In this week's episode, we talk with Dr. M Adryael Tong, Dr. Craig Gallagher, and Dr. Matt Luckett about their experiences with the phenomena of academic coaching. For the uninitiated, academic coaching is a service that you pay for to have a professional look over your application documents–your CV, your cover letter, your research statement–and offer you tips and strategies for improving those documents. Academic coaches can also be hired to give you one on one interview prep. 
What interested us about this now growing sector of academia is the fact that the services offered by the academic coach are in theory something that graduate students should be able to access for free within their own institutions, either through working with their advisor or utilizing the resources on campus. Why are academics paying someone for personalized coaching? Is the training they are getting really worth the cost?
In part 1 of this episode, we will start to investigate the answers to these questions. We discuss some of the reasons why academic coaching exists, the way in which it tries to fill a void in academia, but also the ways that it can be predatory and harmful to the very people it claims to help.

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