“Karen is a fearless visionary and her confidence is contagious. I was in despair as an adjunct on maternity leave when the pandemic shut down my options. She brought me back into the job market in 48 hours by helping me apply for an admin role. When I got the interview, she made time to run a mock interview with me. Her intervention saved the day. After my anxieties surfaced, her empathetic and strategic debriefing built my confidence for the real interview. I GOT THE JOB! And channeling Karen, advocated for a salary increase.
I have never met an expert as smart or as helpful as Karen. Sho brings ALL of her administrative, academic, and coaching experience to working with you. She helped me think critically and optimistically about my search and re-envisioned my profile holistically. I’m in awe that my professional persona now captures who I really am. After Karen, I will no longer settle for work that does not feel authentic and valorizing. As a minority and interdisciplinary scholar, I never thought I could compete with such confidence and competence. Karen’s insight and care was truly transformative!”
“I took advantage of Karen’s “quick fix coaching” when I needed candid insight on a managerial issue. 30 minutes later, I’d had a leadership tune-up! She asked great questions and got right to the heart of the matter. I will never forget her answer to my lament that maybe I just need to grow a thick skin: “we don’t need to be impervious as leaders to hurt or feedback, but after being pierced we can heal the ‘skin’ of our experience through compassionate, responsive action.” I left with a toolkit of productive steps and follow-up inquiries. Karen has such a gift for empowering clear and courageous leadership.
—Career Development Executive
Your polished draft of your book chapter on interviewing was so, so helpful. Especially combined with our mock interview! I did a better job of answering questions fluidly, with the right tone throughout. They asked how I worked with shifting priorities and how I’ve dealt with feedback or a setback, so our preparation was apt. Your help was *essential* and I feel way more prepared to be fantastic in the next interview, whoever it is with.”
“Before I came to Karen I’d spent 7 years psyching myself out of a job search. I was a tenured full professor at a SLAC—in the Humanities, this is the brass ring, right?—feeling a peculiar mix of shame and fear. I was grateful for the job but it wasn’t enough, and as a middle-aged woman who’d invested most of her energies into teaching and service (vs. scholarly stardom) I felt like a cliche. I had a lot of relevant expertise, but felt simultaneously over-qualified and under-qualified for virtually everything that caught my eye, in and out of academe.
Karen translated my 17-page CV into a 2-page resume that became a touchstone as well as a tool—clarifying the version of myself I wanted to be next. During our sessions and mock interviews she helped me find the focus and courage I needed to seek, and find, a new job in a new region.
My life feels like an adventure again. The position is off the tenure track, and it feels remarkably fine—liberating, even—to see myself as a more strategic and and flexible professional.”
“Karen is amazing. I can’t say enough good things. I hired her for a package editing my fellowship application and found her to be a superb editor and consultant with a fantastic eye for detail. Karen not only brushes up your language but provides conceptual development, looking deeply into thematic preoccupations. She is professional, knowledgeable in her craft, down-to-earth and friendly. Her help has made me a better writer and a competitive applicant: I got the fellowship! I highly recommend her to everyone I know.”
“Karen is a highly requested, experienced, successful coach with a unique background that bridges the academic and Alt/Out ac, with extensive career coaching and advising experience, plus hands-on skills at helping you conceptualize and write your application documents. Most of all, she deeply understands “higher values”—i.e. that your work needs to have meaning, and is an expression of your larger aspirations in life and in the world. Karen knows this isn’t just a job search: it’s a re-evaluation of your sense of self, and deepest values. ”
Since 2019 I have had the pleasure of collaborating with Karen to create spaces for academics to share significant decision points in their professional journeys. From editing to event management, she brings a creative and expansive vision to designing content and convenings. Karen’s close-reading, editing, and publishing expertise was critical to creating our polished essay collection, Higher Education Careers Beyond the Professoriate. Demonstrating her project management and leadership skills, I watched her curate a series of well-received events to build meaningful conversations around the book’s central ideas. Always focused on our agency and capacity for change, Karen has a gift for weaving together the big picture and the details, blending thoughtful planning and agile improvisation while connecting broad issues with specific practices.
As with her coaching, Karen is an encouraging, generous, empathetic, and insightful teammate who brings out the best in everyone. I was facing a difficult career decision when I had the good fortune to work with Karen as a professional coach. I needed to make a big change but felt like I was stumbling in the dark and unsure which direction was forward. After just two coaching sessions, I felt more confident in my internal compass of values, strengths, and interests. With Karen’s deep listening, outside-the-box reframing, and grounded, empathetic presence, I gave myself permission to “begin again” on an uncharted path with renewed courage and sense of agency.
-Katie Kearns, Collections Specialist, Professional Development Hub (pd|hub) (January 2025)
“What a relief to talk to someone who understands PhDs AND has expertise in both ac and non-ac applications! Karen helped me reinvent my professional self. I had the limited mindset that I “should” become a professor, and that I only knew my dissertation topic. Karen outright told me to delete “should” from my dictionary and gave me the courage to explore who I really am. She is truly an expert whose insights cut across fields. My applications for academic, private sector, and non-profit roles ranged widely but each was tailored to the industry and presented me as very professional and confident.
