Job-Seeker, Market Thyself! Thoughts on Not Finding My "Brand"

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.)

The Thousand Cuts - A Guest Post

The following is a guest post from J.D.J. Plocher from walkingledges.com. If you would like to submit your own story about leaving, finding work out of academia, or any other topic, please contact us!

The first cut in the eight-year death of my academic career came when I applied only to doctoral programs “in places I’d like to live.” Looking back, the disconnect between my priorities and my goals is obvious. I was one year into an interim appointment as coordinator of operations for a new music center housed in the same college of music where I’d completed my master’s. My wife was just finishing hers. We were ready for something new…so why not more school? The answer has come in another 999 slender wounds.

That coordinator position was an interim appointment. The previous coordinator had left with little warning the previous summer, and I was tapped to replace him. I’d finished my masters in composition and music history. I was keen on new music. I was organized. My wife’s remaining year of school helped the timing make sense. It was also a hell of a pay increase from the college bookstore where I’d been working for slightly north of minimum wage.

Still…I did not want to stay in northwest Ohio. By 2005, my description of the area was well-rehearsed: “It’s flat in every possible way: topographically, culturally…you name it. The highest point in the county is a hill made from leftover fill from an overpass project. There are seven pizza places, two mediocre Chinese restaurants, the worst Mexican restaurant I have ever eaten at, and, inexplicably, a really good Japanese restaurant. Almost all the undergrads can go home to do laundry on the weekends. It feels like we’re farming music teachers for every primary and secondary school in the state.” I really wanted to move away. I liked my new job well enough, but there wasn’t anywhere to advance in it. The center consisted of a director, a coordinator, and a graduate assistant. The director’s chair was a 50% faculty assignment, and I wasn’t faculty.

I was not sure I wanted to be faculty (and couldn’t have been at the time). I did, though, want to learn more about new music. I’d started wondering why people kept composing the stuff (even though I was a composer myself). One of my main responsibilities as coordinator of operations was to administer and do the initial screening for an international call for scores. I listened to hundreds of pieces. Most of them weren’t particularly good. Some were especially bad. Some were really cool, but we’d never sell the performance faculty on them. We picked our battles in pitching works the performers. I learned a lot about the sausage-making that goes into any new music festival. Even when the festival went well, it was still full of pieces that left me scratching my head. It wasn’t because the pieces were bad, per se. (We kept the bad ones off the program.) It was because this music was mostly for people who were already sold on new music. The audience was full of composers.

Going into a musicology program while questioning the function of music was a second cut. It’s one that wouldn’t have been fatal in the right program, or with the right advising, or with the right courses on offer. That’s the thing, though: None of these cuts were fatal in themselves. Like my geographic limitations on programs, this was a case of me not doing myself any favors.

I waded through the application process for a handful of school and accepted an invitation to the program at the University of Minnesota. I had liked the Twin Cities while doing my undergrad; it was exciting to move back. My pregnant partner and I settled into a nice apartment we quickly discovered was in the ghetto. (It turns out that hunting apartments from 600 miles away leaves a wide margin for error.) We ignored the murders and began to accumulate furniture. Eventually, classes started. I liked my seminars.

My son was born in February of my first year. The timing was as close to ideal as it could be for a grad student. I was on fellowship and didn’t have any teaching load. I had the easiest semester I’d had since my undergrad years. I remember walking from the hospital to campus the afternoon after my son was born. I wanted to tell people, but I also wanted to be asked.

Having a kid? That started a whole series of cuts. Every time I was up in the middle of the night convincing him to go back to sleep. Every time I stayed home to take care of him instead of going to a campus event. Those moments accumulated, but the cuts came not just from fatigue and lost time. They came from perspective. The more often I thought of graduate school as a job rather than a calling, the less inclined I was to define myself by it. The less I defined myself by it, the harder it was to see all the hoop-jumping as necessary.

Some selected cuts accumulated during coursework:

The late Michael Steinberg—an incredibly erudite and charming man with an encyclopedic knowledge of the western canon—told me I had “debased musical tastes.” I had made the mistake of comparing a neo-classical Stravinsky piece to a Disney musical. His subsequent comment was clearly the kind that make their way out of one’s mouth before fully registering in the brain. His later, slightly-mortified apology was entirely sincere. Like my research interests, this wasn’t something that would have been a problem in the right program or if I had the right degree of firebrandish commitment to my cause. As it was, the comment proved another warning sign of an imperfect fit.

