Four Ways a Ph.D. Student Internship Can Prepare You for a Faculty Career

A Ph.D. program inevitably involves trade-offs and choices: how can I invest sufficient time in teaching to meet my own standards for excellence while balancing progress on my dissertation? Is it better to cast a wide net in terms of constituting my committee members’ departments and institutions, or stay more local so that I have a deep base of support close to home?

Similarly, many Ph.D. students who contemplate a summer internship carefully consider the trade-offs: could the internship experience be worth the sacrifice of intensive reading, writing, fieldwork and archival research time over the summer?

In a recent panel discussion, The Graduate School asked this question of three Ph.D. alumni who are now in tenure-track faculty careers: was the Ph.D. summer internship experience worthwhile? During the conversation, they highlighted four key benefits.

A Better Dissertation

Many students perceive that an internship commitment will distract them from their research and writing. All the alumni agreed, however, that the internship experience actually helped them frame and ask new questions, recognize new avenues of inquiry, and provide a richer orientation to the project in unexpected ways.

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Hannah Borenstein, Ph.D.’22 (Cultural Anthropology) participated in an internship with Elite Sports Management, an international athletics agency that works closely with Ethiopian runners.  This internship aligned well with Hannah’s dissertation project on the culture of women’s long-distance running in Ethiopia and offered her new angles on her topic as well as new questions to ask. The internship also introduced her to people and organizations that helped her deepen her understanding of the networks of corporate sponsorship and international competition in which these runners were situated. Dr. Borenstein is now Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Global Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. 

More Structure for Summer Writing

Many of the alumni were pleasantly surprised that the internship experience actually made them more productive in their dissertation work. By forcing them to budget their time carefully around the internship work commitment, they found they were able to produce more writing.

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Achille Castaldo, Ph.D.’19 (Romance Studies) designed an internship experience with the Association Il Chiostro dei Celestini in Bologna, Italy, a nonprofit association dedicated to the preservation of the State Archive of Bologna. His projects included leading guided tours of the archive’s exhibition on the racial laws against the Jewish community implemented by the Fascist regime in 1938 and lasting through he end of World War II. Achille found that he was more productive with the structure of the internship than in other summers where he faced unstructured time. “Instead of having a summer in which you are alone against this mountain of the dissertation, you have to … think of your days in a more efficient way.” Dr. Castaldo is currently Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University.

Show Your Fit for a Broader Array of Institutions

Though none of the alumni featured the internship experience prominently in their application materials for faculty positions, now that they have seen the application process from the other side of the desk as search committee members themselves, they say that they would absolutely highlight that experience. The transferable skills that the internship experience can build—such as public speaking to large groups, sharing your research in an accessible way, and running a meeting effectively—help new assistant professors jump-start their first year successfully and would help applicants stand out among dozens or even hundreds of other applicants for a job.

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Amanda Hughett, Ph.D.’17 (History) crafted an internship with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a nonprofit organization based in Durham dedicated to advancing the political, social, and economic rights of communities of color and economically disadvantaged communities in the South. Because her dissertation examined how civil-liberties lawyers helped to reshape the corrections system after the 1970s prisoners’ rights movement, she saw powerful intersections between this work and her research. Now that she is a veteran of several search committees, she can see that at a regional comprehensive or teaching-focused institution, an internship could be particularly helpful in showing that you have a commitment to service and broader public impact. Dr. Hughett is now Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Build Your Confidence for Your Next Professional Chapter

All the panelists expressed that one of the original considerations for pursuing an internship was the “insurance” of seeing that their skills would be valued in broader contexts beyond faculty roles. Once they had the internship experience behind them, they could ease some of the pressure of the faculty job search: they knew that their skill sets could be used in other employment opportunities, so they didn’t have the stress of thinking that their search was all-or-nothing if they didn’t receive a tenure-track offer. This confidence had the effect of strengthening their candidacy for faculty positions.

Editors’ note: The internships completed by these alumni were part of the NEH-funded Versatile Humanists at Duke initiative, which ran from 2016 through 2019. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as campus leadership from the Office of the Provost and The Graduate School.

Current Ph.D. students interested in exploring summer internship experiences can find a list of non-departmental summer funding opportunities and their usual timelines on The Graduate School’s website.

 

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AUTHOR

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Melissa Bostrom, Ph.D.

Assistant Dean, Graduate Student Professional Development

Melissa ensures that all Graduate School students can identify and develop transferable skills that prepare them for the full range of opportunities available to professionals with master's and Ph.D. degrees. She is Managing Editor of the blog.