HWW Alumni Board Spotlight: Kei Hotoda
Meet Kei Hotoda, Program Coordinator at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Philosophy Department.
As a current member of HWW's alumni board, Kei consults with the HWW PI and staff on future workshop designs and other programming. Kei attended HWW's Career Diversity Summer Workshop in 2015.
Describe Humanities Without Walls in 1-2 sentences.
Humanities Without Walls provides full support for PhD students in their search for professional development and career opportunities outside of the tenure-track. The program provides both concrete advice about how to navigate a non-academic job search while also providing social and emotional space and support for what can be a complicated or difficult transition from academia to non-academic career paths.
What is one thing you learned at the HWW workshop that impacted your life?
HWW taught me to trust that I have valuable knowledge, skills, insight, and work experience to successfully navigate a non-academic job search.
What advice do you have for workshop participants?
Talk to all of your fellows as much as possible, learning about both their research and aims for post-doc career paths and their relationship with one another. The way they approach their job searches can be helpful in newly orienting your way of thinking about your approach to your job search or more generally, your professional development path. The reverse may be true as well!
Take up the informational interview assignments and don't be afraid of them! You can always start small by talking to friends and family in different fields you might be interested in and work your way towards reaching out to people you don't know directly for more information. You may have more comfort talking to people you know, or someone you know knows, but you have less to lose the closer to "cold-calling" organizations and their representatives you don't know.
What was the most memorable part of the HWW workshop?
To be honest, the most concrete, memorable part of the HWW workshop was finding out about a Belgian bakery that made really wonderful croissants nearby from another fellow. I still go to that bakery when I am downtown, which usually means I walk near the building where we had our workshops, and this means I am filled with warm, fuzzy feelings about the workshop. So in a word, the location was very memorable!