statement for graduate school is good on naming the pivot once and then building the bridge from old skills to new requirements. If you are applying in your late thirties with a decade of adjuncting behind you, the advice also differs from what undergraduates hear, and a piece on writing a personal statement as an older applicant deals directly with explaining gaps and answering the question of why now.

What the archive says, taken together

Read in order, these posts move from anxiety toward something like calm. In 2017 the writers are arguing about whether the PhD was worth doing at all. By 2018 and 2019 they are describing businesses, postdocs, digital projects and teaching jobs, and the doctorate has become one credential among several rather than the whole of who they are. None of them claims to have found a formula. What they share is a refusal to treat leaving the tenure track as failure, and a habit of writing plainly about money, time and the kinds of work job ads leave out.

If you are where Campbell was in early 2017, with the degree behind you and no clear next step, her first piece of advice still holds. Find people who have already crossed over and talk to them.

The posts in this essay

Written for the Smart Women Write archive, October 14, 2026. Quotations belong to the authors of the original posts.