The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career: A Portable Mentor for Scholars from Graduate School through Tenure

by John A. Goldsmith, John Komlos, Penny Schine Gold

Is a career as a professor the right choice for you? If you are a graduate student, how can you clear the hurdles successfully and position yourself for academic employment? What's the best way to prepare for a job interview, and how can you maximize your chances of landing a job that suits you? What happens if you don't receive an offer? How does the tenure process work, and how do faculty members cope with the multiple and conflicting day-to-day demands?

With a perpetually tight job market in the traditional academic fields, the road to an academic career for many aspiring scholars will often be a rocky and frustrating one. Where can they turn for good, frank answers to their questions? Here, three distinguished scholars—with more than 75 years of combined experience—talk openly about what's good and what's not so good about academia, as a place to work and a way of life.

Written as an informal conversation among colleagues, the book is packed with inside information—about finding a mentor, avoiding pitfalls when writing a dissertation, negotiating the job listings, and much more. The three authors' distinctive opinions and strategies offer the reader multiple perspectives on typical problems. With rare candor and insight, they talk about such tough issues as departmental politics, dual-career marriages, and sexual harassment. Rounding out the discussion are short essays that offer the "inside track" on financing graduate education, publishing the first book, and leaving academia for the corporate world.

This helpful guide is for anyone who has ever wondered what the fascinating and challenging world of academia might hold in store.

Part I - Becoming a Scholar
* Deciding on an Academic Career
* Entering Graduate School
* The Mentor
* Writing a Dissertation
* Landing an Academic Job
Part II - The Academic Profession
* The Life of the Assistant Professor
* Teaching and Research
* Tenure
* Competition in the University System and Outside Offers
* The Personal Side of Academic Life

Genres: Academia, Academic, Grad School, Education, Science, Nonfiction, Reference

272 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2001

About the author

John Anton Goldsmith is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in linguistics and computer science. He was educated at Swarthmore College, where he obtained his B.A. in 1972, and at MIT, where he completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics under Morris Halle in 1976. He was on the faculty at the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University, before joining the University of Chicago in 1984. He has also taught at the LSA Linguistic Institutes and has held visiting appointments at McGill, Harvard, and UCSD, among others. In 2007, Goldsmith was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Goldsmith's research ranges from phonology to computational linguistics. His Ph.D thesis introduced autosegmental phonology, which regards phonological phenomena as a collection of parallel tiers with individual segments representing certain features of speech. His recent research deals with unsupervised learning of linguistic structure (particularly exemplified by his Linguistica project, a body of software which attempts to automatically analyze the morphology of a language), as well as in extending computational linguistics algorithms to bioinformatics.

Reviews

[Phil]

peer review
"As a PhD student, I would say that this book is more useful for two groups of people: 1) those who are thinking of going through a phd program and becoming professors, and 2) for advanced phd students who are getting to the job market. This book is lacking in useful advice for funding, staging the phd progress and conducting research, which is why I originally bought it. (It might be better titled as "guide to the academic job market and working conditions") "

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 2001, parts of this text are still useful (if sobering) and others are outdated. As a female scholar, I particularly appreciated Penny Gold's contributions.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, these are rather outdated ideas. It is more appropriate for those considering a career in academia before they start graduate school or someone nearing the end of graduate school.

[Issue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in a Q&A format. Have read Part One, Becoming a Scholar. Most helpful for readers who are not already in academia.

[Luc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though this book is 22 years old (as of 2023), I found much of the general advice about dissertation planning and writing, and publishing, still relevant and true to my experience. However, even there, the continual focus on mailing materials and little/no discussion of electronic technologies made those chapters only useful in the broadest of strokes -- for someone, as other reviewers have commented, who is beginning to consider a PhD, but not of much/any use for someone in a program today, whose advisors can offer more updated and specific advice.

All that said, I was very disappointed with the two male scholars' continual dominating of the page and dismissal of any gender discrimination in academia. The chapter on gender was particularly challenging to read, as these male scholars bookended most of the female scholar's comments, praised "meritocracy" and put down affirmative action programs, and, even when the female scholar shared that almost every female colleague has had male professors make inappropriate advances or comments to her, claimed that they have not witnessed any evidence of any gender (nor racial!) discrimination on their campuses. Further, given that all three primary authors are white, there was a profound lack of nuance or depth around the (continued and almost constant) challenges of being a BIPOC student and scholar.

In short, perhaps useful to some folks, in some regards, around its publication time, but now: your time and money would be much better spent were you to go elsewhere.

[Beth Windle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most definitely has given me a lot to think about with regards to grad school. I enjoy that it's realistic and not sugar-coated and yet not completely pessimistic, either. Definitely gives me some hope.

[Michael Tallman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An essential read for anyone considering graduate school.