Ten months ago, I bought myself a brown corduroy blazer. With elbow patches. As it settled around my shoulders, I felt a surge of confidence fill me—a knowledge that, while I may look like an utter dweeb, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I took a picture wearing it—a professorial selfie—and shared it with my friends.
Who does that?
It would be so much easier to say goodbye to teaching if I were a jaded curmudgeon, full of bitterness and spite that had curdled my soul into a spiritual Limburger cheese. I could flip the double deuce at the conniving university bureaucrats who had a hand in my exit as I rode off into the sunset. I could cackle at my former coworkers’ misfortune at being stuck in the quagmire of academia, telling myself I’m so much better off now. After two years of throwing myself at over a hundred academic positions and getting the door slammed in my face each time, it would be easier if I hated the university, the students, the professors; the committee-sitting, researching, grading, and especially the weary grind of teaching.
It would be easier if I could blame someone, anyone else for why I’m leaving.
My failure began seven years ago, when, faced with the prospect of an imminent graduation from my college, I decided I wanted to go to grad school. It wasn’t a particularly difficult decision: I had a very high GPA, undergraduate research experience, great recommendations, and a combined GRE of over 1400. I was also majoring in a degree (communication studies) that doesn’t exactly translate into, well, virtually anything outside of the university.
After a brief consultation with my professors and soon-to-be-spouse, I threw myself into the application process with all the enthusiasm and confidence of a man who’d spent 20 years playing life on Easy Mode. The results were what you’d expect: acceptance from each of the four universities to which I’d applied, offers of fellowships and funding.
I chose a five-year MA-PhD program that offered me a stipend, paid health insurance, and free tuition at one of the best universities in the country. I was one of only two graduate students accepted for the fall of 2008.
My first year, I wasn’t allowed to teach. Yes, you read that correctly. I was on a research fellowship at a top-tier research university. Our program was designed so we could get a head start on our Master’s Thesis this way.
This was fine by me. I’d taught some at summer camps during college, and I knew I’d have to lead classes here eventually, but I chose this university because I wanted to do Very Serious Social Scientific Research.
I began my classes, started my research and buckled down to work. I was confident that, when I left, I would be able to find a tenure-track position at any university of my choice. Just like grad school all over again.
That was about the time the economy crashed.
Admissions plummeted. Universities across the country froze tenure lines and cut back on grad student funding as the endowments shrunk.
Good thing I was safe and sound, locked into my five-year contract. Surely the economy would recover just in time for my triumphant return.
* * *
The first class I TA’d for was Argumentation, a course designed to teach students how to create and dissect arguments. I approached it with some degree of reservation and a healthy dose of skepticism. Undergraduates, after all, were lazy, surly pseudo-adults more interested in TV, drinking, and video games than critical thinking. I should know—I had been one less than a year hence.
As I walked into my first hour-long discussion section, I expected apathy. What I got was an epiphany.
I loved teaching.
My students were fantastic. They were engaged, intelligent, sarcastic, humorous, kind, honest, bitter and alone, together and full of hope.
And I? I was really good at teaching. I got them to laugh, forced them to think, encouraged them to find their own answers.
I walked away from a crap half-hour pedagogical addendum to a so-so class feeling like I had actually done something valuable. Like I had made a difference. Like I mattered, what I did mattered.
Because these students? They mattered.
* * *
I took every opportunity I could over the next three years to get into the classroom. In the winter quarter of my third year, I taught my first class solo. After that, I was well and truly hooked. I was a teaching assistant when I wasn’t teaching. I completed a teaching certificate program, and was selected to be a teaching fellow—a competitive, paid position. I knew in my heart that I wanted to do this. I wanted to teach at a university for the rest of my life.
When my fifth year rolled around, the time had come to put together my applications for teaching jobs. And while I was perfectly happy to work at a small liberal arts college, I needed to take stock of my research regardless. It couldn’t hurt to see if I could get a few articles accepted for publication, even in small journals. By this point I’d racked up almost ten individual research projects, including six that I’d presented at conferences.
As I looked back through my collected works, searching for something publishable, I hit upon a stunning realization:
I was not very good at doing research.
My writing was stilted and formulaic, my theoretical grounding was sparse, my hypotheses were naïve guesses, and my methodology was rudimentary at best. The odds of turning more than two of the papers into publishable articles were . . . poor. That I had gotten some of these accepted at conferences was a testament to the steep decline in competition resulting from dwindling university travel budgets.
It was really fortunate that I’d decided I wanted to teach.
* * *
Every fall, universities decided which positions they will hire for the next academic year and post them online. Most of these cluster in a span of a few months, from September to November.
I spent hours searching, hunting down postings at universities that fit my specialty. Then another several days of work for each position as I tailored my cover letter (two pages, single-spaced), teaching portfolio, and curriculum vitae to fit as best as possible. A batch of applications sent out the door, or Internet portal, I suppose. And then, waiting. Damn, was there a lot of waiting.
