Nonfiction Titles
Academic Job Search Handbook (2nd ed.), by M.M. Heiberger and J. M. Vick. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
A guide for the perplexed job-hunter.
Academic Scientists at Work: Navigating the Biomedical Research Career, by Jeremy Boss and Susan Eckert. (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2002).
This handbook for aspiring biomedical scientists features advice on finding an academic job, obtaining research grants, setting up and managing a laboratory, and advancing one's academic career. There's a chapter on mentoring and another summarizing the results of a national survey of biomedical faculty members on how to have a successful career in scientific research. The book's appendix has sample CV's and cover letters.
Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus, by Robert Boice (Allyn & Bacon, 2000).
This guide offers tips on developing work habits that will help graduate students and new faculty members succeed in academe.
Anthropology in Practice: Building a Career Outside the Academy, by Riall W. Nolan (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003).
This guide is designed for students who want to pursue nonacademic careers in anthropology. The author explores the differences between academic, applied, and practicing anthropologists and offers tips on preparing for careers beyond the academy. The book also includes sample résumés and cover letters, lists of anthropology-related Web sites, and advice on surviving the first year on the job.
The Academic Job Search Handbook (3rd edition), by Mary Morris Heiberger and Julia Miller Vick (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
A comprehensive guide that starts with planning a job search and continues through the tenure process. A large section on written materials includes sample correspondence, professional vitas, and statements of teaching philosophy. A two-year timetable helps plan the search. The new third edition has additional information for candidates in the sciences and applicants for adjunct and community-college positions. There's also a section on nonacademic career options.
The Adjunct Professor's Guide to Success: Surviving and Thriving in the College Classroom, by Richard E. Lyons, Marcella L. Kysilka, and George E. Pawlas (Allyn and Bacon, 1999).
This guide is designed for real-world professionals -- in business, law, medicine, and a variety of other fields -- who want to teach part time in colleges and universities. The book opens with advice on finding an adjunct teaching job, then addresses the skills you will need to survive and flourish as a part-time instructor. Each chapter contains questions to help readers focus on the issues that will be covered. Topics include course planning and conducting effective class sessions, choosing an instructional method, and assessing your teaching performance.
Alma Mater: A College Homecoming, by P. F. Kluge (Addison Wesley, 2000).
Reflections on a year at Kenyon College in Ohio. Kluge maintains a critical yet affectionate tone in his regard for a rural liberal arts college with a distinguished tradition.
Alternative Careers in Science: Leaving the Ivory Tower, ed. by Cynthia Robbins-Roth (Academic Press, 1998).
Cynthia Robbins-Roth left an academic biochemistry career in the 1980s for the biotechnology industry and later founded a newsletter and a consulting business. This guide covers 22 alternative careers for scientists, including journalism, publishing, business development, sales and marketing, technology transfer, and public policy.
At the Helm: A Laboratory Navigator, by Kathy Barker (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2002).
This guide for new principal investigators focuses on how to set up and effectively manage a laboratory.
Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, by Stephen D. Brookfield (Jossey-Bass, 1995).
Brookfield offers a very personal and accessible guide to how faculty at any level and across all disciplines can improve their teaching. Applying the principles of adult learning, Brookfield thoughtfully guides teachers through the processes of becoming critically reflective about teaching, confronting the contradictions involved in creating democratic classrooms, and using critical reflection as a tool for continuous personal and professional development.
Career Renewal: Tools for Scientists and Technical Professionals, by Stephen Rosen and Celia Paul (Academic Press, 1998).
An extremely detailed guide to making a career change, this book includes in-depth, first-person accounts. While all the examples come from people with backgrounds in scientific and technical fields, most of the exercises and advice are useful in almost any field.
Career Strategies for Women in Academe: Arming Athena, by Lynn H. Collins, Joan C. Chrisler, and Kathryn Quina (Sage Publications, 1998).
