The University of Illinois - Chicago

Date: Jul 17 2017
Major: Anthropology (This Major's Salary over time)
For the class of 2006, UIC's Anthropology department was undergoing significant changes and students felt the brunt of it through limited personal and poor career advising. This was a program which was moving away from theory and applied anthropology to archaeology and medical anthropology. My class was during the archaeology and medical anthropology times and it was under an administration facing annual state budget crises while trying to invest in many young faculty. Let me list key issues with the program in my time which may help you understand us and our frustrations and why many of us do not get involved as alumni.

As a small program in a large university, there is potential for personal attention and individualized mentoring. Despite my best efforts, none of that happened for me but it may have happened for others.

The Field Museum relationship program was a benefit for graduate students and not for undergraduates except for maybe five quietly chosen students per class year. Field Museum faculty primarily taught upper-level courses which were for either graduating undergraduates or graduate students. There was no networking at that point for students about to graduate. Also, most undergrads assumed that the program was a back-door to Field Museum work. No. Most Field Museum docents are retired volunteers who can commit to more than two years of work and last-minute scheduling changes during the week days. Most UIC students do not fit that expectation. The average UIC undergrad did not get fast-tracked to a paid (or even volunteer) research assistant position. Museum faculty were mostly unavailable to undergrads.

Most undergraduates should seek internships related to the job they want after graduation. This program did not provide that. A few students took loans to pay for fieldwork trips during the summers. This was not financially possible for most students. The result? Many students would have to leave Anthropology to find a job after graduation. This should be emphasized in all faculty interactions with students.

Undergrads were kept in the dark about most apartment events with very few exceptions. Each class had a few students who quietly won the two (then unadvertised) department scholarships, worked with Museum faculty as paid interns, and went on annual field site projects in ethnography or archaeology. Most undergrads took lecture courses and worked off-campus to pay for groceries while taking growing loans. To learn that there were unadvertised scholarships and that some students had multiple paid fieldwork experiences left multiple students feeling betrayed and bitter.

Take a look at who wins department awards. There could have been a strategy to invest limited department resources into a select few rather than the whole lot.

The arguable lack of significant anthropology career advising was more than disappointing—it was negligent. LAS advisors reasonably seemed to have had little idea about anthropology career guidance and they provided little help, as one would have expected. However, as a department student it was tempting to conclude that the multiple Anthropology undergraduate advisors treated the job as a service to their colleagues rather than to their students. It often seemed that the undergrad advisors were largely hands-off and the saying

I'm not going to hold your hand

was commonly used or expressed to alleviate personal responsibility for students unsure of what to do.

As a result, it was not unusual to meet double majors who found employment related to their second (not Anthropology) major. Many students entered careers in medicine or public health. A few students continued in Anthropology and became contract archaeologists, adjuncts, or professors. It's possible that things have improved since 2006.