Hosted by Bloom Funding
This fall, we will be featuring blog posts written by PhD students who participated in Career Services’ Career Exploration Fellowship (CEF), a program that helps doctoral candidates explore their career interests through networking opportunities with advanced degree professionals. Click here to learn more about CEF.
As I neared the end of my PhD, after spending over five years pursuing research on international human rights of vulnerable migrants in precarious contexts, I found myself with a clear understanding of what I wanted for a career beyond research and outside of academia, but unsure of how to navigate translating my skills, experience, and commitment to my past work to new contexts. I considered careers in nonprofit development, consulting, and higher education administration—and found the Career Exploration Fellowship and one of the Fellowship’s hosts, Dr. Maria Murphy at Bloom Funding, who just so happened to have experience with all three of those fields.
Maria’s mentorship has been invaluable. In our meetings, though her experience as a scholar and educator was in an entirely different field at Penn—in Musicology, while I study Political Science—her guidance and our deep discussion of our academic experiences and goals helped me better understand how I could best pursue my future career in three ways: first, Maria guided me through how I could frame my extensive research, program development, and teaching experience to fit multiple career paths. Her professional experience in the consulting, nonprofit, and university worlds gave me clear, practical advice on how my past experience applies in different contexts. Beyond our conversation and the contacts across these fields whom she introduced me to, she also generously provided me with examples of her own on how to frame my academic career. Our conversations led me to better understand how valuable our skill sets as researchers and educators are in other environments, and her generosity in sharing her own practical experiences helped me prepare as I began applications and interviews.
Second, Maria gave me a window to what the sustainability and nonprofit consulting world looks and sounds like through working on a sustainability course for SMEs. Though my work at Penn has allowed me to lead multiple research projects in international relations and human rights, and to work on projects examining climate and international development in particular, my experience on the practical side of environmental sustainability and development has been limited. The project I worked on with Maria helped me better understand how I can share my skill set with clients and make my knowledge more accessible to a non-academic audience.
Finally, my fellowship experience with Maria helped me better understand what kind of professional community I want to join and invest in: an environment that is built upon advocacy and shared mission. My academic career has always been justice-oriented—I decided to dedicate six years of my life to the study of international relations, human rights, and conflict in the pursuit of justice, and I found that I shared that goal with Maria, who also came to study sustainability from a climate justice lens.
I am immensely grateful to Maria and Bloom Funding as my hosts and to the Career Exploration Fellowship for providing me the environment in which I could push myself to think beyond the academic context and to see clearly how valuable my work would be for the consulting, nonprofit, and higher education worlds, through the work that Maria has done moving through all three. Maria’s insights and her work at Bloom Funding directed me in how to identify opportunities that will satisfy my moral ambition just as much as my professional ambition.
