Well, This is Upsetting

Hello, readers! (If any of you are still out there. :) )

Unsurprisingly, with the passage of time and distance from my grad school life, I haven't had as much free time or motivation to keep up with this blog as I did for the first several years. I periodically come on here to clear out the spam comments and/or to see what people in this world are reading and writing about, but in general - since I haven't made a career out of postacademia - I've just gravitated away from this world and into my "real life" world.

Which is definitely how it should be! Hopefully those of you who read my blog back in the day (who have fully left academia) have done the same thing. If you're making a writing or coaching or whatevering career out of the postacademic world, then of course you should still be watching and reading academic news on a regular basis. Otherwise, hopefully you've slowly gravitated away from a daily perusal of the job market forums and things like that.

However, I have been meaning to write an update to tell you all how I've been doing after all this time has passed, and I have read a few articles recently that I wanted to pass along to anyone who still finds themselves arriving at my blog and thinks that the problems I discussed several years ago have disappeared. They absolutely, 100% have not!

Gawker is Asking for Adjunct Stories!

Hi readers!

If any of you out there who are still reading or finding this blog are adjuncts and would like to share your story, Gawker is looking for people who are willing to share their stories for an upcoming article or series that they're planning. They are guaranteeing anonymity. See the info at this link.

From the article:

What is the reality of life as an adjunct professor? I’d like to run some stories from adjuncts. Please email me if you’d like to share the following info: How much money do you make? How much do you work? How does your school treat adjuncts? What is your quality of life? And what do you think should be done to change the labor system of colleges and universities, if anything?

Email me. Anonymity guaranteed.

If you have time and are willing to share your story, please do. If there's one thing I've become convinced of in the last five years (and maybe longer than that), it's that nothing in higher ed/grad school/academia will change unless we start agitating for it. And successful agitation is probably going to require some public attention on the plight of adjuncts and grad students.

As always, I hope you're all doing well and are finding support while you're working your way through grad school, academia or postacademia. Take care and be well!

New Location for How To Leave Academia

Hi all! Long time no talk!!!

I am still here...still working...still happy...still doing pretty great, with no regrets about my choice to leave academia in 2011. I'm going to write more about what I'm doing now and how I'm feeling in the next week or so, but it won't be appearing here...it will be appearing over at our recently moved and revamped How to Leave Academia site!

Check it out: http://www.howtoleaveacademia.blogspot.com/

As some of you probably noticed, the old site went kaput a year or two ago, and unfortunately due to work and life demands it took us a long time to fix it. But all of the content that used to be at HTLA is now at this (free!) Blogspot site, and it will remain there until the end of the internet. We promise.

I doubt that any of us will be writing much over there, but I suppose you never know when the mood might strike one of us to write something. So keep an eye on it! In the meantime, if any of you would like to add some content, write a guest post, leave a comment, etc., shoot one of us an email! We would love to add more to the site, and I'm sure that the newer folks who are leaving would love to hear from people who are going through the same process.

And in the meantime, don't forget about our e-book, Moving On, which is still available on Amazon!

I hope you're all doing well and are figuring things out for yourselves. Even if you feel alone, don't worry...we've got your back, and there is light at the end of the academic tunnel.

Article on Quitting Academia

Hey everyone,

As I said in one of my more recent updates, I'm basically absent from the whole postacademic/alt-academic world these days, mostly by choice. I see an article about academic politics or the job market or whatever, and I'm like ..... meh, do I really want to get more depressed today? Nah, I don't think so.

But I promised a few months back to bring you links to anything that I read on academic or postacademia that I find to be particularly good. And I think this piece at Vox definitely applies.

There are about a million parts of this piece that I want to highlight and would love to discuss - if I didn't have a pesky day job that I have to attend to right now - but in particular, this passage spoke to me, and I believe it will be useful for readers of this blog:

The concept [of alt-academia]  is good enough in theory, but in practice it's just another way of phrasing the problem: There's not enough room in academia. Go find a job in a different field.

Some blame scholars themselves for the problem — claiming that today's PhD holders aren't as capable or as qualified as generations past. But after sitting on hiring committees and reading hundreds of CVs and writing samples, I refuse to blame the earnest applicants whose sole crime was being told scholarship was a worthwhile pursuit and believing it. If anything, market pressures have resulted in the production of some of the finest scholarship in generations, with even many adjuncts having a handful of great publications under their belts. The problem is that the system is more than happy to take their money and use their services from undergrad all the way to their doctoral graduation, but when it comes time to pay it off with a real job? Sorry — best look somewhere "alternative."

 There's a lot of good stuff in this piece about student engagement, tenure, how the promise of grad school and academia relates to the reality, and quite a few other things.

Read it, enjoy, and feel less alone!

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Side note: For those who regularly look(ed) at our website How to Leave Academia, we are aware that the site is having massive problems and is currently unavailable when you try to navigate to it. We've been trying to figure out what's wrong - though, of course, our attempts to fix the problem are hampered by the fact that even WE cannot access the site to even poke around behind the scenes to see what's happening.

And, you know, all of us have day jobs and real life to attend to, so trying to get the site back up and running definitely has fallen fairly low on our priority lists in recent months.

But we are aware of the problem, we are trying to see if we can figure out what's happening, and hopefully we can figure it out one of these days! In the meantime, you can always find us and reach us via our personal blogs.