A guide for women who want to get ahead in academe. It examines women's roles in higher education and offers information about affirmative action, salary and negotiation strategies, and advice about how to get to the top and avoid and deal with potential pitfalls.
Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, by T.A. Angelo and K.P. Cross (Jossey-Bass, 1993).
This handbook offers teachers at all levels of experience detailed, how-to advice on classroom assessment—from what it is and how it works to planning, implementing, and analyzing assessment projects. The authors illustrate their approach through twelve case studies that detail the real-life classroom experiences of teachers carrying out successful classroom assessment projects.
The Complete Academic Search Manual: A Systematic Approach to Successful and Inclusive Hiring, by Lauren A. Vicker and Harriette J. Royer (Stylus Publishing, 2005).
This manual for faculty members and administrators provides practical advice on conducting a successful search. The topics covered include: selecting a hiring committee, writing a job description, conducting interviews, attracting a diverse pool of applicants, evaluating and selecting the finalists, making an offer, and retaining new hires.
The Curriculum Vitae Handbook: How to Present and Promote Your Academic Career, by Rebecca Anthony and Gerald Roe (Rudi Publishing, 1998).
This revised edition includes samples of C.V.'s for different stages of academic careers and information on how to create an electronic C.V.
Faculty of Color in Academe: Bittersweet Success, by Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner and Samuel L. Myers, Jr. (Pearson Education, 1999).
This work focuses on inequities based on racial and ethnic differences within the professional workplace in higher education. By using both narrative and statistical data, the authors provide an in-depth view of the issues surrounding the successful recruitment, retention, and development of faculty of color. Includes a comprehensive discussion of what needs to be done in order to achieve diversity in the teaching profession.
Faculty Advising Examined: Enhancing the Potential of College Faculty As Advisors, edited by Gary L. Kramer (Anker Publishing Company, 2003).
This book for faculty members, department chairmen, deans, advising directors, and vice presidents provides information on how to improve faculty advising on college and university campuses. A dozen essays examine issues such as training effective faculty advisors, the importance of assessment and reward in advisor development, organizational models of academic advising, and using technology to enhance the advising process. There's also a chapter on resources for academic advisors.
The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve, ed. by Constance Coiner and Diana Hume George (University of Illinois Press, 1998).
Faculty members from various institutions and disciplines contributed personal histories to this book, as well as articles on being a mentor, facing your biological clock, doing adjunct work, and caring for children with disabilities and for elderly relatives, among other topics.
Field Guide to Academic Leadership, edited by Robert M. Diamond (Jossey-Bass, 2002).
This handbook for academic managers of all stripes -- department chairs, deans, provosts, presidents, and other academic administrators -- looks at what it takes to be an effective leader and provides practical advice on a wide variety of topics, including dealing with budgets, personnel issues, and technology.
Finding an Academic Job, by Karen M. Sowers-Hoag and Dianne F. Harrison (Sage Publishers, 1998).
Two deans of social-work schools offer advice on what colleges and universities look for in new faculty members, how to match your credentials to the job market, and how to negotiate a job offer. One section deals with employment issues affecting academic couples.
Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Postmodern America, by Peter Sacks (Open Court, 1996).
This book, written by a journalist-turned-college-professor, examines the cost of upholding academic standards in an era of student apathy and entitlement.
Getting an Academic Job: Strategies for Success, by Jennie Jacobs Kronefeld and Marcia Lynn Whicker (Sage Publishers, 1997).
This guide explains the nature of job searches, interviews, and landing the right job, and includes a section on the do's and don'ts of job searching.
Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books, by William Germano (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
This guide to scholarly publishing provides tips on writing and editing a manuscript, drafting a proposal, signing a contract, and everything in between.
Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning a Master's or a Ph.D., by Robert L. Peters (Noonday Press, 1997).