A prospective faculty member was giving her job talk. She had impressed most of the graduate students in our informal lunch meeting, discussing the breadth of her research interests and methodologies. She was friendly, too. I was close to liking her. Her job talk was among the most boring presentations I have ever seen. I spotted several attending senior faculty members dozing off. I came pretty close to falling asleep myself. Some of that can be blamed in scheduling the presentation for a Friday afternoon, but…if there was such a chasm between her teaching persona and her research, what was going to happen to me?

I’d hear rumors about the department’s ghosts. You know, the students who were ABD, or technically still enrolled, only nobody ever saw them. I knew there were people like this out there (the gentleman hired to replace me at the new music center was such a fellow), but I hadn’t really encountered any. While not literally specters, they embodied the specter of failure. I had come into grad school with the notion that academic success was more or less guaranteed for smart, hard-working people. Meeting some who were smart, hard-working, or both—and still flailing—was a surprise.

The real shock came at the end of my third year, when I got an e-mail notifying me that I wouldn’t have funding for the following year. Budgets were tight. I had finished my coursework. The faculty making the decision wanted to protect their graduate seminars by allocating the department’s limited resources to those students still taking classes. This happened just a few weeks after we’d discovered my spouse was pregnant with our second child. I got angry. I threw my heavy desk chair across the room. I yelled. I picked up and put down my phone half a dozen times without any idea who I should call to yell at. There had been no hint of this in the air. My first year had been on graduate college fellowship; it was only my second year on the department’s dime. Cutting me off seemed insanely capricious.

It was my last best chance to hop off the academic track before finishing. I had not quite settled on my dissertation topic. I liked teaching and had just finished assisting the four semesters of the undergraduate history sequence for majors. Except for the dissertation, I was “done.” I had gotten the direct experience I expected out of my doctoral program in terms of direct education.

Instead of using the opportunity to escape, I twisted it around to cling all the harder to my nascent PhD. I swore I’d finish to spite the people who’d cut me off. Somehow I convinced myself that the best revenge for the wrong I’d been done was to pretend it had never happened. If I left, I’d let “them” win. It didn’t matter that I had no clear concept of which “them” I was spiting, or how finishing my degree would accomplish that.

Losing my funding was my first direct acquaintance with how bad the money situation is in higher education. I had loosely tracked the growing number of stories about adjunctification, but when I lost my assistantship, I began to pay them much more attention. My naive faith that I’d be one of the success stories had been an armor. Losing my funding cracked that armor and made me far more receptive to bad news. If any single thing laid me open to the cuts that followed, it was that.

Some few of the thousand cuts go at the feet of my advisor. Ideally, the participants in an advising relationship (as in any relationship) complement one another. When you work with somebody who can shore up your weak spots and whose weak spots you can shore up, the results can be very good. They can be good, too, when you can amplify each other’s strengths. In my case, I ended up with an advisor who amplified my weaknesses. I was inclined to be independent; he was extraordinarily laissez-faire. I did not ask many questions; he seldom volunteered information. While I was writing, we’d meet once or twice a semester. When I had specific questions, my advisor gave great feedback. Otherwise, our meetings quickly devolved into departmental gossip.

There was a lot of gossip. I had the bad fortune to be working with my advisor as the department’s (and college’s) political landscape tilted away from him. He wasn’t at the meeting in which the department cut my funding, and he wasn’t able to do much to mitigate the damage. (He offered to help land me a 25% assistantship that would have ended up costing me money because it required full-time enrollment.) He did eventually help me land a few adjunct jobs and even got me back into the department to teach world music for a semester (sort of…it was complicated). None of our problems stemmed from from ill-will. We were just a bad fit—his benign neglect let us both drift more than we should have, especially when I was off-campus so much taking care of my kids. There was too much out of sight, out of mind…from both of us.

More cuts accumulated slowly but constantly as I worked on my dissertation. I enjoyed my research—even the irony that I made repeated trips to New York City and saw only the inside of libraries and archives. Occasionally, I enjoyed the writing. Mostly, I struggled to squeeze work in on evenings and weekends, annoyed at how much it took me away from my family. Every evening I handed the kids to my wife minutes after she got home was another wound.

