The following is a guest post from Sarah S. If you would like to contribute your own post about leaving academia, finding new employment, or any other topic, please contact us!
A current trend in career advice is to build your “brand” in order to better “sell” yourself to prospective employers and control your career trajectory.(*) In this digital age, the thinking goes, employers can find out all about people online and it behooves the jobseeker/career builder to stand out from the crowd with focused, personalized branding. I mean, if it works for soda and tennis shoes and software companies, why not you?
Transitioning academics likewise receive this branding advice. In fact, the difficulty of translating academic experience to employers in the “real world” makes concise, coherent branding particularly attractive. It can also supposedly demonstrate a post-academic’s business acumen as well, her awareness of market realities outside the Ivory Tower. I get these arguments. They make sense to me. So why am I so unable to discover and package my brand?
The Academy, at least in the Humanities, traditionally eschews this kind of corporate speak. And yet I was never so well branded as at the end of my PhD in English. In fact, I’d spent ten years honing and narrowing myself into an incredibly specific area and then spent hours perfecting my “elevator speech,” as well as articulating my philosophy of teaching (student-focused!) and area of expertise (British and American modernism, with an emphasis on the novel, trauma, and war!). I even had multiple distillations of my dissertation argument. First, the formal: “The Great War was so unprecedented it disrupted traditional mourning rituals, with their attendant resolution, leading to a traumatizing state of irresolvable mourning that I call ‘traumatic grief.’ This state caused post-war novelists from Britain and the US to represent the war as causing a widespread sterility, an inability or unwillingness to procreate, that manifests in characters, themes, and narrative itself.” And then this version, honed over beers and tator-tots, “World War I was major and it made people feel bad on their insides and then broke their baby makers.” By the end of the PhD I was this scholar-teacher—squished, narrowed, and branded within an inch of my life.
As we know, all the branding in the world can’t fix academia’s job issues and so after a fruitless year “on the market” I embraced my decision to stop applying for tenure track jobs and become post-ac, alt-ac, what-have-you. But one cannot transform on openness alone and magically transition from what she was to what she will become.
I tried the branding thing. I really did. I researched various careers. I participated in online communities. I did informational interviews. I wrote and rewrote (and rewrote and rewrote) my resume and cover letters. And I discovered a couple of things. First, getting a job is hard, ya’ll, even outside the Academy. Second, after the corseting I experienced by the end of my PhD, I didn’t want to “brand” myself, to limit myself to a single identity. Sure, I attempted to market my experience and goals for a handful of different career paths. Yet whenever I seemed to encounter a point where I really ought to buckle down and choose something, I balked.
I think there were several reasons for this. On some level, I was (I still am) gun shy; I put all my eggs in the academic basket and I remained wary of making the same mistake again with a new career path. I was also still connected to my identity as a scholar and teacher, and even though I was rationally comfortable with my decision to leave academia, the emotional and personal effects could not be wished away. When you spend years becoming a thing you cannot simply cease being it. Surely, as the soldier finds civilian clothes a little too constrictive and the transformed princess still wants to flap her goose wings so too the no-longer-academic forgets that she is not, anymore, a scholar, teacher, researcher, and so forth.
On the other hand, I pushed back against “branding” because I was also tired of being constrained. For so many years, I had been this very specific thing and now I wanted to take this new ephemerality out for a spin. Sometimes this flexibility involved uncovering things I’d always been, such as “writer.” I’d relinquished the right to call myself a writer after my MA when I chose the PhD path rather than, as did many of my peers, the MFA. They were writers, and I was this other thing called an “academic.” But as soon as I stripped off the title of academic, “writer” was underneath, like a worn undershirt. Other things I’ve come to realize as essential parts of me include “mentor” and “critical thinker” but also “story-lover” and “rock climber” and “political news junky”—none of which cohere nicely into logo form.
Apart from uncovering these bedrock components of myself, I also felt an expansiveness in self-definition, at times exhilarating and at others, I must admit, discombobulating and horrible. And yet even in the darkest times of uncertainty and seeming dissolution, I could not seize on a new thing: This is me. This is who I am. This is my brand! Would this experience have been different if I had been quickly hired into a job with a viable career path? Possibly. But I wasn’t and however I tried I found that, post-PhD, I encompassed far more than an elevator speech—for good and for ill.
I don’t write this post as a tirade against “branding” or to discourage anyone from taking the ubiquitous branding advice because it probably is good advice, or at least practical. I write merely to note that, at least so far, this approach has not worked for me. And so I embrace Walt Whitman’s declaration, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.” Despite the rigidity of academia, many of us loved it because of the endless possibility. Imagination alone limits one’s potential for reading and thinking and writing and teaching. I submit that the same holds true outside academia’s hallowed halls. Those who triumph with this approach are those wildly successful, entrepreneurial types who switch careers every three years and go base jumping. Meanwhile, the world also holds the rest of us, who may wish for greater specificity but will not relinquish our multivocality.
I thus prefer the approach of storytelling rather than “branding.” (I am a literature person, after all). Chris Humphrey has two excellent posts on this subject, one on overcoming the post-academic “failure” narrative and the other on telling a great story about your transition out of academia. Stories allow for so much more dynamism than a brand. Stories can develop and grow. Stories also honor the complexity that makes up a life’s journey, pulling together the splatters of experience, synthesizing the shared and highlighting the unique. And stories emphasize that I, that you, are so much more than a “brand.” In the end, practical or not, I’d rather be represented by a narrative than a catchphrase.
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(*Here are a few examples of the type of "branding advice" that is referenced in this post.)
Showing posts with label feelings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feelings. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Missing Your Favorite Academic Conference? Don't!
At a work function, a number of my colleagues were talking about attending the Modern Language Associate Convention. MLA is the conference in English and Comparative Literature studies and, as such, it has long been a staple of my academic life. As a new MA student I went to listen to talks, as a PhD student I gave papers, and as someone ABD I had job interviews.
Although my job description is quite postacademic--sales (!)--my role in academic publishing means I am in touch regularly with marketers and editors who do attend the MLA conference, as well as various other conferences in my old field. Sometimes it makes me sad that I'm no longer a part of that world and, judging from Versatile PhD's forums, I am not the only one.
Christian Senger via Compfight
Sitting at dinner with my colleagues, I bombarded them with questions about MLA.
"What papers did you enjoy? What fancy scholars attended? Did Michael Berube address the poor job market?"
As I hungrily try to catch conversational scraps from their MLA table, it occurs to me that I miss academic conferencing.
But why?
As recentPhD astutely points out conferences are expensive, papers are of varying quality, and socially awkward academics are not everyone's idea of a great party date.
She writes:
JC, too, has written on the topic of academic conferences and privilege.
And upon reviewing my own conference horror stories--here, here, and here--I am no longer sure why I miss academic conferences! Money, hassle, and boredom aside, I had people proposition me and die en route!
In my case, I think I miss academic conferences because I miss feeling that I "know" a field. I "got" academic conferences; I still do not "get" my new role in academic publishing. Also, I still miss aspects of academia. miss the "idea" of conferences--furthering one's career, intellectual development, academic nerd camaraderie. Yet in reality, conferences afforded me none of those things. And that's a sobering reality. I'm thousands of dollars out in traveling costs and I never even got to appreciate the (sometimes) cool places I traveled!
