About Beyond The Tenure Track
We create pathways to opportunity beyond the professoriate for graduate students and PhDs. We accomplish this through leadership skills training, professional identity building, and mentorship connections.
About the Founder
Fatimah Williams, Ph.D. is the CEO of Beyond the Tenure Track, a professional development and career-planning firm that prepares graduate students, faculty, and PhDs for leadership roles and high-quality careers. As a global speaker and coach, her professional development guidance has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, Scientific American, University Affairs, numerous podcasts, and her book Be Bold: Launch Your Job Search or Career Change with Confidence. She has been an invited speaker at leading conferences such as the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools and the 69th Annual Meeting of the Association of Graduation Schools, the constituent group of graduate deans of the Association of American Universities.
Dr. Williams holds a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers University and bachelor’s degrees in Foreign Affairs and African American Studies from the University of Virginia. Awarded the nationally competitive Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2011, Dr. Williams has published scholarship in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Latin American Perspectives, and Anthropology Now. She is the recipient of scholarly awards, including the Inter-American Foundation Grassroots Development Fellowship, New Jersey Minority Academic Career Fellowship, and Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (honorable mention), and is an alumna of The Philips Academy Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers.
Dr. Williams served as chair of the Workshops Committee of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology for three years and is a past member of the Graduate Career Consortium and the National Postdoctoral Association. Additionally, she is a former Associate Director of Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Scholar Advising at the University of Pennsylvania Career Services. Dr. Williams is a graduate of the Rutgers Business School Entrepreneurship Pioneer Initiative, a nine-month business accelerator.
When she’s not speaking or writing, she’s probably at the gym or on her way to grab an ice cream cone
The Story Behind the Bio, or How I came to Found Beyond the Tenure Track
People often ask me how I came to be an entrepreneur of professional development and a career coach for academics. Given that I have a PhD in Cultural Anthropology, I “should” be a professor or at least working in international development somewhere. Well, like any life/career story this one has some twists and turns, so sit tight and grab a cup of tea because this is the story behind the story. If you want the official (read: “professional”) bio, click here.
The Nagging Question
I had been on the academic job market for about two years when I began to question whether or not academia was for me. I really liked the people I met at the campus where I’d received a nationally awarded postdoc offer. The location was great – I have family that lives about an hour away—the location was conducive to writing, and the package I had been offered was complete with faculty development support and a very manageable teaching load. It was the best scenario for a junior scholar, but for some reason, I felt like I needed to try something new.
Get the whole story here.
