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.
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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.
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