Beyond Graduate Studies

Beyond Graduate Studies

With the expertise they gain at UC Davis, graduate students go on to pursue successful careers across diverse fields. Many of them credit the post-grad opportunities they’ve secured to the variety of available teaching positions and strong pedagogical training offered by the department. Such were the experiences of Ashley Sarpong (‘21) and Michael Mlekoday (‘22). Starting a tenure-track position at California State University, Stanislaus this fall after wrapping up her time as a Yale University Presidential Visiting Fellow, Sarpong ties her job market success to teaching experiences that gave her the opportunity to experiment with course materials and devise curricular goals. Mlekoday felt similarly. In the interview process for private high school positions, they felt confident in their ability to articulate pedagogical practices across a diversity of courses. Now, as an 11th- and 12th-grade English teacher at Charles Wright Academy in Tacoma, WA, Mlekoday finds that the student-centered teaching approach they cultivated in UC Davis’s English Department made them an excellent fit for the job. 

Likewise, Sophia Bamert (‘21), who recently joined Brooklyn College as a Lecturer in Composition, highlights the teaching experience she gained through a special exchange program between the English Department at UCD and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz, Germany. Her teaching at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies in Mainz, along with her work as an instructor at UCD, were assets in her search for teaching-focused positions, helping her secure a postdoctoral fellowship in the Engagements Core Curriculum at the University of Virginia, where she will develop new liberal arts courses based on her research interests and hone her expertise in teaching first-year students. 

Alongside teaching, graduate students engage in community-oriented activities that align with their academic and professional interests. Ph.D. Candidate Jonathan Radocay ('23), a citizen of Cherokee Nation, served as the Spokesperson and Communications Director for the Cherokees of Northern Central Valley as he wrote his dissertation which “reconceputalizes Cherokee storytelling forms that emerged from the allotment and privatization of Cherokee lands during the early 20th century around place-based, Indigenous environmental and geospatial practices, counter-geographies, and geographic knowledges.” Radocay will start as a tenure track Assistant Professor in the University of Washington English Department this fall. He was drawn to the job because he felt the department would support his efforts to sustain his relationships with the Cherokee Nation and other Indigenous communities through community-based research projects. 

Kristin George Bagdanov (‘22) and Ben Kossak (‘19) sought post-graduate careers that valued both the subject matter knowledge and skills they cultivated at UC Davis. Before landing a position as Editorial Associate at Duke University Press, Kossak got experience with the acquisitions process by working with English Professor Elizabeth Freeman as managing editor of the journal GLQ and by interning at MIT Press. And as Bagdanov finished up her dissertation on nuclear poetics, she interned with the Building Decarbonization Coalition (BDC), which seeks to direct the current energy transition away from fossil fuels. She used her expert knowledge of the historical relationship between energy transitions, cultural production, and social movements to guide her work with the organization. Bagdanov now works full-time as the BDC’s Manager of Policy Research and Knowledge Sharing, where she collaborates with organizations across the country to get fossil fuels out of buildings by doing educational work and research-based writing. 

To help connect graduate students to careers like these, the department provides multiple forms of support. For instance, the Beyond Graduate Studies group, led this year by Professors Kathleen Frederickson and Matthew Vernon, connects job-seeking graduate students with one another and helps them with the application process by reading materials and conducting mock interviews and job talks. In addition, the English Graduate Students Association’s Scholar Symposium committee regularly facilitates professional development workshops. In March, PhD students and co-chairs Grace Hayes and George Hegarty organized the panel “On and Beyond the Job Market” to give current students a chance to connect with recent alumni. Current students are encouraged to use resources like these throughout their time in the program to explore future career opportunities.