You: Part Time Entrepreneur
Over the past two blog posts, I’ve talked to you about my story--the story of an accidental entrepreneur who turned curiosity into a growing business. Today, I provide consulting to individuals and organizations, speak at conferences and at universities, and create professional development products for academics who want to enhance their skills both on and off the tenure track. Most importantly, I live a life that I’ve designed, on my own terms. I’m a full-time entrepreneur. But you don’t have to be. You can experience the same type of fulfillment that I do providing your services part-time. The Academic Entrepreneur [...]
How I Made the Leap to Entrepreneurship
In 2011, I completed my doctorate in Cultural Anthropology with a focus on black political mobilization and black identity formation in Colombia, South America. I’d had a great run in my graduate program, and by most accounts, I was a model graduate student. University and national fellowships. Authorship and co-authorship of publications in leading scholarly journals. Presentations at national and international conferences. A research fellow at the Center for Race and Ethnicity at my university. And, an amazing offer for a postdoctoral fellowship that came with all the bells and whistles – a 1:1 teaching load, faculty development training, mentorship, [...]
How to Use Your Academic Skills to Create the Perfect Side-Hustle
If you’re a regular reader of Beyond the Tenure Track or you read my column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, you know me as the career coach to PhDs. I travel all across the country each year and speak on college campuses to provide career strategy to academics. I also provide one-on-one consulting to clients, build online courses, and author publications to help academics achieve their career goals. As my clients and colleagues have watched my company grow each year, I’ve started to get more questions about my actual business--how I built it and how I’ve gone from a [...]
Cultivating the Skills You Need
A marketable skill-set is not just a matter of maintaining the skills you've developed, but consistently cultivating new key job skills to keep you competitive for jobs and any entrepreneurial projects you may decide to pursue. You've heard it before, "You have the skills you need to do jobs in many sectors whether inside or beyond the academy." Even I've provided training to shine light on the transferable skills you already possess. Still, there may be times you need to enhance the tools in your toolkit. At Beyond the Tenure Track, we believe that you should focus your skills-building. Time and money [...]