For those people who genuinely and truly miss the experience of academic conferences, I encourage you to still attend. I think I may do this myself some day. Treat it like a vacation and go when you have time, money, and freedom to do so, rather than at the whims of the MLA jobs cycle. Register as an independent scholar. Listen to papers. Research and write on of your own. Connect with old colleagues you actually liked. Take some risks--do the kind of paper you felt would have held you back in your professional career. But at the same time, tour the city you're staying in. Take in the sights. Bring along a friend of partner to keep you company. Cultivate real life experiences outside academia. Do your conference on your own terms--a true perk of being postacademic!
Although my job description is quite postacademic--sales (!)--my role in academic publishing means I am in touch regularly with marketers and editors who do attend the MLA conference, as well as various other conferences in my old field. Sometimes it makes me sad that I'm no longer a part of that world and, judging from Versatile PhD's forums, I am not the only one.
Christian Senger via CompfightSitting at dinner with my colleagues, I bombarded them with questions about MLA.
"What papers did you enjoy? What fancy scholars attended? Did Michael Berube address the poor job market?"
As I hungrily try to catch conversational scraps from their MLA table, it occurs to me that I miss academic conferencing.
But why?
As recentPhD astutely points out conferences are expensive, papers are of varying quality, and socially awkward academics are not everyone's idea of a great party date.
She writes:
I've heard some astonishingly good papers over the years, papers that entertained, papers that made me think in ways I'd never thought before, papers that set my brain on fire through the sheer power and play of language. Papers that just plain blew my mind. But ... a lot of papers put me to sleep, too. More often than not, conference papers are less than brilliant.
JC, too, has written on the topic of academic conferences and privilege.
Let's just start by saying that I find something deeply disturbing about an academic system that pays graduate students and adjuncts poverty wages to do something as apparently important as teach college students ... and then also expects them to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars traveling to conferences while not having any outside employment to help them cover their expenses. The system is basically forcing people who don't come from privileged backgrounds to go into massive debt in order to just go about the expected business of their job. And in the end, what that does is privilege students from wealthy families over others. Wealthy students can go to conferences without incurring additional debt, don't have to worry about outside employment to help foot the bills, and can graduate debt-free. Less privileged students face a completely different situation.So not only do conferences likely not do much to actually further anyone's career, but in my opinion? They do further the obvious (but unremarked upon) class divide in graduate school and academia more generally.
Fuck the idea that we have to go to conferences, and we’re losers if we can’t afford it
And upon reviewing my own conference horror stories--here, here, and here--I am no longer sure why I miss academic conferences! Money, hassle, and boredom aside, I had people proposition me and die en route!
In my case, I think I miss academic conferences because I miss feeling that I "know" a field. I "got" academic conferences; I still do not "get" my new role in academic publishing. Also, I still miss aspects of academia. miss the "idea" of conferences--furthering one's career, intellectual development, academic nerd camaraderie. Yet in reality, conferences afforded me none of those things. And that's a sobering reality. I'm thousands of dollars out in traveling costs and I never even got to appreciate the (sometimes) cool places I traveled!
For those people who genuinely and truly miss the experience of academic conferences, I encourage you to still attend. I think I may do this myself some day. Treat it like a vacation and go when you have time, money, and freedom to do so, rather than at the whims of the MLA jobs cycle. Register as an independent scholar. Listen to papers. Research and write on of your own. Connect with old colleagues you actually liked. Take some risks--do the kind of paper you felt would have held you back in your professional career. But at the same time, tour the city you're staying in. Take in the sights. Bring along a friend of partner to keep you company. Cultivate real life experiences outside academia. Do your conference on your own terms--a true perk of being postacademic!
Monday, January 14, 2013
Academia: No pain, no gain? Jet's story of illness, diagnosis and the road to recovery
After reading Lauren’s and Currer’s stories that chart their experiences with depression during and after their PhD studies I was struck by the common threads about frequent occurrences of physical symptoms such as pain, fatigue, exhaustion and, unsurprisingly, lack of motivation. While studying at MA level when I was a part-time student with a young baby the experience of constant fatigue, headaches and short tempered mood was so common I just accepted the conditions as a normal part of my life, a consequence of having to work hard to achieve the much desired academic goal of a higher degree. This isn’t to say there were never good moments in my life at that time, but I am amazed at how the whole culture of academic postgraduate study normalises over-work and the many stresses that go with it. If you’re not anxious over the quality of your academic performance then you’re perceived as a slacker and as someone who doesn’t care enough. Academia expects postgrads to show how passionate they are about their subject and that passion often is performed through personal sacrifices. While this expectation is never made entirely explicit, it is certainly implicit and internalised by PhD students. Unfortunately those personal sacrifices can materialise in poor physical and mental well-being. My experience of sacrifice also moved in this direction and had a devastating outcome during my second year of PhD study. I should have seen the bad signs when I was studying at MA level, but the reward of finishing with a Distinction and being patted on the back by my tutors, academic husband who saw moving on to PhD as a natural progression from a successful MA, was enough to fuel my energies to carry on in academia, in spite of it all.
I relate very much to Lauren and Currer’s hesitations about accepting their ailments as those that were related to depression, or as Currer’s physician put it, her ‘pain was mental…Mental like your body no longer realizes how to process serotonin and so you don’t sleep and you always feel anxious’. The culture of academia in many areas relies so much on an ideal of the rational, knowing subject who is in ‘control’ that is difficult to admit to feelings of vulnerability or instability, especially when connected with one’s mental health. In Lauren’s and Currer’s cases, drawing on therapy and anti-depressant medications were positive solutions that helped set them in more positive directions during and after their academic and post-academic anxieties. My experience of illness, I am convinced, was prompted by frequent anxieties about my work never being good enough, which led me to work into early morning hours, often having to still wake early with my two young children and then research/write and/or teach in the day. At this time my daughter was only five and my son eight, still young enough to have many demands and the usual run of illnesses that required them to stay at home from nursery care or school. With my mind often racing with work-related ideas or worries I frequently experienced sleep problems. It was unsurprising that fatigue and regular headaches (from a longer history of headaches) was a norm in my life. Wasn’t this all part of the course in academia, I justified to myself. I watched my academic spouse work extended hours to be able to succeed in his career and I knew I would have to pay my PhD dues as well. When I continued to experience back and neck ache from spending so much time at a desk I told myself that more exercise would solve everything, from the endless stream of colds and sinus infections to the headaches and sleeplessness. The problem was the more time I allowed myself to spend on exercise or have family time, the more I felt I had to make up my lost research/work time. So the endless cycle of work activity continued until my body finally screamed out for help. It had enough.
Bhumika Bhatia via Compfight
After I had recovered from a sinus infection I experienced a strange numbness in my mouth on the tongue and then the inside cheek area. This was around the same time I found I was forgetting things like my own phone number, which I laughed at and put down to being overloaded with academic reading. The sensation moved to my neck and face with tingling and eventually to my eye when I ended up with double vision. A doctor friend reassured me and said it must be shingles – very common, don’t worry. This came during the Christmas break so I was pleased to have some time off.
