1. What are the perceptions, advantages, disadvantages, etc. involved in putting ", PhD" after your name? I know some people do it and others don't, but why? I get the sense that Bitch PhD's pseudonym is intended to have a dramatic pause before the "PhD" part. I believe that when she started her blog, she had a period after "Bitch," and the "PhD" part is added (if you're reading it out loud) as a "Ms. Jackson if you're nasty"-style afterthought.
I ask because I just received business cards with my contact information. When ordering them, I looked at some samples from other professors in my department, and they had the ", PhD" after the names. I went ahead and put it on there, too, but I don't put the ", PhD" part on any other correspondence. I'm not sure why. I guess for some reason it seems more suited to an industry context, and I've also wondered in passing if putting the ", PhD" after the name carries a certain hint of insecurity -- like "I have a PhD, see?"
2. I've been thinking about job placement rate statistics. Let's say you have a graduate program, and they claim to have a 100% placement rate (as many in my field do). What would you need to know in order for that number to be really meaningful? I submit the following; anything else?
- Number of years searching: Say that 100% of the graduate students get jobs the first year on the market, or that 100% of the graduate students get jobs, but 80% of them have to search for five years or more -- two very different situations.
- Number of jobs applied for by candidates in the program: Are those 100% of the graduate students who are getting positions applying for ~140 jobs? Or is the program still able to claim a 100% placement rate even though some (or all) graduate students are being a little more selective -- doing regional searches, or only applying to certain kinds of schools?
- Kinds of institutions where the program is placing students: I'm not saying that some categories of institutions are automatically or necessarily better than others, and I suppose this question doesn't much matter from an administrative standpoint, but as a prospective graduate student trying to decide on a program, I'd want to know that. Are the students coming out of a given program successful in getting jobs at the kinds of institutions they want? For example, if they're interested in positions at small liberal arts colleges, HBCUs, schools overseas, schools in urban areas, etc., are they able to get those?
- Kinds of jobs: This is a pretty obvious one, but are all of these tenure-track jobs? Does a non-tenure-track or administrative job warrant a +1 in the placement category? That's fine as long as those are the jobs that the candidates wanted, but if not, it would be kind of misleading to put those as positives in the placement category. It would amount to saying, "We have a 100% placement rate! Not one of our graduates is unemployed *cough!--but some of them are underemployed--cough!*"
- Job candidates' options: I know there's the "you only need one job" argument, but as a prospective student, I'd also want to know if most folks coming out of a given program had multiple offers, or if they barely managed to get one.
I know there are all kinds of individual complexities and good reasons that some people coming out of the program should not be counted in either category: "successfully placed" or "unsuccessfully placed." Still, though, I think directors of graduate studies should always tell prospective students the whole story when it comes to placement. I'm sure most of them do, anyway; I only mention it because in my field, which is much less competitive than others when it comes to getting tenure-track jobs, many -- if not most -- of the PhD programs claim to have a 100% placement rate (jobs are so plentiful, in fact, that it's sort of bad if a program doesn't have 100% placement).
