Now that I’m on the other side of the fence, I realize that a culture of openness can do as much, if not more, than creating new resources. We have a stunning array of professional and transferable skills programming available to graduate students on campus, as we do opportunities–like the Mitacs internship program, various faculty RA positions, and non-traditional TAships like working in the writing centre–that can help students develop valuable skills in communication, translating research into impact, writing pedagogy, and a whole host of other soft and technical skills. And they’re underutilized. I blame this on a culture that keeps professors from telling their students about these opportunities, because students headed for the tenure-track don’t need transferable skills, and that keeps students feeling like their commitment to the ideal of the tenure-track is constantly being policed, which makes it unsafe to do anything other than teach, write, publish, and conference.

TL;DR, fostering this culture of openness and revealing some of the many fascinating and challenging non-professorial careers that graduate study can lead to, and that DH may facilitate the transition into a bit more easily than traditional humanities study, is the primary reason I’m curating this series of posts.