On 19 January 2016, the inaugural event of the BHGS series Meet the Alumni was held. Four former BGHS doctoral researchers - Gleb J. Albert, Ruben Quaas, Li Sun and Anna Zaytseva - from Berlin, Delft, Detmold and Zurich - shared about their career paths after graduation and conversed with the current doctoral researchers at the BGHS about possible prospects ‘after’ their disputation.
In discussion with Melanie Eulitz, responsible for the alumni work at the BGHS office, they talked about their time at the BGHS, their expectations and plans for the future, and the challenges of a future academic career.

 
Panel with Alumni of the BGHS (from left to right): Ruben Quaas, Melanie Eulitz, Anna Zaytseva, Li Sun und Gleb J. Albert.      Picture: Thomas Abel /BGHS

Academic Career
Li Sun is now, after her successful graduation in 2012, working as a Postdoc at Delft University of Technology and investigates land policy in China. She informed the participants how international networks and presentations at international conferences helped her to get this job.
Gleb J. Albert is, after his graduation in 2015, a research assistant at the History Department of the University of Zurich. He is currently working on his habilitation thesis on Mimetic Gift Economy in Network Society: A Global History of Software Piracy as Subculture, 1980-1995. The title of his postdoctoral project shows what kind of new research perspectives can be developed after graduation. As a graduate student at the BGHS Gleb Albert wrote a work on the revolution in the early Soviet Union, the focus of his research now lays on contemporary history.

 
Alumni of the BGHS (from left to right): Anna Zaytseva, Li Sun und Gleb J. Albert.      Picture: Thomas Abel /BGHS

Non-academic career
After his doctorate in 2014, Ruben Quaas decided against an academic career and is now an instructor for fair trade Church Development Service Brot für die Welt. Thus he directly established a connection between his occupation and his dissertation Fairtrade - A global-local history using the example of the coffee and his passion for coffee. He stressed that, even if such a career is impossible to plan, it is immensely motivating to follow your own interests, to look for something suitable or for something suitable finding you.
Even before her Ph.D., Anna Zaytseva planned a non-academic career. Shortly after her graduation in 2011 she started working at the University of East Westphalia-Lippe in advising how to start up a business. Additionally she offers workshops for start-ups and prepares herself for her self-employment.

This variety of different career paths after graduation within and outside the academic system in Germany and abroad, portrayed by the BGHS alumni, generated a lively discussion with the doctoral researchers of the BGHS about such matters as: Should I, after my dissertation, pursuit an academic path? and: When should I decide which way to go?

The series ‘Meet the Alumni' will continue in the summer term 2016.
For further information about the over 100 doctoral researchers who have successfully completed their doctorates at the BGHS since 2008, please see: www.uni-bielefeld.de/bghs/Personen/Alumni/

Further information about the guests of the first Meet the Alumni event (Titles of their dissertation projects and links to their Alumni profiles):

• Gleb J. Albert: Das Charisma der Weltrevolution. Revolutionärer Internationalismus in der frühen Sowjetgesellschaft (Alumni Profile)
• Ruben Quaas: Fair Trade - Eine global-lokale Geschichte am Beispiel des Kaffees (Alumni Profile)
• Li Sun: Making a Claim or Not - Migrant Workers' Coping Strategies under Policy Intervention in China (Alumni Profile)
• Anna Zaytseva: The Emergence and Interdependence of Work Norms: An Example of International Hotels in Russia and Germany (Alumni Profile)

Authors: Melanie Eulitz, Thomas Abel (BGHS)