It’s 2025 and too many of those enrolled in humanities PhD programs¹ still think they’re going to land a tenure-track faculty position in higher education. Yes, Faculty² members have been slowly facing the crisis of the academic job market, but even the most supportive ones are strapped for the resources, field knowledge, and the necessary time to effectively help PhDs navigate this landscape. Graduate curricula rarely includes comprehensive career training or coaching. This task falls almost entirely on academic advisors, many of which barely have time to keep up with their own work. How will they have time to educate their students about non-faculty careers? What happens if the tenured advisor isn’t even interested in engaging with the core issues of this challenging landscape? Who is going to support the PhD worker then?

Part of the academic job market problem is that we struggle to rethink the meaning of a successful PhD graduate in our times. We,³ scholars especially in the humanities, don’t know enough yet about non-academic networking to know or show what kinds of jobs, lifestyles, and interventions the humanities can create beyond the university. This is a challenge that haunts me, personally, as I’m soon-to-be in the job market for non-faculty academic jobs. It is also one that feels fundamental to answer for all of us who worry about the future of humanities scholarship and pedagogy.

One of my internship tasks this semester was updating the alumni data for two programs sponsored by the Scholars’ Lab: the Digital Humanities and Praxis fellowship programs, both yearlong DH-training opportunities for PhDs at UVA. Though there were preceding initiatives, the current structure of the Digital Humanities Fellowship is in place since 2007, and the Praxis Program since 2011. By now, there’s 121 combined alumni, many of which have graduated and taken on different positions. Some of those make great departing points for re-envisioning what success looks like for PhDs.

For example, humanities PhDs, did you know you have been gaining project management competencies all this time? I’d never heard about this field before I joined DH, but it turns out all that invisible work you put into completing your program gives you transferable skills that are highly valuable in project managers. Critical thinking, independent research, writing, pedagogical training, communication, and problem-solving are some of the core abilities we develop over time as we comply with the graduate and hidden curricula.

There’s also people who work as digital librarians/specialists within academic libraries. They engage, on different levels, with the training and education of known and emerging technologies, particularly those on the web. Think curriculum development, workshops, mentorship, library guides, project consulting, archival research, research assets creation and management. Are these abilities not akin to the training we acquire throughout the PhD?

Curators, consultants, artists, freelancers, programmers, developers, faculty, teachers, life coaches, housemakers, writers, editors, program directors. Those are some of the other careers and pathways of Scholars’ Lab alumni. Faculty and teaching-heavy jobs are only one genre of options. Why do we romanticize those positions and disproportionately teach PhDs to prioritize them? There’s so many things a humanities PhD can be. Why do we insist on feeding the neoliberal academy with our own bodies?

Graduate students workers are a lower class form of contingent labor in higher education, although a privileged one. Grad workers supply essential labor to universities for a fraction of a faculty/lecturer salary. As a direct consequence of their contingent status, graduate professional development is rarely a priority in the daily operations of a doctoral academic curriculum. Institutional needs always come first.

Many grad workers come into PhD programs unaware of this dynamic and how it decisively shapes our professional outlook during and after the program. Others, like me, have been exposed to its reality through sour personal experiences and conversations with mentors, colleagues. Even so, I know we remain at least partially in the dark about the ramifications that being cheap, contingent workers have on our role and responsibilities as workers. We graduate without fully realizing the extent to which being employees in a knowledge company affects our ability to afford basic necessities, like rent and food. Partly, this happens because cloaking the commodification of higher education has become part and parcel of academic culture.

For me, it was in the digital humanities community (DH) where I started feeling more like a colleague than a student. In this space, I met people who helped me see, understand, and navigate my position as a higher ed worker. Why is it that some realities of labor are more visible in DH spaces? Why is it so hard to talk about labor in academic ones?

Academic scholarship, for historical and cultural reasons, holds the allure of being a virtuous pursuit, the always-noble goal of producing and managing human knowledge. Scholars are the watchful guardians of humanity’s archive—or that’s supposed to be the idea. Many apply to grad programs hoping to join a knowledge-driven guild. In reality, joining this grand purpose also means inheriting a set of intellectual hierarchies, values, and practices that have as much to do with oppression as they do with knowledge-production and pedagogy. It is easy to forget that, after all, the university is a centuries-old product of early Christian European ideas of knowledge-making and learning. This means that the dedication of the “Academic Ivory Tower” to the pursuit of knowledge also includes strict models, formats, and biases about what scholarship means and looks like, who can produce it, what makes it valid, and how it turns into knowledge.

This long tradition of academia as a space for intellectual exchange is what still draws many of us to its campuses, what compels us to dedicate long hours to reading, writing, thinking. We collectively subscribe tacitly to the belief that the university is a safe site for intellectual exchange and learning. Such an idea hides institutional interests and dealings in politics and funding to, instead, present the university as an intellectual safe-haven. The hidden underbelly reveals a for-profit institution looking to capitalize its assets (human and otherwise) to their maximum potential, often as cheap as possible.