Karen really gets to know you: she cares, remembers your details, and sees the gems in your experiences that you take for granted. She is a counselor, cheerleader, and mentor in one. I would regularly write to her for advice as well as a cheerful and calming attitude before an interview. Karen has given me both a new perspective and practical skills. I have more authenticity in my professional development, and have found my own way of decoding job ads and tailoring my materials.
I worked with Karen on 8 applications for tenure-track faculty positions, business consulting firms, and NGOs. I landed a great job with a great salary in international development that suits my interest, background, and level of expertise. Years later, Karen’s help was again essential in helping me land a significant promotion!”
Karen doesn’t only provide thoughtful and humane guidance for PhDs through the higher education careers landscape. She provides hope. My organization was fortunate enough to host a webinar that Karen organized upon the publication of her collection Higher Education Careers beyond the Professoriate, an event (borrowing from contributing author Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli), subtitled “A Constellation of Possibilities.” She illuminates those possibilities with humor, candor, and a humanity we frankly sometimes find lacking in higher education.
Karen’s attention to and practical advice for bringing one’s authentic self to meaningful work, and her ability to inspire, encourage, and support others–particularly those who have been marginalized by higher education–is radical and necessary. She creates opportunities for generative convening, connecting people from a variety of career pathways and honoring diverse trajectories that shape PhDs in varied roles in higher ed, industry, and beyond. Karen walks the walk; her own path has been rich and winding, and she speaks from true, lived experience. Her edited volume is an excellent and essential resource for lifelong career development, and I recommend her with the utmost enthusiasm for speaking events, webinars, and workshops. We are so lucky to have her among us!
--Janine Utell, Modern Language Association
Having worked with Karen at Northeastern University when she was AVP of Career Design and I was Cooperative Education Faculty in the College of Science, I knew she is experienced, dedicated, and visionary in supporting diverse learners in their quest to find fitting work in a fulfilling life. When I moved on to leading professional development at UMass Chan Medical School and saw that Karen had published Higher Education Careers Beyond the Professoriate (HECBP), I invited her to help me bring more visibility to diverse pathways for biomedical PhDs. She quickly designed a 2-part series in Spring 2024, curating two panels on career versatility, featuring contributing authors. She helped coordinate the logistics and generated compelling marketing materials.
The first session illuminated how career paradigms have shifted from a linear track to cultivating multiple options. At the networking lunch afterwards, students asked Karen a range of questions that led to enlightening discussions. The second session over Zoom focused on skills development, job searching, and networking; I saw that Karen’s facilitation skills are just as impressive online. She brought out great insights from everyone while seamlessly responding to questions in the chat. Having received extremely positive feedback on these events, I asked Karen to design a third session in Fall 2024 specifically on careers in scientific communication and administration. In addition to tapping additional HECBP contributors with relevant expertise, she drew upon her network to include role models who have transitioned successfully from bench science into scientific administration, communication, and/or outreach. As an experienced humanities educator, Karen knows that content creation, design, and presentation skills are highly prized in a multimedia landscape. Like the first two, that session showed that STEM PhDs lead to many satisfying outcomes. I recommend Karen’s consulting and program design services highly—she is that rare partner who makes your life easier, not more complicated!
--Lisa Tison-Thomas, Assistant Dean, UMass Chan Medical School
“When I came to Karen I was terrified to take what seemed an impossible leap: to leave my tenured position for a better quality of life for me and my family. After just a few consults, I learned how to think more expansively about work (and life in general), and felt a sense of both possibility and freedom. I learned how to design job materials highlighting the strengths of my unique background, engage in my job search with an open mind, and simply, take action! Each time I felt frozen because of fear or “shoulds,” my exchanges with Karen left me feeling empowered to move forward. Thanks to Karen, I was able to take the leap and relocate while obtaining a new job and vision for my career trajectory moving forward. I feel more self-assured and in control of my own destiny than ever. I truly feel that each time I encounter new “pain points” on this journey, our work together helps me navigate and re-contexualize productively. Thank you for helping me achieve that. ”
“Karen’s prompts sent in advance of the initial consult showed the insights I could expect. Given that I was mentally “stuck,” it helped that she had concrete steps: gather 2-3 appealing job ads. Small, actionable steps helped get the ball rolling. When I had to write the resume and cover letter, she was so good at encouraging me to make changes. The process became smoother and faster. Her analysis of different jobs was also useful. The non-academic world has a different vocabulary for things we do without acknowledgment in the academic CV. This contributes to learned helplessness and the belief that we lack transferable skills and are trapped in a vicious cycle without exit. I had prior exposure to the public sector. But it’s one thing to have those skills and quite another to articulate and translate them. Karen helped me do that and added a nice, human touch to my documents—emotional intelligence, really. I appreciated that about her work.
Karen’s “Building Blocks” method of interview preparation helped me organize my answers into concise, compelling units. As soon as I heard a keyword, I immediately had substantive content to talk about. The technique worked in actual interviews, making me feel calm and collected. And it is effective regardless of the order of questions! Karen also taught me how to handle contingency proactively. For instance, when a reference hadn’t gotten back to me on time, she encouraged me to send in the reference anyway. Grad school has a tendency to make one feel powerless; these expressions of agency increased my confidence. Karen never failed to provide timely, constructive encouragement — she is a dream mentor! ”