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!

The Ph.D. Placement Project

Hey all! Long time no talk!!

I'm writing today because everyone who hasn't already done so should head over to the Chronicle of Higher Education and contribute to their new Ph.D. Placement Project. There are numerous ways to do this - you can take the anonymous survey (if you've completed your Ph.D.), follow them on Twitter, email them directly (PhDPlacement at Chronicle dot com) if you have any ideas for how they should proceed, or sign up for their email list to receive updates on the project.

(This wonderful project seems to primarily be a response to William Pannapacker's most recent column in the Chronicle, where he laments the lack of data on Ph.D. job placements. Kudos to the Chronicle for trying to tackle this challenge and to assemble the necessary data).

They've already received more than 600 responses, and they are clearly excited about the huge response to their initial survey. But as they write in that article, this is just the first step in what they intend to be a much larger project:

...the survey we've posted is only a starting point. We intend to use it to collect ideas and advice that will help us determine how best to proceed in collecting detailed, accurate placement information.

When we publish placement information about individual Ph.D. programs, it will be based on a formal research project, not on a Google survey.

In short, if you're interested in the issue of placement rates and Ph.D. programs, please keep communicating with us.

At this point they are only collecting survey data from people who have completed their Ph.D.s ... so if you're a current grad student or a dropout like me, you can't take the survey. However, you can still follow them on Twitter, email them with suggestions, and sign up for their email list. So if you haven't finished your Ph.D. but you are interested in this project, there are ways to get involved.

I Don't Think We're Saying What You Think We're Saying

So ... while I've been away taking care of work things and life things and computer things, it appears that my blog has gotten tangentially caught up in an academic/postacademic brouhaha.

It started when Amy Pistone, a Classics Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan posted this article (under the official U of M grad school masthead! Neato!!), instructing all of us in the postacademic world (and particularly those in the humanities) to sit down and shut up and stop talking, because she really really loves her work and that's all that matters. Not the crappy academic job market in the humanities, not the fact that grad school is something that a lot of people find depressing and demoralizing, and not the fact that there are a huge number of people out here who are reading and commenting (note: check out the years-long comment threads after each of those posts) and obviously gaining some value from those of us who are out here "writing these sorts of articles about grad students" that she doesn't like.

Sigh.

When I first noticed the traffic coming over from her article and skimmed it, I wasn't going to bother to respond. We postacademics get pushback from time to time, and I've got thick skin. And I'll be honest - when I glanced through Pistone's piece, my thoughts were basically: "mmmhmmm ... sure. Go ahead and vent, my dear ... but let's revisit this in five years and see how you feel then." Then I went on about my day.

But yesterday, I saw Rebecca Schuman's open letter to Amy Pistone, in which she expresses similar feelings to mine:

Do I dislike you, personally, Amy Pistone, even though you have misunderstood the dark humor in an article I wrote [...]? No, on the contrary, you remind me of a far more earnest version of myself at your stage (I’d say “at your age,” but I spent seven years working in the private sector between college and grad school, which is more than two, in case you’re wondering).

No, my reaction to you, personally, is “Oh, bless her heart—she’ll learn soon enough.”

(It was apparently Schuman's piece in Slate from earlier this year that inspired Pistone's university-sanctioned* temper tantrum.)

Reading Schuman's response inspired me to go back and read Pistone's article more closely. And boy, am I glad I did. Because now that I've read her post in full, I feel compelled to respond to what are clear and notable misrepresentations of my writing on this blog.

On Two Years ... Some Random Thoughts

Hello from your friendly and loving (but neglectful) blogger!

You know my typical excuses by now ... work, outside (non-computer) life, work on the website/e-book, lack of overall motivation to write, blah blah blah...

But I'm still here!

And I just realized this morning ... today is my two-year anniversary of the day where I officially decided to leave academia.

I can hardly believe it. Two years. I swear, sometimes it feels like it's been two months.

Anyway, I wrote a lengthy post and series last year (here's part 1 of 4) to commemorate my one-year anniversary of leaving, so I won't go into something long and convoluted today. In fact, I really don't even know what I would write in terms of long, flowery observations about having left academia anymore.

The simple fact is: I've left. I have another job. I have work and life obligations, and I earn money and buy groceries and run errands and see my friends, and in general my life has gone on. It has its ups and downs ... but without a doubt, it's still better than it was 2.5 years ago.

