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 Through my work, I’ve had the opportunity to coach and train hundreds of academics to greater career success both within and outside of the academy. I’ve also consulted academics who were interested in starting their own full-time businesses. My goal in starting [...]

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, and a competitive salary. (Did I mention that the university was located near my family, which would make visiting my mom and aging grandparents so much easier?)  Still, something about moving forward in academia didn’t feel right. I felt like I wouldn’t [...]

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 Cultural Anthropology graduate student to a consultant to national philanthropies and government agencies with contracts upwards of $30,000 each. I’m not at all surprised by this influx of entrepreneurial interest. While some readers who follow my business may think that I’m solely [...]