“We regret to inform you . . .”
“Unfortunately . . .”
“A more suitable candidate . . .”
Rejections. Dozens and dozens of rejections. When I didn’t get one of these terse dismissals, I heard nothing at all.
That stung. Each application took so much time and effort that I ended up investing a significant part of myself by the time I was done. With each application I sent out, hope sprang anew. With each rejection, pulling myself up to send out another letter got a little harder.
As I faced a crowded market, hemmed in on all sides by unyielding economic pressure, I belatedly realized just how much of my former success could be attributed to fortunate circumstance and privilege. Now that I was competing with others who had actually accomplished things—teaching experience covering a dozen classes, lists of publications that would only fit on medieval scrolls, years of service to the university, the discipline, and the community—the blank white spaces on my CV suddenly looked a lot more empty.
It had taken me most of my adult life to realize I wanted to be a teacher. It took me another two years before I realized that was never going to happen.
* * *
My first year on the market ended in a flurry of activity. Suddenly two universities wanted to interview me for adjunct positions, and another had me as a finalist for a tenure-track spot. Everything was finally coming together.
I wanted the tenure-track position, of course. Better pay, security, university support for research—the works. The adjunct positions, on the other hand? Well, I’d be teaching, sure. But when the contract for those jobs ended, there was no knowing whether they’d bring me back the next year.
The interviews turned into two offers: one from each of the universities considering me for an adjunct position. I waited, and waited, and waited, only to hear at the last minute that the other university had chosen a different applicant.
Disappointed, if not despairing, I chose the best remaining offer and promised myself I’d snag that tenure-track spot next year. I had been so close. I was sure to succeed the next time around. I just needed to be a bit better. Work a bit harder. I resolved to use my time wisely.
By the next time I hit the market again, I was a stronger candidate. I had more teaching experience. I’d published an article in a respectable journal, and co-authored entries in two collected works. I was ready.
* * *
The next year, I turned down not one, but two job offers at universities. They were only 9-month positions with no guarantee of renewal. Both times, I had no other offers. I said “no” when my alternative was literally nothing. After all, a tenure-track position was bound to come along eventually. I was a better candidate than last year, when I’d been a finalist. Wouldn’t I feel stupid if I took a crappy temp position, only to find later that I could have had my dream job?
Boy, did I feel stupid when every other school still under consideration sent me curt rejection notices. I wasn’t even interviewed for a single tenure-track position. I had gotten better as a candidate, and actually performed worse on the market.
The stress was killing me: I put on 15 pounds, my blood pressure soared, and my resting heart rate rose 13 bpm. I was exhausted all the time. I couldn’t sleep some nights, because I could feel my heart thudding in my chest and all the way down to my limbs. As much as I loved teaching, I couldn’t bear to put myself, or my spouse, through this perpetual uncertainty any longer.
Could I teach at community colleges? Certainly! Or so I thought, until I applied, and was rejected. Either they had other candidates, or figured there was no way I was serious about my application.
Could I teach in high school? Sure! Except I’d need to pass certification, and teaching jobs in my state even at the high school level turned out to be more competitive than I’d anticipated.
The end of my contract was coming up, and I needed a paying job. My wife and I had been living apart for seven months—she hadn’t been able to find a job in the rural town where my university was located, and had to move elsewhere. The measly salary I’d been making had left us with little in terms of savings. I had two options: risk everything on my dream, or give up. If my life were a movie, we all know what I would have chosen.
But it isn’t. I gave up.
I hung up the blazer, sold my textbooks, cleaned out my office, and said goodbye to all my students.
I wish I could be bitter. I wish I could blame the market, or the university, or politics. But the truth, the bare truth . . .
. . . is that I could have worked harder. I could have done more. I could have pushed myself. It was never a physical impossibility for me to get any of these jobs. I had a combination of talent, ability, connections, and privilege the likes of which few other people in the world do.
If I’d been willing to sacrifice more (my health, my relationship, my social life), I could have stuck it out in adjunct positions until I hit on the perfect tenure-track job.
I couldn’t. I can’t.
I’m done.
* * *
Three months later, I’ve landed a position at a large company. I’m an instructional designer now. I help my organization create more effective training programs for their workers. It’s a wonderful job. I love the people I work with, I’m paid well, and I have a kind of stability I’ve never experienced before.
Every day, the hole inside me heals a little more. Every day, it hurts a little less.
I’ve still got that damn blazer in my closet. Now and then, I pull it out and try it on—just to see how it fits. I could get rid of it, sure, but I won’t. I need to be reminded. I need to remember.
Plus, I look damn sexy in it.
“If I’d been willing to sacrifice more (my health, my relationship, my social life), I could have stuck it out in adjunct positions until I hit on the perfect tenure-track job.”
I understand this feeling, but I’m not convinced it’s true. At least in my area(s), I see folks who would be willing to sacrifice anything and still never land even the imperfect tenure-track job.
