Planning a career

If you know that you plan to continue to the Ph.D., start building your career path now. The courses you take depend on the curriculum, faculty availability to give those courses, and your choice form among the courses offered. Demonstrably successful students see their course work not as a smorgasbord of unrelated dishes, but as stepping stones to what will eventually become their dissertation and lifetime research plan. Properly selected, your courses should first give you a broad understanding of the entire literary tradition or linguistic field you are studying, and then allow you to focus on the specific problems that will lead eventually to your dissertation work.

This is another reason why the selection of an appropriate minor is so important. In the choices you make (of courses, of minors, of second languages, etc.) you are crating a defined professional profile that will form the foundation of your future work.

If you plan to continue to the Ph.D., give thought early to what your dissertation might generally be about (time period, genre, author, problem, theory). Take courses that will support this future research. Choose paper topics that will introduce you to the literature and sources of the are in which you will able specializing. By the time you get through the exams and to the dissertation, you will have already done a great deal of preliminary bibliographic and research work and will shorten your dissertation writing time. You will also have built up sufficient expertise in an area to revise a paper for publication.

If you do not plan to continue on for the Ph.D., take advantage early of the various placement and advising opportunities offered by KU. Career counseling is available from KU University Career and Employment Services (tel. - 4-3624; e-mail: upc@ukans.edu), as well as from Lyne Tumlinson in the Russian and Eastern European Studies office. REES also offers a Job Search Workshop every other year for M.A. students who want employment using their Slavic expertise.

Take control of your own intellectual and professional development. Consult with your mentor and other faculty as often as you need to, but take personal responsibility for planning and implementing your graduate program.

Find the right mentor

Every academic program has a unique set of strengths that derives from its mix of faculty interests and the resources of the institution. Presumably, you have chosen to engage in graduate study at the University of Kansas in order to take advantage of the unique program offered here. As you advance in the studies towards the Ph.D., you should become increasingly aware of the need to find a mentor or mentors with whom you will work closely and eventually write your dissertation. It is assumed that your dissertation work will be in an area that is closely related to an area of expertise of one or more of the faculty members of the Department. You would not want it any other way: the best advise comes an expert. It stands to reason that you should educate yourself on the interests of the faculty members who are potential mentors. A good way to start is to read their published works and talk with them. It may be possible to assist them in a research project, allowing you to try out an area and determine whether the area is appropriate for you, i.e., it holds your interest and has derivative possibilities for further pursuit in your own career. Although you will naturally seek a mentor with whom you have rapport, you should find a mentor whose area of interest is in accord with your own.

Study in the target countries

It is now standard practice for graduate students to stay for an extended time in one or more Slavic countries as a means of gaining language proficiency, acculturation, and acquaintance with professional partners in those countries. There is no set formula, but is common to spend a semester or an academic year in the country of primary interest and, minimally, a summer in a country of secondary interest. If you foresee yourself as a teacher of Russian and, say, Polish, the profession nowadays expects that you will have spent a substantive amount of time in Russian and Poland engaged in some meaningful academic pursuit. Often there is funding available outside of the University to pursue education goals or work on projects abroad. KU also offers summer FLAS fellowships, which may be used for study abroad. KU also offers summer FLAS fellowships, which may be use for study abroad. In some cases there will be opportunities to serve as a group leader or director of a study group, for which you will receive remuneration along with essential in-country experience. Information on opportunities is available on the continuous basis through posters in the Department as well as on the Internet, through organizations such as the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), as well as through individual faculty members.

Join professional organizations

Professional organizations foster a sense of community across a discipline. The sooner you join and participate in the organization, the sooner you will feel a part of it. Through these organizations you can widen your net of contacts in the profession, help you to seek advice or collaboration on projects, arrange to deliver papers and, ultimately, look for employment through standard search procedures. At a minimum a student with a strong inclination to become a teacher or scholar should join the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL), membership in which in includes a newsletter on the profession, a subscription to the journal of Slavic and East European Journal, and discounted fees for participation in the annual December meeting. At the December meeting that most colleges and universities seeking to fill academic position in Slavic languages conduct interviews. You can also look at the AATSEEL Web page, which give a good snapshot of the profession.

