Staying in Academia? Why am I always job searching??

I am in the middle of a major slump. I have had these fits regularly throughout the last half of graduate school and throughout my postdoc.

The last few months of my postdoc have been going so well that I thought this phase of my life was over. I always attributed them to general grad student malaise and my love/hate relationship with academia. But now...? I'm not so sure.

I have been spending my time at work writing easy emails, reading random articles unrelated to any specific project, attending lectures, looking online for jobs for Spousal Unit, looking online for dream jobs for me-academic and non-academic, putting together a baby registry, thinking about relocating to a different state, freaking out about money, checking on the status of my manuscripts under review, engaging in email discussions about unsolvable controversial issues, worrying what I will do if I receive the recent career development award I applied for, worrying what I will do if I do not receive the recent career development award I applied for, and generally avoiding real work.

Why do I do this? Why can't I just get started on a new project and make some headway on something new and/or some long-lost project at the bottom of my pile of things I really don't want to do?

Is this ever going to stop? Am I ever going to stop fantasizing about the "perfect" job where I wouldn't face these temptations and these periods of uselessness?

Is this just because my work is so deadline oriented that when I don't have a deadline I can't get anything done? This is definitely part of the reasons my dissertation phase was so looooonng and so horrible.

It's times like this where I convince myself I need to do some real work and start looking at the government and non-profit sector listings.

Quitting Graduate School- I Didn't Do It, Should You?

Despite a continuing number of hits to this blog from individuals considering "quitting graduate school," I acknowledge that I am no longer an expert on this topic. I consider only those poor, overly tortured saps currently in school to be experts on this topic. Did you graduate? Then you don't know what you're talking about anymore. (HELLO, recall and Pollyanna biases.) Did you quit already? Recently or many years ago? Then you're clearly not an expert either. (Quick, what type of bias is this?)

Anyway, I still get a lot of hits on this so I thought I'd revisit how I feel about not quitting graduate school. Clearly, as a disclaimer, this is pretty field-specific. I have the (um? luxury?) perspective of working in a relatively interdisciplinary field with connections to both hard and squooshy and very very fluffy sciences, so while that gives me some options, it also shows me that in terms of faculty appointments and expectations, that while I someday (Imshallah) may have it much easier than some, I may have a much harder academic life than others. (As in, there is no program in my primary field in which I could ever have a summer break. I know, boo-hoo!)

Did I quit graduate school? No. Am I glad I finished? Abso-fucking-lutely. Will I actually be able to use the knowledge and skills that I was taught in graduate school? Only time will tell (so far I've been lucky on this and the answer is "yes" but I'm still only a postdoc.) Am I still considering "quitting" academia? Yes, just not as often as I once did. Am I trying to gain some realworld skills just in case? Yes.

...and now, more about you:

Should you quit? Odds are, yes. Why should you quit? This depends on your goals. Have you always thought you would be able to grow up and be just like your professor? Hey, you might, but don't hold your breath. If you think you can apply the knowledge and skills and socialization you gained in school in a number of different environments and toward different ends...well, more power to you. Keep going. If you just want someone to call you "Doctor" someday? Then keep going, you can totally make it and get what you want from the experience. If you seriously think you'll get tenured someday? Take an informal poll of assistant professors out there. If you want to stay in academia but can't stand the thought of adjuncting or remaining research faculty? Consider a different field or get ready for disappointment.

Restructuring the University

clipped from www.nytimes.com In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

Mark Taylor's NYT's recent editorial calls the graduate education the "Detroit of higher learning." As in, it's doomed. The quote here (below? above? I don't know) sums up a lot of the ambivalence I feel about academia. WAY too many people are churned through a ruthless system.

I like what he says about disciplines and about problem-focused learning and restructuring the university, and even abolishing permanent departments (to a lesser extent). His suggestion of a "water program" was obviously based on (or was strangely coincidental with) a famous course called (you guessed it) Water at my alma mater, The Evergreen State College. But while this is a great idea for undergraduate education I am not convinced this should be the way of graduate education. Disciplines serve as a form of organization, structure, and shared memory for thought and knowledge. Collaboration is great but without any solid grounding in one or many disciplines, all you have is loose and unstructured knowledge. Plus you have no academic lineage and good luck succeeding in academia without lineage. I can say this for a fact because Evergreen had no disciplines and I am missing a lot of the basic grounding in certain fields that would serve me well today. (On the plus side Evergreen, you excel at the promotion of critical and innovative thinking, reading, and writing skills.)

