Attention, all MLAers! Thanks to the good folks at Inside Higher Ed, I’m going to be joining in on the English-language loving convention happening this year in Philadelphia. Come and find me at exhibitor booth 311 (where Inside Higher Ed will be bookended cozily by the Scottish Writing Exhibition) on the afternoon of December 28th and the morning of December 29th. I’m looking forward to discussing all matters post-academic with you!
Lest I forget about my own post-academic brethren who live in and around Toronto, we’re going to be holding another meet-up on Monday, December 14th at 7:00 pm. Due to increased interest in the meet-ups, I am on the hunt for an appropriate venue that can accomodate all of us. I’ll be announcing the location, then, closer to the time (and if you have any ideas of cheap/free, quiet locations, let me know!).
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meetup
Earlier this week, I organized another installment of the Toronto-based Leaving Academia meetup. It was a great meeting, with new people and a lot of wonderful energy. The theme for this week was networking, and lots of folks had some great tips and techniques for strategies they had used to mobilize their own network. Here are some useful resources that folks shared:
Someone alerted us to Donna Messer, a networking queen who actually does have a lot of good insights into networking.
Whoa, talking about networking: for those of you on the academic job hunt, are you aware of academia.edu, which someone at the meeting described quite accurately as “Facebook for academics”?
Are you still wondering how to maximize LinkedIn in your job search? Here’s a nifty little video that will explain it all.
And then there’s the piece I wrote about my recursive networking process over at Inside Higher Ed.
And wow, why had I not yet encountered MITACS, an organization that links business, government and non-profits with universities “to develop cutting-edge tools to support the growth of our knowledge-based economy.” It actually has post-doc internship programs in industry–wow (I’m assuming, though, that this is limited to Canada–if you find out otherwise, intrepid Americans, let me know). It does seem mostly aimed at the science-y among us, but it seems there’s a wealth of info at the site for researchers of all stripes.
Moving away from networking, but totally worthy, is a little advice for those of you dreading telling your supervisor/PI that you’re planning on leaving academia.
And if you need even more post-academic advice, I just discovered Kate Duttro’s Career Change for Academics site.
And here’s a superfabulous former music psychologist turned writer-editor-blogger, Christine Koh (and one of these days I’ll post my interview with English-PhD-turned-blogger Anna Viele who writes over at ABDPBT).
Finally, one reader sent in this link about the “quarterlife crisis” phenomenon, which included this little zinger:
An obvious choice for panicking twentysomethings with a post-undergraduate sense of displacement and for the ones that aren’t fulfilled by their jobs is grad school. James, a 28-year-old student, says “Quarterlife crises are the reason that so many universities have turned lower-level graduate programs into a cash cow.” Graduate and professional school can provide a direction and delay other choices about career and stability. And, while it’s true that higher education can “help students improve their personal and professional competency,” it can also “leave students feeling insecure about their abilities and their job prospects,” says Marc Scheer, who is a career counsellor and educational consultant, the author of No Sucker Left Behind: Avoiding the Great College Rip-Off and an advocate for considering options beyond formal education. (He also has a Ph.D.) Scheer emphasizes making an informed choice. “Whether graduate school is a wise move depends on each individual student and what they want to study. Law school can be helpful, but mostly if a student can gain acceptance to a top-tier school. Getting a Ph.D. could be dangerous for some students, especially since Ph.D. graduation rates are obscenely low these days, and few tenure-track jobs are available. So it really depends.”
And, dovetailing what I wrote earlier this week,
Women also find themselves conflicted, usually more than men, about the trajectory of their twenties as they relate to relationships. Sarah, who is 27 and works at a non-profit, wants to travel and get a master’s degree, but feels conflicted about doing either. “I want to have kids, and every day that goes by, I have this number in my head. It’s 32. It used to be 30. That’s only a few years from now. I’m thinking, if I don’t do some of this stuff now, before I have kids, am I going to be able to do it?” Women are roundly considered to be in biologically ideal form for baby-making in their twenties and early thirties, which are also prime fun-having and career-building years. For women who want all of the things promised by (theoretically) equal education, work and sex lives, the conflict of desires can be catastrophic.