I can't think of the last time I had a crying fit, or a mini-panic-attack, or a temper tantrum because I didn't want to go to work in the morning. I no longer feel self-conscious or inadequate at work, or worry that I'm a huge fraud who is incompetent at my job. I sometimes have to take work home with me, but I'm no longer still working when my partner comes home from work at 11pm on the weekends. Evenings are mine. Weekends are mine.

Leaving: it's still the best decision I ever made.

In lieu of a big long flowery post, then ... I'll just leave you with a few random observations/comments about things that have been going on lately in my life. Enjoy!

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!

More Magical Thinking in Academia

More updates on my postacademic life later this week ... for today, a rant. :)

I ran across this link the other day - another post from the job market rumor forum for my former discipline of sociology. I admit, I've been checking the rumor mill from time to time this year, both because one of my close friends is on the market and my curiosity is getting the best of me ... but also, I admit, out of a more general curiosity about how this year's market is shaping up.

This year it feels like there has been a slight uptick in the number of people who are starting to "see the light" about the job market as compared to previous years - they're writing about how they're starting to realize it's all a crapshoot and that their chances of getting a good job are pretty miniscule. I've written about this before, to some extent. So far, most of the commentary has just been generalized worry about how the market "feels worse" or something similar - no one's really talking in earnest about the need to seriously think about a Plan B career.

And that's fine. The social science markets haven't contracted so much that absolutely no one is getting jobs. So I can definitely understand why some people might maintain their optimism. That's all good.

But I have noticed one thing in these "worried" threads that particularly irks me. When someone expresses concern about the job market or starts doubting their chances of landing someone permanent, there will often be a few other commenters who chime in, agreeing with them. "The number of jobs look the same, but it just feels worse," they'll say. "Surely the backlog of Ph.D.s is starting to play a role. Maybe we should start thinking of a backup plan."

The New Normal In Academic Hiring

Colorado State University has now updated their job posting, so that now it only indicates that they are looking for an "entry-level" tenure-track assistant professor, with no further specifications listed about year of degree or anything else.

It's a nice gesture, I suppose ... but I'd still love to see how many long-term adjuncts they bring to campus for interviews. I'm thinking that the "best qualified candidates" will still mysteriously be the folks who are newly graduated, not those who've been already working as (non-tenured) faculty for five or more years.

I mean, I have a different definition of who your "qualified candidates" would be, but what the hell do I know, right? I'm not a professor, so clearly I know nothing.

So that's encouraging, I suppose. (Although I'm also open to the argument that it's better to see this kind of thing out in the open in job ads, to work against the myth that long-term adjuncting is the path to a tenure track job. It's a valid point, but it doesn't alleviate my anger...)

But if you're in the latter category - the ones who think that universities being blatant about this is a good thing? You'll be happy to hear (via a commenter on yesterday's post) that there is another job posting for a tenure-track assistant professor of Comparative Literature position at Harvard, which specifies that the Ph.D. must have been received since 2009. 

An Update on Colorado State's "No Olds Need Apply" Ad

The chair of the English department at Colorado State has responded to questions about their discriminatory highly controversial job ad, which I posted about earlier this week:

By specifying 'between 2010 and time of appointment' we indicated that we are interested in applicants with up to three years in a tenure-track position as well as those who are just beginning their careers. In examining the pool of applicants, we have actually given the true 'entry-level' applicant an advantage in that such applicants will not have to compete with others who have as much as six years' more experience.

Now, this sounds reasonable, if you are looking from the outside and have absolutely no idea what the academic job market looks like - especially in the humanities.

But from the inside of the academic job market - you know, the exact position that the chair of the English department should be looking from - this is still just as clueless and problematic of a statement as the original job ad was.

First, the chair is naively identifying "true 'entry level'" applicants as only those who are new Ph.D. graduates - or those who have jumped out of grad school directly into a tenure-track job. Wow, is that a blindfolded look at the academic job market! It's kind of staggering.

In a robust academic job market, this might be true. Every graduate will get a job, and then after a year or two young professors will reshuffle into different positions. That might make sense in a perfect-world academic job market ... but in the actual academic job market we have today? It doesn't. At all. And everyone in academia should understand that. No exceptions.

Posted Without (Much) Comment

So, Colorado State University has posted an ad for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English position, to start in the fall of 2012.

Great news, huh? A tenure-track position in English!!!! An opportunity for one of those English Ph.D.s who've been toiling in crappy adjunct positions for the past five years to finally break through and get the kind of job they've been working towar ......

.... Wait a minute.

