So, you have your PhD, the academic world’s your oyster, but teaching jobs, it turns out, are as rare as pearls. Take it from someone who’s been there: your disappointment, approached from a different angle, becomes opportunity. Marshaling hard-earned wisdom tempered with a gentle wit, Rachel Neff brings her own experiences to bear on the problems facing so many frustrated exiles from the groves of academe: how to turn This wasn’t the plan! into Why not?

Fully expecting to be Doctor or Professor Neff someday, Neff instead found herself in the company of the 66 percent of doctoral graduates-more than 35,000 a year-who cannot find a full-time, tenure-track teaching job. In Chasing Chickens, she retraces the steps that took her from her moment of reckoning (aka failure ) to a new way of seeing and grasping success. Each chapter in her pilgrim’s progress along an unlikely career path-whether revealing how she ended up chasing chickens on New Year’s Eve or explaining what happens when a PhD becomes an executive assistant (The Devil Wears Prada with a dash of Portland plaid? Yes, please!)-comes with the benefit of hindsight, lessons as practical as they are entertaining. How to face a fear of No ; how to see the bigger picture; how to find your next career, ace an interview, and stick the landing: with every step, Neff takes the uncertainty and stress out of reinventing yourself, suggests fresh approaches along new directions, and provides the tools for finding, and making, your own way.

Finally, as if enlightenment, guidance, and the occasional moment of hilarity weren’t enough, her book offers every academic itinerant the chance to one day look back and say: At least I didn’t have to chase chickens.