Taylor spends some time bemoaning narrow scholarship. He's right. I can hardly even explain my work to others. But my field is primarily supported by grants from the federal government (primarily NIH). Should they be paying me to do something that everyone else is doing and that is "obvious"? Clearly not. Is the pursuit of new knowledge flawed just because it's obscure? So what if few people ever read my dissertation. Only a few people need to for it to have any actual impact on the world. In this way, it only matters that people who want to move beyond it read it. They learn what is already known. Then, they go farther. Clearly, many paths are dead ends. But you can't learn or discover something new until you ask a new question, something that hasn't been asked or answered before.

He also suggests mandatory retirement. Oh hell no. Seriously? Abolishing tenure? Yeah, that's probably on its way out anyway. I won't get into that here. Transforming the traditional dissertation? It's likely that any changes in the diss won't be as radical as he suggests. I see no problem with writing a long tome that is rarely read by others. It's a learning exercise. Besides, I had to write one.

Taylor suggests expanding the range of professional options for graduate students? YES. YES YES YES. This is a suggestion of his that I adore. To do this, the graduate students need to be taught practical skills and to be taught by non-career-academics.....people who actually work in their field in the real world (if there is one.) This never happened in my graduate school.

There have been plenty of other responses to this. I'll post to them later in a format that takes html.

Till then, publish or perish!

Quitting Graduate School

Recently, fabio from orgtheory posted Grad School Rulz #21 on a topic of interest to 99% of all graduate students: quitting graduate school. It provides a good look at reasons to stay or quit the Academy.

I know this is of interest to my readers as it's probably the #3 reason search string that brings people to this site. For example, I get these a lot (insert various spelling errors): "graduate school cult" or "quitting graduate school". Even a good friend of mine (T-2 days from his defense) just posted on his FB that, following his advisor's criticisms at the 11th hour, he was planning to drop out.

Clearly, it's too late for me to drop out. BUT YOU MIGHT STILL HAVE A CHANCE!

Graduate school and the academy are quite cultish and as such, frank discussions about "quitting" are few and far between. Just this weekend I attended the National Postdoctoral Association annual meeting in Houston. For those of you unfamiliar with the organization, be sure to check out their website but do keep in mind the fact that the organization is heavily geared toward biomedical/science postdocs. Anywho, this meeting did a wonderful job presenting career development, networking, goal-setting, and job-landing opportunities OUTSIDE the Ivory Tower. My favorite part is when a group of recruiters from the [INSERT BIG FEDERAL RESEARCH INSTITUTION HERE] asked, "Why on earth do you people do this to yourselves? For Christ's sake, I pay my secretary more than you make!"

The meeting was great and I encourage you all to look into it. Let me know if you want more info on it, and I'll be happy to share some of the things I learned. Basically, I was newly inspired, filled with big thoughts and dreams, until I got back to my cube on Monday, and I realized I don't know how to do anything else.

What do you guys think about the re-entering the "Real World?" Worth it? Not? What about telling your mentor? (Now that would not be a discussion I would look forward to!)

Academic Identities and the Real World

This may seem really minor or silly to some of you. But I have a problem. And judging by the most recent PhD Comics, I'm not the only academic with this problem.


copyright Jorge Cham, PhD Comics

In many ways it's worse for me than others. What I do is pretty interdisciplinary and also pretty obscure and overall just defies simple explanation. I can't just say I'm a biologist or a historian. While the average person (including myself) has no real idea what it is that a biologist or historian does on a daily basis, at least we are able to conjure up an image, an identity for these fields. My field doesn't even have a name that ends in an "ist!"

It's the eternal cocktail party dilemma. Is it enough to say I work at a university? I'm not a professor yet and nobody (and I mean nobody) knows what a "post-doc" is. Sometimes I say I do "research." I know it's a major cop-out but it's the best I can do.

Plus there's the very real issue identified in this comic. Few people really ever understand what any other academic is doing. If you were totally understood then I'd worry about your job security.

It's the Little Things that Matter

So, I'm back from a little jaunt to the north. I met some really great people and I also had a quintessential academic experience.

I interviewed for a national fellowship program that has sites at several universities across the U.S. As I was writing the application essays I faced a choice in jargon. In many ways the choice was equivalent to the following ways of saying that someone is fat:

"chunky"
"big-boned"
"chubby"
"full figured"
"overweight"
"obese"
"roly-poly"

Except, this is academia. Selection of any one word over any other word carries with it the weight of countless leaders in the field and any number of known and unknown connotations and implications regarding your academic and personal self.

To my amusement, in my third or so question in an interview with one of the program directors, I was asked, "tell me what you mean when you say roly-poly? Sure enough, in the only marks on my entire sweat-stained essay, he had circled, in red, just those very words. This query led to a discussion that lasted several minutes about the exact meaning of those words vs. the other possible word choices, the appropriateness of the words I selected vs. the alternatives, and the implications thereof.

