This is a special hi to those of you who’ve found this blog by doing mad internet searches in the middle of the night because you can’t sleep for worrying about your future. I just want to say that, even though you may not believe me now, things are going to work out for you.
I also want to say: have you yet discovered Julie over at Escape the Ivory Tower? Julie offers coaching, classes and free teleclasses, but she also writes an awesome blog that will validate what you’re going through and make you smile.
And also: how come you’re not on Twitter yet? That’s not a genuine non sequitur — I ask because I found out about Julie via Twitter. Although I have Google alerts set up for all kinds of phrases, I hadn’t been pinged by Julie’s site. So if she hadn’t landed on my Twitter radar (Twittar?), I wouldn’t have heard of her and wouldn’t be letting all of YOU know about her.
Tagged as:
resource
A friend of mine recently sent me this article from CNN Money, which lists “college professor” as number 3 on a top 50 list of best jobs in America, and top 3 on the list of low-stress jobs. Yeah, that’s right. Number 3.
The piece is pretty breathtaking in its innacuracies and highly skewed picture of current academic realities in North America. It starts off with a list of what profs do, which lists teaching, grading, research and writing. No mention of committee work, external funding applications, the hours spent preparing for conferences, readying manuscripts for publication and the annual need (for most profs) to re-apply for your job over and over again.
This skewed picture of what constitutes “work” continues with the good old fallacy about how great it is to be a prof because you can do what you want with your time:
Why it’s great: For starters, major scheduling freedom. “Besides teaching and office hours, I get to decide where, when, and how I get my work done,” says Daniel Beckman, a biology professor at Missouri State University. And that doesn’t even take into account ample time off for holidays and a reduced workload in the summer.
As more than one person observed in the comments thread at this piece, the schedule is free for you to manage, but the content of the schedule is not negotiable. And people, can we quit it with the lie about having summers off? Elementary school teachers have the summer off, i.e. they don’t have to do any actual work related to their actual job/profession/career for roughly 2 months. But profs?! C’mon, summer is an opportunity to ramp up your writing, research, and your worry level as you wait to hear from the uni about whether or not you’ve got a course to teach in the fall.
It continues:
Competition for tenure-track positions at four-year institutions is intense, but you’ll find lots of available positions at community colleges and professional programs, where you can enter the professoriate as an adjunct faculty member or non-tenure track instructor without a doctorate degree. That’s particularly true during economic downturns, when laid-off workers often head back to school for additional training.
Uh…where do we start with this one? “Lots of available positions”? Okay, let’s say that was actually true. Oooh, fancy you, you can “enter the professoriate” supposedly without a PhD! Mmmm, staaatus! Yeah! Just make sure you go to Value Village to get your tweed jacket with the elbow patches first (and remember not to actually light up the pipe tobacco in the classroom–that’s frowned upon in the 21st century). Oh, the glamour of being “an adjunct faculty member or non-tenure track instructor,” especially in what the article pegs as a “low-stress” position. Hahahaha! ‘Cause it’s not stressful at all having to re-apply for your job every year! And WTF is with the bit about economic downturns? I’m actually genuinely confused by that sentence.
The article adds:
More valuable perks: reduced or free tuition for family members and free access to college gyms and libraries.
M’kay, seriously? What family members? Oh, the children that you can’t afford to have? And c’mon, free access to the library is considered a perk?! Honest to dawg, isn’t that like saying to a firefighter, “You get free access to the fire truck!” And as for the gym at my alma mater, there was no way I was working out in a space that distinctly had the look, feel and smell of my high school change room.
Tagged as:
professor,
stress
I got an email recently from a reader who pointed out that most of my podcast interviewees were people who could quite literally afford to step off the academic career path because they had each had a partner who could support them financially.
It’s true that I have interviewed a lot of academics who transitioned out of academia while having a partner (or, in some cases, a parent) who earned enough money to cover things until stable employment was secured. And it’s true that not everyone is in this situation. If you’re single, or if your partner is also an academic whose labour is cheap, you are not in a position to just up and quit without a plan. That’s it. Bottom line.
So, if you want to quit academia, I guess you need a plan, then.
But even if you want to stay in academia, you’re gonna need a plan, too; I bet that the number of people currently in your cohort at your institution vastly exceed the number of jobs advertised in your field in the entire country (US or Canada, you choose) this year.