First published in 1992, this book came about because its author found that most graduate students did not understand how graduate education worked and received only minimal information from their advisers and institutions. In painstaking detail, Peters explains the entire process, from selecting and applying to a graduate program to obtaining a teaching position. While the tone is occasionally cynical, it is more often supportive and realistic, whether Peters is discussing oral presentations or faculty-student relationships. He cites the work of other writers as well as providing quotations from individual graduate students. Peters, a biologist, revised the book to accommodate a job market that has become more difficult and stressful for candidates.
Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty--and the Price We All Pay, edited by Michael Dubson (Camel's Back Books, 2001).
The number of adjunct professors in academe is rising, yet their voices are seldom heard. In this collection of essays, adjunct professors share their on-the-job experiences and horror stories.
Job Search in Academe: Strategic Rhetorics for Faculty Job Candidates, by Dawn M. Formo and Cheryl Reed (Stylus Publishing, 1999).
The authors of this handbook analyze their own experiences and those of more than 50 job seekers in a variety of fields, including business, the humanities, and the sciences. They suggest ways job seekers can use the verbal, written, and visual clues offered during a job search and interviews to improve their chances of landing jobs.
Journey to the Ph.D.: How to Navigate the Process as African Americans, edited by Anna L. Green, LeKita V. Scott (Stylus Publishing, 2003).
This book, by twenty-four Black scholars who “have been there,” offers a guide to aspiring doctoral students to the formal process and to the personal, emotional and intellectual challenges they are likely to face. The authors come from a wide range of disciplines – from computing, education and literature to science and sociology. Although their experiences and backgrounds are as varied as they are as individuals, their richly diverse chapters cohere into a rounded guide to the issues for those who follow in their footsteps.
Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year, by James M. Lang (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
The author shares his trials and tribulations as a first-year college professor.
Lifting A Ton of Feathers: A Woman's Guide to Surviving in the Academic World, by Paula J. Caplan (University of Toronto Press, 1993).
Based on interviews with hundreds of academic women, this handbook includes suggestions for the job hunt, preparing your C.V., interviewing, handling job offers, and applying for contract renewals and tenure. It also includes a checklist for "woman-positive" institutions.
The Madwoman in the Academy: 43 Women Boldly Take on the Ivory Tower, ed. by Deborah Kealey and Deborah Schnitzer. (Michigan State University Press, 2003).
Tales from women on the front lines; a must-read for women aspiring to an academic life.
Managing People: A Guide for Department Chairs and Deans, edited by Deryl R. Leaming (Anker Publishing Company, 2003).
Department chairmen and deans share their personnel-management strategies in this collection of essays.
Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia, by Emily Toth (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).
Ms. Mentor was born in 1992 as an advice columnist for woman professors, graduate students, recovering academics, and those who love them. In this question-and-answer guide, she dispenses wisdom on surviving graduate school, landing a job and earning tenure in "pale-male" fields, and what to wear to academic conventions.
My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, by Rebekah Nathan (Penguin, 2006).
Puzzled by apathetic undergraduates who had adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward their studies, Nathan went undercover for a year, enrolling as a freshman at her own university. Here she exposes her discoveries on contemporary college life.
On the Market: Surviving the Academic Job Search, ed. by Christina Boufis and Victoria C. Olsen (Riverhead Books, 1997).
Based on the assumption that hearing people's stories is therapeutic and empowering, this book collects the accounts of graduate students in many fields who have recently braved the market, some successfully. More than two dozen essays explore such issues as dealing with rejection, the treatment of feminist scholars by hiring committees, relocating, making a living as a full-time adjunct, and leaving the academy and finding alternative careers.
Parenting and Professing: Balancing Family Work with an Academic Career, ed. by Rachel Hile Bassett (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005).
A collection of personal essays on the challenges of balancing parenting and a scholarly career.
A Ph.D. Is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science, by Peter J. Feibelman (Perseus Books Group, 1994).
Should you ask that prominent scientist to be your thesis adviser? How do you go about writing a compelling scientific paper? These and other topics are covered in a guide designed to ease the transition from graduate school to professional researcher.
