blog posts

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  A Better Way to Prepare for Job Interviews

  Sep 23, 2025 1:15 pm

  One of the things that makes interviews stressful is their unpredictability, which is unfortunately also what makes them so hard to prepare for. In particular, it’s impossible to predict exactly what questions you will be asked. So, how do you get ready?

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  Navigating Professional Uncertainty

  Jun 9, 2025 10:45 am

  Throughout your career, you will likely face times of uncertainty. It may come rapidly, as with an unexpected loss of a job or sudden changes in research funding, or may mount gradually as you contemplate a new direction or adjust to changing responsibilities. Whether sudden or subtle, it can understandably cause anxiety, frustration, and even resentment. Here are some strategies for practicing resilience and navigating uncertainty, no matter what stage of your career you encounter it:

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  Ask the Grad College: On Changing Career Plans in Graduate School

  Jan 20, 2024 8:00 am

  I started my program thinking I wanted to go into academia, but I feel less and less interested in an academic job. I’m committed to finishing, but I don’t know what kinds of jobs I should look for. What do I do? 

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  A Fellowhsip for Exploring Career Pathways while in Graduate School

  Oct 27, 2023 2:00 pm

  Exploring your career options can be intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. Hear from recipients of the Graduate College's Career Exploration Fellowship about their time as fellows.

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  Managing Stress in a Job Search

  Oct 3, 2023 11:00 am

  You came to grad school seeking knowledge and skills that would prepare you for a meaningful career. Through hard work you’ve developed expertise in your field. While you can’t avoid the stress of a job search, you can make a plan to deal with it.

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  Development is a Dance: Tips for a Non-Linear Journey

  Jun 1, 2022 8:30 am

  "A baseball scout once told me, 'Development is a dance.' He was talking about how young baseball players don’t improve on a linear path. Some take steps forward and then back, or laterally, before figuring it out."

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  What Happens After You Submit a Job Application?

  Apr 14, 2021 2:30 pm

  You may not see it, but a whole world of people evaluate your job application, writes Derek Attig, who describes all that happens after you push Submit.

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  Podcast: Your Portfolio Will Never Be Perfect or Done

  Feb 25, 2021 4:45 pm

  Landscape designer Saloni Chawla (MLA '18) sits down to talk with us about how she landed her dream job and why she considers it a perfect match.

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  How to Keep Track of Your Stuff or Four Horror Stories in Two Parts

  Feb 10, 2021 10:30 am

  PART I: My file management horror stories and how they taught me to manage my data like a pro. 

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  How to Keep Track of Your Stuff or Four Horror Stories in Two Parts

  Feb 10, 2021 10:00 am

  PART II: My file management horror stories and how they taught me to manage my data like a pro. 

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  Grading is the Worst & Why Being a URAP Graduate Mentor Is Valuable

  Jul 6, 2020 3:45 pm

  The Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program connects undergraduates who are new to research with experienced graduate students who mentor them through the research process. 

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  On the Job Hunt: How to Keep Your Options Open

  Jun 30, 2020 7:15 pm

  In the coming months, facing uncertainty head-on and doing what you can to prepare for multiple possible job outcomes is the best thing you can do for your future self, advises Derek Attig.

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  How to Enhance Your Personal Brand Online this Summer

  Jun 2, 2020 2:15 pm

  Remember in the early 2000s when we used to create online pseudonym usernames like “plantlover101” or “sillys0pran0” for internet safety? Fast-forward to 2020, where personal branding is now one of the best tools to market yourself. Long gone are the days where you’ll be advised to hide social media accounts from employers - and why should you? They paint a picture of who you are as a scholar and as a person, too. But personal branding is a scary term. How do you embody a form of corporate personhood without hiding your authentic and multi-faceted self? The answer sounds too good to be true: You don’t have to!

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  Navigating the Surprising Stress of a Job Offer

  Feb 13, 2020 9:30 am

  Looking for a job can be pretty terrible, and it’s often a long slog. Amid that stretched-out stress, it’s easy to start thinking of a job offer as a kind of holy grail, a singular solution to all your problems. But what I see over and over again, among the hundreds of graduate students I advise each year, is that the job offer is often its own source of emotional turmoil. A sudden offer, or the sense that one might be incoming, can prompt as much panic as delight.

