Last month a small national group of graduate career counselors met on the University of California at San Diego’s campus in La Jolla to discuss one of the academic world’s hottest and most vexing topics: how to help Ph.D.’s and postdoctoral scholars get jobs.
The three-day conference, which was organized by the Graduate Career Consortium, was the group’s 26th annual meeting, and its largest ever: Around 100 advisors and counselors from 80 institutions attended. One-third of this year’s attendees were new registrants, an indication that campus administrators are responding to growing calls from around the country to reform graduate education.
When the GCC formed, back in 1987, only a handful of counselors showed up to these annual gatherings. As recently as a decade ago, relatively few colleges offered career-counseling services to graduate students beyond managing their dossiers. Victoria Blodgett, the GCC’s president, attributed the uptick in attendance to this year’s conference to a confluence of factors: the recent expansion of career services for Ph.D.’s, the creation of postdoctoral-affairs offices on more campuses, the growing demand for better counseling about alternative and nonacademic careers, and the need for more transparent data on job placement for advanced degree-holders.