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Supporting Ph.D. career diversity is increasingly common at many research-focused universities. Yet career support for international Ph.D. students and postdocs remains challenging. Historical data show that at least seven out of 10 international doctoral students of all disciplines intend to stay in the United States after graduation. But close to 40 percent of current doctoral students and 53 percent of postdocs in STEM and social sciences do not hold permanent status in this country.
International students make up almost 35 percent of the Ph.D. population in the United States, and that number will probably only increase in the coming years given the looming enrollment cliff and projected decrease in numbers of domestic students. The ability to support and advance international scholars will be a key differentiator in attracting future global talent to U.S. institutions.
Thus, higher education institutions increasingly need to take new approaches to meet the diverse career needs of such scholars. In this article, we will present the reality facing international Ph.D.s who are looking for job opportunities in the United States, the existing institutional structures and efforts to support such students, and a new model that can help both educators and emerging scholars advance career development initiatives on many campuses.
The Current Reality
If they want to work in the United States, international Ph.D.s often know well ahead of graduation about the immigration restrictions they must deal with. The most common approach they take for successfully transitioning from a student/scholar visa to an eligible employment status is to have an employer sponsor their work visa. But jobs with sponsorship are limited and competitive.
International Ph.D.s entering the job market must also understand the American workplace culture as well as any organizational differences that may affect the application process and their chances of securing the job. What’s more, this particular Ph.D. population experiences all the stressors facing their domestic counterparts—namely, the uncertainty of one’s career possibilities and anxiety about succeeding on the job market.
With this backdrop, many individuals of such backgrounds often feel pressured to make life decisions based on the odds of obtaining and maintaining work authorizations. While common career development advice encourages people to incorporate their values, skills and interests into their decision-making processes, international trainees must often prioritize getting beyond external constraints rather than their personal preferences.
When looking at existing institutional support for international Ph.D.s, we often see two units providing services related to professional development. The first unit is the international student and scholar office on the campus, which typically offers guidance on optional practical training and curricular practical training (two types of work authorization commonly used by international Ph.D.s) and other areas related to policy compliance. The second stream of support often comes from career development and education services. Depending on the structure of a particular institution, either the main university career center or a separate unit located at a graduate school or office provides these services. Where campus support exists for international Ph.D.s, it is often uncoordinated between those two offices or units. Such organizational structures result in limited engagement when international trainees have to seek out different sources to piece together information necessary for their future advancement.
Over all, international Ph.D.s tend to feel rather pessimistic when thinking about their future. Meanwhile, those working in university offices can find supporting international scholars difficult. Career professionals often get immigration-related questions as Ph.D.s try to figure out their work eligibility; international advisers frequently receive career-related questions as Ph.D.s encounter jobs in different sectors, which further complicates one’s immigration prospect. What’s more, rarely do those different offices have the bandwidth or resources to focus on long-term career or immigration planning, which limits campus efforts to focusing on the immediate job search rather than comprehensive, long-term guidance that considers each scholar’s evolving needs over time.
Needed: A Novel Approach
We acknowledge the challenging reality facing both international scholars and campus educators. Yet too many international Ph.D.s continue to embark on the post-Ph.D./postdoc life with limited knowledge of how to navigate their career moves while advancing their goal of legally staying in the U.S. Therefore, it is important for institutions to address these topics in a holistic manner.
We recently designed a series of workshops, the International Ph.D. Career Readiness Series, to deal with many of the difficult issues we’ve described. By sharing information about them, we hope help career educators at more universities will be able to better support the international Ph.D. community.
We intentionally designed the workshops to provide career-preparation strategies for international Ph.D. candidates and postdocs in the United States. They include best practices on navigating the career landscape and how to prepare the professional immigration portfolios needed to find employment and stay in the country long term. Both of us authors, Priya and Yi, immigrated to the United States for our doctoral education and share the lived experiences of international Ph.D.s and immigrants. Having navigated personal, career and immigration transitions ourselves, we actively use our knowledge of international scholars and expertise on career development in our respective roles as professional development educators. In the workshop series we offer, we help international Ph.D.s and postdocs:
- Focus on the ideal career instead of the sponsorship. Our series explains the nuances of navigating the job search from an international scholar’s perspective. It emphasizes how scholars can continue to explore career options and search for jobs without letting visas take over. This teaches them to approach career development, in some ways, more similarly to their domestic peers, so that they can simply follow their passion, values and interests. Instead of focusing only on jobs with explicit sponsorships, we provide strategies for navigating both the open and the hidden job markets (that is, the roughly 70 percent of jobs employers never advertise or publish publicly) while utilizing international candidates’ unique strengths and transferable skills. The series educates international scholars on how work visa sponsorship works and how they can advocate for themselves with employers who are less knowledgeable about hiring international employees.
- Celebrate multiculturalism while unpacking the U.S. workplace culture. We dedicate a session to uncovering the unstated shared values and belief systems in the U.S. workplace that trainees should be aware of and providing tips to improve intercultural fluency. This session empowers scholars on how their cultural intelligence can be an asset to creating incredible workplace synergies and removes a self-imposed deficit mindset. Individuals with non-U.S. backgrounds can understand and value diversity and bring different perspectives, experiences and skills to the workplace, leading to increased innovation and creativity.
- Develop immigration portfolios and look to the future. Finally, in line with another “Carpe Careers” article on the importance of educating graduate students on building successful immigration portfolios to secure the proper pathways for long-term permanent status, we explain the evaluation criteria and guide students on organizing these dossiers. Preparing an immigration portfolio is like building a network—it takes time, effort and knowledge. The session includes specifics on how to use one’s professional development activities to create a portfolio by prioritizing activities that satisfy the immigration criteria for substantial merit or extraordinary abilities, the two most common work-based permanent residency pathways. A forward-looking immigration approach will also help increase international scholars’ ability to navigate career transitions in diverse fields.
Many institutions have some programs run through different central offices focusing on work visa options for international students, résumé building, internship opportunities and more. However, our goal is to consolidate those efforts under one umbrella so students can have a one-stop shop for their career needs and don’t have to coordinate with several offices to understand their options when making crucial decisions.
We also developed the International Ph.D. Career Readiness series with the expectation that anyone with a career-development background and passion to support international scholars could offer it at their own university. The materials are adaptable and can be integrated into any existing offerings an institution may have. The content could also be repurposed for different occasions—such as onboarding and orientation, individual development plan appointments, and any workshops the international offices or career and professional development services provide. With continuing feedback from participants and colleagues, we hope to make the series increasingly robust and to give international Ph.D. students and postdocs the information and confidence they need to succeed over the course of their professional trajectories.
