Zsuzsa Magyar’s prospective career in academia will involve playing the lottery.
Magyar is a political science graduate student and, like many other graduate students she knows, she hopes to become a professor after getting her degree.
She said she is on track for an academic career, but she also knows that the declining job market for academia leaves her with no guarantees.
“When you are investing in your field (of academic study), you don’t know if your lottery number will be picked,” Magyar said. “The reality is that some of us won’t.”
This summer, the Career Services Subcommittee of the UCLA Graduate and Professional Student Welfare Committee released a report that assessed the career planning needs of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars at UCLA.
The report was aimed at identifying how to better help graduate students be successful in their career searches, said Christine Wilson, director of the Graduate Student Resource Center.
“We wanted to see where there are gaps (in graduate student resources),” Wilson said. “It’s hard to see where you need to add programs when you don’t know what’s out there.”
The report takes into consideration a year’s worth of information and is part of an effort from different departments in graduate education and development – such as the Career Center, Graduate Student Resource Center, Graduate Division, faculty and students. They aim to increase collaboration across different campus departments and identify the needs of students.
Some of the report’s statistics highlight problems with how graduate students feel about their job prospects and the support their professors and advisers are giving them.
About 40 percent of graduate students said they were dissatisfied with the support they receive in their searches for employment, according to the report.
The report also found that the career expectations of UCLA graduate students are often different from the actual jobs they obtain. About 35 percent of graduate students said they expected to work in tenure-track positions after they graduate, but 10 percent will actually end up with those jobs.
A disparity also existed between the number of graduate students who expected to work in non-academic jobs after graduation and the number who did. Fourteen percent of graduate students expected to work outside the academic field after graduation, but the actual percentage of students who will obtain non-academic jobs was about 10 percent higher.
Wilson said she thinks the results of the report are representative of a “changing world,” where the job market holds less opportunities for academic careers and schools are hiring fewer tenured faculty and more lecturers.
“I wasn’t surprised by what we found because I think it confirmed for us what the challenges were,” Wilson said.
April de Stefano, director of academic services for the Graduate Division, also said the changing job market is playing a large role in graduate student career paths.
“There are just as many graduate students now, but fewer highly valued academic job positions,” she said.
Members of the Career Center, Graduate Division and Student Affairs said they are continually working to help graduate students. This year, they have made some changes as part of their normal work and as part of their response to the report.
To help graduate students, the Career Center is hiring two new staff members whose jobs will focus on aiding graduate students in their careers, said Kathy Sims, director of the UCLA Career Center.
Temporary funding for the positions comes from the Student Fee Advisory Committee, which gave about $222,300 to pay the salaries for a new associate director of the Graduate Career Services and a Graduate STEM Career counselor.
Some additional programming is also being supported by the Student Fee Advisory Committee on a temporary basis, Sims said.
The Student Fee Advisory Committee also allocated $100,000 to expand graduate career workshops and $140,000 to restore grant and fellowship application review services and upgrade databases where students can search for funding opportunities.
Kim Hedlin, an English graduate student, said she thinks the English department has presented her career options to her realistically, and she feels the department is training her for multiple career paths both in and out of the academic field.
“The department is good at recognizing that not everyone will go into academia,” she said.
Hedlin added that she is still not sure what career she wants to pursue, and that she is keeping her options open.
Some other students said they had less helpful experiences working with administrators.
Lee Rogers, a political science graduate student, said it can be hard to wade through bureaucratic processes to get the help he needs.
“It’s like there’s someone whose job description is to take care of me in (the Graduate Division),” he said. “But I don’t know where she is.”
For Magyar, working with her personal adviser has been a helpful experience. However, she said she thinks a positive experience should not hinge on each individual’s relationship with professors and advisers.
“Part of the issue is that we really depend on (an) adviser, so it’s really an individual experience,” she said. “Some of the students have absent professors, they don’t belong to anybody,”
Magyar said she plans to continue pursuing a job as a professor because that is what she is being trained to do.