Professor Van Ry

“So you’re a teacher, right?”

This is a question I get all the time, and I never know how to answer it. As an adjunct, I don’t feel totally honest saying, “No, I’m a college professor.” The university, after all, is only paying me to teach—no more, no less—and I don’t have a title with the word “professor” in it.

But as I’ve begun my job search outside academia, I’m finding that talking about my work as “teaching” leads to a whole lot of assumptions about my experience and skill set. Finding a way out of those assumptions—by conveying the full range of my grad-school experience to potential employers—will be key to creating a new career path.

This can be difficult for anyone: Any career shift requires reimagining your position in the world. But for women, fighting against the teacher stereotype is an especially real obstacle. <Read more.>

Via Elizabeth Keenan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vitae.