New Blogs (and Crappy Advice from Advisors)

Hey, everyone! Sorry for my relative lack of posting this month ... it's been a crazy one!

Today, I have two new postacademic blogs to link you to, along with some brief additional commentary stemming from a conversation I had with a grad student friend of mine this week...

(Seriously, I cannot believe how many postacademics we have out here! Maybe the group of us will someday be able to really get the word out that Grad School Is Not Necessarily A Great Life Plan, or that Academia Kind of Sucks For Some People. Maybe...)

Also, don't be surprised if you see me ramping up my complaints about academia in the next few months. My one good grad student friend is on the job market this year, and is currently at the annual national sociological conference, starting the process of trying to network herself* into a job somewhere. As someone who occupies the weird space of (1) having gone through the whole market process, having been reasonably successful with interviews, and having survived, but (2) ultimately winding up very cynical about the whole thing, I've become a huge sounding board for her. Which is great - I genuinely want to help her stay sane through this whole process and to help her keep some perspective on the whole thing ... while genuinely hoping that she is able to get an academic job, since that's what she really wants.

But as you'll see in a minute, these conversations are also drawing my attention - yet again! - to the ridiculousness of the academic job market and to the utterly cruel and deluded things people will say to you while you're going through it.

So I'm sure I will have Many Further Thoughts About Academia and the Academic Job Market (tm) to share with you over the next few months.

Blog intros after the jump...

On Guilt, Self-Blame, and Magical Thinking in Academia

I've got a few links to share with you today, all of which are loosely related to the basic theme of Your Brain on Academia. As you know, the other postacademic bloggers and I have written at length about the effect grad school and academia has on your mind - the guilt, the self-doubt and self-blame, the boredom and the isolation and the frustration and the possible ill-effects all of it can have on the mental health of someone trying to work in academia.

Despite all of the discussion we've had, though, I always think there's room for a little bit more. And I ran across a couple of things this week that got me thinking - yet again - about the mindset of an academic. And more specifically, about how the academic guilt that grad students feel and make jokes about is actually not funny at all.

In reality, I believe that this guilt is seriously problematic. Not only is it terrible for your self-esteem, but it also clouds your reality when you look around at the structure of academia and the state of the job market.

Let's talk about this.

First, we have this post, which is by another postacademic and addresses academic guilt. The author writes:

...as graduate students, we are discouraged from discussing our 'personal lives.' We are supposed to be completely dedicated to our work. I can't count the number of times I talked about or heard others talk about all the work we have to do, how we haven't left the house in days, how we fell asleep in our office because we had to hand in that paper in the morning. Even though we talk about these things and we are aware that they are not necessarily positive things, we try to top each other in our stories of academic agony. We do it because we believe, deep down inside, that a committed graduate student does not have a life.

This description definitely mirrors my experiences in my graduate program. Discussions between grad students would often devolve into some kind of weird Competition of Misery, where we'd all talk about "how late we had stayed in the lab last night" or about "how long it'd been since we watched a movie" or visited our families or went out to dinner. We wore the overwork (whether it was real or not) as a badge of honor, with the people who worked hardest and longest being characterized as the models we should all be looking up to. And faculty would chime in when needed, assuring us that "if we just worked hard enough" we'd get a great job in the end.

But how hard was "hard enough?" No one ever seemed to know. So we just worked constantly. Or tried to, anyway. And if we didn't work on any given day or evening or hour in the lab, we'd talk about what "slackers" we were. How "unmotivated" we were. How we "really needed to step it up next week." Anything short of working every single day and evening was unacceptable.

The author of the linked post continues by pointing out that this mindset is not a good one:

Graduate student guilt, as I like to call it, is a dangerous thing. This is what it sounds like: when we take time to watch a movie, we complain that we wasted our evening. When we have some free time we think first about what we should do for work when our body and mind probably needs a break. When we can't write down 10 pages for the day, we curse our inability to produce. Grad student guilt can harm us because it can prevent us from seeing all the work we really are doing and [instead] focus on our shortcomings.

Pay careful attention to that last sentence; we'll come back around to it.

Odds and Ends ... and You're Still Not Alone

A few random thoughts for today......

