Susan Basalla May
Managing Associate
email: May@artsci.com
phone: 410 377-7880 x11
Susan Basalla May, managing associate and project director, is co-author of So What Are You Going to Do With That?: A Guide to Career-Changing for M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s. The book was based on two years of research and hundreds of interviews with students, faculty and administrators. Ms. May is a columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education and has been a guest speaker at Yale University, Brown University, Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, University of Kansas, University of Delaware and others.
Education
- B.A, English, Bucknell University
- Ph.D., English, Princeton University
More About Susan
Susan always knew that she would spend her life on college campuses, but she thought it would be as a professor. She grew up in the college town of Newark, Delaware, and remembers learning the word “esoteric” at the dinner table. Her father, a retired history of science professor, met her mother in the Harvard library.
Susan earned her Ph.D. in English at Princeton University, writing her dissertation on Zora Neale Hurston’s fictionalization of her own anthropological fieldwork. Although Susan enjoyed both research and teaching, she decided halfway through graduate school that she was more of a fox than a hedgehog. She began researching careers for Ph.D.’s outside of academia while finishing her degree, and cold-called dozens of graduate alumni to ask for advice.
Talking with Ph.D.’s who worked in careers ranging from private investigator to midwife inspired her to write a career guide for academics called So What Are You Going to Do With That?: Finding Careers Outside of Academia. The book was published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in 2000 and issued in a revised edition by University of Chicago Press in 2007. The book was based on two years of research and hundreds of interviews with graduate students, faculty and administrators. Susan has been a contributor to the “Outside the Ivory Tower” column in the Chronicle of Higher Education since 2002 and has given talks about alternative careers at universities around the country.
In addition to her work with graduate students over the years, Susan developed her own career in journalism, communications and new media. She did research for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, wrote marketing materials for Washington, D.C. think tanks, covered medical technology news for a trade publication, and developed content and email marketing strategies for The Motley Fool and America Online.
Since joining Art & Science in 2004, Susan has taken a particular interest in trying to understand and work effectively within the culture of each campus she visits. She also enjoys the challenge of translating quantitative findings into practical, relevant advice.
