Summary of Karen Kelsky's The Professor Is In

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Karen Kelsky's The Professor Is In in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration.

Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success. They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Dec 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781669341093

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights on Karen Kelsky's The Professor Is In

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The American university is in crisis, with state funding being slashed to the point where public universities can no longer afford to provide students with basic educational needs. As a result, universities have been forced to hike their tuition prices beyond the reach of many -> The American university is in crisis, with state funding being slashed to the point where public universities can no longer afford to provide students with basic educational needs.

#2

The result of all this spending on student debt is that more and more students are graduating with debt, which in turn causes the student debt to grow even larger.

#3

In order to compensate for the funding cuts, universities have reduced educational programs and faculty positions.

#4

The university also struggles with adjunct professors, who do not receive the same level of institutional support as tenured professors.

#5

The cost of adjunctification for undergraduate students may not be apparent, but it is very real for those who earn PhDs. The job market for new PhDs is saturated with tenure-track jobs that do not exist, leaving thousands of students with no choice but to work as adjunct professors.

#6

The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph. D. into a Job is a book that will help you understand the unspoken norms and expectations of the job market, so that you can better navigate it as a graduate student and as a job seeker.

#7

The author, a cultural anthropologist, spent her career straddling the social sciences and humanities. She was fascinated by the unspoken cultural norms, biases, and expectations of the tenure track job market, so she studied them.

#8

After years of being an academic, she left her job to start a company that helps other academics start their own businesses.

#9

The author, a business professor, wrote a column criticizing academic advisors for not preparing their graduate students for the workforce. The column received a lot of backlash, but also a lot of praise from the students who received it.

#10

Many of the grads that contacted the author were upset with their advisors for not helping them secure jobs. They believed their advisors didn’t care about their success, and were only concerned with their own careers.

#11

The Work of the Mind stance of intellectual purity often criticizes neoliberal logic, which is a logic of pure monetization. Neoliberal values have taken over budgetary decisions by both the Left and the Right in modern-day America, and are behind the wholesale assault on universities.

#12

Many graduate students are left heartbroken and angry when they finish their Ph. D. s, not knowing how to find a job in an academic field where the job market is bleak for those without a doctorate.

#13

The author used to be an academic,