First, let's take a look at the google searches that have been bringing folks to this place over the past couple of weeks. I'll be honest - this group of them have been more striking than usual. I was expecting the people showing up here over the summer to be less stressed out and negative about academia, and more relaxed. After all, it's the summer! That doesn't seem to be the case, unfortunately:

-i am miserable in grad school
-i want to drop out of grad school
-academia overwhelmed workload
-feeling angry for no reason grad school
-i hate being a researcher
-what to do if you hate your grad school program
-am i weak for quitting phd
-academic job market stinks
-my phd research is worthless
-i feel like my research is shit phd

It's also worth noting that the two posts at this blog that have gotten the most pageviews since I started - and continue to get fresh new pages views every single day - are the ones in which I wrote about how I hated my research and about how grad school messes with your mental health. And when I say that they get more page views, I mean that they each have more than five times as many page views as any other post on this blog.

In Which I Become Angry on Behalf of Someone Else

I've recently written that these days, I only find myself angry or bitter about academia when I hear about other people who are struggling or being treated badly. Most of the time, I just work and go home and live my life. But at other times, I find myself furious with academia all over again.

Today is one of those latter times. Let me share the story with you...

I had a drink Friday night with a couple of people from my former grad program - one good friend, and two other grad students who I don't know very well but who I do like, and who have been very supportive (or at least not openly disdainful) of my decision to leave.

One of the acquaintance grad students was a little stressed. Okay, a lot stressed.

(I'm going to refer to this student as Joe, just for the ease of telling this story. You should not assume that Joe is their real name, or that they are male. Although they might be.)

When I arrived at the bar Friday evening, Joe immediately started talking about how stressed out he was - almost before I even had the chance to say hi and ask how he was. As it turns out, he was overwhelmed. He's teaching a class, taking two others, working on a book review, doing data analysis that wasn't going well for a journal article, is ten days away from taking his written comp exam after a year of reading for it, and trying to think of ideas for his dissertation. If you're counting, that's seven distinct things taking up his time and energy this month.

On the day that we met, he had just delivered a presentation to a departmental seminar, which was arranged by his advisor. (Thing #8 for this month!) He was dressed up in his "presentation clothes," and as I sat there sipping my beer in my casual clothes (we don't have to dress up at work), he started talking about how he wished that he could just relax after work like a normal person. And that he was going to have to go home after we left the bar and work some more. And again ... he mentioned how stressed he was.

Posted Without Comment

You know how people say that the various social science job markets aren't as bad as the humanities markets? And that the market might even be "rebounding" after a few down years?

I was emailing with a friend who's still a grad student in my old department at Grad U this afternoon. Zie informed me of the following:

(1) Of the ten students on the market this year from our top-ten social science department, only two got tenure-track jobs. (Another got an instructor position as a spousal hire). Two other people have already been working on temporary contracts, but failed to get a tenure-track job this year despite applying widely. So 70% of the people on the market this year will be back on it next year ... along with all of the new first-timers.

I've been around Grad U Department for nine years, and in those nine years I have known exactly three people who didn't get a job on their first run at the academic job market - and perhaps five or six more who took very undesirable temporary jobs as a desperation move. But never, ever have I seen a year where more than one student was unemployed this late in April. This year ... seven.

And for the record, all of these people have impressive CVs with good publications and teaching experience. These are not academic slouches taking a "test run" at the market.

(2) According to my friend, the department is now giving the advanced students a hard time about funding for next year. Our department has always been very good about funding its advanced students, especially if they were willing to teach and/or were on their job market year. This is apparently no longer the case. These students who didn't get jobs this year are also being told by the department that they will likely not be funded by Grad U any longer.

(3) Just today, the department sent out its excited, self-congratulatory email, announcing the names of the full, normal-sized cohort of first-year students they have admitted for the 2012-13 school year.

Does anyone else see anything wrong with this picture?????

On My Anniversary of Leaving...

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the date on which I left academia.

Well ... more accurately, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the day I learned that I was not going to be hired for the academic job I'd interviewed for that I actually wanted. (To recap: I had three campus interviews and only liked one school, which hired someone else. A second school offered me a one-year VAP gig, which I turned down). After going through the interview process, I was positive that School A was the only job I wanted. The other two schools were nice enough, but for a number of reasons they just didn't suit me. I didn't enjoy the people or the towns or even the students I met, and the pay for the latter two jobs was very low. By the time I returned home, I was actively hoping that School A would hire me and that Schools B and C would not hire me.

I got the bad news by phone from School A at around 5pm on February 22. I hung up the phone, and panicked for about an hour. I cried and yelled. It wasn't pretty ... but I was really upset. Because I now knew that I had two terrible choices looming ahead of me. Being rejected from School A meant that I'd either be forced to (1) take a job at Schools B or C that I didn't like, or (2) scramble for funding from Grad U for another year, taking another stress- and anxiety-filled stab at the market the following fall (all the while knowing that my chances of getting an interview at a second "School A" were miniscule). In short, I was either going to be a miserable faculty member or a stressed and anxious grad student, yet again. Needless to say, I didn't like either option.