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  What exactly is professional development, anyway?

  Feb 7, 2020 3:30 pm

  When people talk about ‘professional development’, they tend to emphasize the ‘professional’ part. The type of capital P professional development, that in many people’s minds, is a formal process with a defined beginning and end. But this type of thinking minimizes the ‘development’ part, which is really where the growth takes place. 

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  Creative and Collaborative: Trying out Careers in Publishing

  Jun 17, 2019 12:00 pm

  I recently had the opportunity to participate in a “Try-It-Out Experience” through the Grad College Career Development Office and the University of Illinois Press. This one-day professional development opportunity provides graduate students with a focused goal-setting session, industry connections, and the chance to explore new-to-them career paths.

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  Lessons From a Grad Student Job Search Support Group

  Jun 4, 2019 1:45 pm

  This Spring, Mike Firmand started the first-ever job search support group for graduate students at the University of Illinois. Here's what Mike learned from listening to them and leading the group. Read the original post on Inside Higher Education.

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  Making the Most of Summer: Developing Skills Employers Want

  May 9, 2019 11:45 am

  As you move into your first summer as a graduate student at Illinois, now is a perfect milestone to take time to reflect on your progress as a student and scholar.

  Over the past year, you’ve gained new skills and knowledge in your field, but success beyond graduate school requires taking a comprehensive approach to your professional development. It requires more than technical skills and field-specific knowledge.

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  Staying Organized During a Job Search

  Mar 26, 2019 10:15 pm

  In his newest article on Inside Higher Education, Director of Career Services, Derek Attig, gives his tips for staying organized on the job search. 

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  What to Do Immediately After an Interview

  Nov 12, 2018 3:15 pm

  You just finished a job interview. Moments ago, you hung up the phone or arrived back at your hotel room. What should you do next?

  In his most recent article for Inside Higher Ed, Derek Attig talks about things you can do in just 15 to 30 minutes to set yourself up for success in the next stages of the hiring process and beyond. This advice applies to any kind of job search -- whether in or outside academe.

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  5 Tips for Talking about Your Work

  Sep 18, 2018 1:15 pm

  So, what do you do?

  This is a question graduate students hear frequently—whether from scholars in their field, people in an elevator, or family members. And while at first the answer might seem simple—it’s what you do every day, after all—finding ways to frame and explain your work to others can be a challenge. Thinking about your answer to this question is important since there are many situations when you might need to answer it: applying for fellowships or funding to support your work, job interviews or networking events, interviews with the media, or discussions with political leaders regarding policy. And recently, several UI students found themselves confronted with this question when former President Obama made an impromptu coffeehouse stop during his visit to campus!

  Below are some tips for talking about your work to help you prepare no matter the situation.

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  Using Job Ads for Career Exploration

  Jul 31, 2018 12:00 pm

  Reviewing advertisements of all sorts can help you identify appealing job types and sectors that you may never even have heard of, advises Derek Attig in this post originally published on Inside Higher Ed.

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  What Can I Do with a PhD in the Humanities?

  Oct 10, 2017 1:00 pm

  It’s well-known that academic jobs are in short supply for humanities PhD graduates right now, but the question ‘what can I do with a PhD in the humanities?’ should have less to do with a lack of academic positions than it should the sheer number of career possibilities. That was the focus of ‘What Can I Do with a PhD in the Humanities?’, a 5-week Graduate College workshop run by Derek Attig that I attended last Spring. The workshop covered advice and resources for finding jobs beyond academia, weekly conversations with humanities PhD graduates working in fields like public radio to environmental advocacy, and self-assessments of values and skills. The self-assessments were particularly illuminating, and they allowed each of us to approach the broader workshop questions with a focus on our own goals and interests.

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  An Internship Can Help Change the Direction of Your Career

  Sep 20, 2016 4:30 pm

  Should you do an internship in grad school? Kristin Divis says “Yes!” and once you hear her story, it’s easy to understand why.

  This summer, after graduating with a PhD in Psychology from Illinois, Divis started an exciting, full-time job at Sandia National Laboratories. Sandia is also, as it turns out, where she’d worked as an intern for several years while in grad school.