Either way, grad students (and the post-docs, contract faculty and full-time faculty who dream of a different life) are currently in a situation where they (feel they) have to simultaneously work their butts off to gain their academic credentials (publishing, primarily) and create contingency plans for non-academic jobs. This is one of the many things that makes academic career-changers different from other career changers: the requirements of grooming yourself for two different streams of career change are quite separate, without a lot of overlap.
One thing academics do share with any other worker who is looking for a job is the basic fact that the more lead time you have to create a plan for your career change, the better (don’t hate me for stating the obvious). But the thing with academia is that there are so many stages where your exit from the profession is built right in to your role. If you’re a grad student, you’re going to graduate from your program at some point (or, depending on your situation, you’ll be shown the door). If you’re contract faculty, maybe you won’t get enough courses to teach. If you’re faculty, maybe you won’t get tenure. Those are all moments when you’re faced with an opportunity to stay in or get out. So your lead time for creating your plan may be limited, depending upon where on academia’s ladder of precarious employment you sit.
These are the realities. But the overarching philosophy of this blog has always been to illustrate that there is life after academia, even if that immediate stage after leaving is rocky and scary. Whether you choose to leave academia or are forced out, whether you have time to plan your transition or not, whether you have a partner to support you or unpaid bills stacked up on your desk, you are faced with two new research projects: ways to make money, and a path into a new career. Ideally, these two things will coincide, but for people who leave academia without a partner’s support, making money may have to come before the fab new career.
Dog-walking, house-cleaning, working for a parent and temping are some of the ways academics I’ve met have paid the bills while figuring out the next step. Taking jobs that only take advantage of one set of skills–like transcribing or taking notes for disabled students–are also other ways people I know have transitioned out of academe before settling into other careers. In my own case, I took a job as a closed captioning editor at a national broadcaster as a way of grooming my English skills, moving back into media/communications and earning a steady paycheque–even though the work took advantage of very few of my analytical skills (which was a very, very welcome relief at first).
I’m not advocating for a blind jump from the ivory tower and I’m not denying that finding a job and changing careers is as difficult as surviving grad school. What I have always maintained, through this blog, is the belief that there is life after academia. When you’re on the inside, the prospect of leaving seems, at times, both foolish and impossible. But the idea of not making a plan, in the current economic climate, seems equally foolish, and the execution is actually very, very possible.
Tagged as:
money,
postacademic
I’ve got a few things I want to draw to the attention of Leaving Academia readers, so it’s a link-roundup kinda Friday.
- Canadians: are you aware that the federal government has re-opened their post-secondary recruitment campaign? Most job ads close October 8th, so you’ve got a week to whip your application together.
- Thanks to @jovanevery’s introduction on Twitter, I’ve found out about the very busy Raul Pacheco-Vega (that’s @raulpacheco in Twitter-speak). I haven’t had a chance to talk much with Raul, but I thought you should know about him because he has managed to bridge the divide between scholarly research and consulting. And no, he’s not a computer guy. Water is his thing.
- I’ve also been thinking about this piece over here at The Ladders which claims that “men have stronger professional networks than women.” This is based on research by two American sociologists who found that
“both men and women tend to build networks comprising people of their own gender — a process known scientifically as homophily and colloquially as “birds of a feather flock together.” But women tend to recognize the tendency and try to overcome it — building networks made up of about 50 percent men — while men’s networks included very few women, Torres said.
“According to Torres’ and Huffman’s theory of social networking: Because men hold 80 percent of the jobs in senior management (a figure that has been steadily declining), they are more likely to hear about job openings at the senior-management level. Men pass the news on to their mostly male social networks, and it is likely that news about the job opening reaches women only after it has reached and passed several men.”
And sociologist William Bielby adds:
“Women have tended to be better connected overall, but they and many of their female contacts tend to work in more female-dominated jobs,” Bielby said. “So their networks may be wider but not reach to as high a level as men’s, who tend to be better connected, particularly in getting professional news, to more high-status people.”
Hmmm. Something to think about when you’re cultivating your networks. The advice the article supplies in response to this problem?
“If women want to equal the effectiveness of male social networks, they need to emulate the men in those networks, said Torres. If male-dominated professional networks are passing jobs leads to other men before women, women should put themselves in the path of those leads, Bielby said. Women must add more men — especially high-status men — to their professional networks. Furthermore, they need to make their interests and competencies as clear as possible, he said.”
Tagged as:
consulting,
jobs,
networking,
roundup