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networking
How’s this for an attention-grabbing headline? “Family is the number one reason for women leaving academia.” You can get the full report here, but it turns out that even though women now obtain more than 50% of all PhDs in the life sciences in the U.S. (!), they leave before getting tenure. Take this jaw-dropping snippet:
Our findings indicate that women in the sciences who are married with children are 35 percent less likely to enter a tenure track position after receiving a Ph.D. than married men with children. And they are 27 percent less likely than their male counterparts to achieve tenure upon entering a tenure-track job. By contrast, single women without young children are roughly as successful as married men with children in attaining a tenure-track job, and a little more successful than married women with children in achieving tenure. Married women without children also do not fare quite as well as men.
Though I can’t say this is too surprising:
In unparalleled surveys of doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars at the University of California, we found that both men and women report a shifting away from the career goal of research professor, with women’s move being more pronounced. Among doctoral students, career-life issues populate four of the top-five most commonly cited reasons why students changed their minds, with women more likely than men to cite these issues as very important, and more than twice as likely as men to cite issues related to children.
Then there is some really maddening stuff about the lack of mat leave provisions, which makes this Canadian go a little crazy (full-time workers in Canada are entitled up to 52 weeks of maternity leave for bio moms–with a bit of an income paid by our employment insurance system–and up to 9 months of mat leave for adoptive parents, to be split up in whatever way you like between the two parents).
But this really made me flip:
The time pressures of academia are unrelenting for most faculty in the sciences, who work on average about 50 hours a week up through age 62. When combined with caregiving hours and house work, UC women faculty with children, ages 30 to 50, report a weekly average of over 100 hours of combined activities (—compared to 86 hours for men with children). And women faculty with children provide an average of more than 30 hours a week of caregiving up through age 50, while family responsive policies rarely address this long-term career-life issue. Evidence indicates that the collision course between career timing and family timing may be worsening—the average age for tenure receipt among tenure-track faculty in the sciences was 36 in 1985, and extended out past age 39 by 2003.
Wow. That sheds some serious light, doesn’t it?
Tagged as:
research,
women
Attention, Toronto-based academic ex-pats (and those of you who are still at the thinking about it stage)! The next installment of the Leaving Academia meetup will happen on Monday, November 23rd at 7:00 pm. We’ll be meeting at Kahawa, a cafe at 388 College, at Bathurst (for a map, click here). The space is kindly being donated to us for free, but I will frown at you sternly like a schoolmarm if you don’t order a drink and/or something to eat. Please let me know if you’re planning to attend by emailing me: sabine [at] leavingacademia [dot] com.
From the Guardian’s piece on Sunday about the outing of Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle du Jour, the PhD who anonymously wrote the Diary of a London Call Girl blog (which was turned into a British TV show):
Among sex workers themselves there was little surprise that a well-educated woman like Magnanti had got into prostitution. “Loads of people who work in the sex industry are academics – education is a very expensive habit,” said Catherine Stephens, an activist for the International Union of Sex Workers who has been a sex worker herself for 10 years.
“At a brothel I worked in, I think I was the only one not doing a PhD.”
Dr. Magnanti now works as a children’s cancer scientist at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health based at Bristol’s St. Michael’s Hospital.
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sex work
I just wanted to make sure that those of you who are on the non-academic and academic job markets know about Interfolio. Its main strengths seem to play best to those doing a high-level or academic job search, since one of its key functions is managing and shepherding along your letters of reference. If your campus career centre doesn’t already do this, the service is a great way to get your letters out without constantly nagging your referees. There is also a document-sharing feature, so if you need a quick, tidy way of, say, getting copies of your dissertation out to people, this would be ideal.
