One Last Week to Submit Proposals for Our E-Book!

Greetings, readers of my poor little neglected corner of the internet!

As of today, there is just one short week left in which you can submit initial 250-word abstracts to be included in the "Leaving Academia" E-book that Currer, Lauren, Jet and I are putting together.

We have received several great submissions, but are still hoping to get more! So if you think you might have something to contribute, please see the CFP below and consider submitting!

Keep in mind - you don't have to be in your dream job or completely recovered from leaving academia to submit. We are hoping to collect stories from a range of people who have had a range of experiences and emotions and feelings about leaving the academic world, at any stage.

So if you're a former faculty member who is now the happy director of a giant think tank ... we want to hear from you! And if you're a former grad student who left ABD and is now working at a "meh" job for the time being (hey...that story sounds familiar!) ... we want to hear from you too!

See the CFP below for information on what we're looking for and how to submit. Thanks!

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Have you left academia? Or are you currently in the process of leaving? Share your story!

As post-academic bloggers, we know firsthand that there is a desire for stories that explore more than just the career aspects of leaving the ivory tower. People want to know how, when, and why you quit; emotional issues related to quitting; and examples of post-academic success. We envision this book as a source of advice and support for readers who have quit graduate school before getting their Ph.D., people leaving academia even after they have finished their degrees, and people who are adjuncting or working in academia who are looking to leave. Many stories of the post-academic transition have been told on personal blogs and websites, including our blogs and web site www.howtoleaveacademia.com, but this is the first collection has been organized to speak directly to people’s experiences leaving academia.

We’re looking for thoughtful, personal pieces (non-fiction or creative non-fiction) that tell a story or develop a theme related to the process of quitting academia. Like any good paper, the essay should have a core thesis or concept that you’re exploring through your writing. We prefer submissions that are relatively jargon-free and more casual in writing style. Your essay can be any length, with a general goal of 5-10 pages double spaced (but we’ll consider shorter or longer!). If you have poetry, art, or other (digitized) creative work that explores these themes, we’d be interested in that, too.  

This collection will focus primarily on what happened after you quit; thus, we are not interested in treatises about the failures of grad school or the problems in higher education. You’re welcome to explore the reasons and circumstances under which you left, but please continue the narrative forward from there. You can be as anonymous as you like, although please include enough detail that the reader can be drawn into your story. We invite you to explore the messiness, difficulty, and contradictions in the quitting process. 

Not every story has a happy ending, and that’s OK. We encourage submissions on any of these topics, as well as proposals for essays that explore any gaps between them:

How, when, and why you left academia: hopes/expectations versus realities in grad school, specific incidents/anecdotes, the job market, what you wish you’d known.

Alt-Ac Careers, Adjuncting -- Life on campus when you’re not a prof or student, changes in relationships with “the academy.”

Success Stories: how quitting changed your life for the better, how happy you are, how glad you are to be gone.

Failure stories: screwing up, falling down, awful jobs, bad experiences, floundering, despair. 

If you want to share a simpler or more straightforward story of your post-academic journey, please consider submitting to the website (email Lauren or Currer at the addresses below and specify that your submission is for the website).   

Timeline:
250 word abstracts due: Feb 1st
Goal of getting back to accepted folks mid-February
Final essays due: April 1st
Goal of publication by graduation in May 2013! :)


Email submissions with “E-Book Submission” in the subject line to Lauren at lauren.nervosa@gmail.com or Currer at projectreinvention12@gmail.com  by Feb 1 2013.

Career Transitions: Teaching stories, writing stories, stories of how you discovered a new vocation/path.

Belated New Year's Roundup Post

Whew, finding time to blog is hard when you're also trying to work full-time, volunteer a few hours a week, start up a brand spanking new postacademic website, and find a little bit of time to hang out with your partner and pets and yourself! :)

But I really can't complain ... things are going pretty well for me right now. So, yay.

But given that we just had another new year sneak up on us, I wanted to write a brief "year in review" kind of post, to sum up how the year has gone and where I hope to go in 2013.

2012 was a weird year. Upon first glance, it looks like a pretty uneventful year, primarily because nothing much happened for me career-wise. But when I think about it more closely, I actually do think it was a big year for me in my journey out of academia. And even more importantly, I'm hopeful that I'm finally in a good position to make 2013 a really great year.

New Links for the New Year!

Hey all!

I'll be back this weekend with a more substantive post ... I've been meaning to write up a "2012 Year in Review" post like many of the other postacademic bloggers have done, so I'll get to that this weekend.

The reason I've been neglecting my own blog, however, is because Currer, Lauren, Jet and I have been busily getting our new postacademic website up and running. We bought a domain, and set a template ... and now we actually have some content up!

So go check out our new site - How To Leave Academia! It's a work in progress, of course, and we still have some kinks to work out with the template (and a lot of content to add). But it's coming along nicely, and in the meantime we'd love to have folks bookmark it and start sending people over to check it out.