Godspeed, Whitney. You’ll always be a teacher.
Yeah, I think this is actually one of the major problems with the way the system (and American capitalism in general, really) is set up–you end up blaming yourself for your own individual “failure” when really the cards–the market, the university, the politics–are stacked against you. Academia (and, again, American capitalism) encourages you to tie your identity up so strongly with your success in a system that continues to dangle the carrot of tenure-track jobs that no longer exist…
Thanks for writing this. I’m really glad you’ve found a job that you enjoy, and I hope your heart continues to heal. As shitty and terrible as it’s been, it sounds like you made the right choice.
Amen to this. This is basically the comment I wanted to write.
Oh, lord, yes.
On top of the structural problems described here, there’s also the problem of intangibles from search to search and department to department that are just impossible to know and subsequently navigate (I say this, I guess, as someone who has sat on two search committees as a graduate student rep and is also currently on the academic job market). Last spring, as I was finishing the dissertaiton and preparing to defend, I was part of a doctoral colloquium in my field that included a session hiring practices in academia. By far the most common – and most disconcerting! – thing faculty and administrative representatives kept discussing was the importance of “fit.” A department or school wants someone who is a good “fit” (regardless of position descriptions, which are often written to be deliberately broad so as to capture an even larger pool of applicants) – and “fit” cannot be reduced to anything you can possibly account for in an application package, as it figures in (among other things) school/department politics, past/current/future research trends (*as conceived by a given school/department*), and just a general “vibe” someone might read into your application. It’s infuriating and – worse – it is completely out of your control.
Of course, hiring in many professions carries considerations of internal politics and “fit,” but in the case of academia, this “crapshoot” piece is compounded by the structural problems already identified up and down this discussion. In short: EVERYTHING IS THE WORST.
Yes, seriously. The job market is no longer about being good. It is about being lucky. Everyone knows how competitive it is, and everyone is publishing and teaching and doing all the things that academia asks us to do. So if someone else gets the offer instead of you, it’s actually probably not about you. It’s that they said one random thing in their letter than someone on the hiring committee glommed onto, or happened to go to the same undergrad as the chair, or for whatever reason made a personal connection with the interviewer. It’s about work to some degree–you can’t do nothing and expect to get hired–but once you’ve met and surpassed an increasingly high baseline, it’s luck. That’s all it is.
I think it is possibly true that “being willing to sacrifice more” raises your chances, even if it doesn’t guarantee anything, but you know what? FUCK THAT. If you have to sacrifice your health, your relationship and your social life, and the rhetoric of the system are telling you that’s an acceptable deal, then yes, there IS something wrong with the market, the university and the politics. Not to mention that all it ever means is “the guy who can afford not to think about his fertility just yet has an advantage over the woman who definitely wants kids and his looking at 37” and “the person for whom “neglect my health” means “getting a really nasty cold at the end of semester has an advantage over the person with the serious chronic health problem”.
(Have PhD, love teaching, am not great at research, am now a careers adviser and love it. May be over-identifying.)
I’m so glad you’ve been able to find a job that uses your skills–and I hope that this gives you extra time to focus on your writing! Academia is so hard (I say this as a PhD who’s currently an adjunct and married to a PhD in a tenure track position)–I wish more programs focused on alternatives to university life, because so much emphasis is put on getting that tenure track job that it’s easy to feel like a failure when you don’t land it.
Oh wow. Hi. Former professor here as well.
This hit home so hard, down to the private sector gig. I miss teaching every day, but the hoops I’d need to jump through for K-12 certification would be laughable at this point, and adjuncting wasn’t sustainable.
Maybe someday I will earn my jacket with the elbow patches.
Congratulations on not sacrificing your health, relationship and social life for the sake of a job that would continue to sap all three! And congrats more, I guess, for not becoming bitter and cynical, because I sure am. The research/teaching model is idiotic, in many ways — while some researchers are great teachers, the skill sets are so different that they’re a minority. This whole set-up is why kids who pay ridiculous amounts of cash to go to prestigious schools get stuck in lectures by brilliant professors who couldn’t pedagogue their way out of a paper bag.
I feel like I’m always learning new horrible things about academia, and today it was that you can get all the way through a PhD program without anyone telling you that you’re not that good at research, or helping you to improve.
Ah, I don’t know about any programs except my own, but I think that the idea that you’re totally adrift and alone is not quite accurate. It does feel like that sometimes, but you can find lighthouses.
There was a great deal of feedback, guidance, and coaching on improving writing and research, in my experience. Some came from faculty, and a lot came from peers– I think you can find folks to talk to about your work on the concrete or abstract levels if you make yourself vulnerable to seek critiques. Within my cohort, we set up dissertation working group meetings and folks would read whole chapter drafts for one another, then spend significant time breaking them down and working through the tangles together. It was actually a very collegial learning experience and productive for my development as a writer and researcher.