When the vision problem occurred my husband got me to the doctor who referred me to a neurology consultant for an MRI. The results showed I had multiple lesions on the brain but he never mentioned Multiple Sclerosis at that point. We were all relieved I didn’t have a brain tumour and I was told this was ‘inflammation’ that can occur after an infection. The double vision lasted almost a month and the tingling/numbing eventually passed – I was happy to move on and forget about it. It wasn’t too long afterward that when a full, second ‘episode’ occurred which knocked me back completely. Soon I was in bed, the whole body numb and it was difficult to move and walk. I made it to the hospital for more consultations and later tests and Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis was confirmed. I was in such a bad way, both physically and mentally, that I had to suspend studies straight away. In the end I opted to take a year out of studies with the full support of my supervisor. After a short fix of steroids it took months to recover more fully and longer to begin to feel a bit ‘normal’ again. My option of weekly injections of Beta-Interferon (which I gave up on) caused horrible side-effects including more headaches and the possibility of depression. Well, at that point I finally admitted I had a lot to feel depressed about and I was indeed pretty miserable. I took antidepressant meds which were initially prescribed to help take care of the numbing sensations but they also helped the mood problems. The UK National Health Service even offered a free counseling service through the General Practitioner's office. I put that on hold until I was ready to face the range of issues that all of this introduced.
Eventually when I was well enough to get around physically I searched for therapies that would help me recover psychologically. Much of this recovery process had to do with my perceptions of my new health condition, and the rest had to do with how I would proceed with the prospect of carrying on the PhD. I had experience with therapy in the past and found many benefits, but this time I saw that my pattern of anxiety and worry around academic work, in particular, possibly needed another method of care. I tried acupuncture for a bit as a way of attempting to manage some of the physical pain and other symptoms and also because I heard its value could be found in the talking part of the consultation.
Later I tried hypnosis and found this option very rewarding. We spent lots of time talking about my history of anxiety and current state of health with RRMS. I was a good hypnosis subject for sure, as I was able to go under so easily. My hypnotist structured the session especially for my needs and later made me a recording that I could use on my own, which I used regularly and still use every now and then in my present life. The hypnosis as a form of therapy helped me return to my studies with more confidence but also helped me to begin to think more about what I really wanted out of my working life in the future. It was at that point that I had major doubts about pursuing an academic career. I thought, if I carry on it will have to be at a slower pace and on some of my own terms. I considered giving the PhD up (I felt so much better when I had time away from it) but I could not escape the feelings of ‘What if?’ Having got that far I talked myself into finishing (and all my academic colleagues and husband pushed me in this direction too) and told myself if I hadn’t found a permanent academic post, preferably a part-time job, a year or so after graduation then I would rethink my choices. It all became much more complicated later on when I did finally find myself in transition out of academia. There were no permanent part-time lecturers’ posts in my field within a reasonable distance from home. By this time there was a new government in office in the UK and Higher Education cuts were brutal across the arts and humanities. I continued contract teaching, but I was really just buying some time before I had a better plan in mind. In the back of my mind, particularly since my MS diagnosis, I think I always felt academia was not going to work for me. I didn’t want to return to the culture of self-sacrifice at all costs. If I was going to manage this new chronic health condition, avoid future relapses and stay on my feet I had to take care of the self and say no to academic craziness.
My story of ‘therapy’ and ‘recovery’ from MS, or at least recovery from the impact of a devastating MS episode, and academia is a bit complex. My Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis did not come on merely because of academia – it would have visited me at some point - but these early episodes, I believe, were triggered by all of the stress and anxiety that the PhD studies brought on. In a way I am grateful that having MS has forced me to rethink carefully the way I need to manage my working and family life. It has forced me to think hard about what I really want and about what makes me happy. For me, MS and a teaching/research academic career are a bad match. It’s taken some time to get to the point where I have accepted this fully and found ways to look outside of academia for meaningful work. Living with MS means I am reminded that nothing in my future can ever be certain. MS is what some have called ‘The unwelcome visitor’. But I’ve realised also that life itself introduces a whole bunch of these uncertainties every day. In some ways that realisation has helped me when planning my exit out of academia into a different, unknown work-sphere.
My advice around coping during your postgrad studies and/or when dealing with the many anxieties when transitioning out of academia is to pay close attention to the signs that your body is giving you and don’t dismiss them as just another ache and pain and sacrifice that goes with the PhD territory. We need to reject the ‘No pain, no gain’ mentality and begin to take care of the self in ways that will accept the limitations of the body. Listen to your own instincts, take care when care is needed, and be open to a range of therapeutic options that might be available to you.
I relate very much to Lauren and Currer’s hesitations about accepting their ailments as those that were related to depression, or as Currer’s physician put it, her ‘pain was mental…Mental like your body no longer realizes how to process serotonin and so you don’t sleep and you always feel anxious’. The culture of academia in many areas relies so much on an ideal of the rational, knowing subject who is in ‘control’ that is difficult to admit to feelings of vulnerability or instability, especially when connected with one’s mental health. In Lauren’s and Currer’s cases, drawing on therapy and anti-depressant medications were positive solutions that helped set them in more positive directions during and after their academic and post-academic anxieties. My experience of illness, I am convinced, was prompted by frequent anxieties about my work never being good enough, which led me to work into early morning hours, often having to still wake early with my two young children and then research/write and/or teach in the day. At this time my daughter was only five and my son eight, still young enough to have many demands and the usual run of illnesses that required them to stay at home from nursery care or school. With my mind often racing with work-related ideas or worries I frequently experienced sleep problems. It was unsurprising that fatigue and regular headaches (from a longer history of headaches) was a norm in my life. Wasn’t this all part of the course in academia, I justified to myself. I watched my academic spouse work extended hours to be able to succeed in his career and I knew I would have to pay my PhD dues as well. When I continued to experience back and neck ache from spending so much time at a desk I told myself that more exercise would solve everything, from the endless stream of colds and sinus infections to the headaches and sleeplessness. The problem was the more time I allowed myself to spend on exercise or have family time, the more I felt I had to make up my lost research/work time. So the endless cycle of work activity continued until my body finally screamed out for help. It had enough.
Bhumika Bhatia via CompfightAfter I had recovered from a sinus infection I experienced a strange numbness in my mouth on the tongue and then the inside cheek area. This was around the same time I found I was forgetting things like my own phone number, which I laughed at and put down to being overloaded with academic reading. The sensation moved to my neck and face with tingling and eventually to my eye when I ended up with double vision. A doctor friend reassured me and said it must be shingles – very common, don’t worry. This came during the Christmas break so I was pleased to have some time off.