And as I mentioned in my last post ... if you have any ideas for content or if you'd like to contribute an article or a postacademic success story or just a thought about something that you see over there, leave a comment or email one of us!

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A couple of links to new blogs after the jump...

Seeking Contributors for our E-Book!

Hey all!

I am currently out of state visiting my family for the holidays, so haven't had much time to sit down and write anything. Hopefully all of you who celebrate Christmas (as well as those who don't) have had a lovely holiday season and are finding some time to step away from work and the daily grind and to just relax for a little while...

Anyway, before I get back to the holiday/family festivities, I wanted to post the CFP for our "leaving academia" e-book. Our goal with this book is to create a collection of stories, reflections, and anecdotes about leaving academia and becoming a post-academic, so that others can gain some inspiration and maybe some perspective on how easy or not-easy the transition has been for others.

Now, you may be thinking that if you left and aren't working your Dream Job and/or if you don't have your Ultimate Dream Life, you shouldn't contribute. Nonsense! All of us out here have been open about how the leaving process has had its ups and downs and of how we might not be exactly where we hope to be in the future. And yet, we are all fairly happy and are all going to contribute stories. You don't have to be the Perfect Postacademic in order to contribute. (And in fact, what would that Perfect Postacademic look like, anyway? Only in academia do we expect that there's one life and one career path that would make everyone blissfully happy...)

So see the CFP below (shamelessly copied-and-pasted from Currer's place), and if you have any questions shoot us an email or leave a comment!

Exciting News! ...Wanna Help? :)

As Lauren mentioned in her post just a little while ago, we have exciting news to report from the postacademic blogosphere!

After months of ranting away on our own blogs, several of us (me, Lauren, Currer and Jet) have decided to move forward with a centralized website and e-book that will provide resources for folks who are contemplating leaving academia, as well as support for those who have already left.

The website won't be up and running for a little while, although we do have a URL and an outline, so it's definitely going to happen. :) The book will follow once the website is up and running, and once we get a sense for the type of information people seem to be looking for and how we can best complement what's on the site.

Our initial plan for the website is for it to provide concrete, tangible information about how to leave academia (how to tell your advisor, how to write a resume, how to deal with financial and other issues that might arise), as well as support and resources to help you make the decision that's best for you and to keep yourself emotionally on-track.

So! We have plans, and we're excited about them! And this is where you come in.

So Many Ph.Ds...So Few Jobs

I'm going to read the whole thing this weekend and will probably have more to say about it in future posts, but the newest NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates is out, and the picture about jobs isn't a pretty one.

According to the IHE, the percentage of folks who graduate with Ph.D.s and have firm employment commitments on hand at graduation has fallen sharply ... across every discipline.

Here's the table from the IHE article, which is drawn directly from the report:

(Side note - I am really surprised to see that the percentage of new grads with job commitments is highest among social scientists. Though I suppose if you include economists and psychologists in that group, you may be catching a number of people who are moving into industry. But still...).

At any rate, these numbers are pretty scary. Note that the comparison year is 2006 - which is at least a year or two before the academic job market is perceived to have started its collapse.

And as everyone knows, the next few years were awful. Fewer schools had money to hire new faculty, and many schools cancelled their searches when they were already underway. Graduate programs (like mine) where students who graduated in 2004 or 2005 were often mulling over 2 or 3 job offers as ABDs were suddenly seeing students who got nothing more than a single VAP offer or (if they really got lucky), an offer from a school that was at the end of their desirability list.

But now, in 2011 and 2012, we keep hearing that the market across multiple disciplines is rebounding. There are more job listings than in previous years, and schools are finally getting the go-ahead to hire tenure-track faculty. Don't worry, Ph.D. students! Everything is back to normal! Just keep working hard, and it'll all work out!

Random Miscellany About My Life Now - Boring Work Weeks

I logged into the blog today, thinking that I would edit a nearly-finished draft of a post I was working on last month and put it up.

But then my partner texted me on his way to work: "Whatcha doing?"

It's raining and gloomy outside, and I'm in the office working on some pretty monotonous tasks today. Everyone in my office is pretty tired today, so no one's really all that talkative. The first week of each new month is always the busiest for us, so we're all working fairly hard this week (though obviously I still have time to blog!) and recovering from our holiday party* last weekend.

So I texted him back: "...eh, I did [task X] this morning, and now I'm doing [task Y]. My job is SO THRILLING. :)"

Then I went back to work and started thinking about what I wrote. And of course, since I'd already logged into the blog and sent my mind to "postacademic mode," I thought about how I'd feel if I still had a dissertation that I had to work on instead of these monotonous work tasks. Or papers to grade, or a syllabus to write, or whatever. In other words, I started thinking about how my life in my boring job compared to my life when I was a Super Important Grad Student Doing Important Groundbreaking Work.

And I realized that I'd rather work on monotonous tasks X and Y every workday for the rest of the freaking month then spend even a couple of hours trying to code data for my dissertation or trying to read some horrible blowhard's academic paper to add to my lit review, or responding to a needy student email.**