Yes, that is correct. In my case, I was smart enough that my work looked fine from the outside, so in a program with limited resources, time was spent helping others. I never bothered to critically examine my research using the lens of a peer reviewer until it was too late for me to correct the error–social scientific research takes a long time to get approved and conduct, so by my fifth year I was left with no time to craft new studies for publication. If I had really sought out assistance and feedback, I would have gotten it. At the very least, I’m proud of the work I did for my dissertation, where I fixed my oversights.
Hi- it’s Megan B from RPC and the Searle Center! 🙂
Hey Megan! Fancy meeting you here. 😀
I was so relieved when you wrote that you weren’t great at research, because I have never heard anyone else admit to that, and I thought I was the only freak out there.
In my case, I wasn’t able to unlearn all the training I’d had since I was a little girl to hedge things about with soft words, not go too far out on a limb, not commit to things that had the potential to bite me, to try my damnedest to please everyone, etc. To be a really good researcher, you need to be able to say something new and defend it and to hell with the rest of them, if need be. And then if they publish a well-reasoned rebuttal with evidence you hadn’t considered or something, you learn from it and move on. I was totally unprepared to enter that world. I could mimic its mannerisms well enough to get by, but fundamentally my heart and guts weren’t in it.
Thank you for saying all this.
Heh, I went to a lunch talk last week where a visiting researcher presented some work that made interesting claims, but was pretty clearly not well-developed, and the faculty just tore him to shreds. It was embarrassing to be there. I left feeling like, how would I even survive if that happened? I mean, I guess you have to learn to take it, but yeah, the gender performance and interpretation of social cues required (e.g. “this person is saying something overtly hostile about my work, but in this context, that’s not taboo, and crying is not an appropriate response”) seems pretty at odds with the way girls are raised.
I’m glad you had that experience but it’s really not universal. My cohort was a pit of vipers (…practice for being junior faculty!), and I only survived because I finally realized I needed to stop giving them opportunities to tear my work down. In the end, I actually moved to another city so I could make any progress at all on my dissertation, so destructive was the environment. And I’m definitely not the only one who had that experience in my program, or a number of others I’ve heard about.
Another former Prof, one who did try to stick out the Adjunct grind. I feel your pain, I loved teaching more than any other job I have ever tried and then discovered that same shrinking pool of opportunity. It was around that same time that I found the degree to which one’s effectiveness as an instructor is the smallest part of how you are evaluated by your peers. Right then I knew I had to get out, and it was the best decision of my life. I still miss that part of my life where I was discovering something truly new and telling others about it, in a classroom or colleagues, but at least I learned how to do it.
Best of luck
I am one year away from submitting my thesis, but even in my first year, all anyone in my department– in my university– could talk about were the dismal odds of ever getting hired doing anything. This pressure got to be too much, and I took a semester off, mid-way through my third year. The only job I could get was retail and now I’m back in school. Retail sucks.
I believe– hopefully not naively– that what we learn as PhD candidates and teachers can be useful in “the real world,” and that none of this (well, very little of it) is a waste of time. I consider your story a success story, but really, anyone who gets a job they like that pays enough to support a sustainable lifestyle is a success story. Particularly when blogs like The Toast provide an outlet for people like you and me who may not be able to teach and research for a living but who still have writing and interests we want to share and discuss with others. I hope you wore your blazer when you wrote this!
The department I work in (I’m a secretary, not an academic) has started to offer non-academic job counseling for our graduate students. Small steps, but important.
This was excellently-written! I’m glad to read that you have found a great job that makes you happy. My partner is in the middle of the rejection phase, and I hate how it all becomes so personal, despite the fact that it’s anything but.
Totally unrelated, but this part jumped way out at me: …as I tailored my cover letter (two pages, single-spaced). DAMN. I was always taught that cover letters should be three paragraphs! The obvious answer is to do away with them all together.
Academia is very different in what they expect in a cover letter. Two pages is usual.
Right, and CVs for people in their mid-careers are often upward of 10 pages. Job-type documents that would never fly anywhere else are standard in academia.
Two pages is the standard in Canada. I don’t know how Americans get the necessary information across with just one.
BRB, sending this to The Beloved, who is in a similar position in academia. He has a solid, full-time teaching appointment, but has problems getting respect because he’s not tenure track. It’s heartbreaking to watch him struggle so hard, so consistently, and against such maddeningly archaic mindsets.
Good for you, though, for not sacrificing everything. I’m trying to convince The Beloved that it’s just not worth it. There are other worlds than these.
I am not an academic, but I am, professionally speaking, academia-adjacent.
Do not go into academia unless it is literally the only thing you could ever see yourself doing that wouldn’t make you want to die. And even if it is, take a gap year or two to make sure that that’s really how you feel about it.
Thumbs-upping this SO HARD.
This is the advice I give to any and all people when they say “I’m thinking about applying to grad school. What do you think?”
