Discover How Academic Career Coaching Works

Academic Coaching Serves Three Primary Purposes:

1. Clarifying Career Identity

The problem: Students start graduate programs and don't finish them or get degrees and don't use them. Researchers publish papers they don't care about.Professors gain tenure only to find themselves dissatisfied and sometimes ready to quit. All of this flows out of a lack of career identity.

The solution: We will help you develop a deeper understanding of which kinds of work you are enduringly most drawn to, repelled by, and why. This provides direction on which academic achievements will prove most meaningful across the span of your career.

2. Mapping Strategic Possibilities

The problem: There are endless programs, grants, papers, and jobs to apply for. It can be overwhelming and depressing to receive rejection letters. But worse than the rejections are the acceptances that lead you away from the destinations you really want.

The solution: We will help you prioritize a portfolio of projects that clearly reinforce one another towards your goals. This requires the creation of a process for investigating options and building a purposeful network of collaborators.

3. Systematizing Forward Progress

The problem: Academics struggle from (productive) procrastination, writers block, and paralysis-of-analysis. Grading, lectures, emails, meetings; anything with a defined deadline tend to get done first, even though they are usually not the items most important to us or our careers.

The solution: We will help you break big projects into daily micro-actions that keep you engaged and reframe roadblocks into creativity-inducing new vistas on a project. This is more than just time management, it takes understanding workflow energy, project assets, and realistic time-lining.