Why Is a History PhD a Good Fit in the Job Market?

I am a PhD candidate defending my dissertation next month. Facing the uncertain academic market, I have to rethink my value in the market. I have read many arguments on the value of humanity and liberal arts education. But I have no intention to join the meaningless disputes between humanity as the most valuable subject and it as the least useful discipline. For me, humanity teaches me to tell the nuance of human affairs, not just generalize them. So I will not say humanity training is most important. I just want to reflect on my own experiences and try to tell you why a history PhD like me is a great candidate in today's job market.

I have been thinking about this topic for a while. Now I have finished writing my doctoral dissertation, I finally have time to take a deeper look at it. Do I have to be a history professor? Will the skills I have learned in this process be valuable in other fields? Even after I complete my degree, I still can choose, whether I want to be a history professor, or something else. One option is not higher than another. It is just a life choice, and I, and other history PhDs, should be able to find success either way.

I have been reading Karen Kelsky's The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D into a Job. She lists 111 skills that a PhD should have learned that could translate outside the academy. Do I have all these 111 skills? Of course not! Every individual has unique experiences in their path to PhD. I do, too. I examined these 111 skills and found that I have 40 of them. Among those 40 skills, I am really good in some of them.

I came to my PhD program with a research proposal, in which I recognized a historical issue I wanted to solve in my research. In other words, I identified and defined the problem in my proposal. In my proposal, the problem was, why did many people in colonial New York remain their loyalty to the British crown? By identifying this problem, I looked at the American Revolution from multiple perspectives, not just from the Patriots, but also from the Loyalists. To conduct my research, I have to read the primary sources broadly. Some of the primary sources were unknown to me before I commenced this project. I had to dig into what had been written about related subjects and identified the sources the authors used. I also needed to visit different archives and databases trying to find the pieces that other scholars might miss. In order for me to find the funding to visit those archives, I needed to write grant proposals to persuade the top scholars sitting in the search committees that my project deserved to be funded, even though I had not completed it yet. I had to sell my project, my ideas, before it became a thing. I have received two major fellowships from Thomas Jefferson Foundation and the American Philosophical Society. I have also been awarded several travel grants to support my trips to conferences to present my research.  

After collecting primary sources, I needed to frame the information. The sources won't speak for themselves. I need to provide the organizational framework to interpret the sources. In order to provide the framework, I needed to find connections among diverse ideas and viewpoints. I had to compare the differences and distinguish the similarities. To actually complete this dissertation, I had to be extremely concentrated in my project, and have to be able to keep my focus for a long period of time.

As a PhD student, I not only stayed in my office working on my project. I also needed to share my work with other historians and build the network. I did it mostly through attending academic conferences and workshops. I submitted paper proposals to persuade the organizing committees to select my paper/panel. I have organized a panel and presented my paper at 2015 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), one of the largest history conferences in U.S. As a non-native speaker of English, I presented my papers in many conferences and workshops professionally. I thus gained many experiences of public speaking, in a foreign language. In those conferences and workshops, I exchanged my ideas with other scholars. I learn to critique my peers' work, and even the experts' work. In those conferences and workshops, when the experts from the audiences asked me questions or critique my works, I have learned to ponder their opinions quickly and respond to their critique. When I disagreed with them, I defended my work politely and professionally.

How many skills have you already recognized so far? Do you think those skills are valuable in non-academic jobs? A lot of time, people label others by what they do, and forget to consider how they do it.

Researching and presenting is only a part of a PhD student's life. I also had to teach and serve as professors’ assistant. When I served as a teaching assistant, I facilitated group discussions, and led students to think and analyze important historical events to understand what actually happened, and the meanings of those events. When students had problems, they came to me for help. I guided and tutored them to find success in their learning. When I taught my own course, I had to design the whole curriculum and decide what I wanted my students to do to meet the objective of this course. I had to develop the content by myself. When I taught world history after 1500, I had to ponder what the most meaningful events were for them to learn in this long period. Obviously, I could not cover all the things happened in these 520 years in one semester. I had to be selective, not according to my pleasure, but based on what the students would need to know. I also needed to grade students' papers, assessments, book reviews, and even their comments in the discussion board. Right, this was an online course, so I had to learn how to teach remotely and effectively on a platform I was not familiar with in the beginning.  

I have served as a graduate assistant for the Center for Intercultural Studies for 5 years. Most of time, my supervisor did not supervise my work very closely because he trusted me. I had to be very self-disciplinary to accomplish all the tasks. When it came to the two months before the center's annual meetings, I worked under extreme pressure when we planned and organized the annual meetings.

Throughout these years, I not only share my research in conferences, I have also blogged in two languages. I published Chinese articles for a popular history blog in Taiwan, and I have also published English articles on history blogs in U.S. While scholars usually write for our peers, blogging helped me learn to write for a general audience about complicated subjects.

Pursuing PhD degree is a long process. Mental health has been an serious issue for many graduate students. With all the pressure and responsibility falling on me, I have been able to remain optimistic and positive by paying attention to and working on my own mental health. 

Some people might imagine that a historian's daily life is to immerse themselves into our past. Actually, a historian also reacts to contemporary historiography, or in other word, current research. What actually happened in the past won't change, but historians of different generations react and interpret this past in divergent ways with diverse perspectives. I as a historian always look for new perspectives, new ideas, and even new primary sources that could help me offer new interpretations of our past. Or, to put it in a different way, historians look for innovative approaches to their old past.

My dissertation advisor and mentor, who I was really connected with, passed away suddenly last July. I was sad and shocked. Sorrow does not go away itself. I still feel sad, sometimes even tearful, whenever I walked on campus, on the roads we used to walk together all the time, in the rooms we used to exchange our ideas. However, I was able to overcome my emotion and finish my dissertation within a year of his passing. I have learned to work under emotion and pressure, and to adapt to changing situations.

Do you agree that those skills that I have developed throughout my PhD years are valuable in job market? Not only that I have completed a 270-plus pages long book to demonstrate that I can do research on many similar topics in the future, but, more importantly, I have developed these skills ready for use in my future jobs, academic or not.

(This article was first published on LinkedIn on May 29, 2020.)