Adjunct jobs were no salve. My first one was 100 miles away. Door-to-door, exactly 100 miles. It was also an 8:15 class, which meant I had to be out the door by 5:50 a.m. the two mornings the class ran. My “office hours” were half hours immediately after class in the horn professor’s office…and I was grateful that the department had an office to loan me. (They even let me have keys!) The few faculty members I met were incredibly nice. One volunteered to come observe my teaching so she could write me recommendations. It was, as adjunct jobs go, a nice environment. The problem was that the pay was barely enough to cover gas and childcare.

Another was in Shakopee—a mere 35 miles away from North Minneapolis. That one was at a for-profit school in a strip mall. They used Microsoft Outlook for all of their administrative functions and talked earnestly about enrollment targets. I was handed a syllabus that was, quite literally, from the corporate office. My students were mostly studying to be veterinary technicians (though I also had some aspiring accountants and a young man studying game design). World music was not their thing. College readiness, by and large, was not their thing, either. A few of the students were the kind who would have thrived in any environment. Most were not. It was a challenge to get them to read the textbook and pass basic quizzes (even with terms lists that told them exactly what might appear on said quizzes). The imperative to have them do college-level work without college-level skills necessitated a constant and awkward balancing act.

My adjunct jobs were not the worst ones I’ve ever had. The hours were bad and the pay was bad, but it was nothing on the couple of weeks I temped at a canning plant. If I were ranking jobs I’ve had, adjuncting would fall somewhere near working in a grocery store deli. That was a union shop, though, and if I’d stayed there even a week or two longer, I would have qualified for full benefits. That was never an option as an adjunct.

Adjunct jobs were supposed to be steps toward full-time positions. Job listings all called for a record of college teaching experience. Graduate assistantships only partially qualified. The real stepping stones were adjunct positions…mostly because those were the only ones available. They made for pretty dubious stepping stones, though, an extremely precarious path to cross the river between graduate school and the tenure track.

As I trudged through my dissertation, I had to sell myself on the idea of being done with my dissertation. I persisted with the idea of spiting my intermittently-supportive institution. In part I was wrestling with the years I’d already sunk into my PhD, and in part I had sold myself on the idea of being done. Being done would make everything better.

Being done did not make everything better.

I graduated in December 2012. Because of some quirks of academic scheduling and a particularly odd adjunct position I’d taken, I wasn’t teaching in the spring. I took care of my daughter and sat on my hands and waited for something, anything, to come back from the applications I’d spent October and November sending all over the country. I was miserable. I had begun to understand some of the consequences of my mutually laissez-faire relationship with my advisor. My CV was far too thin to insulate me from the chilly job market. I told myself that I’d chase the one-year positions that begin to be announced in the spring. I told myself that I’d get an interview invitation any day now…

…I told myself that I was worthless, that I’d thrown away seven years of my life chasing a degree that was going to get me something between jack and squat. After a decade in graduate school, I was somehow even less employable than I would have been straight out of undergrad. I’d made my wife work full time through our kids’ preschool years, made her live 1200 miles from her family. I was convinced I was failing my family. Late one night it got so bad that I cried for an hour, great wracking sobs that I couldn’t stop. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d been alone. My partner helped me get through that night, and the days that came after.

In March 2013, I went to the Society for American Music conference, hoping it might renew my enthusiasm (and because I had a paper to present). I heard more interesting papers than I’d heard at any previous conference. The members were supportive. They understood my research and some were excited about the way it fit in with their own work. It was the best conference experience I’d ever had. A week later, I was more convinced than ever that leaving academia was the right next step for me. My peers at the conference were all gunning for the same jobs I was. None of us were optimistic about our immediate futures. The early career professionals committee meeting was filled with too-familiar laments, even though my fellow scholars were excited by and committed to their work.

It also became clear in the wake of SAM that my odds of landing any lately announced long term positions—tenure-track or postdoc—were slim to none. The jobs wiki filled up first with campus interviews than with “position filled.” Postings for the secondary market were just starting to roll out. The string of one- or two-year visiting positions gnawed at me. I could not haul my family around the country for short-term jobs with marginal pay. There was no way I was leaving my wife to take care of the kids while I worked somewhere else. The secondary market wasn’t practical. I could sit out a year and use my connections to pick up more adjunct positions in the Twin Cities…

…or I could get out. Just plain out. The market and I were not a “good fit,” and there was no point in forcing it. The decision was as much realization as conscious choice. I didn’t want it badly enough. I had colleagues and acquaintances who thought about musicology every day. Since I’d defended my dissertation, I hadn’t really done that. The moderately adversarial position that had inspired me to start my doctorate in the first place had played itself out. I hadn’t changed my mind, but I’d answered most of my questions. Pushing further into theoretical constructs of music sociology or developing further music historical topics just didn’t seem that interesting any more.