STEM Readers: Can You Help Advise a Student Reader?

Hey everybody!

I received the following email from an undergraduate student in biochemistry who is currently enrolled as a senior in a university in the United States.

This student wrote to me yesterday to see whether I might be able to offer some advice, as they've come to think that grad school might not be the best option for them after all.

Unfortunately, since I haven't taken a "hard" science course since my freshman year in undergrad and my only two friends who come from the biosciences are currently enrolled in graduate programs, I don't think that I can be much personal help for this student. So I thought I would pass their question along to you, dear readers, to see if anyone has any advice.

If you can offer any advice for this student, please leave a comment below! I allow anonymous commenting and don't review/approve comments before they're posted, so advise away!

The student writes:

I’m an undergraduate biochemistry senior. Lately I have become sort of disinterested (sort of disillusioned) about graduate school in the sciences and pursuing a science career. From my undergraduate research experience this summer to interacting with professors, I don’t feel like I could handle the lifestyle nor would I want to. I don’t know what options there are though. Biochemistry isn’t really extendable to other careers, and I’m not even sure where to begin. Most of my professors advocate for graduate school too. What would you say to someone in my position? Thanks for any help!

So what do you say, dear readers? Can anyone offer any advice to an undergrad who really needs it?

Some Thoughts on the LaCour Scandal

So as I've learned this week, apparently there is at least one thing that will get me sucked back into reading and writing and thinking about academic work and the controversies therein. And that one thing is an instance of research fraud so massive that it almost defies imagination.

I mean......really, Michael LaCour? You published a huge study in Science with a fancy glittery co-author, and it turns out that you completely fabricated your data? And apparently didn't even bother to get IRB approval for a face-to-face survey until after you already "carried out the interviews?" (Scare quotes intentional, obviously.) And then you faked a few grants and a teaching award, just because the research fakery wasn't enough? And you even stopped to falsify a document of research integrity along the way?

Wow. Wow. That's...astounding.

(For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here is a good overview of both his fraud and of the excellent work by the grad student who uncovered it.

Or just google LaCour's name. Even if you think you're done reading about academia, this scandal might just suck you back in for an hour or two or ten. Or maybe that's just me.)

Anyway, many people smarter and more engaged in these issues than me have done great work writing about the underlying issues about research ethics and coauthor relationships, etc., that are related to this fraud. I don't have much to add on those issues since I haven't done research in almost five years, so I'll leave it to others to dig in on those important and relevant topics.

I do have a few things to say about this scandal, though, from the "postacademic, cynical-about-academia" side of the aisle.

How To Succeed in Academia: Be Rich!

I ran across another link that those of you who find your way here may be interested in reading: an article by the excellent Sarah Kendzior, who writes about the reproduction of privilege and inequality in academia for the Chronicle's Vitae website.

Those of you who have been reading here for awhile know that this was a bit of an obsession for me for awhile - you can see my old posts on privilege and academia here, here, here, and here. I've also written about how this privilege divide has followed people into postacademia as well, both here and at HTLA.

But Kendzior takes it further, by pointing out that the vast majority of tenure-track slots in many fields are going to graduates of elite programs...but that the solution to this apparent problem, unfortunately, isn't as simple as telling prospective graduate students to only apply to elite programs:

The answer is often financial, and, again, speaks to privilege and discrimination endemic to academic culture. The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even with full funding, it is nearly impossible to live in such costly cities without incurring debt, given that stipends tend to be $25,000 or less. - See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/929-academia-s-1-percent#sthash.sbh256KX.dpuf

The answer is often financial, and, again, speaks to privilege and discrimination endemic to academic culture. The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even with full funding, it is nearly impossible to live in such costly cities without incurring debt, given that stipends tend to be $25,000 or less.

 She goes on to note that while it may be fiscally responsible for a prospective student from modest means to go to a cheaper graduate school in a cheaper city, by doing so they are likely dooming themselves to a tenuous career marked by low pay, insecurity, or even adjuncthood.

Academia’s currency is prestige, but prestige is always backed up by money, whether the expenditure for life in a costly city, the expectation of unpaid or underpaid labor, or research trips assumed to be paid out-of-pocket.

Her article references several studies that have recently been done on the hiring practices of academic departments. Since I no longer have access to a university library and the journals therein, I can't pull up the original studies. But for those of you who are still in the academic club, they might be worth a look.

For many of you, it's probably too late to forego grad school or to transfer programs. But if you can gather some information and prepare yourself for what you'll be facing on the academic job market, perhaps you can plan ahead, research some (just in case!) alternate careers, and NOT wind up toiling in adjuncthood once you graduate.

The answer is often financial, and, again, speaks to privilege and discrimination endemic to academic culture. The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even with full funding, it is nearly impossible to live in such costly cities without incurring debt, given that stipends tend to be $25,000 or less. - See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/929-academia-s-1-percent#sthash.sbh256KX.dpuf

The answer is often financial, and, again, speaks to privilege and discrimination endemic to academic culture. The most prestigious universities – the Ivy League, University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of California system – tend to lie in the most expensive parts of the country. Even with full funding, it is nearly impossible to live in such costly cities without incurring debt, given that stipends tend to be $25,000 or less. - See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/929-academia-s-1-percent#sthash.sbh256KX.dpuf