When the vision problem occurred my husband got me to the doctor who referred me to a neurology consultant for an MRI. The results showed I had multiple lesions on the brain but he never mentioned Multiple Sclerosis at that point. We were all relieved I didn’t have a brain tumour and I was told this was ‘inflammation’ that can occur after an infection. The double vision lasted almost a month and the tingling/numbing eventually passed – I was happy to move on and forget about it. It wasn’t too long afterward that when a full, second ‘episode’ occurred which knocked me back completely. Soon I was in bed, the whole body numb and it was difficult to move and walk. I made it to the hospital for more consultations and later tests and Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis was confirmed. I was in such a bad way, both physically and mentally, that I had to suspend studies straight away. In the end I opted to take a year out of studies with the full support of my supervisor. After a short fix of steroids it took months to recover more fully and longer to begin to feel a bit ‘normal’ again. My option of weekly injections of Beta-Interferon (which I gave up on) caused horrible side-effects including more headaches and the possibility of depression. Well, at that point I finally admitted I had a lot to feel depressed about and I was indeed pretty miserable. I took antidepressant meds which were initially prescribed to help take care of the numbing sensations but they also helped the mood problems. The UK National Health Service even offered a free counseling service through the General Practitioner's office. I put that on hold until I was ready to face the range of issues that all of this introduced.
Eventually when I was well enough to get around physically I searched for therapies that would help me recover psychologically. Much of this recovery process had to do with my perceptions of my new health condition, and the rest had to do with how I would proceed with the prospect of carrying on the PhD. I had experience with therapy in the past and found many benefits, but this time I saw that my pattern of anxiety and worry around academic work, in particular, possibly needed another method of care. I tried acupuncture for a bit as a way of attempting to manage some of the physical pain and other symptoms and also because I heard its value could be found in the talking part of the consultation.
Later I tried hypnosis and found this option very rewarding. We spent lots of time talking about my history of anxiety and current state of health with RRMS. I was a good hypnosis subject for sure, as I was able to go under so easily. My hypnotist structured the session especially for my needs and later made me a recording that I could use on my own, which I used regularly and still use every now and then in my present life. The hypnosis as a form of therapy helped me return to my studies with more confidence but also helped me to begin to think more about what I really wanted out of my working life in the future. It was at that point that I had major doubts about pursuing an academic career. I thought, if I carry on it will have to be at a slower pace and on some of my own terms. I considered giving the PhD up (I felt so much better when I had time away from it) but I could not escape the feelings of ‘What if?’ Having got that far I talked myself into finishing (and all my academic colleagues and husband pushed me in this direction too) and told myself if I hadn’t found a permanent academic post, preferably a part-time job, a year or so after graduation then I would rethink my choices. It all became much more complicated later on when I did finally find myself in transition out of academia. There were no permanent part-time lecturers’ posts in my field within a reasonable distance from home. By this time there was a new government in office in the UK and Higher Education cuts were brutal across the arts and humanities. I continued contract teaching, but I was really just buying some time before I had a better plan in mind. In the back of my mind, particularly since my MS diagnosis, I think I always felt academia was not going to work for me. I didn’t want to return to the culture of self-sacrifice at all costs. If I was going to manage this new chronic health condition, avoid future relapses and stay on my feet I had to take care of the self and say no to academic craziness.
My story of ‘therapy’ and ‘recovery’ from MS, or at least recovery from the impact of a devastating MS episode, and academia is a bit complex. My Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis did not come on merely because of academia – it would have visited me at some point - but these early episodes, I believe, were triggered by all of the stress and anxiety that the PhD studies brought on. In a way I am grateful that having MS has forced me to rethink carefully the way I need to manage my working and family life. It has forced me to think hard about what I really want and about what makes me happy. For me, MS and a teaching/research academic career are a bad match. It’s taken some time to get to the point where I have accepted this fully and found ways to look outside of academia for meaningful work. Living with MS means I am reminded that nothing in my future can ever be certain. MS is what some have called ‘The unwelcome visitor’. But I’ve realised also that life itself introduces a whole bunch of these uncertainties every day. In some ways that realisation has helped me when planning my exit out of academia into a different, unknown work-sphere.
My advice around coping during your postgrad studies and/or when dealing with the many anxieties when transitioning out of academia is to pay close attention to the signs that your body is giving you and don’t dismiss them as just another ache and pain and sacrifice that goes with the PhD territory. We need to reject the ‘No pain, no gain’ mentality and begin to take care of the self in ways that will accept the limitations of the body. Listen to your own instincts, take care when care is needed, and be open to a range of therapeutic options that might be available to you.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
JC's Experiences with Therapy and Mental Health: Before and After Leaving
In the summer of 2008 – about 2.5 years before I decided to leave academia – I started seeing a therapist.
It was almost like my subconscious mind was working against me. Something was clearly wrong, but I could not figure out what it was.
For about two years, I went regularly to the therapist. She helped me out a lot, and after a few months I was doing great. I wasn't diagnosed with anything, really - just some mild situational anxiety. She didn't prescribe anything ... just talk therapy. So I kept coming in and talking.
And even though I could tell I was making progress, I never really felt like I wanted to stop seeing her. Every few weeks, I'd have this vague feeling where I'd feel like I was going to burst. I'd suddenly be vaguely frustrated and anxious and just want to start screaming at people, venting about anything and everything. I'd take it out on my partner, or I'd just start crying and screaming for no reason. I'd go in and talk to my therapist, and I'd feel better. For a couple of weeks.
But I could never feel permanently better. I'd always need to come back a few weeks later after another freakout.
My therapist and I talked about my family, and my relationship, and my friendships, and the way I dealt with problems. We talked about everything ... but not work. We never talked about my academic work. Well, more accurately - I never felt like I needed to talk about work.
"Work? Work's fine. Going on some interviews next month, and making progress on my dissertation. It's fine. Now, about that thing my mom said to me the other day..."
It wasn't that I didn't have frustrations about work. I most certainly did - my friends and partner were hearing about them. But I didn't feel like I knew how to talk about them with her. And what good would it do, anyway? It's not like I'm going to quit or something.
So my therapist never told me to quit. I never discussed the fact that I was unhappy with academia. Hell, I never really talked about academia at all.
But the week after I decided on my own to quit, I went in for my appointment and told her. She was surprised, but happy that I'd made a decision that clearly made me feel happy and relieved. She told me that some of her other clients were grad students and academics and that many of them had expressed unhappiness and a desire to quit. She said she was proud of me.
I felt great.
I went to see her regularly for the next six months or so ... always talking about my decision to leave. I'd excitedly tell her about this or that article that I'd run across that had validated my decision to leave. I'd talk about the sad search terms that were bringing people to my blog, and tell her how thankful I was that I'd left and that other people were finding my blog useful. I'd talk about how nice it was to just come home from work and have my evenings to myself. How glad I was that I wasn't busy moving to Nowheresville, Idaho for some crappy professor job. How happy I was to have left.
And by mid-August of 2011, I found that I didn't have anything else to talk about in therapy. Things with my family and my partner were much better. I was hardly ever feeling anxious or overwhelmed anymore. I wasn't having my freakouts anymore. I simply didn't have much to say during my sessions.
So she and I agreed that it might be time to stop regular sessions, and to have me just call if I needed to come in. I thanked her for everything, and went on my way.
And I haven't gone back.
Now ... that's not to say that I will never go back. I think therapy is a wonderful, useful thing, and I definitely expect that there will be another point in my life where I'll be dealing with some stuff and will need to go back into therapy to help myself work through it.