But it could be beneficial to those focussing on a non-academic search: one really nifty thing it offers is a portfolio option, which essentially is a web page with nice, clean layout that helps you establish your online identity. This is something that job hunters inside academia and out can really benefit from. If you don’t have the chutzpah to set up a blog or the skills/money to establish a website, getting set up on Interfolio would be a great way for you to have a professional presence online. Of course, this is the main reason why I’m not using Interfolio, ’cause I don’t need much help in that regard! But perhaps you do, readers.
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services
It’s time to come clean, dear readers, about a little secret I’ve had for the past two months or so. I, Sabine Hikel, prophet of all that is great and good about ditching the academic life, am on the job hunt. It’s true: I’m out there on the job market, just like you. Not having job searched for over three years now, it’s been a very clear and solid reminder of just how much work is involved in looking for work!
Now, the situation I’ve got going at the moment (i.e. the freelance life: cobbling together writing, editing, consulting, workshops and research projects) has its virtues, much in the same way that any flexible work arrangement has its virtues. But the downsides of all that flextime and being my own boss include managing the isolation, keeping many balls in the air all at once, and the lack of steady income.
What I lack in income, though, I make up for in time. As we’ve discussed before, like other former academics, I wouldn’t be able to be self-employed if my partner weren’t bringing home the bacon on a steady and predictable basis. I’m taking advantage of this situation by steadily, systematically and vigorously meeting new people, cultivating my current contacts, and learning, learning, learning about the job market.
This is why, as much as this is a semi-awkward time in my life (being a freelancer, I mean), it’s also an incredibly rewarding one. Since the inception of Leaving Academia, I’ve been able to meet an incredibly diverse range of professionals who’ve shared their time and thoughts with me. This started off, of course, as my podcast series of interviews. It evolved into my own personal information interviews, not always with people who had ditched academia, but with people who were working in roles and sectors that I was curious about. This is a process I am still engaged in, and enjoying just as much as ever.
At first, I wasn’t sure about sharing my job-hunting adventures on this blog because I was afraid I’d discredit myself. How could I keep a blog about non-academic job hunting when I was in the same position as many of my clients and readers? And then I realized two things. One is that, as someone who already left academia three years ago, I’m actually moving from strength to strength. I’ve done the heavy lifting of the resume writing, the transferable skills analysis, and landing that first non-academic job. I’ve dismantled my academic identity and built up a wholly new one. So although I’m changing jobs again, I’m a hell of a lot further ahead than I was a few years ago.
The other realization I had about sharing my decision to go from freelance to finding something more stable was about practicing what I preach. Use social media as part of your networking strategy, I’ve been known to say. Tell everyone you know that you’re on the job market. Well, not sharing my professional ambitions with those of you who read this and my other work online seems unwise, at best.
So there you go: I’m out here in the trenches, just like many of you, and I’ll be writing more dispatches to let you know how it’s going and what strategies I’m using. And as always, leave your comments and questions below, since it’s you guys who make Leaving Academia the resource it is.
Here’s another use of effective marketing on Twitter: someone called @AcademeJobs started following my tweets (@sabinehikel). I checked out theirs. There’s some good stuff there–not job postings, exactly, but links to articles on the politics of higher education. Then I clicked on the home page for this tweeter, and it turns out to be Academe Jobs, a site I’ve never heard of before (have you?). I’m not endorsing the site, but I am letting you know that it exists, because I know there is a segment of my readership that hasn’t yet given up on the academic job search. It appears as though there are listing for both the US and Canada, as well as for faculty, admin and “executive jobs” (what the heck is that in the context of a university?).
I have to say, though, that nothing I’ve ever seen in the world of academic job listings beats the nifty little Dual Career Search tool over at Inside Higher Ed. Sure, this doesn’t apply to everyone, but for those two-scholar households, this little search mechanism makes it a heck of a lot easier to find academic work in the same time zone for both of you.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled non-academic programming.
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jobs,
social media
Here’s just a quick hit: a link to a PhD who left academia when she rediscovered her love of art. Sounds like all that time you spent watching Forbidden Love during your women’s studies BA could actually pay off!
Tagged as:
leaving,
women
