Abstract
The landscape of graduate science education is changing as efforts to diversify the professoriate have increased because academic faculty jobs at universities have grown scarce and more competitive. With this context as a backdrop, the present research examines the perceptions and career goals of advisors and advisees through surveys of PhD students (Study 1, N = 195) and faculty mentors (Study 2, N = 272) in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines. Study 1 examined actual preferences and career goals of PhD students among three options: research careers, teaching careers, and non-academic careers in industry, and compared the actual preferences of students with what they perceived as being the normative preferences of faculty. Overall, students had mixed preferences but perceived that their advisors had a strong normative preference for research careers for them. Moreover, students who ranked research positions as most desirable felt the most belonging in their academic departments. Further analyses revealed no differences in career preferences as a function of underrepresented minority (URM) student status or first-generation (FG) status, but URM and FG students felt less belonging in their academic departments. Study 2 examined faculty preferences for different careers for their advisees, both in general and for current students in particular. While faculty advisors preferred students to go into research in general, when focusing on specific students, they saw their preferences as being closely aligned with the career preference of each PhD student. Faculty advisors did not perceive any difference in belonging between their students as a function of their URM status. Discrepancies between student and faculty perceptions may occur, in part, because faculty and students do not engage in sufficient discussions about the wider range of career options beyond academic research. Supporting this possibility, PhD students and faculty advisors reported feeling more comfortable discussing research careers with each other than either non-academic industry positions or teaching positions. Discussion centers on the implications of these findings for interpersonal and institutional efforts to foster diversity in the professoriate and to create open communication about career development.
Highlights
“I would feel relatively uncomfortable, mostly because my advisor pushes all of their graduate students to apply for academic research positions because prestige is a value that is highly important to them
PhD Students’ Normative Perceptions of Career Preferences in Their Academic Departments To determine how PhD students perceived the norms in their academic departments, we assessed their perception of their advisors’ general career preferences, their perception of other faculty members’ general career preferences, and their perception of other PhD students’ career preferences
In Study 1, we first examined whether there was a discrepancy in normative career preferences of PhD students and what they perceived to be their faculty advisors’ career preference for them
Summary
“I would feel relatively uncomfortable, mostly because my advisor pushes all of their graduate students to apply for academic research positions because prestige is a value that is highly important to them. -STEM PhD Student, on why one might not feel comfortable discussing industry or teaching positions with an advisor. The National Science Foundation has a specific program, the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, whose goal is to “to increase the number of historically underrepresented minority faculty in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields (National Science Foundation, 2021).”. The expectation has historically been that after obtaining a PhD degree, a student will pursue a tenure-track research-focused academic position. A 2019 international survey of PhD students by the journal Nature found that 56% ranked academic positions as the sector of work they would most like to pursue, whereas 28% ranked industry highest
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