I’ve been following the discussion and insight over at Invisible Adjunct with more than casual interest lately. There’s been some passionate and articulate discussion on the essential folly of getting a Ph.D. in the humanities (and many other disciplines for that matter). The problem being the huge imbalance between supply and demand for Ph.D.s in academic settings.
This discussion comes too late for me, since I already did the “piled higher and deeper” game (although to be technically correct my degree is not a Ph.D., but a D.B.A. – doctor of business administration, which has more to do with the academic politics of different graduate schools at Harvard than with anything else). I also went into the process with a clear notion of what the job market was likely to be.
I’ve actually spent the bulk of my post-doctoral career on the non-academic side of the fence and I’m headed back there again. You can see the details here, although I try to avoid wearing a tie whenever possible. I find that I’m happiest working in rapidly growing environments. Kellogg has been great fun and it was particularly rewarding to be able to develop a course on knowledge management, but what I’m interested in isn’t at the heart of what Kellogg does best. Time for a new adventure.
I’ve been at Huron now for a couple of months so I can say that I expect the blogging to continue. Managing knowledge work hasn’t gotten any easier and I expect I’ll continue to write down my questions, observations, and suggestions about how we can design our way into some useful answers. I just think of it as a participating in this colllective action research program from a slightly different location.