The Alt-Ac Job Beat Newsletter Post 1 2023-10-10

Hi Everyone,

So I have chatted with many of you over the past few weeks and given job advice (see this blog post for background). Currently in my process, I am reaching out to various private and public sector agencies to see if I can get formal recruiting contracts into place. (Mea culpa for adding you to this list without permission, you can respond with unsubscribe to this email and I will take you off the list, no hard feelings! I have added many professors I think it would be good to forward to PhD students as well.)

In the meantime though, I am going to start a newsletter. This newsletter will provide example job opportunities I come across, give pieces of advice, and highlight other individuals with similar backgrounds to folks in this group (mostly CJ PhDs) who have various tech jobs. No promises, but I hope to send out a letter every other week. (Easier than me sending texts to y'all when I identify new opportunities.) And you can feel free to forward this friends (it is open to all, if requested I will add whomever to the list.)

JOBS

I am going to keep a spreadsheet of job opportunities I come across in this spreadsheet.

For this round, will point out three opportunities:

Don't discount "Analyst" jobs in your search, you can see that they are starting to have very nice salaries, and typically have fewer coding requirements (more SQL and experience with Dashboard tech like Tableau).

Note I will send jobs outside of CJ (dashboard/analyst jobs it doesn't really matter the subject matter, if you have a PhD you have the quant skills to do those roles). And I will send jobs some may think "I don't know if that is ethical" (the checkr here). The beauty of AltAc is that there are many more opportunities than CJ/Crim professor gigs, you can personally be picky.

EXAMPLE SCIENTIST

Companies like Deloitte also have software writing divisions that are very similar to SteamPunk. Check out Amber Askey's career (PhD from Temple), who has one of those positions.

TECH ADVICE

Natural Language Processing is currently in vogue due to ChatGPT, but there actually are not very many generative AI applications in practice. I suggest checking out the python library simpletransformers, in particular named-entity-recognition and text classification, for a simpler introduction to help you get started with more realistic natural language processing tasks that have wider applications.

Best, Andy Wheeler