Determining Your Purpose in an Academic Career

Whether you are a graduate student thinking about an academic career or a senior professor still searching for just the right “position,” this session provides a perspective and suggestions to help answer career questions. If you’re on a quest to tilt that academic windmill, your dream may not be as impossible as it now appears.

The process of determining your unique purpose begins with a self-assessment. Pinpoint your attributes beyond the knowledge and skills necessary to execute your job, including your special gifts and talents, imagination and creativity, and passion. Next, conduct a career assessment. How can you use all of your attributes in a teaching, research, and/or clinical position? Why did you pick an academic position? Scrutinize your motivation.

Six suggestions are given to guide these decisions, including using your gifts and imagination to separate you from the rest of the pack, putting your whole heart into everything you do, and being resilient and persevering in spite of setbacks. An interactive segment on the commitment, sacrifices, rejection, and satisfaction of an academic career permits participants to air their specific professional issues. Ultimately, the degree of match between your attributes and the job characteristics determines your success at spearing academic windmills.

This topic is available as a 1–1.5 keynote.

To find out more, email Ed Leach or call (480) 705-8200, x233.