blog posts

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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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  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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  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.

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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 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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  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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  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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  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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  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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  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 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....