In this system, the love and devotion for sharing knowledge that is inherent to the role of lecturers, faculty, and graduate PhD workers becomes entangled with the amount of labor they individually generate for the university.¹ But these conditions aren’t immediately visible in everyday life. It takes time, exposure, good guidance, and effort to see the small ways in which they end up significantly shaping career outlooks, especially for grad workers. You’re caught between being a student (someone who takes courses), a teaching instructor, a research assistant, and a researcher-in-training. You’re meant to defer to your advisor and/or department when you take on new commitments, projects, applications, and they sort out the administrative side sometimes without much explanation. Institutional rules and regulations are not to be your immediate concern, much less your focus. You’re theoretically expected to fully focus on your research. But these rules hold the bureaucratic and capitalist nuances that govern the existence of your position as a grad “student” worker.

DH offered me, instead, a space to meet, listen, and learn from a community of scholars that do not all hold traditional tenure-track placements. Many are librarians, research specialists, programmers, admin directors, or officers. Regardless of job title, these are the kind of worker hired generally under the label of “staff.” Their salaried conditions play a daily role in their workplace interactions and their position’s descriptions are more granularly described than “graduate student” or “dissertation committee member,” for example. This varied constituency, in turn, supports the development of DH’s overt disciplinary concern with the job crisis in higher education at a time when traditional graduate school curricula aren’t evolving quickly enough to protect graduate workers from the crisis. Professionalization in DH goes hand in hand with discussions about pedagogy to address job uncertainty, job market survival skills, alt-ac opportunities/training, and hidden curriculum issues.

A landscape where labor is frequently discussed creates the space to consider the necessary individual, personal, material needs that we each require to become fulfilled employees amidst current broader issues of social and economic decay. A space that acknowledges multiple forms of expertise, abilities, and needs, also highlights that one single person—no matter their desire and experience—is incapable of single-handedly supporting a grad worker’s growth as a professional. DH pushes grad workers to seek and foster a community of colleagues to navigate the brutal job market where the traditional graduate curriculum dictates graduate student workers should always do what their advisor says.

Last week, I started an internship at the Scholars’ Lab made possible by the PhD+ Program at UVA. This means that, during the Fall semester, I get to support the student programs, Lab initiatives, and labor of the folks that over the past four years have modeled for me how scholarship can be a liberating personal and professional practice, a genuine exercise at human connection.

The position involves a series of tasks with varying levels of depth that touch on curriculum development, pedagogical practice, documentation development, consultations, and institutional regulations. These topics speak directly to my professional goals to hone in skills and gain experience working in positions that support and develop scholarship within the realm of digital humanities, going beyond the space of academic departments. It is a tailored internship that was collaboratively conceived between my internship supervisor, Brandon Walsh, and me. Brandon is the Head of Student Programs at the Scholars’ Lab, and working closely with him in an official capacity has been a dream for a long time now. I could not ask for a better boss, mentor, and friend to guide and support my professionalization journey as I take steps to position myself as a young working professional about to enter the job market, rather than as a student.¹

Brandon’s ongoing commitment to critical digital pedagogy, as a philosophy and active practice, has profoundly changed my own relationship to learning and teaching. Through mentorship meetings, article discussions, workshop practices, and collaborative writing exercises, our collaborations were a catalyst I desperately needed to begin imagining and theorizing what I want in my personal relationship to pedagogy as well as the shape of the pedagogical spaces I envision fostering.

While this inaugural blog post highlights why this internship is meaningful to me, as a 6th-year PhD candidate, Brandon’s latest blog post reflects on the role of a supervisor and shares details about the main tasks I will tackle over the semester.

My main goals are to strengthen my ties to this community and make new friends, though I also anticipate making plenty of mistakes as I make my way to small wins and achievements. Grappling with failure and process are, after all, essential parts of digital humanities scholarship and labor due to their historical connection to coding, as Quinn Dombrowski has pointed out. I welcome the attention in DH to individual working experiences, especially when it addresses navigating failure and reflecting on labor processes, as a methodological sandbox to practice patience with myself. Within the internship, I plan to exercise this knowledge to continue unlearning the culture surrounding academic hierarchy that is based on degree, tenure, rank, or institutional influence. I want commitment, accountability, labor, skills, and consistent kindness, instead, to guide who I come to respect and whose respect I earn, regardless of ranks. Moreover, I want these to be the values I use to assign my own labor value.

At a time of uncertainty, fear, and massive funding cuts, I envision my PhD+ internship at the Scholars’ Lab to be a nurturing space of experimentation where I can shape the kind of laborer I want to become, post-PhD, in a crumbling social environment that desperately cries for sustainable practices of care.