The Ph.D. Process: A Student's Guide to Graduate School in the Sciences, by Dale F. Bloom, Jonathan D. Karp, and Nicholas Cohen (Oxford University Press, 1999).
"[T]he most comprehensive guide to date about graduate school in the sciences. . . . The book includes the voices of graduate students themselves, discussing, and in some cases qualifying, the authors' advice. The combination of authoritative summaries along with anecdotes from students themselves help lend substance to what otherwise might be a daunting litany of do's and don'ts about grad school. The book is organized in a more or less chronological sequence of major events and issues in the grad school process. Interspersed with these subjects are chapters on more strategic and issues-related subjects."--Science's Next Wave
Piled Higher and Deeper: A Graduate Student Comic Strip Collection, by Jorge Cham (Piled Higher and Deeper Publishing, 2002).
The author of this hilarious book is a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford University's mechanical-engineering department. The book is collection of the first five years of Piled Higher and Deeper, a comic strip about life (or lack thereof) in graduate school that originally appeared in Stanford University's student newspaper and is now online.
"So What Are You Going to Do with That?" by Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
This guide -- written by two Ph.D.'s who've made the transition from academe to the "real world" -- looks at non-academic job opportunities for Ph.D.'s and M.A.'s and offers practical advice for those who are considering careers beyond the ivory tower.
Spirit, Space, and Survival: African-American Women in (White) Academe, by Joy James and Ruth Farmer (Routledge, 1993.)
Surviving Your Academic Job Hunt: Advice for Humanities PhDs, by Kathryn Hume (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005).
A guide for first-time academic job seekers and junior professors on the tenure track, written by a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. The appendix includes samples of application letters and other documents that job seekers must submit when applying for a faculty position.
Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers (10th ed.), by W. J. McKeachie (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
McKeachie's Teaching Tips provides helpful strategies for dealing with both the everyday problems of university teaching and those that arise in trying to maximize learning for every student. The strategies suggested in the text are adaptable to specific classroom situations. The book does not suggest a "set of recipes" to be followed mechanically; it gives instructors the tools they need to deal with the ever-changing dynamics of teaching and learning.
This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics From the Working Class, ed. by C.L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law (Temple University Press, 1995).
A collection of essays by faculty members and graduate students from working-class backgrounds, this book eloquently describe some of the hidden costs and struggles of "upward mobility."
To Improve the Academy: Resources for Student, Faculty and Institutional Development, Vol. 22, ed. by Catherine M. Wehlburg and Sandra Chadwick-Blossey (Anker Publishing Company, 2004).
This volume for faculty members, administrators, and instructional development professionals features essays on topics such as redesigning a curriculum to improve student learning, providing support for adjunct faculty members and graduate student instructors, assessing student learning and the impact of faculty development, using peer evaluation to enhance learning, and implementing successful models for professional development.
Tomorrow's Professor: Preparing for Careers in Science and Engineering, by Richard M. Reis (Wiley-IEEE Press, 1997).
A must-read for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior professors seeking successful academic careers in science and engineering.
What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain (Harvard University Press, 2004).
What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators.
Working Equal: Academic Couples as Collaborators, by Elizabeth G. Creamer and associates (Falmer Press, 2001).
This book presents case studies of academic couples who collaborate on scholarly projects and looks at how these couples have redefined their domestic roles to create environments that are conducive to mutual career satisfaction and success.
Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis, by Joan Bolker (Owl Books, 1998).
As a clinical psychologist who cofounded the Harvard Writing Center, Bolker has helped hundreds of writers complete their dissertations. She offers suggestions on how to create a writing addiction so that you feel incomplete if you don't write every day and stresses the need to set reasonable goals and deadlines for yourself to keep from getting discouraged. She also offers strategies for dealing with both internal and external distractions and for fending off writer's block.