Seriously good advice. I’m also academia-adjacent and give the same advice (with the added caveat, if you must go, do everything in your power to avoid taking out loans). Sadly, I think in many cases that advice doesn’t really sink in until you’ve started to actually experience what it means to be in upper-level academia. We all think we’re going to be the exception, I suppose. I probably would have been in a similar boat if not for being rejected from every school I applied to. Seriously the best failure of my life. The more I observe of academia now, the more I am glad I got out early.
“The stress was killing me: I put on 15 pounds, my blood pressure soared, and my resting heart rate rose 13 bpm. I was exhausted all the time. I couldn’t sleep some nights, because I could feel my heart thudding in my chest and all the way down to my limbs.”
–>ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh I feel this so hard ugh ugh ugh ugh ugh
Being unemployed / about to be unemployed and job seeking is THE WORST. UGH.
Yup. I’m just entering the job market for the first time. For whatever reason, this always becomes most stressful at about 12am, exactly when I can’t do a single thing about it. Except worry, and then think about all the things I could have accomplished while lying awake fretting this whole time.
The idea of achieving tenure seems, from this description, to be very similar to breaking the glass ceiling.
People tell you that you can do it, and you’ve even seen a couple of people succeed, but for the most part it’s still out of your reach for reasons that aren’t clear or logical.
I read something a few months ago just saying, “Not everyone can beat the odds. That’s why they’re the odds.” Can’t remember when or where, to my annoyances, but it kind of blew my mind. Yes, of course one or two people can beat the odds! But everyone can’t! That’s why they’re the odds! So bloody obvious when you put it like that.
It’s like the McDonald’s Monopoly game, right? I mean, you want to hang on to those properties floating around your ash tray just in case, but how many people actually win more than a Big Mac?
But in the case of modern academia, the reasons are quite clear: the model is shifting away from jobs with stability, a professional salary, benefits, etc. and toward criminally paid adjunct work that academics are supposed to do “because they are passionate about teaching.”
(Which is why I respectfully disagree with the rhetoric of “don’t go into academia unless you are passionate about it/can’t imagine doing anything else/know that this and only this is your vocation”. I mean, yes, be passionate, sure, but “passion” and “vocation” are basically the ideological opiate of us academic masses.
Disclosure: current PhD student here.)
Your story is very similar to mine. I’ve linked below to a blog post I wrote about it for the local Philadelphia adjunct labor group, sponsored by the AFT, trying to organize local university adjuncts into unions. It’s so important to push back against the forces driving the “temping” of academic labor. http://higheredhubphilly.wordpress.com/2014/06/19…
“I developed parsimonious rules of grading – 1-2 comments per page, a 5 sentence global comment at the end. I felt guilty, but it was the only way to ensure that the 90 papers I received every 2-3 weeks were returned to them before the next round was handed in.” This isn’t the first story like this I’ve heard but I always find them the most heartbreaking. I totally understand why you had to do this but it is so fucked up bc those Philly area schools are so expensive! At least the four-years- Temple, Penn, Drexel, etc. Something is so broken when students are paying over $30k in tuition but their instructors are barely making it.
When I read this Michelle I immediately thought of the piece you wrote. Your story is like so many others of our colleagues in Philly. I’m glad we’re able to come together and try to push back against the broken system.
Thank you to everyone for all your kind words of encouragement and support! I’m happy that my story has resonated with some of you, and been interesting to others. Also, a big thanks to Nicole and Mallory for the opportunity. The Toast is awesome!
I regularly talk with undergraduates who are making decisions about seeking additional degrees, and one of my chief goals in those conversations is to help them identify their expectations about what it will mean to go into a program of study at the masters or doctoral level.
If they believe it’s going to be a straight shot to professoring, there is some real talk that must be had. The debt that can be accrued in pursuit of the degrees is also very serious business, and not to be taken on lightly. When they think about going, I try to help them stay flexible in their goals and their definitions of a successful professional life.
But graduate school isn’t only a pain farm. It’s a chunk of time where you can spend a portion of your life dedicated to learning. (And I fully recognize the privilege of being able to do it without building up a bunch of debt- I was fortunate to go to places that funded me.)
The years I spent earning my doctorate were hard and pleasant and happy and unhappy, like all of my other years of life. My time in school yielded learning and self-knowledge and experiences that I wouldn’t have had and friendships I couldn’t have built and risks I wouldn’t have taken if I had spent those years in another way. I am glad about that. I am proud of what I learned and accomplished there and I love the friends I made during that time.
Like the author I also loved teaching, and I am not faculty now. I work in the academy, I love my job and I couldn’t do it as well as I do without the experiences that I had in graduate school. Most importantly, though, wasn’t my professional preparation. I wouldn’t be the person I am and the world wouldn’t be the world that it is for me if I hadn’t spent a total of seven years studying these subjects that fascinate me to such a depth.
