The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job
by Karen Kelsky, 2015

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who plans to be on the academic job market in the next 3-5 years. You’ll want to read it early in your academic career to understand the difference between “good lines” on your CV and less valuable ones. You’ll want to re-visit it before applying to understand how to craft excellent job documents and how to prep for interviews.

This book is well-written and very practical. It is from the perspective of a former department chair who now runs her own consulting business to fill in the information gap between what tenured academics know and what grad students don’t.

I would offer one warning to students in business fields: the book is written from the perspective of humanities majors. In those fields, you are often expected to be publishing books and your prospects for academic employment are terrible. Books are not valued in business fields like A-journal publications are. With that in mind, however, the book is still very useful. I will be sharing it with fellow IU Ph.D. students.