The Academic Career Handbook

Rating:
Summary: Fahgettabouditt
Review: puh-leeeeeeeze! Academic career? Yeah, right. And by the way, don't go to grad school for a Ph.D. Don't even think about it. There are few academic jobs worthwhile these days (i.e, tenure-track). Take your smarts elsewhere and you'll be all the happier for it. Trust me, I know.

Rating:
Summary: Useful and friendly guide to career development
Review: This is a book intended for early-career academics and advanced students who are thinking about taking up an academic career. Apart from the introductory chapter, the book deals with the nature and development of academic careers (3 chapters), and academic roles and tasks (5 chapters, on networking, teaching, research, writing and managing). The authors have drawn extensively from research into academic activities and careers, the 'advice' literature for neophyte academics, and their own experiences. The book therefore taps into a broad range of sources on most aspects of academic life and how to make and get the most out of it. A lot of the detailed material is contained in about 120 'boxes' distributed throughout the book. Each box contains a set of numbered or bulleted points or tips, or a collection of short quotes from academics, often from external sources. A typical strategy for dealing with a topic is to describe an issue (such as departmental politics), or to define some concept, in the body of the text and then refer the reader to boxed pointers or suggestions. In this way, the book presents a distillation of information from the wider literature. I found this quite an effective strategy. The coverage of the book is wide, and the style is mostly descriptive, friendly and informative. The flavour is decidedly from the UK perspective. Specific conditions and contact details of research grants bodies are of limited use outside the UK. The focus in Chapter 2 is on the UK higher education system (subsectors, enrolments, league tables and salary scales), again of more local value. Most of the issues and advice can, however, be readily translated into and interpreted within an Australasian context. Each chapter contains an annotated list of published resources, making it possible for the reader to go into depth on issues that are important to them. At the end of the book, the authors list about 30 (mostly British) organisations together with national and international journals that work towards the betterment of higher education generally. A comprehensive bibliography and a good index conclude the volume. Overall, the book makes an excellent contribution to helping budding academics develop a sensible perspective on the nature of academic work. It is a source of useful, practical ideas on becoming an academic and developing a sense of career. The tone is positive throughout, and the book is likely to be referred to repeatedly as various issues and phases arise during the course of academic life. Of course, in a book of this length (or any fixed length for that matter), choices have to be made as to what to include and what to exclude. My wish list would have included more specific advice on how to organise and manage time, on how to make decisions in favour of long term career advancement at critical choice points, and on how to balance competing claims on one's personal resources from both within and outside the institution. Blaxter, Hughes and Tight have put together a helpful, up-to-date handbook, which deserves to be available in every higher education institution. (Reproduced with permission from HERDSA News, Nov 1998, p.22.)