Yes to all of this. I actually applied for about eighty corporate jobs before I got an interview, and as it turns out, they were looking for someone with a background in curriculum design and evaluation (thanks, Searle Center!) and teaching experience. If I hadn’t gotten the skills and experiences I had, they wouldn’t have hired me. My regret is, as you mentioned some do and have done, that I wasn’t realistic enough about the market before I began the process and overestimating my chances of success. I think if I had done that, I could have saved myself a lot of stress and reached a place of acceptance sooner.
I’m on the job market again (after applying to ~200 jobs last year, with … one brief Skype interview) and this really resonates with me. I love teaching but don’t see how I’ll do this professionally.
Good luck.
When we started our (psychology) PhD program, the first lesson they hammered into us was: publish, publish publish. Now that I’ve been here for several years and have had more insight into the job application process, it is abundantly clear that what gets you a job is your publication and grant/fellowship record (even, it seems, at small, teaching-focused liberal arts schools). It’s unfortunate in many ways because, while I love teaching, I’ll always take the opportunity to avoid it in favor of a fellowship (when I can get ’em), since research is prized so much more highly and teaching cuts into research time.
The situation is definitely scary, but it seems to me that all we ever see are horror stories about graduate school and what happens after, so I will add: I love my PhD program. I’ve felt very fulfilled and encouraged, have a great work-life balance, and because I’ve published a few times I feel like I’m actually doing my job NOW instead of just preparing for a future career. I’ve also seen many of my classmates go on to achieve tenure-track positions. I know, I know: Congratulations, how wonderful. But I do want to float it out there that graduate school isn’t a mistake or waste of time for everybody, and experiences can differ hugely depending on one’s university and field of study.
“Rejections. Dozens and dozens of rejections. When I didn’t get one of these terse dismissals, I heard nothing at all.
That stung. Each application took so much time and effort that I ended up investing a significant part of myself by the time I was done. With each application I sent out, hope sprang anew. With each rejection, pulling myself up to send out another letter got a little harder”
This is TOO REAL. I haven’t even been applying for dream jobs, but this still happens to me every time. .
I finished a PhD in 2007, and had about a year where I was still theoretically pursuing the idea of an academic career. I did the same as Whitney: looked at my work and my CV realistically a few months after I finished, compared it to that of my partner who had a fixed-term full academic job (equivalent of a US adjunct position. I guess – paid at the same annual rate as a full-time permanent position, but a 12-month contract), and realised that I was about two or three years of work off the kind of solid, properly-paid position that my partner had. I remember writing a rather despairing post on my blog saying, “am I supposed to work a full day in my earning-money job, and then come home and do six hours of academic work? How am I supposed to do that?” One of my friends, who had a tenure-track job in the US, said, “you’d do it if you wanted it enough” – rather pompously, I thought. I was completely devastated for a moment, because I’d expected sympathy, and then I suddenly had a lightbulb moment – it was completely true. Yeah, I could do that if I wanted it enough. But I didn’t want it that much, and good Lord, that’s absolutely FINE. In academia-blinker-lights, Wanting It Enough is supposed to be all that matters, but in the rest of the world, Not Wanting It That Much is an entirely normal state of being.
I’m now a careers adviser, a job that I absolutely love. And I also have a small coterie of PhD students and graduates a few years behind than me who are like, “you are my inspiration! You are proof that a great non-academic career is a realistic post-phd ambition!”
Good luck, Whitney!
I narrowly avoided going after an academic career. Only it would’ve been for music, which is ridiculous, since not only do you have to jump through hoops, but you also have to audition. Somewhere in my junior year of a performance degree I realized how little job security I would have. I promptly had a nervous breakdown, withdrew from college for a semester, then regrouped. I turned it around, although it took a couple years and a very expensive terminal masters in an unrelated field. But at least I avoided chasing tenure all over the country.
And I still get to play the clarinet, so.
“Boy, did I feel stupid when every other school still under consideration sent me curt rejection notices. I wasn’t even interviewed for a single tenure-track position. **I had gotten better as a candidate, and actually performed worse on the market.**”
This so hard. Both myself and my partner have been there, felt that.
This essay resonates with me very much – I got my PhD from a top-flight school, third in the country for my academic speciality. I was okay at the research, but really really wanted to teach; I found that teaching is ephiphenomenal to teaching in the contemporary academy. Because my heart wasn’t in it, my publication record was lousy; consequently I got lots of tenure-track interviews, but no offers. I left academia in 2006 to become a civil servant; today, I’m an urban planner and transit-policy specialist in the Toronto area. I’ve got interesting work, great salary, a pension, and I commute to work by bike. I get to see my parents and my brothers every week, and my kids and my nephews and nieces area are all growing up together.
I’ve never been happier, and I speak as a person who spent my twenties CONVINCED I could only ever be an academic and a teacher. There’s a great big world out there: don’t ever believe that you have to be in academia to be happy.
