What do you do when you get stuck? Kel has found that her coaching clients tend to devolve into a spiral of self-loathing. But that doesn’t work; it’s just not very motivating! So Kel asks: why does the academy tell us we must automatically be good at every single thing we try in the academic career, and how can we get past that when we find ourselves stuck? Drawing from their newfound love of lap swimming this past summer, Karen and Kel talk about taking an inventory of your strengths and...

Karen insisted that we watch The Chair, and insisted we devote a podcast episode to it. So here it is. At this point in time there are no more “hot” takes to be had, so in this episode we offer our tepid takes.  Even so, there is a lot to say. Karen and Kel talk the many painful accuracies of the show: the terror of senior faculty in the face of threats to their power; the overt and covert racism directed at Yaz, the sole Black faculty member; the puritanical dress code and terrible hair;...

Karen and Kel are back from their summer hiatus, and they talk re-entry. Re-entry, that is, to a shitshow academic year in a pandemic that, in the US, has been mismanaged to a degree that almost defies belief.  Academics are coming back to campuses that are for the most part totally unprepared and unwilling to deal with actual student and staff vulnerabilities to COVID-19, and confronting a level of lethal indifference from many administration and students both that has shocked even the most...

An episode recorded pre-pandemic but even more relevant now.  Karen and Kel talk resisting overwork, and recovering your joy.  The key here is detachment from your work: neither misery nor joy; just a set of tasks. Put another way:  it’s what you do, not who you are. Drawing from the work of Brene Brown, we dig into the culture of scarcity and the nature of resiliency. In our world of scarcity we wake up in “not enough” (sleep, work, time with kids, writing, etc etc.) and the competitive...

We are delighted to bring back Allante Whitmore, PhD candidate in Civil Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, impresario behind the podcast and website Blk+In Grad School, and founder of the 4-years-running virtual Grad School Success Summit, coming up June 14-16. Allante tells us all about the Summit, and how it covers all the things she wished she had known as a first-gen, Black graduate student when she was starting out–especially about how to prepare for grad school, managing finances, and...

Summer is imminent… but, are you even ready? How to even think about it after the trauma of the past year or more? Karen and Kel talk about lightening your load, taking things off your list, and keeping an eye on your BIG goal, which might be “getting healthy” or “leaving the academy,” or “finding gainful employment.”  The key is to keep reducing the demands on yourself until you’ve targeted the least you can do, and the most you can rest, while still moving incrementally toward that larger...

  Grant-writing is a craft and it can be learned. The challenge is getting your head in the right space. Just like job applications, it’s not about your hopes, dreams, wishes, and preoccupations. It’s about marketing yourself in an intensely competitive environment. In this episode Karen and Kel walk you through Karen’s Foolproof Grant Template, showing you how to grab the reviewer’s attention with a vivid topic, substantiating that with references to current literature, showing a gap in...

We are delighted to host Fobazi Ettarh, who first created the term “Vocational Awe” and has written extensively on its threats to the health and well being of librarians in particular and those employed in “calling” fields in general. Vocational awe refers to “the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in beliefs that libraries as institutions are inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique.” In today’s conversation...

We are delighted to host Sarah Jaffe, the author of the new book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Our Devotion to Our Work Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone (2021). Sarah’s book talks about academics (“Proletarian Professionals”) as one among many groups of laborers in fields that include art, sports, non-profits, teaching, domestic work and more, that try to make laborers substitute “love” for adequate compensation. Sarah brilliantly and energetically breaks down just how, if the...

If you’ve been wondering how to bring some semblance of productivity back to your life, this episode is for you. Karen and Kel introduce Kel’s Unstuck: The Art of Productivity, a 12-module program that combines daily emails, coaching videos, awareness exercises like time-maps, and writing techniques, as well as a community support page, to help you discover what is blocking you from getting your writing (and submitting) done, and learn how to overcome it. And at the end, we give you a way to...

Self-promotion is a dirty word for academics but it shouldn’t be. People won’t invite you to be part of their scholarly community if they don’t know who they are. And if you don’t curate your digital profile then Google will do it for you–and you don’t want that. Self-promotion encompasses all of these things. Karen and Kel talk tactics for sharing your work with scholars, networking, using social media effectively, highlighting press contacts, and why you need your own website. They also...

Karen and Kel talk to Professor Erin Cech (Sociology, U of Michigan), the author of the forthcoming book, The Problem with Passion (U California Press, 2021), about why our national obsession with “following your passion” actually intensifies inequality. Erin explains how passion leads to “choice-washing,” in which unequal outcomes are justified  by claiming they were freely chosen, even while those without privilege and resources struggle to get access to “passion”-driven work.  She shows...