But while I was panicking, either I or my partner (I can't even remember who) suggested that maybe - just maybe - I didn't have to do either thing. That I could take my degrees and my education and do something else with them.

Suddenly, it hit me. I could leave if I wanted to. I didn't have to take an academic job that I didn't want. And I didn't have to prostrate myself to my department by begging for funding again, just so I could go through the academic job market again and wind up with a job I didn't like. Academia didn't own me. I could do whatever I wanted ... and it was okay to not want to do academia anymore. Grad U didn't own me, and it was okay to look for a job that would make me happy ... regardless of what kind of job Grad U wanted me to take.

Try Not to Let Your Head Explode When You Read This

This article was sent out over my department's listserv this morning, from a "star" grad student in my former program. I'm not sure why zie sent it out - as advice? A "useful article" that hir colleagues might find helpful? I ... certainly hope not.

The article is specifically about grad students in the humanities and the potential link between the number of available jobs and their time to degree. This may seem like an odd article for me to get fired up about, since I'm not in the humanities ... but let's not pretend that all of us social science and humanities grads aren't in very similar boats these days. The various social science job markets may not be as terrible as the ones in the humanities, but they're still not good and certainly not going to get any better.

Anyway, it may not directly pertain to my former discipline, but I could not let this pass me by this morning without posting about it. And thought that my fellow postacademic bloggers who are in the humanities might have some further thoughts ... if their heads don't explode first, that is.

The Academic Job Market, in Numbers

So I'm still on the listserv for my grad department, which means that I get almost-daily updates on what's going on in my department and discipline (most of which I ignore, of course, since I don't care about the 22nd Annual Mid-South Conference on Medieval Widgetmaking anymore, nor the upcoming lecture from Boring-Ass Professor Who Should Have Retired 20 Years Ago).

But this week, I got an email from our department chair with a "summary" of our two successful faculty searches that completed this fall. My curiosity got the best of me, so I opened it. And over the last few days, I've been doing a little bit of thinking about what my (former) department's search says about the academic job market more generally, and about how we can extrapolate from the number of applications Grad U received to the health of the larger job market.

Now remember, my graduate department is in the social sciences, not the humanities. The job market in this discipline is struggling, but is still seen as reasonably decent in comparison to a lot of other disciplines. There are more job listings per candidate than in other fields, so you'd assume that Ph.Ds in our discipline would have a much better shot at getting a job than Ph.Ds in English, history, and a lot of other fields.

Some department-specific background: one of the positions the department listed was an open position - they were looking for someone to teach various quantitative research methods classes in our and another department, with any research interests whatsoever. The second position was looking specifically for a qualitative researcher working in a moderately popular research area.

Also, the department is an R-1 program whose ranking hovers around tenth in the discipline - give or take a few places - every year. The university is in a medium-sized college town - not in one of the hot urban locales where a lot of grad students and faculty would like to live. It's not Bumblef*ck, Idaho ... but definitely isn't someplace where you'd expect people to apply just because they'd "love to live" in our city. 

So given this background info, what did Grad Department's job search and candidate list look like this year ... and what does it suggest about the larger market?

More Discussion of Privilege in Academia

Quick blogging/life note: Yes, it's after January 1st ... and yes, I'm restarting my nonacademic job search. I'm currently writing/revising two different resumes (for two broad categories of jobs) so that I have templates to work from, and I've been reading job listings all week to get an idea of what's out there for me. Resume sending will start this weekend, as long as I don't hit any unforeseen roadblocks. I'll write more about it later this week or next week ... but in the meantime, rest assured that I am making progress ... even if it's starting out kinda slow. The mental process of figuring out "what comes next" and "how to sell myself as a good candidate without spending 200 hours on every application" really is pretty tough ... not to mention simply trying to find time and motivation to sit down and work on such things *in addition to* the full 40-hour workweek. But I've got time and I'm working at it every day ... and I do have a job for now, so I'm doing okay.

-----------------------------------

For another take on the question of privilege in academia, I turn to a couple of comments left on my last post about privilege and inequality in academia. This commenter has completed her Ph.D. and is now looking for work, and is finding that concerns about money, social class, and relative privilege are cropping up as she contemplates her career prospects after graduation.

