As someone who recently graduated from a history program and took a “nonacademic” position, I was particularly pleased to see the AHA’s recent move to enable historians to explore jobs outside academia. During my last years in graduate school, I was starved for opportunities to have honest conversations with my colleagues about career options beyond the ivory tower. Mostly I feared I would be labeled as defector, or worse, an inferior student. While I never found an open dialogue with my colleagues in graduate school, I was pleasantly surprised to see it happening on our social media platforms in the last few weeks. Spurred by our announcement a few weeks ago of a new member benefit, Versatile PhD, we received a number of tweets—some positive, and some critical. While I was not planning to write a follow-up post to the announcement, I found the conversation around Versatile PhD important enough to share with our readers, using Storify- a virtual storyboard.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.