A second, much larger organization, is the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS). It encompasses all Slavic area studies from history and polities to language and literature. Their annual meeting is usually in October of November and provides an opportunity to meet people in related disciplines concerned with Eastern Europe and the C.I.S. and to give papers at this conference. In addition, members receive a newsletter and the journal Slavic Review. Another important organization is American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR), which is a must for those who shish to make a career of teaching Russian. Broader fields, covering languages and areas outside of the Slavic world, are served by organizations such as the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). There are many other, generally smaller, organizations addressing specific interests (e.g. The Bulgakov Society, the Nabokov Society) about which you can inform yourself either through library resources or the advice of the Department faculty. Organizations such as AATSEEL, AAASS, MLA, and LSA publish up-to-date membership information inside the covers of their periodicals.

Seek support in the University at large and outside of the University

Advancement in the profession is in part linked to one's success at obtaining outside support for one's work. Because peer review is involved in the selection of candidates for support, this process serves as a referendum on the candidate's ability to succeed in the profession. The sooner one can establish a track record of success, the better. Moreover, it is not bad to have money to pursue one's interests. Although there are relatively smaller amounts of money available for humanities disciplines than in the sciences, there is still a surprising number of opportunities available to those who seek them. Information about support can be found on posters in the Department, the Grants Book in the REES office, through the Humanities Research Center (HRC, located in the Hall Center for the Humanities), on the Internet, and through individual faculty members. Ask Professor Carlson for her grant-preparing guide, Frank Advice on Writing Research Grant Proposals in the Humanities. Individual faculty members can and should be consulted in identifying appropriate sources of funding and applying for them, but one should also take advantage of Graduate School's GFOG database and the HRC office in the Hall Center (Tel. 864-7834).

There are also some regularly updated published guides to sources of grants and fellowships. If you are on the linguistics track, you should obtain a copy of Guide to Grants and Fellowships in Linguistics. Washington, DC: Linguistic Society of America. Updated every tow years. For a current copy, write to LSA Secretariat, 1325 18th Street, NW, Suite 211, Washington DC 20036-6501. This resource also lists fellowships for language-related work that is not narrowly defined as linguistics.

Choose the right minor field

Your ability to obtain gainful employment will depend not only on assembling a coherent set of academic accomplishments on your vita, but also on the particular combination of areas of expertise that you bring with you. Within the Slavic Department you man choose to specialize in a certain number of Slavic languages and either literature or linguistics. The minor field has been designed to give you a special, unique academic profile. When choosing a minor, ask yourself what area you think would help you to become employed in the kind of job that you envision. For example, if you are interested in developing your profile as a teacher (including a teacher of teachers), you may with to choose the pedagogy option offered in the Department. If you see yourself as a literature specialist who would like to work in a comparative literature program, you may wish to choose a minor in another cultural area. If you are interest in culture, you might consider philosophy, history, or even anthropology. Slavic linguistics students often wish to expand their interests by studying with a general linguist in the Linguistics Department. No one can predict the future, but everyone can go into it well informed. Once you have selected an advisor, meet regularly with him or her and keep them informed of your progress.

Develop a paper from course projects into a conference presentation and, perhaps, publishable paper

It has become the norm to have presented a paper at a national conference and, in some cases, to have a paper or two published before one enters the job market. Whether this is a good thing or not is debatable (it can be argued that time spent on the basics in graduate school is more important than time spent on jumping the publishing hurdle; in some cases this may also extend the time to completion of the terminal degree), but the fact remains that the field has come virtually to expect this. Also, preparing a paper to this level of sophistication may be very helpful in preparing for dissertation work. For these reasons, as well as others, it is a good idea to try to develop a course project beyond the requirements of a course. A sensible approach would be to revisit the topic with the instructor and work independently under his or her guidance. The instructor can then give advice on when and whether the paper is ready for publication or presentation and, if so, suggest appropriate outlets. But note that not everyone is ready for this at the same time, so do not become overly discouraged if the first attempt does not result in publication. Periodicals have their own refereeing processes and may turn down papers or ask for substantial revisions. If you do have a rejection on the first attempt, you should not feel that you are being singled out: the same criteria apply both to established professionals as well as graduate students. A good solution for many people will be to try to place their first effort in a graduate essay collection.