As someone who tends to fall into an “all-or-nothing” mentality, it’s wonderful to hear that you found a really fulfulling career after deviating from what you intially thought was the only path that could be right for you. 🙂
Your comment caught my attention because, having just finished a master’s degree in urban planning/policy (and aiming to work in transit planning and policy), I’ve been having a minor freak-out about NOT doing a PhD, since that’s what a lot of people from my cohort seem to plan on doing next. What astounds me is that they seem driven less by a deep passion for the discipline or for research, than by a conviction that an academic job will be a) necessarily obtainable “if they just want it enough/stick it out/work enough” and therefore b) a way to cement their financial future and their intellectual street cred (if such a thing exists) at the same time.
For all that we have books and blogs and articles expounding on the painful experience that awaits many of even the most dedicated graduate students, I wonder if a lot of people my age (early-to-mid-twenties) simply don’t realize how very, very different a commitment a PhD is from a bachelor’s or a master’s program, or the kinds of possibilities that actually exist within modern academia (hey, their professor/mentor Dr. X did it in 1983, so why not them, Dr. X’s favorite pupil?). Although I feel like something of an intellectual fraud trying to go into “policy”-related work without a doctorate, I know that I don’t have the requisite combination of talent, drive and sheer courage to make it through what Whitney (and others) describe.
Would you find it comforting if I told you I totally know someone who got a transportation planning job with only her master’s degree? Because that’s totally a thing I’m telling you if it’s reassuring. If it’s frustrating, just ignore me- that’s definitely not a thing that happened 😛
(I also know another person working in an unspecified area of planning with “only” a masters degree. I know zero people working in planning with PhDs. You can ignore the part where people in my cohort who did crazy things like try to get PhDs in planning might not be done with their PhDs yet. Anecdata!)
That is definitely reassuring, thank you Beakses! And good luck to the people from your cohort still working on their doctorates ; I do think that the work urban-design/planning/policy researchers do is hugely important/interesting, I just don’t know that I’m cut out for (potentially) ten years of it while the interest on my student debt continues to compound.
I second Beakses; no one in my office has a PhD but me, and mine isn’t in in urban planning or transit policy. It’s in (ahem) American history, which is particularly exotic in a non-academic Canadian setting. I won’t tax you with career advice, other than to say that smart, hard-working people can go far in government and business. The only purpose credentials serve is to get you in the door; a Masters can do that for you for FAR less investment than a PhD. Indeed a PhD can hold you back in some places, as you come off as an over-educated snob who doesn’t understand the real world. This is vile calumny, but that is the prejudice in some circles.
Please do not blame yourself for something that is outside of your control.
I have a weird relationship with academia as I work there and had amazing, life-transformative experiences in undergrad and grad school. But nowadays you have to really, really think hard and know as much as possible before getting into a graduate program. Especially if it will cost you student loans or personal money, especially if you want to be a professor or teach, and especially if you are going into the humanities. I wish everyone who wanted could go to grad school but it is nearly impossible right now to get a tenure-track position in ANY area and there are so many sacrifices that come with being a professor. Also, please do not ruin the next 20 years of your life by taking out crazy student loans.
I still read and love this article, and the original, on the Chronicle: http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-t…
Also want to add that I am feeling kind of bummed about this whole subject in general. . .I just did StrengthsQuest again a week ago (love it!) and four of my top five traits were about total love of learning, ideas, research, knowledge, etc. . .which says to me I would probably LOVE being in an academic/professor/research type position. But I’m so soured on the whole thing I don’t think I would ever do it. So self-study for me now! Sigh. :\
It’s also worth shouting out to the ‘alt-ac’ career paths – jobs in which you use your PhD and conduct peer-reviewed research, but not within a university. My PhD was in art history, and after (after dozens of unsuccessful post-doc applications), I’m now a curator in a large art museum. Not all of my job is research based, but I still use the museum as a platform to research and publish articles. I suppose you could find a similar set-up in organisations such as think-tanks, cultural outreach institutes and research libraries. I still think of myself as an academic – and I think/hope that that’s not just wishful thinking – but I’m an academic who happens to work outside a university. We can bend the paradigm a bit.
This is a really good point! But museums are competitive too. I read this and empathised because although I finished my PhD this year, with several years’ experience in national museums, I’m about to decide to leave and train to teach at high school.
It’s so great to read this – there are many similar stories out there, and every one makes me feel better for making the same decision you did. I participate in this phdsatwork.com community, which has been endlessly helpful to me.
“I had two options: risk everything on my dream, or give up. If my life were a movie, we all know what I would have chosen.”
Ah man I feel this much. Since realising the only career I ever worked for was unattainable I think about how I should have given up more to achieve it. Realistically though without a magic money fairy and decent job prospects at the end it just wasn’t viable. I’m now 2 months into the hunt for a job which is unrelated to all my experience and training, which is kind of soul-crushing. The worst is definitely the silence. When you’re sending emails to yourself to check that your email hasn’t spontaneously stopped working you know you need to leave the laptop for a few hours.