  I spoke with Divis earlier this year, shortly before she graduated and not long after she accepted that full-time offer. She wanted to share her reasons for doing an internship, what she learned, and why you should consider doing one, too. Here’s what she had to say...

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  More Than Just Buzzwords: Social Media as a Tool for Personal Branding in STEM

  Sep 9, 2016 3:45 pm

  nspired by nothing more than a joking remark from a colleague on the importance of securing a unique domain name before someone “stole it,” I made my personal website, RituRaman.com, in my second year of graduate school. Luckily for me, launching this website was the first step in an ongoing attempt to develop a coherent web presence and recognizable personal brand.

  Before I continue, I would like to acknowledge that terms like “personal brand” can often come across as meaningless buzzwords used by millennials to justify a relatively self-centered use of social media. When used without context, they make me cringe and feel pretentious – and I understand if they make you do the same – but this blog post isn’t about the philosophical clash between personal modesty and taking selfies. Rather, this post is about crafting your online presence in a way that best represents your personal history, your interests, and your future goals.

  Now that we’ve moved past the obligatory disclaimers, I will attempt to distill the social media lessons I’ve learned over the past few years into a few pithy steps.

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  What We Learned at the Faculty Job Search Retreat

  Aug 8, 2016 10:15 am

  On an especially hot and muggy day last month, nearly 250 graduate students and postdocs peeled themselves away from the bench, left the library, set aside their dissertations, and trekked over to the Illini Union for the Graduate College’s seventh annual Faculty Job Search Retreat.

  The retreat featured sessions on application documents of all kinds (cover letters! teaching philosophies! research statements!), helping attendees get ready to write excellent materials. But as it is every year, the highlight of the day was a panel of faculty members who offered a window into everyday life and hiring practices at their very different institutions. This year’s guests were: James Matthews, Associate Professor of French at Illinois Wesleyan University; Angela Glaros, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at Eastern Illinois University; and Jeremy Guest, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois.

  Since not all of you could attend this year, we thought we would share some highlights in the form of 3 tips from our panelists....

   

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  Looking for a mentoring opportunity? Why You Should Be A URAP Grad Mentor.

  Jun 21, 2016 4:30 pm

  Are you looking for a mentoring opportunity? Whether you are interested in a career in academia or industry, you should be.

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  Making Your Skills Make Sense Outside Academia

  Mar 25, 2016 3:45 pm

  I’ll start with the good news: as a graduate student, you have a ton of fascinating, impressive skills. You know how to do lots of different things, and you know how to learn even more of them. The bad news really isn’t so bad, just initially frustrating: many of those amazing skills you have aren’t always going to make a ton of sense to people outside your field, let alone outside of academia entirely. At least not at first.

  Does that mean those skills aren’t valuable outside academia? Absolutely not. It just means you have to be creative and translate them. By shifting how you think and talk about your skills, you can help potential employers see the links between what you've done and what they need—and make it easier for them to hire you. And you’ll also make it easier for yourself to discover and explore broad, interesting career options.

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  The Faculty Interview

  Jan 14, 2016 2:30 pm

  There’s nothing quite like a faculty interview to get you tied into knots. The stakes are high, the formats can be awkward, and it’s not really like anything you’ve done before. So it’s easy to be scared, anxious, worried, nervous, apprehensive—or just plain super-freaked-out. And that’s normal. But it’s a good idea to be some other things, too. Here are some ideas...

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  Four Ways to Make Your Research Presentation Stand Out

  Nov 3, 2015 4:15 pm

  It’s after midnight, you’re taking a quick look at the slides for your research presentation the next morning, and you have this distressing thought: “I think my research is interesting, but will anyone else?” No one wants years of hard work to be met with blank stares or a fascinating discovery to be dismissed by wandering minds. Your research is interesting, but how do you get people to realize that?

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  Going on the Market? Time to Get Started on those Applications

  Jul 30, 2015 2:15 pm

  Back to school is almost back. Soon, it’ll be time to put away the sunscreen and dust off your research. Time to fold up that beach umbrella and pull out those freshly sharpened pencils. With the start of a new semester, you may find yourself busy to bursting with things to do—new classes to prep and new deadlines to meet—but now is also a great time to get ready for the academic job market.