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
Thinking about undertaking a career change is a stressful proposition at the best of times. Thinking about a career change during a recession, when news about fresh rounds of layoffs get announced every week, is even more frightening. So even if you’re miserable, is it a good idea to stay in grad school when the economy is undergoing a battering? Or are you supposed to do some kinda reverse-psychology thing and look for the opportunities that a rough economy supposedly has?
Well, Penelope Trunk (she of the Brazen Careerist startup) advises not to dodge the recession with grad school. While this post is aimed at people who are thinking of going in to grad school (rather than those who are already in or recently out, as most Leaving Academia readers are), it does provide some interesting food for thought. For example, Penelope says,
2. PhD programs are pyramid schemes
It’s very hard to get a job teaching at a university. And if you are not going to teach, why are you getting a degree? You don’t need a piece of paper to show that you are learning. Go read books after work. Because look: In the arts, you would have a better chance of surviving the Titanic than getting a tenure-track position; and once you adjust for IQ, education, and working hours, post-PhD science jobs are among the most low-paying jobs you could get.
Now, I have to come clean here: I used to be someone who very firmly was against the idea that grad school was a job-training ground. In the old days, I would have sputtered and jabbered about how absurd it was to ask why you’d get a degree if you weren’t planning on teaching. The way that I felt about grad school was kind of how I felt about a liberal arts education: the learning was the important thing. Worry about your career? Well, that’s just gauche.
Now that I understand how grad school actually works, I don’t have quite the same attitude. I kind of appreciate Penelope’s perspective that learning can take place in any job, and not just in school.
Of course, no one wants to jump from the frying pan and into the fire. So I would not suggest quitting grad school without a plan (though I know that’s worked out for a number of people I’ve talked to). But I would say that the recession is not a reason to not research other jobs, to talk to people who do interesting work about how they got into that field, to haunt the forums at Chronicle and WRK4US, join in the discussion here, etc. I don’t know about the situation in the States, but in Canada, people are hiring–just look at any given job search site. And many of the jobs are well suited for people who can think, write, read, research and play well with others.
I also think that, as much as grad school gives you a sense of security by virtue of the fact that it gives you something to do (even when you avoid doing it), it’s a very, very insecure state to be in, year after year. Financially, it could not be more insecure. The prospects for academic work are insecure. It can be draining on your mental health, your social life, your relationship with your significant other. To go from the insecure state of grad school to the insecure state of the general job market actually doesn’t seem so bad when you consider that job-hunting doesn’t cost you money, doesn’t have built-in ritual humiliation (though that can certainly be a by-product of it, for sure) and only requires you to draft a 2-page document, rather than a 300-500 page one.
As an aside, I really liked Penelope Trunk’s interview with Guy Kawasaki on the nine biggest workplace myths (especially the bit about talking to someone instead of worrying about choosing precise verbs for your résumé) and I thought it might be useful for those of you thinking of jumping to the corporate sector.
Tagged as:
leaving,
money,
recession
When I was a grad student, there was a rule that students could not have jobs outside of the teaching assistantships (or research or graduate assistantships or course directorships, as the case may be). And the rule that guided the way that we were paid was that teaching assistantships were supposed to take up about 10 hours a week of our time (totalling 270 hours per academic year).
It turns out that this is the official policy of the Ontario Council of Graduate Studies. The rationale is that working any more hours than that is too much of a distraction and reduces students’ completion times.
It is not possible or desirable for the university to monitor and enforce the employment activities of its graduate students outside the university. However it is both possible and desirable for the university to ensure that it does not itself create a structural situation that jeopardizes the ability of the graduate student to make full time progress toward the completion of graduate program requirements.
But given the fact, you know, poverty goes a long way to reducing completion times, is the 10-hour rule obsolete? Should universities just wake up to the fact that grad students often need to supplement their measly incomes with other forms of work? And has anybody actually done any studies that would actually show that working more than 10 hours at a job reduces completion times?
Tagged as:
money,
work