But I haven't felt the need to go yet ... and now that I look back? It seems obvious - based on the time when I needed (and then didn't need) therapy - that my unhappiness with academia was seeping into other parts of my life, and making me miserable and anxious and causing me to act out.
My therapist would help me work on some stuff, and I'd go home and do okay ... but I'd always need to come back. Things would always bubble back to the surface, and I'd need help. I just wasn't stable yet.
And then I left academia, and suddenly my life and my moods stabilized.
Coincidence? I don't think so.
So if you're feeling vaguely unhappy in academia and are thinking that maybe you could be happier or maybe you might want to make some changes, I strongly recommend making an appointment with a therapist.
But unlike me, try talking to them about work. Maybe they can make some suggestions ... and save you some time and mental anguish.
I wasn’t feeling depressed or particularly anxious, and I didn’t go to the therapist because of issues related to work or school. Rather, I had found myself struggling with different parts of my life – my marriage, my relationship with my parents and siblings, and the fact that I was making some irresponsible choices. Basically, I was behaving as if something was very wrong in my life even though on paper, everything seemed to be going quite well for me. Great partner, a job that I (thought I) loved, etc.
Everything should have been fine ... but I wasn't acting like it was.
It was almost like my subconscious mind was working against me. Something was clearly wrong, but I could not figure out what it was.
For about two years, I went regularly to the therapist. She helped me out a lot, and after a few months I was doing great. I wasn't diagnosed with anything, really - just some mild situational anxiety. She didn't prescribe anything ... just talk therapy. So I kept coming in and talking.
And even though I could tell I was making progress, I never really felt like I wanted to stop seeing her. Every few weeks, I'd have this vague feeling where I'd feel like I was going to burst. I'd suddenly be vaguely frustrated and anxious and just want to start screaming at people, venting about anything and everything. I'd take it out on my partner, or I'd just start crying and screaming for no reason. I'd go in and talk to my therapist, and I'd feel better. For a couple of weeks.
But I could never feel permanently better. I'd always need to come back a few weeks later after another freakout.
My therapist and I talked about my family, and my relationship, and my friendships, and the way I dealt with problems. We talked about everything ... but not work. We never talked about my academic work. Well, more accurately - I never felt like I needed to talk about work.
"Work? Work's fine. Going on some interviews next month, and making progress on my dissertation. It's fine. Now, about that thing my mom said to me the other day..."
It wasn't that I didn't have frustrations about work. I most certainly did - my friends and partner were hearing about them. But I didn't feel like I knew how to talk about them with her. And what good would it do, anyway? It's not like I'm going to quit or something.
So my therapist never told me to quit. I never discussed the fact that I was unhappy with academia. Hell, I never really talked about academia at all.
But the week after I decided on my own to quit, I went in for my appointment and told her. She was surprised, but happy that I'd made a decision that clearly made me feel happy and relieved. She told me that some of her other clients were grad students and academics and that many of them had expressed unhappiness and a desire to quit. She said she was proud of me.
I felt great.
I went to see her regularly for the next six months or so ... always talking about my decision to leave. I'd excitedly tell her about this or that article that I'd run across that had validated my decision to leave. I'd talk about the sad search terms that were bringing people to my blog, and tell her how thankful I was that I'd left and that other people were finding my blog useful. I'd talk about how nice it was to just come home from work and have my evenings to myself. How glad I was that I wasn't busy moving to Nowheresville, Idaho for some crappy professor job. How happy I was to have left.
And by mid-August of 2011, I found that I didn't have anything else to talk about in therapy. Things with my family and my partner were much better. I was hardly ever feeling anxious or overwhelmed anymore. I wasn't having my freakouts anymore. I simply didn't have much to say during my sessions.
So she and I agreed that it might be time to stop regular sessions, and to have me just call if I needed to come in. I thanked her for everything, and went on my way.
And I haven't gone back.
Now ... that's not to say that I will never go back. I think therapy is a wonderful, useful thing, and I definitely expect that there will be another point in my life where I'll be dealing with some stuff and will need to go back into therapy to help myself work through it.
But I haven't felt the need to go yet ... and now that I look back? It seems obvious - based on the time when I needed (and then didn't need) therapy - that my unhappiness with academia was seeping into other parts of my life, and making me miserable and anxious and causing me to act out.
My therapist would help me work on some stuff, and I'd go home and do okay ... but I'd always need to come back. Things would always bubble back to the surface, and I'd need help. I just wasn't stable yet.
And then I left academia, and suddenly my life and my moods stabilized.
Coincidence? I don't think so.
So if you're feeling vaguely unhappy in academia and are thinking that maybe you could be happier or maybe you might want to make some changes, I strongly recommend making an appointment with a therapist.
But unlike me, try talking to them about work. Maybe they can make some suggestions ... and save you some time and mental anguish.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Should I Quit? Definitive answers here!
Just kidding. Sorry. We can't tell you if you should quit. We truly wish we could be an Academic Magic 8-ball and give you that confirmation you're looking for.
Reframe your concepts of "leaving," "quitting" and failure with our article here. There are tons of great reads that will stoke the fire of your indignance and make you feel like less of a chump (you are not a chump, but you probably feel like a chump).
JC has written an entire series called "Reasons I'm Leaving." She also did a more academic, less personal, series called "A Sociologist's View on Leaving" that's worth reading as well.
Julie Clarenbach has a lot of suggestions for weighing this important decision in "How can you tell if you should leave academia?"
(Dropping the "shoulds" was huge for me.)
Grad school made Caroline Roberts puke. No, really. Stress is no joke: it really can destroy your body and make you crazy. It doesn't really matter if you "should" be stressed out. You just are. It's not weakness. Caroline also has some amusing and very helpful reactions to a bunch of advice columns that focused on grad students here.
Bottom line: only you can know if it's time to go. From my personal perspective, I think any reason is a good reason to quit. I don't think you need to hit some magical threshold to have a "good enough" reason to quit. It seems like a lot of folks consider quitting for a long time, and then there's a "straw that broke the camel's back" that pushes them into actually quitting -- a missed deadline, a rejection letter, a disappointing interview, a conversation, a revelation. I could say "I quit grad school because I had a disagreement with my advisor," but it was really so much more than that: years of accumulated stress, debt, fatigue, and frustration. If you want to quit, you can quit. Really. You don't have to justify it to anyone except yourself.If you're considering quitting, and are stressing out over should I, should I, I challenge you to flip the script: ask yourself why you should stay. What's keeping you here? What are you getting out of academia? What's the reward? You might be surprised how short that list, how flimsy.
The collaborators of this website have gone in circles over how to answer this question. Should you quit? We all grappled with it in different ways, for different reasons.
Below, we'll link to dozens of articles and essays that ask the questions should you quit, why should you quit, what are good reasons to quit, etc. Then Lauren wraps it up with a few thoughts.
* * *
Reframe your concepts of "leaving," "quitting" and failure with our article here. There are tons of great reads that will stoke the fire of your indignance and make you feel like less of a chump (you are not a chump, but you probably feel like a chump).