That first cut—the one about only applying to schools in places I’d be interested in living? This was about the time I noticed that all my rationalizations about place were only relevant to the prospect of a stable job. Sure, I’d move somewhere for a job that would last. There was no way I’d move for just a year or two of visiting. Being an itinerant academic laborer seems much more palatable at a childless 25 than in a family of four at 33.

The numerous cuts I accumulated over the course of my graduate work and adjunct teaching did not change my mind about whether I’d be good at the job. They didn’t even change my mind too much about the things that had driven me to graduate school in the first place. I still believe that I am a good teacher and a competent researcher (even if I’ve long since given up fantasies of driving U.S. critical theory). My dream hadn’t changed. My understanding of reality did. I was a competent graduate of a midwestern research university. There was not much to distinguish me from the other 200 or so competent PhDs applying for just about every tenure track job and post-doc. Working years for less than minimum wage without promise of continued employment semester to semester just seemed…well, stupid. That is what staying inside meant. I wasn’t a wunderkind with a fat publication record and institutional legacy to help me out. I’d be adjuncting until I won the metaphorical lottery, died, or got out.

I decided to stop paying Interfolio for lottery tickets.

I knew a year ago that my decision was the right one, but that did not make it easy. I’d already been wrestling with depression. I never quite hit the lows I did in the few months after my defense, but I spent a lot of time as an emotional cork, bobbing up and down. I threw myself into Minnesota’s spring, unwilling to commit to anything until my son was done with his school year and we could make a plan. I spent a lot of time at the gym. I pecked fitfully at the novel I’d been waiting years to write. I slacked off. I took care of my kids, cooked, tried to keep the apartment clean, read books, played computer games.

About the time I was beginning to feel that I’d slacked off enough, it was time to decide where to live. My wife and I had already decided to move out of North Minneapolis. Our son needed to be in a school where being an Academic All-Star required more than being at grade level in reading and math. We needed a place to live that had interior doors. (Two kids had long since driven us out of love with our apartment’s open floor plan.) My son received a placement in a school in South Minneapolis, a good one that was also part of the district’s citywide autism program. There was a catch, though: rental properties in South Minneapolis were tiny, expensive, or both. Even a cursory look at the numbers made it clear that buying a house was a much better option.

My wife, who’d endured over a decade and a half in the midwest, balked. Her family was mostly in Texas, 1200 miles away. Buying a house in Minneapolis meant committing to that distance for several more years. Those were roots she was reluctant to put down. I wasn’t in graduate school any more, though, so we didn’t have to stay. I loved the Twin Cities, and would have happily remained there, but we’d been following my academic obligations around for as long as we’d been married. It was my wife’s turn to choose.

We made plans to move in the latter part of summer. That, conveniently, gave me an excuse to put off thinking about things like “I need a job.” I still had no idea what I was going to do beyond vague plans of “something with writing.” That could be done just as easily in Texas as in Minnesota. I should have started trying to build a network and apply for things, but I was much more interested in playing ultimate and taking my kids to the park and otherwise enjoying a last summer without scorching heat.

The move was about what you’d expect for 1200 miles to Texas in August: hot, tedious, exhausting. We’d moved with the naive belief that job offers for my wife would come quickly (mostly because she’d had a few before we moved). Instead, we had to make do with savings and a mix of my substitute teaching and my wife’s face-painting. The small and large expenses associated with moving ate into our savings quickly. One of the cars needed work before it could pass a vehicle inspection. Car registration was expensive. Our apartment complex botched air conditioner repairs in a way that jacked up our electric bill.

I spent the days I wasn’t teaching looking for jobs. Technical writing. Journalism. Design. Copy writing. Proofreading. Post-relocation, my network was nonexistent. I applied anywhere that looked vaguely plausible. On the rare occasions I got interviews, my PhD was the first (and sometimes last) topic of discussion. I wanted to start a new career, not just a new job. Starting in a position with no potential for advancement seemed stupid. I had skills, damn it, and I intended to use them. The problem was convincing potential employers that my skills were more important than my (lack of) concrete qualifications. It was disheartening, but I didn’t know what to do beyond “apply apply apply.”