Looks like I made the right choice.

Leftish Leaning Universities? Ahmadinejad and Summers

The Becker-Posner blog recently had a a debate about the lefty nature of American Universities.

Posner started off the relatively anecdotal discussion by contrasting the recent invitation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (you know the one, Holocaust-denier, supporter of terrorism, etc.) to speak at Columbia and the recent dis-invitation of Larry Summers, (ex-Harvard president who was ousted for talking about the distribution of female vs. male IQ.), who had been invited to speak to the Board of Regents of the University of California.

This strange contrast and all of its potentially deeper meanings aside, the blog digresses into a general discussion of liberalism in U.S. universities.

We're certainly leftish in my field, which is concerned with population- patterns of health and disease, a topic inherently concerned with inequality and social responsibility. But please, think of the average medical school or finance department! It's pretty simplistic to talk about the "leftyness" of universities overall. But personally, I do not equate "PC-ness" with being liberal. There may well be a correlation but to me, left-leaning and liberal are far larger things. Also it's important to look at universities across the globe, many of which house students and faculty who openly study and promote socialism.

Although Becker made a good point...that perhaps it's not the universities that have moved to the left, it's the American public that has shifted to the right.

The Insularity of the Academy

I just came across an article about the self-contained universe of the academy in Salon that seems as relevant today or a hundred years ago as it was when it was written in 1998.

In this, Annalee Newitz writes about the challenges of PhDs outside academia, "The problem is not our so-called crappy jobs; it's an educational system that teaches us to think we are not proper intellectuals unless we are employed as academics. Why should my colleagues and I be ashamed to take our considerable knowledge and work as writers, designers, administrators, researchers and teachers outside academia? Why should our worth as scholars be measured in tenure tracks?"

Great question. A few years back I came across a Zionist log-cabin Republican and experimental psychologist who left a poorly paid, high-demand, low-control post-doc for a great job working for a large corporation in the city where his partner lived. On speaking with one faculty member, it was as if he had sold his soul to the devil. Will he be able to rejoin the academy? Unlikely. Would he want to? The answer to that is also unlikely. Call me a non-believer but to me, being with your partner, being able to pay back some loans, buying a house, and working on real-world soon-to-be-applied research sounds....good.

Another topic touched on in this article is related to the insularity of the ivory tower, "In theory, everyone in the United States has the right to be educated. And yet, rather undemocratically, we continue to isolate education (and the educated) in certain elite institutions, effectively eliminating the possibility that useful ideas developed in the academy will ever reach a public that truly needs them. Being more educated than other people does not mean we should escape the real world. We should use our education to change the world for the better rather than hiding from it."

This is perhaps my biggest beef with academia. I am in an applied field well, because I am interested in enacting change. Ok ok, if not actually enacting change, I am interested in identifying targets for change, the mechanisms through which change is possible, and oh yes---this one is imperative--criticizing current methods for change. But if all of my interaction is within the academy--my potential for change is limited.

What is it that causes this insularity? Is it a compositional effect formed by our collective anti-social dysfunctional personalities? Is it an immature reactionary response to the hazing process of graduate school? Are we still worried if we're smarter than everybody else? Are we just trying to please our mentors by following in their footsteps? Do we foster and perpetuate the timeless tradition of isolation because we believe, however subconsciously, that it results in a deeper mystery and appeal of the ivory tower and therefore contributes to our sense of worth? Do we just not know how to talk to other people anymore and thus don't like them because they don't understand all our bullshit?!

Why We Do It

I saw this first at The Paper Chase. It really resonates for me right now because amidst my endless uncertainty and negativity about the ivory tower, I am currently in a pro-academia mode. This is a great post--check out the rest at Professor Zero's blog.

clipped from profacero.wordpress.com On Becoming a Professor At school we make observations, develop theories, draw pictures of these, and finally write them down. We do this no matter what anyone else has to say about the evils of “overachievement.” Because we are not “overachieving,” we are living, and doing creative work. We do this in memory of Paulo Freire, and for the sake of the collectivity - and to entertain the spirits. And everyone has a right to be a subject in their own life, to stand at the head of their own acts, and to speak. Axé.

Gender Equity in Academia

An article in the latest issue of Ms. magazine tackles the problem of gender equity in academia.

No surprise here to anybody who has ever set foot inside an ivory tower. Women are less likely than men to hold tenure track positions or to hold leadership positions in academia. Those who do are less likely to be married and less likely to have children. Unfortunately while suggesting that family friendly policies may help, this article doesn't really tackle the difficult issues of what those policies might look like and how they might be applied.