This May 2012 article from The Guardian discusses reasons that Chemistry PhDs -- especially women -- decide to leave academia:
The participants in the study identify many characteristics of academic careers that they find unappealing: the constant hunt for funding for research projects is a significant impediment for both men and women. But women in greater numbers than men see academic careers as all-consuming, solitary and as unnecessarily competitive. Both men and women PhD candidates come to realise that a string of post-docs is part of a career path, and they see that this can require frequent moves and a lack of security about future employment... Women more than men see great sacrifice as a prerequisite for success in academia.
Karen Kelsky @ The Professor Is In assures us that "IT'S OK TO QUIT":
What starts out as an inspired quest for new knowledge and social impact can devolve into endless days in an airless room, broke, in debt, staring at a computer, exploited by departments, dismissed by professors, ignored by colleagues, disrespected by students. It is ok to decide that’s not what you want. It is ok to make another choice. There is life outside of academia.
JC has written an entire series called "Reasons I'm Leaving." She also did a more academic, less personal, series called "A Sociologist's View on Leaving" that's worth reading as well.
Julie Clarenbach has a lot of suggestions for weighing this important decision in "How can you tell if you should leave academia?"
Get rid of the shoulds. If you take a break from telling yourself what you “should” do, what do you WANT to do? Does anything on your to-do list sound fun? We spend so much time learning by watching in this career that it can be hard to notice what we need to make this work for us. Maybe your colleague can grade four papers a day and get them all done efficiently, while you really just need to set aside five hours in front of Glee reruns. If that’s your way, having “grade 4 papers” on your to-do list every bleeping day will likely make you want to stab your eyes out. And that will affect everything else.
You “should” serve on committees, you “should” contribute, you “should” teach a certain way, you “should” write a certain kind of essay — what happens if you drop the stories?
(Dropping the "shoulds" was huge for me.)
Grad school made Caroline Roberts puke. No, really. Stress is no joke: it really can destroy your body and make you crazy. It doesn't really matter if you "should" be stressed out. You just are. It's not weakness. Caroline also has some amusing and very helpful reactions to a bunch of advice columns that focused on grad students here.
Bottom line: only you can know if it's time to go. From my personal perspective, I think any reason is a good reason to quit. I don't think you need to hit some magical threshold to have a "good enough" reason to quit. It seems like a lot of folks consider quitting for a long time, and then there's a "straw that broke the camel's back" that pushes them into actually quitting -- a missed deadline, a rejection letter, a disappointing interview, a conversation, a revelation. I could say "I quit grad school because I had a disagreement with my advisor," but it was really so much more than that: years of accumulated stress, debt, fatigue, and frustration. If you want to quit, you can quit. Really. You don't have to justify it to anyone except yourself.If you're considering quitting, and are stressing out over should I, should I, I challenge you to flip the script: ask yourself why you should stay. What's keeping you here? What are you getting out of academia? What's the reward? You might be surprised how short that list, how flimsy.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Packing It In: Getting Rid of Books & Moving Out of Your Office
I think it was bookshelves that got me hooked on the idea of academia in the first place. I vividly recall visiting a Professor's home while an undergrad friend was house sitting. On a leafy street in a neighborhood near campus, the green clapboard house had wood floors, thick rugs, and bookshelves everywhere, even running up the staircase. As a starry-eyed junior, it seemed like the perfect life.
When we rented our first apartment in new grad school town, we found a place with built in bookshelves lining one wall of the living room and were sold instantly.
So maybe it's not a surprise to anyone that going through your books is a big moment in post-academic life. Similarly, packing up your campus office is a moment where your past life -- and its hopes and dreams -- crashes into your new life, with its uncertainty. What do you keep? What do you get rid of? What do books mean to you if you're not going to use them, or necessarily read them? What kind of life will you lead in which books aren't central to your work?
I strongly encourage you to visit your public library. Not your university library, but the little building with a children's area and a meeting room that you may never have been to. Now walk around and look at all of the books that you could read, right now, for free, for the pure joy of it. Hello, check out that graphic novel section. Wait a minute, wait a minute: you haven't read the Hunger Games trilogy yet?!! Check out all 3 books right now. Reorient yourself to a life in which reading is something you do because you want to and like to, and you read books for the loveliness of language and narrative. It will make you look at your collection in a whole new way.
When we rented our first apartment in new grad school town, we found a place with built in bookshelves lining one wall of the living room and were sold instantly.
So maybe it's not a surprise to anyone that going through your books is a big moment in post-academic life. Similarly, packing up your campus office is a moment where your past life -- and its hopes and dreams -- crashes into your new life, with its uncertainty. What do you keep? What do you get rid of? What do books mean to you if you're not going to use them, or necessarily read them? What kind of life will you lead in which books aren't central to your work?
For some people, getting rid of books is a huge relief. You might be tempted to do a bonfire of the humanities and symbolically purge your life of these markers of academia. If that's the case, more power to ya (although you might only burn the truly trashed copies and consider donating the rest). For most of us, though, it seems like going through our books is a crucial aspect of the transition out of academia. It often takes multiple pass throughs. It can be a useful marker for your own transformation, as you might see books that made the cut last time and think "wha??"
WoPro developed a case of bibliophobia going through her books, and the process kept bringing up the painful reality of her uncertain life after academia:
I probably didn’t get rid of enough books. I fear that my dream library is something that will never happen anyway, and the more pressing issue is deciding which books will make it into my car, since I’ll be living out of it for a few months.
Arnold @ Postacademic went through his books multiple times and still struggled with deciding what to keep and what/where to get rid of the rest.
When I quit, I gave my students extra credit to return stacks of library books for me. I had no problem getting rid of books related to my academic pursuits, but teaching books proved harder to purge. I still have a lot of books about feminist science studies and developmental education on my shelves.
Here are some questions to ask yourself as you go through your books:
- Do I like it?
- Will I read it for fun? (Really: will you read Foucault for fun?)
- Is this book important or significant in some way? (Sometimes thinking of the books as "artifacts" of a time in your life makes it easier to decide, e.g. I wrote my senior thesis on Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, so it stayed.)
- Is this a book I could easily replace if I later regret this decision? (So maybe you can justify keeping something out of print, but really, it's not that hard to pick up another copy of The Politic Unconscious if you wake up in the middle of the night really, really wishing you had it on your bedstand.)
- Can I make money from this? (If you have a recent textbook, or a nice version of a recent edition of a Norton Anthology, its dollar value might outweigh its sentimental value. And you're really going to need that $15 in your post-academic life. Really.)
- If I could trade this for an awesome comic book, would I? (If the answer is yes, then get rid of the book, and buy yourself an awesome comic book.)
I strongly encourage you to visit your public library. Not your university library, but the little building with a children's area and a meeting room that you may never have been to. Now walk around and look at all of the books that you could read, right now, for free, for the pure joy of it. Hello, check out that graphic novel section. Wait a minute, wait a minute: you haven't read the Hunger Games trilogy yet?!! Check out all 3 books right now. Reorient yourself to a life in which reading is something you do because you want to and like to, and you read books for the loveliness of language and narrative. It will make you look at your collection in a whole new way.
Once you're ready to get rid of some books, here are some of the ways post-acs get rid of and/or make money off of their book collections:
- Post a list to facebook and offload them on to non-quitting academics (haha, suckers!).
