Man, do I ever love when my traffic stats alert me to a new postacademic blog. I loooooove it. I can't even describe how happy it makes me to see someone else blogging about this whole process. While it's awful that we're all struggling with this transition with the associated guilt and sadness and anger and lack of support from our departments, it's great that we're all out here communicating with each other and supporting each other.
And hopefully, when some grad student or adjunct who is feeling hopeless about their life runs a Google search that leads them to one of our blogs, they get some comfort from finding that there are so many of us out here who are feeling the same way ... but have gotten ourselves out and have moved (or are moving) onto new jobs and new careers.
Today, I introduce University of Lies to the postacademic blogging community.
The blog author is a Ph.D. student in the humanities who is on hir way out. It's not clear whether zie is a Type 1 or Type 2 leaver (if zie would even classify hirself as one or the other), but it's clear from the early posts that zie is fed up with the culture of academia and the lies about what the job is actually like (hint: your intro to literature course will NOT look like a deleted scene from Dead Poets Society).
Unlike many of us who were fed nothing but idealistic nonsense about grad school and academia, it sounds like UOL was actually warned by their favorite undergraduate professor that grad school was not as wonderful as advertised. It really sounds like hir advisor tried his best to convince hir not to head to school, but like many aspiring grad students, UOL ignored the advice.
(This is no knock on UOL, of course. As we've discussed in the postac blogosphere before, most of us agree that we would never have listened if we'd been adequately warned of what was ahead of us. And plenty of people we talk to now don't listen or don't understand what we're saying).
But UOL has seen the forest for the trees now, and is getting out, and writing some great (and funny) stuff along the way. Go check it out!
thanks for the shout out, JC :)
ReplyDeleteI feel so glad to have found this little corner of the interwebs.
Thank you JC for introducing us all to this blog. I'd not known of it before. I've just the more recent blog post 'The Big Lebowski of Academia' and I look forward to reading more.
ReplyDeleteUOL is awesome, we are all awesome!
ReplyDeleteI posted again today about the way grad school economics worked for us as a family with children. Check it out: http://mamanervosa.com/2012/05/23/lets-talk-about-debt-part-2-the-catch-22-of-grad-school-economics/
ReplyDeleteHaving kids means everything is high stakes: you HAVE to be able to feed them, clothe them, get school stuff, etc. It also makes your options more limited (moving becomes harder, you can't live on a shoestring budget in a rented room, etc).