Stanford EdCareers, the career resources center at the GSE, has released its annual report statistics summarizing the placement status of the GSE’s 2012 graduates. All 225 graduates received a placement survey from EdCareers three months after their graduation in June 2012. From the total class, 96 percent, or 216 graduates, responded with completed surveys.  GSE contributor Amy Yuen sat down with Nereyda Salinas, director of Stanford EdCareers, to discuss the findings, and to hear her thoughts on the evolving career needs and concerns of GSE students and alums.

Q: The past few years haven’t been great economically, and the education field has been especially hit hard. But the latest survey results show that our 2012 graduates are faring well in the job market, with 91.6 percent finding employment within six months of graduation, and 91.9 percent of those employed working at an education-related organization. Why do you think they’re doing so well?

Nereyda Salinas: I think you have to start with the high quality of our graduate programs. For people wanting to make an impact in the field of education, our graduate programs are very alluring. Once they’re here, faculty and staff work tirelessly to expose students to both academic and professional opportunities.  We try to scaffold theoretical and applied learning experiences to help students learn about the field and decide where and how they want to create their impact. The MA program directors and PhD faculty advisors, in particular, really help affirm our students’ commitment to the education field, and they all take their roles in preparing education leaders very seriously.

I think it’s important to acknowledge the role of internships, too.  Nearly 60 percent of our MA students participate in an internship, and last year over 25 percent of them said that their internship directly or indirectly led to their final placement.  If you’re trying to explore a new field or build relationships within an industry or company, an internship can be very valuable.

Certainly, Stanford GSE has a strong reputation and many of our alumni and their professional colleagues come back to recruit our students. In addition, however, we invest significant time in helping our students articulate their passions, contributions, and interests to their growing professional network through informational interviewing and networking opportunities.

I was particularly struck with how well the STEP grads have been doing. Ninety-four percent of the 2012 STEP grads accepted positions as classroom teachers. I thought that the job market has been especially tough for new teachers. Is this changing? 

NS: The teaching job market really varies depending on the type of school — whether it’s private, public, or public-charter — and the specific school district that students want to work in.  What really helps our STEP graduates is that employers know they can expect excellent teaching from Day One, so they seek them out.  Superintendents and district offices contact us early in the year because they want to make sure they register for our recruiting events.  There’s been such heavy recruiting by some schools — Sequoia High in Redwood City, Hillsdale High in San Mateo, and East Palo Alto Charter School, for example — that they’ve hired a critical mass of STEP alumni who are helping to transform not just their classrooms, but the entire school.  STEP also has a strong alumni network. Many STEP alumni come back to recruit STEP graduates because they know first-hand that our teacher candidates can deliver high-quality education.

Given STEP’s quality and reputation and the strength of its alumni network, every STEP graduate who wants a teaching job gets one.  The very small number of students who aren’t teaching in classrooms choose other vocations such as home schooling children with special needs or launching educational start-ups.

What general trends are you seeing for MA and PhD grads in terms of the industries and the types of jobs that they’re landing?

NS: We’ve only begun to capture data for the graduating classes for the past two years, so it’s difficult to identify real trends yet. But what I have noticed from the 2011 and 2012 annual reports is that our MA and PhD students are pursuing significantly diverse organizations and industries. Our students come from all over the world and form unique career visions, so when they’re considering where they want to go after their graduate studies, we try to work with them to find the right organizations that match their career interests.

Our most recent report shows that our 216 students were hired by more than 140 organizations. This speaks to the growing number of educational organizations around the world that attract our graduates. I think it also shows that it’s an exciting time for the education field. New organizations and new initiatives within traditional organizations are being created every day, and we’re seeing new perspectives on pedagogy, and the incorporation of technology on all levels of the learning spectrum.

One interesting side note to mention is that our MA, non-STEP students who pursue start-ups have more than doubled from eight to 18.4 percent.  More students are choosing to work in new organizations or start their own, which isn’t surprising given the Stanford-wide infrastructure that supports student-led entrepreneurial initiatives.  Two organizations that come to mind from the class of 2012 are Go Go Games and Haystack. Go Go games was founded by three LDT (Learning, Design and Technology) masters graduates who wanted to create learning games for autistic children on the iPad. Haystack.edu was created by a joint MA/MBA grad who wanted to empower teachers to find the right schools given their career interests.