Burnout is the story of the 20-21 academic year. Honestly, who isn’t burned out?  If burnout is a lack of desire to do what you normally want to do, then how should we best think about it, and deal with it? Kel discusses an article by Brad Stulberg about the “passion paradox” and how burnout happens when you get wrapped up in obsessive passion, which is fixation on external validation, rather than harmonious passion, which, in his formula, is motivation that comes from autonomy, mastery, and...

This episode, recorded prior to the pandemic, continues our deep dive into coping with the inevitable disappointments of the academic life, whether it’s the job, or the grant, or the publication… or the whole career that just didn’t pan out. The second of a two-part series, it introduces tools 7-12 for managing disappointment in ways that academia never teaches us. The tools: 7) changing expectations from outcome to process; 8) Take a break 9) Get outside your head and do something for others...

This episode, recorded prior to the pandemic, delves into coping with the inevitable disappointments of the academic life, whether it’s the job, or the grant, or the publication… or the whole career that just didn’t pan out. The first of a two-part series, it introduces six tools for managing disappointment in ways that academia never teaches us. The tools:  1) Face the facts, feel the feelings; 2) You are not a failure and you are not your job; 3) Learn from this experience (ie, process not...

Today we are joined by Dr. Chris Catarine, author of the new book Leaving  Academia: A Practical Guide (2020).  Karen loves this book so much, it’s the only book she’s ever reviewed on the blog. Chris shares his own journey out of the academic dream (from age 11) of being a Latin professor and on to becoming a communications strategist at a major corporation … and all the steps along the way.  He serves us major insights on the grief of leaving, the limitations of Quit Lit, how to access your...

  One of the peculiarities of academia is that you have to be able to explain your project before you’ve actually done it.   And all projects have to start somewhere–at some level you are conjuring a new project out of the force of your imagination. So… how to do that? In this episode Kel and Karen talk about Ideation, Conceptualization, and Production and how important it is to keep the parts of the academic process separate. Ideation is the blue-sky thinking and things like mind maps and...

Kel and Dr. Jane Jones from UpIn Consulting talk confidence and competence, especially among marginalized communities in academia. Are you struggling with Imposter Syndrome, or are the people in power continually making you feel like an imposter? Black women in particular are told in countless ways you don’t belong.  Dr. Jones shares the things she’s found that work in fighting the confidence-sappers, remembering your true competence, and accessing your own power.

Responding to a reader question, Karen and Kel talk about how to manage sensory overload in academic settings. We discuss how to extract yourself politely from overwhelming interactions-whether personal or professional (or in that weird academic way – both at the same time), and how to get familiar with your inner cues that you’re fast approaching overwhelm. Academia trains this kind of self-knowledge out of us, but you CAN get it back. [Become a subscribing member for just $3.99 a month...

Gatekeeping is endemic in the academy, and in some ways necessary as part of the evaluation process, but it doesn’t have to be as cruel, racist, and inflexible as it has been. Karen and Kel start with the job search process, both the casual cruelties of how searches are run, as well as the exclusionary criteria used for evaluating candidates. Then we turn to “Reviewer 2.” If cruel and abusive reviews are so common in academia that they have a universally understood name…. we have a...

Karen and Kel talk about the things that make a problematic advisor: 1) poor boundaries; 2) excessive molding; 3) forgetting humanity, and 4) not managing your overwhelm. The discussion can help advisors do better and help advisees recognize abuse. [Please become a subscribing member to keep the podcast going in 2021! Just $3.99 a month! It’ll be a mitzvah!]

Campus visits are hard! Forewarned is forearmed, though, and Karen and Kel continue in the “job market advice” vein and talk about managing the campus visit, mostly focused on zoom challenges, but with insights for in-person visits as well. We cover the basic schedule, the challenges of meeting Deans, department heads and faculty, coping with Zoom settings and overwhelm, and end on the many bewilderments of the job talk. We disagree on several matters, including on how to best balance “they...

Recorded before the coup, this episode delves into practical advice about interviewing. Mostly focusing on academic jobs, but with insights for interviews more generally, Karen and Kel remind you: the job search is not about you. It’s about the hiring party, the problem they have, and the warm body they need to solve their problem. This is so whether the job is a Harvard endowed chair or a Starbucks barista. We talk the special challenges of Zoom interviews as well. (This episode also...

Karen and Kel talk white water rafting as metaphor for your job search. In rafting you can’t fight the river – it’s bigger than you! And you have to find the spaces between the obstacles – like the rocks, branches, eddies, and forks in the river that are too shallow…  How is this like the academy?  Well,  some rivers are just not navigable. And you might have a terrific kayak (a great PhD based on a brilliant dissertation) but if the river isn’t navigable… you’re not getting down it. And...

We turn to the practical. You have spent years occupying a very narrow space, getting more and more defined by your discipline. In this episode we show you the path out of the academic specific mentality of your skills. Trust us. They are transferable. We talk about what your skills are and how to translate them for people outside the academy.