Post Academic

If you’ll allow us this self-indulgence, we wanted to mark our 100th post by taking a stroll down memory lane and re-posting some of our greatest hits and most useful posts.  Thanks for visiting the site, whether it’s a one-off curiosity look-in or whether you’ve become a regular reader.   We didn’t think we’d get to 100 posts so quickly–just a little over a month since we launched this thing–but we’ve been wanting to keep the content fresh and frequent, because we know there are more and more of you checking the site out.

Let us know how we are doing by emailing us or by replying in the comments section.  We’ll continue cranking out content, from news coverage of the many changes academia is undergoing to some of the more idiosyncratic personal experiences we’ve encountered as post/academics.  We’re also thinking of ways to tweak and improve the site, so contact us with your suggestions.

For now, we hope you enjoy our greatest hits.  Thanks!

1. This series of posts on annoying graduate student personalities gave us our first big spike in readership.  Caroline started things off by identifying classic types like “The Downer” and “The One-Upper,” then Arnold jumped on the bandwagon with “The Networking Name Dropper” and “The Passive Aggressor.”

2. Indeed, grad school life has been a topic of interest, whether you’re an academic, post-academic, or aspiring academic.  Caroline tackled the inescapable phenomenon of gossip and wonders if grad school isn’t that different from a game of musical chairs.

3. We’ve also written up our fair share of first-person accounts of grad school and the academic job market.  Arnold writes *a lot* about how hard it is to make a clean break, even with the many absurdities of the job search process.

4. One of our main goals was to be as practical as possible in the kinds of advice we give, whether you’re (still) on the academic job market or transitioning to something else.  We’ve offered advice on transferring your skills, like how to write a resume, get started freelancing, and even how to dress.  Plus, we point you to great job search resources, like LinkedIn and  Media Bistro.

5. We imagine that pretty much everyone who has been through here is interested in jobs–we are too!  That’s why we’ve spent so much blog space on tracking the dismal numbers for the academic job market (particularly in English).  We’ve also checked into what you should or could or would be making, both in academia and out of it.

Thanks again for reading and keeping us going!