I’m glad you’ve found a job that you like even if its not the job that you would love. Thanks for this article.
Seriously good advice. I'm also academia-adjacent and give the same advice (with the added caveat, if you must go, do everything in your power to avoid taking out loans). Sadly, I think in many cases that advice doesn't really sink in until you've started to actually experience what it means to be in upper-level academia. We all think we're going to be the exception, I suppose. I probably would have been in a similar boat if not for being rejected from every school I applied to. Seriously the best failure of my life. The more I observe of academia now, the more I am glad I got out early.
"But the FREEDOM of academia!"
So far as I've seen, Freedom or Flexibility + Competitive = it is normal in this field to spend all day every day giving some amount of mental effort to working, evenings and weekends do not really have any meaning, a lot of your colleagues have developed very expensive habits by way of compensation or explanation.
it is amazing and wonderful that you got that advice. Candour is hard to get from people who are primed (as teachers) to be encouraging and (more cynically) when you're worth CA$H to them.
This is a really good point! But museums are competitive too. I read this and empathised because although I finished my PhD this year, with several years' experience in national museums, I'm about to decide to leave and train to teach at high school.
“If I’d been willing to sacrifice more (my health, my relationship, my social life), I could have stuck it out in adjunct positions until I hit on the perfect tenure-track job. I couldn’t. I can’t. I’m done.”
That’s just about where I am. I’m 2+ years out from my PhD, in the last year of a 3-year lecturer position. And though I’m applying to some TT jobs, and a few postdocs, I’m also seriously considering other options (and, you know, trying to figure out what those might be). It’s hard, and I spent the last year mourning my imagined career as a college professor – a job I’m really damn good at, actually. But I’m finally starting to be able to look at leaving the academy as a liberating possibility, rather than simply as evidence that I wasn’t good enough for the career I *really* wanted.
But I cannot agree with your suggestion that this is somehow your fault, and not the market’s. Look around you. How many amazing teachers and brilliant researchers, just in your own social circle, are struggling to find permanent professorial jobs? I can’t agree that it’s the “fault” of people who did everything right, but who couldn’t afford (economically, emotionally, socially) to move from one 9-month contract to another. That is the logic of neoliberalism and I reject it.
I have seen friends (not even friends-of-friends, but my actual friends) be finalists for TT jobs at the best universities in the country (Stanford. Yale. Chicago.) only to end up with NOTHING when they were the runner-up. In what kind of fucked-up industry can you be the second choice for the highest-status job in the field, and end up with NO job? How can we say that’s their fault? How could they have tried harder?
"If I’d been willing to sacrifice more (my health, my relationship, my social life), I could have stuck it out in adjunct positions until I hit on the perfect tenure-track job. I couldn’t. I can’t. I’m done."
That's just about where I am. I'm 2+ years out from my PhD, in the last year of a 3-year lecturer position. And though I'm applying to some TT jobs, and a few postdocs, I'm also seriously considering other options (and, you know, trying to figure out what those might be). It's hard, and I spent the last year mourning my imagined career as a college professor – a job I'm really damn good at, actually. But I'm finally starting to be able to look at leaving the academy as a liberating possibility, rather than simply as evidence that I wasn't good enough for the career I *really* wanted.
But I cannot agree with your suggestion that this is somehow your fault, and not the market's. Look around you. How many amazing teachers and brilliant researchers, just in your own social circle, are struggling to find permanent professorial jobs? I can't agree that it's the "fault" of people who did everything right, but who couldn't afford (economically, emotionally, socially) to move from one 9-month contract to another. That is the logic of neoliberalism and I reject it.
I have seen friends (not even friends-of-friends, but my actual friends) be finalists for TT jobs at the best universities in the country (Stanford. Yale. Chicago.) only to end up with NOTHING when they were the runner-up. In what kind of fucked-up industry can you be the second choice for the highest-status job in the field, and end up with NO job? How can we say that's their fault? How could they have tried harder?
I never even tried to remain in academia after getting my MFA. I should have done more research on my own. I actually had professors tell me that grad school was a good option for me. Were they serious?
The economist Richard Wolff talks about the biggest lie in our rigged economy: that if you go to school and work hard you’ll get a good job. But there are not enough good jobs for all the people qualified for them, He talks about how cruel it is for society to keep perpetuating this and allowing kids to rack up debt that will never pay off. I did everything I could with my humanities bachelor degree, sowed a few wild oats, then started saving for grad school but was derailed by family illness. Now there seems to be no hope of going back to it, there are so few jobs compared to when I graduated. I don’t know whether to be despairing or grateful that I could not go, if I could not have gotten work. Things suck now.
PS Our culture is headed for the scrap heap of history if it keeps devaluing the skills, knowledge, accomplishments and potential of so many smart people. What kind of culture even does that? It’s like the Romans burning the books of the Alexandria library to fuel the decadent aristocracy’s heated baths.