Some excerpts from these excellent comments:

In my view, the class differences were not as big a deal in grad school as after. I went to grad school in an affordable city at a school that gave a stipend of around $20,000 each year. It was actually possible to go to grad school without taking on debt, which is one of the reasons I chose this school, despite getting into slightly more prestigious schools in much more expensive cities. (Which itself is a class issue, but that’s another story.)

Yes, that definitely is a class issue worth noting ... so let's talk about it for a minute.

In my earlier post, I mentioned that graduate stipends in my department (a top 10 program) were around $14,000 per year. This commenter describes a higher stipend at a slightly less prestigious school ... an offer that she took in favor of a more prestigious program due to economic concerns.

It's worth noting, of course, that if you come from a privileged background in which someone will be paying your rent, you are free to pay less attention to whether your stipend is sufficient, and more attention to the prestige/fit of a given program. If a top-5 program offers you a tiny stipend in a high cost of living area but a top-50 program offers you a sizable stipend in a livable city? A student whose parents will be paying their rent and helping them out financially is free to take the first offer ... and to reap the benefits of graduating from a top-5 program rather than a top-50 program. A student who has no such safety net will face two choices: take the second offer with its worse long-term job prospects but better financial security in the meantime, or take the first offer and start out their academic career with a load of debt.

In other words, the student who has help from their parents has better options right out of the gate, even though both students are being given the exact same opportunities. Privilege influences one's academic opportunities and academic career success, once again.

Postacademic Rant 6 - On Moving Anywhere

I'm visiting my family this week for the holidays, spending time with them and my partner's family and my old friends in the state I grew up in. I'll be here through the new year, getting some much needed relaxation and catching up with old friends until I head back home to get back to work and start the search for my next job.

It's worth noting, actually, that the city my partner and I would like to relocate to is near where we are this week. After having interviews in several locations where I'd never even considered living, we decided that now was the time to try to move closer to family and friends and to actually move to a city we'd want to live in, rather than to "any place that will have me as a professor."

And since this is the first time I've seen a number of my family and friends since last December (when I was on the academic job market), I've been having a lot of conversations with people about what I'm doing now and what comes next. In discussing the academic job market and why I'm done with it, one of the things that other people have found the most surprising was the fact that everyone on the academic job market is (more or less) expected to take whatever job is offered to them, regardless of geographic location or whether they'd be happy taking it.

My friends and family in nonacademic jobs find that to be ridiculous beyond words. To them, having no control over where they would live, work, raise kids, etc., seems unimaginable. They keep asking me: "Well, couldn't you just apply to Schools X, Y, and Z in this area?" When I explain that it's not how academia works - that I'm at the mercy of whatever schools around the country happen to be hiring during the year I go on the academic job market? They're amazed that anyone would settle for such a thing. 

So since I'm busy this week and probably won't have time or motivation for a full "new content" post, I thought that this particular postacademic rant would be particularly timely to post ... addressing the geographic constraints of an academic job search. As always, language is very NSFW.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Reason I'm Leaving #9 - I'm Tired of the Pointless Encouragement

Remember how I said a few weeks back that I would probably only post new ranty anti-academic posts when something specific happened that frustrated me? Yeah.....this is one of those times.

This week, I contacted Grad Department for a minor clerical reason ... basically, I needed our graduate program director to sign off on something for me.

The (very kind) director, who I don't work with and don't know very well, responded by asking me some questions about what I was doing now, when I'd be defending, etc. They were all reasonable questions; no problem. It's natural for people in my department to be curious.

To answer the first question, I just said I had gotten a nonacademic job that I liked very much and left it at that, with no details. I deflected the second question by asking what the procedure would be for defending if I was out of residence next year (just in case I do eventually defend - that's not the plan right now, although I don't want anyone in my department to know this).

Grad director wrote back telling me that it was "such a shame" I was leaving, since "my research was so interesting" and "my teaching evaluations were excellent." And how there were still a few jobs being posted this year, and what was the harm in putting some packets together just in case? Because I had so much to offer, and academia would be so sorry to see me go!

Oh, come on now...

I struck out on the market last year. No one has seen me on campus since February. I haven't spoken to my advisor since the winter. I haven't published a paper or taught a class or showed up at a seminar since the fall of last year. I skipped the last national conference for the first time in five years. I couldn't be more removed from academia at this point, and I haven't produced one single bit of academic work - either in teaching or research - in more than a year.

But "academia would be sorry to see me go????" Really???