How do you work with PhD students who are facing an extremely tough academic job market?

NS: When I came on board in March 2012, the main mandate for our office was to serve the masters students.  Throughout this past academic year, however, we found a number of doctoral students expressing the need to establish some baseline career support to complement the support they received from their faculty advisors. We hosted a focus group with the students in May and have begun a number of initiatives that we hope will help them in their academic job searches. These initiatives include creating panels, one-pagers, lists of helpful books — essentially, an institutional memory bank of lessons learned that resides in the EdCareers database, from already hired doctoral students who want to share their knowledge with students entering the market.  We are also creating a separate section on our website under the “Employers (Academic)” tab so that these employers can more easily find our doctoral students who are on the academic job market.

We also need to strengthen connections between the GSE alumni community and our students. It helps our students to have the annual data on last year’s graduates and where they went, but this is a very recent perspective. EdCareers has launched an initiative with the Dean’s Office to better understand where our alumni are now and what they’re doing. I strongly believe that this type of information will be invaluable to all of our students, particularly our doctoral students, as they try to connect with GSE alumni who may be working in the very institutions where they are applying. So much of the job search — whether it’s academic or professional — is about finding the right opportunity, ensuring a fair read of your application, and securing insights on the inside culture of an organization and how well you’re going to fit there. 

A common perception among students in the fall is that career services is something that can wait until they’re closer to graduation. What is EdCareers’ approach to working with master’s students from the start of their GSE experience?

NS: As early as Admit Weekend, we introduce to students the four components of the EdCareers coaching model: Know yourself, know the landscape, know the players, and know your game plan. Before they arrive on campus, we ask incoming students to think long and hard about who they are and what they want to accomplish at Stanford — even if this differs from what was stated on their admissions application. We facilitate this through a series of exercises and book suggestions. Once they’ve completed their own reflective work, we’re here to meet with them to discuss their unique career visions and possible career paths.

In the fall, we introduce them to the career landscape through a series of workshops as well as an internship fair. Informational interviewing is a key part of a successful job search, and we coach them on how to do this and how to create opportunities where they can exercise their skills and learn the landscape.  Winter quarter is really focused on helping them communicate their career visions to others in a way that doesn’t feel forced or rigid.  The end goal is that they feel comfortable articulating who they are, what they have to offer, and where they want to make their impact. Once the first three steps are completed, we help them with the nuts and bolts of actually applying to jobs — putting together a resume and cover letter, preparing for interviews, and so on — through a series of workshops and career fairs that we and our campus partners offer.

For GSE alums who find themselves back on the job market after being employed for a long period of time, what kinds of challenges do they encounter as they learn to navigate the new career landscape?

NS: One of the challenges they may encounter is the surprising number of educational organizations that have become part of the landscape over the last 10 years.  There has been a surge of new organizations from all sectors into the education field, so it can be quite a challenge to familiarize themselves with all of these organizations as they start thinking about their next steps. One way we try to help alumni is through our EdCareers database, where alumni can view over 1,500 organizational profiles. We register an average of over 50 new organizations a month and feature over 150 new job postings a month.

We plan to improve how our alumni connect with each other, given that alumni networks are an invaluable asset. We’re working on a few initiatives, so definitely keep an eye out for more info coming soon on our website.

Your own career has focused on building programs and organizations that help individuals realize their full potential, especially those committed to high-quality, accessible learning.  Can you share with us the best career advice that you’ve received?

One of my favorite pieces of career advice involves career transitions.  When you find yourself transitioning from one position to another, force yourself to take some time to ask yourself, “What am I most proud of in my last role?  What did I not do as well as I wish I had?  What skills did I wish I learned that were necessary in that role, but that I never quite mastered?”  Steal a moment and write your responses out in a journal, a laptop, wherever. We live in a very fast paced world that doesn’t encourage a lot of room for reflection and the pace is only accelerated when we try to honorably leave one role and take on another with zeal.  If we don’t carve out the time to reflect, however, we may lose out on the most important “to do”: the personal growth that takes place within you.

Amy Yuen contributes frequently to the GSE website and publications.