From Shakespeare to short-selling (and back again)
There is a scene in the movie Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray is trying to lure Andie MacDowell back to his hotel room, when she reveals that she majored in 19th-century French poetry. Murray laughs derisively and blurts out, 'What a waste of time!'
If you're trying to get a job in the commercial world armed with a PhD in the arts or humanities, you'd better get used to it. You probably won't hear a potential employer say it to your face, but you are certain to see it in their eyes more than once. Actually, let me revise that - you probably won't see it much at all, because your PhD will have disqualified you long before the interview stage.
But before you get too depressed, this story does have a happy ending. Since completing a PhD in 17th-century English theatre and politics in 2003, I have managed to build a five-year career in finance and investment journalism, making it to the Financial Times in March 2007 - despite mine being pretty much a worst-case scenario in terms of preparedness for the world of 'real work'.
What do I mean by 'worst-case scenario'? Well, if you came to me now saying that you were finishing your PhD but had gone off the idea of slogging your way slowly towards an academic career, my advice would be: (a) consult a careers advisor as soon as possible to map-out a career path; (b) identify the relevant training and educational courses; (c) get enrolled; and (d) free-up as much time as possible for unpaid work experience. In other words, super-charge that CV so the doctorate doesn't sit at the top of it like a neon sign saying, 'You'd have to be nuts to hire a perpetual student like me'.
Unfortunately I didn't do any of that sensible stuff. I was already 29 years old, married, unable to move back in with mum and dad, with a mortgage to pay. I needed a paying job – and fast.
In the period between submitting my thesis and my examination, I started scouring the jobs pages every day. I decided that I'd probably have skills relevant to journalism, public or press relations, publishing, advertising, copywriting, market research or various forms of think-tankery.
When you start thinking about them, the transferable skills developed by the PhD experience become obvious: you have to design, budget and execute an original, constantly-evolving four-year project almost completely independently; you need cast-iron discipline to keep at it and maintain control; you have to write and edit a 100-page thesis with 300 footnotes and 1,200 detailed references to an academic standard; and if you organise seminars or conferences you must have the people-management skills to deal with peculiar academic types.
But of course these skills are not the same thing as skills honed by relevant work experience. I took opportunities to boost my CV as they arose – spending two weeks proofreading for a legal publisher, for example – but ultimately it was obvious that I was looking for an entry-level position designed for a 22-year-old fresh from a BA.
That's when all those transferable skills from the PhD seem to fly out the window and you find various Bill Murrays telling you what a waste of time it all was.
And quite right, too. You've embarked on one career path and suddenly had an inexplicable change of heart. Who's to say that, 12 months down the line, you won't squander all the training they're offering by having another change of heart?
One of my rejection letters, from a publisher offering a year's on-the-job training for £15,000, said they were looking for someone 'younger', who was 'just starting their career'.
Ouch! I was still in my twenties and I was already too old to get a job? Depressing – but really, it's right that such opportunities go to fresh-faced graduates who've had their hearts set on publishing since they were in pigtails. Giving it to me would have been like stealing a lolly from a toddler.
Anyway, the brutal truth is that employers don't see the irony in thinking, simultaneously, that your PhD was a waste of time but that it also makes you over-qualified for a position that only pays £15,000 a year. Your motivation starts to look suspect. I lost count of the number of times I was asked whether or not I might eventually return to academia or teaching. At first I thought it was an innocent enquiry and responded honestly: 'Well, perhaps, but not within the next 10 years.' Don't be tempted – just say No. Tell them the PhD was just another job, a big project you managed, which you enjoyed, but which you never considered should chain you to an academic career – something you are now moving on from, decisively.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. That assumes you've been invited to an interview in the first place. After a month and around 50 applications, I think I'd only managed to bag one. Why? My CV.
Like most people, I put my educational career on the first page, so it was suffering from neon-sign syndrome. It needed to look more like a CV from the 22-year-old graduates who were my competitors, and the best way to do that was simply to shift my vocational career onto the first page and relegate the PhD to the second.
That way, the first thing a potential employer learned about me was that I'd held down full- and part-time jobs in the years since my A-Levels, earned some money doing some teaching, and had recently got some work experience in media and publishing contexts. That lot softened the blow of the PhD, giving me a better-than-evens chance that someone would actually go on to read my covering letter.
That was important because in the covering letter you can address, bullet-point style, the 'essential' and 'desirable' characteristics with all those transferable skills from your PhD experience. It gives you a chance to talk about that awkward part of your life in terms that the employer understands. I can't say for sure, but I feel that my hit-rate improved after this simple adjustment to my CV.
Don't get me wrong – you still need a fair dose of luck. The first offers I got came from within business journalism, which was booming and generating lots of jobs, and from employers who respected pure academic endeavour. The second – who offered me the job as a hedge-fund journalist that turned out to be my big break – simply recognised that, because hardly anyone knew what hedge funds were, it would probably be best to employ someone who just had the maturity and intelligence to work hard and learn fast. But you make your own luck, even if it's just through persistence and the law of large numbers: I must have been rejected for more than 150 jobs before I got that breakthrough.
When it happened, the change was exhilarating. After a four-year project, where writing one chapter of a thesis might take 3 months, it was a tremendous relief to be able to sink my teeth into something new and different, where tasks had to be turned over in a week, a day, even an hour.
The broader context – from radically changing my writing style to learning about statistics and capital markets from scratch – provided an intellectual challenge on a par with my academic work, and the hedge-fund world turned out to be full of independent thinkers who, because they'd often already made their fortunes and lived lives outside of finance, were far from ignorant of culture, philosophy, history or the arts (or short of a few PhDs). In this environment, my doctorate is a topic of conversation – not an awkward blip on the path to a career.
And that is what I have now – a career, one that has evolved surprisingly quickly. When you start thinking about the transition out of academia, it feels difficult joining the dots between your old life and the new one that has to take shape.
But four years after starting out as a hedge-fund journalist who knew nothing about hedge funds, my salary has doubled, I've managed a small team, I sit at the centre of a network that generates regular job offers, and I still use the same processes writing investment features at the Financial Times as I did writing chapters for my PhD thesis on 17th-century theatre. And, by the way, if I look out of my office window I see the foundations of Shakespeare's Globe. So keep an open mind - you may be surprised at the synergies life can uncover.
Martin Steward
July 2008
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