- Dump them in the department's mailroom. People will take them.
- Take them to a used book store and see if you can make some money from them.
- If money is a bigger concern for you, try running the ISBN numbers of your books through the Amazon Marketplace or a similar commercial site. JC got rid of a few books this way during a time in her life where she needed some extra cash, and actually netted several hundred dollars doing it.
- Donate them to your local public library (check the library's guidelines for donation, first).
- Donate them to a student organization that does a book sale (e.g. the English grad students did a book sale at my U, so I took a lot of my criticism books there).
- Make something from them -- art, sculpture, collage.
- Recycle them.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
If You Are In Crisis: Hotlines and Other Emergency Help for the Distressed Post-Ac
If you are feeling suicidal or are in a serious, can't-take-it-anymore crisis, there are people out who can help. Please don't hesitate to call one of these numbers or to reach out for help. Grad school and academia can be sites of tremendous stress and anxiety and isolation, and you are not the first person to reach a crisis point. You are not alone, and there is help out there for you.
The Kristin Brooks Hope Center has a dedicated crisis line solely for grad students anywhere to use: 1-800-GRAD-HLP (472-3457)
From their site:
If you are thinking about harming yourself, please call the National Suicide Prevention Line 1-800-273-8255.
For more general suicide prevention and crisis hotlines, check out this site. They list national hotlines as well as links to organizations and crisis lines for every state in the U.S. As that site states: crisis counselors are waiting for your call. They are there to help. Don't hesitate.
If you feel like you are not in immediate crisis but still need help, please contact a mental health professional in your geographic area. Listings for licensed therapists and counselors and other mental health professionals can be found in your local phone book and the internet, as well as through many insurance company websites. If you are still employed or enrolled at an institution, find out if they have a faculty/staff counselor or student counseling service that can help you for low or no cost. This is how a lot of us get help when we're sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Community health services are also a great place to look, as well as women's resource centers.
Many therapists will schedule quick appointments for people in crisis, and many charge on a sliding scale. Don't be afraid to make some calls. They are there to help.
And don't be embarrassed to seek help. I've done it, as have many people I know both inside and outside of academia. (Me, too! And me, too! Chime in the co-editors of this site.) Going to a therapist doesn't make you crazy or broken. It just means that you need an impartial person to give you some perspective on what you're going through.
Grad school and academia can wreak havoc on your mental health ... we all know it. Grad students joke about popping antidepressants and about how they're too anxious and overworked to sleep. I'm willing to bet that every single person reading this post right now can think of at least one time when they had some type of emotional breakdown over their academic work - a crying jag, a panic attack, a screaming fit, or maybe just a few days where you could not motivate yourself to go to campus (or even get out of bed). It's not just you who feels this way. A 2009 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) summarized some major findings about the mental health of graduate students, and the findings were not good:
You are not alone, and there is no shame in asking for help. Please, if you are in crisis, make a call.
And please: don't end your life over academia. The world is better off with you in it. The transition out of academia is tough and the chasm can feel deep, but we truly believe you can lead a happy life outside the ivory tower. Get help through the roughest patches.
The Kristin Brooks Hope Center has a dedicated crisis line solely for grad students anywhere to use: 1-800-GRAD-HLP (472-3457)
From their site:
Recent studies have shown that the pressures of academic performance, finances, advisor relationships and other factors create intense anxiety for many graduate students, bringing some to a dangerous point of crisis.That's why we've come up with the National Graduate Student Crisis Line -- a toll-free, 24-hour hotline staffed by highly trained phone counselors who understand the unique issues faced by grad students like you.
Please don't hesitate to call. These people understand what you're going through, and they are here to help.
If you are thinking about harming yourself, please call the National Suicide Prevention Line 1-800-273-8255.
For more general suicide prevention and crisis hotlines, check out this site. They list national hotlines as well as links to organizations and crisis lines for every state in the U.S. As that site states: crisis counselors are waiting for your call. They are there to help. Don't hesitate.
If you feel like you are not in immediate crisis but still need help, please contact a mental health professional in your geographic area. Listings for licensed therapists and counselors and other mental health professionals can be found in your local phone book and the internet, as well as through many insurance company websites. If you are still employed or enrolled at an institution, find out if they have a faculty/staff counselor or student counseling service that can help you for low or no cost. This is how a lot of us get help when we're sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Community health services are also a great place to look, as well as women's resource centers.
Many therapists will schedule quick appointments for people in crisis, and many charge on a sliding scale. Don't be afraid to make some calls. They are there to help.
And don't be embarrassed to seek help. I've done it, as have many people I know both inside and outside of academia. (Me, too! And me, too! Chime in the co-editors of this site.) Going to a therapist doesn't make you crazy or broken. It just means that you need an impartial person to give you some perspective on what you're going through.
Grad school and academia can wreak havoc on your mental health ... we all know it. Grad students joke about popping antidepressants and about how they're too anxious and overworked to sleep. I'm willing to bet that every single person reading this post right now can think of at least one time when they had some type of emotional breakdown over their academic work - a crying jag, a panic attack, a screaming fit, or maybe just a few days where you could not motivate yourself to go to campus (or even get out of bed). It's not just you who feels this way. A 2009 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) summarized some major findings about the mental health of graduate students, and the findings were not good:
At the University of California at Berkeley, 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent had felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning, and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide, a 2004 survey found. By comparison, an estimated 9.5 percent of American adults suffer from depressive disorders in a given year.
You are not alone, and there is no shame in asking for help. Please, if you are in crisis, make a call.
And please: don't end your life over academia. The world is better off with you in it. The transition out of academia is tough and the chasm can feel deep, but we truly believe you can lead a happy life outside the ivory tower. Get help through the roughest patches.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Applying for Unemployment After Academia: How You Can Do It and How It Might Feel
Depending on the circumstances under which you are leaving academia, you may qualify for unemployment benefits. Maybe tenure wasn't renewed; maybe you were on a contract that is ending; whatever your circumstances, it's probably worth looking into whether or not you qualify for unemployment in your state. A mantra you'll hear again and again on these pages is ask for help, and accept help when offered. If you qualify for unemployment and it would help you during this transition, you should take advantage of it.
Each state has its own rules and procedures. The link above takes you to a clickable map that will help you find the right department to contact in your state.
And take a deep breath. If you think you're the first, or last, post-academic to seek government assistance, you're wrong. There's absolutely no shame in putting food on your table. There's absolutely no shame in admitting you need help. But it can feel humiliating to consider the disparity between the fantasies that drove us to pursue academia and the reality of our post-academic existence. I certainly didn't dream of living in a small apartment with a filthy carpet filling out paperwork for dependent care assistance when I sipped wine and talked theory in the wood-paneled dining room of a professor's bungalow at the first departmental party I attended as a graduate student.
The new reality can suck, but don't let that deter you from seeking help.
Post-academic in NYC writes about this in "The Crushing Shame of Applying for Unemployment:"
Jessica Burke, an adjunct, also writes about her experience with an unemployment hearing here. Burke writes about a fairly intimidating and humiliating bureaucratic experience trying to get unemployment, but New Faculty Majority offered her a lot of support. New Faculty Majority has a lot of fantastic information for adjuncts applying for unemployment that you should definitely check out, including a PDF guide for contingent faculty who are seeking benefits. They are fierce advocates for the labor rights of adjunct and contingent faculty, and unemployment benefits are a big part of that. Be sure to let them know if and when you file for unemployment.
The bottom line is: you deserve support.
Each state has its own rules and procedures. The link above takes you to a clickable map that will help you find the right department to contact in your state.
And take a deep breath. If you think you're the first, or last, post-academic to seek government assistance, you're wrong. There's absolutely no shame in putting food on your table. There's absolutely no shame in admitting you need help. But it can feel humiliating to consider the disparity between the fantasies that drove us to pursue academia and the reality of our post-academic existence. I certainly didn't dream of living in a small apartment with a filthy carpet filling out paperwork for dependent care assistance when I sipped wine and talked theory in the wood-paneled dining room of a professor's bungalow at the first departmental party I attended as a graduate student.
The new reality can suck, but don't let that deter you from seeking help.
Post-academic in NYC writes about this in "The Crushing Shame of Applying for Unemployment:"
When you call the number, a person who oozes resignation and cold efficiency asks, “you had a teaching job last year, so why did you quit?” You are expected to have a really good reason for why you quit your adjunct gig that didn’t pay well to take a part-time gig that paid a little more (which has since kind of dried up). It is hard to explain this because you are talking to a person who probably thinks “college teaching” sounds like the best thing ever. You can tell the person on the other end of the phone is judging you. She thinks you are an idiot for giving up a perfectly good “college teacher” job, even if it was part-time for not a lot of money. She thinks you’d rather suck on the public teat than work for a living. You really want to launch into a speech explaining about how the neoliberal economic forces destroying the economy also ensure that most college teachers are low-paid adjuncts who live in caves and suck just enough water to survive off of damp surfaces. You also want to explain that surviving grad school and writing a dissertation means you are many things, but lazy isn't one of them.
Jessica Burke, an adjunct, also writes about her experience with an unemployment hearing here. Burke writes about a fairly intimidating and humiliating bureaucratic experience trying to get unemployment, but New Faculty Majority offered her a lot of support. New Faculty Majority has a lot of fantastic information for adjuncts applying for unemployment that you should definitely check out, including a PDF guide for contingent faculty who are seeking benefits. They are fierce advocates for the labor rights of adjunct and contingent faculty, and unemployment benefits are a big part of that. Be sure to let them know if and when you file for unemployment.
The bottom line is: you deserve support.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
The Emotional Transition: An Introduction
Hello, fellow quitter! If you’re here, it means you’re leaving grad school, or quitting the adjunct circuit, or bailing on the job market, or considering in some way getting out of academia. You've decided to pretty much change everything about your life as it is now, and everything about your hopes and dreams for the future. We've been there. We've done that. It's hard, but it is doable.
So, yeah: expect to feel a lot of intense emotions around the decision to quit. Expect to feel them for quite awhile after you’ve left, too. Even for folks who leave academia on good terms, who simply want a different direction and have no regrets, feelings of confusion, uncertainty, and turmoil can crop up. In a month or a year you might glimpse a CFP your diss would have been perfect for, or see a job ad that you would have loved to apply for if only... We all hit those rough patches. It’s part of the territory. Because academia is more than just a job, right? It’s our life. It’s our passion, it’s our hobby, it’s our bread and butter, it’s our social circle, our hopes and dreams, our health insurance, our visa, our sense of self. Leaving academia is more than just changing vocational goals, it’s leaving a whole world behind. I’ve heard it compared to leaving a church, or the military. It’s understandably difficult to disentangle that web when you decide to leave. Heck, a lot of people stay in academia just to avoid that messy process.
So the first thing we want to say is: your feelings make sense. Quitting is freeing and can be extremely rewarding, but I think we’ve all found it difficult at times. Don’t beat yourself up for feeling overwhelmed, confused, sad, or angry.
The second thing we want to say is: you are not alone. It’s easy to feel isolated when you don’t have connections to people who’ve left academia, especially if you feel like you can’t talk openly about it with your advisor/partner/friends who are still in that world. But you are not alone. For all of us, finding a community of supportive post-academics has been really valuable, and we welcome you to join our conversation! Fire up a blog and join our blogroll, or just drop us an email. In regular life, think about people you know who’ve left and dropped off the map. They’re still out there. Look up that guy who was a fifth year when you started and quit to become a teacher: find him on facebook and ask questions. Ask around. Talk to people. It really helps.
But for some of us, friends and journaling aren’t enough and the support of a therapist, sometimes even a psychiatrist, is essential. I know it was crucial for me. Anxiety and depression can be excruciating and debilitating. You do not need to suffer through this process. Find help. Ask for help. Accept help. More on this TBA.
When we started this project, we all agreed that the dearth of info and support for the emotional transition you undergo when you leave academia had to be remedied. We hope the resources in this section offer some of the solace, perspective, and advice you need to navigate these rough waters.
So, yeah: expect to feel a lot of intense emotions around the decision to quit. Expect to feel them for quite awhile after you’ve left, too. Even for folks who leave academia on good terms, who simply want a different direction and have no regrets, feelings of confusion, uncertainty, and turmoil can crop up. In a month or a year you might glimpse a CFP your diss would have been perfect for, or see a job ad that you would have loved to apply for if only... We all hit those rough patches. It’s part of the territory. Because academia is more than just a job, right? It’s our life. It’s our passion, it’s our hobby, it’s our bread and butter, it’s our social circle, our hopes and dreams, our health insurance, our visa, our sense of self. Leaving academia is more than just changing vocational goals, it’s leaving a whole world behind. I’ve heard it compared to leaving a church, or the military. It’s understandably difficult to disentangle that web when you decide to leave. Heck, a lot of people stay in academia just to avoid that messy process.
So the first thing we want to say is: your feelings make sense. Quitting is freeing and can be extremely rewarding, but I think we’ve all found it difficult at times. Don’t beat yourself up for feeling overwhelmed, confused, sad, or angry.
The second thing we want to say is: you are not alone. It’s easy to feel isolated when you don’t have connections to people who’ve left academia, especially if you feel like you can’t talk openly about it with your advisor/partner/friends who are still in that world. But you are not alone. For all of us, finding a community of supportive post-academics has been really valuable, and we welcome you to join our conversation! Fire up a blog and join our blogroll, or just drop us an email. In regular life, think about people you know who’ve left and dropped off the map. They’re still out there. Look up that guy who was a fifth year when you started and quit to become a teacher: find him on facebook and ask questions. Ask around. Talk to people. It really helps.
But for some of us, friends and journaling aren’t enough and the support of a therapist, sometimes even a psychiatrist, is essential. I know it was crucial for me. Anxiety and depression can be excruciating and debilitating. You do not need to suffer through this process. Find help. Ask for help. Accept help. More on this TBA.
When we started this project, we all agreed that the dearth of info and support for the emotional transition you undergo when you leave academia had to be remedied. We hope the resources in this section offer some of the solace, perspective, and advice you need to navigate these rough waters.
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