About the time we began to think seriously about how much we could get away with putting on credit cards (and for how long), my wife found a full-time job. An unexpected bit of inheritance replenished our savings. We suddenly had breathing room. With my wife working full time and limited childcare options, I went back to being a stay-at-home dad most days. I worked on my novel and my blog. Eventually, we hammered out an arrangement with my in-laws to watch the kids two days a week so I could put in more days subbing.

I was also able to go to what was probably my last academic conference. About two weeks after I had decided to take myself off the market (or not go on the secondary market), I received an invitation to speak at AMS—the American Musicological Society. It was my first invitation to present at AMS. Any AMS, even the twice-yearly regional chapter meetings to which I religiously sent paper proposals. My research and the society’s interests had apparently never been compatible. Looking over the conference programs, I could almost see why. Research into post-1945 American art music was scant. Research that also took odd methodological tacks, that engaged different elements of music-making was even rarer. I accepted the invitation and seldom thought about it until I had to write book tickets and write the paper.

AMS in November 2013 suddenly featured lots of research that I could get behind. I spent most of Saturday hearing papers on post-war American music. The presenters were not just engaging scores or composers. There was a whole panel about music and branding. The papers were excellent. Here were scholars doing the kind of work that had pulled me out of composition into musicology in the first place: asking why, and who, and how, and why we should care.

Sitting in a Saturday morning panel, even more than in the Friday afternoon session featuring my presentation, I felt like I had made it. Here was a collection of smart people, mostly young, chasing the same answers I spent years chasing. I could have collected e-mail addresses to wrangle together a group for an edited volume or two, or panel discussions for future conferences, or just to compare notes on all the Cool Stuff…

…and I didn’t. Before the conference, I had talked about not having anything to prove, but I hadn’t realized what that would look like. I enjoyed being able to approach the presenters with sincere compliments, to share short conversations about our work, and to move on. I wasn’t compelled to network or position my research vis-a-vis theirs. I could appreciate the coolness of the cool stuff and get on with my day.

If I had still been invested in the game, I don’t know as I would have enjoyed the conference much beyond those papers. Most of my conversations with colleagues were about bureaucracy or the job hunt. Neither subject had much sunshine in it. Even the young academics who were collecting awards and doing awesome research did not seem especially sanguine about staying inside. The faculty who mentored me through my doctorate were making noises about or plans for retirement.

I laughed more that weekend than I had recently. I caught up with people I hadn’t seen for months or years. I had too much coffee and not enough sleep. I sat outside panels and worked on my novel. I used my Twitter account more in 72 hours than I had in the previous 72 days. Despite all that, it felt like a farewell tour. Not a victory lap, mind, but that one last walk around campus before everybody goes home for the summer.

The winter (or what passes for it in Texas) was personally dreary without touching the darkness I’d felt the previous February. I staggered from sub job to sub job, intercutting them with working on my novel and taking care of my kids. With my wife working, our household finances finally stabilized, though it took longer to settle into a routine that allowed me to work more than two days each week. My sister-in-law has a son a few weeks older than my daughter. Some changes in her situation allowed her to spend more time watching my kids. I began to sub more.

I was still collecting rejection e-mails, though. The worst was for a coordinator job at the University of Texas that was incredibly similar to the one I’d done back in Ohio. How could I be such damaged goods that I couldn’t get a job for which I was not only qualified, but experienced? Looking at job listings got a little more like staring into the abyss every week. Human resources people and departments at the kind of companies that list jobs on-line are as subservient to formulae as university search committees. Miss a keyword or have the wrong job title and you go straight to the circular file, no matter how qualified you are. The more rejections I got, the harder it was for me to look at a listing and think “I can do that” rather than “there is no way in hell I could even get an interview.”

The rejections were depressing. Thinking about the reasons for them led me in widening gyres of self-blame and self-recrimination. I complained (mostly to myself, sometimes to my incredibly patient wife) about the bad fit with my advisor, about the idiocy of corporate HR, about my utter lack of network in Texas. On the days I got rejections, I was not much fun to be around. Eventually, I came to terms with the fact that I did not have the right set of skills for the jobs I was looking for. That does not mean I couldn’t do them. I learned many thing as I went through school. I could do most of the jobs I was applying for, official qualifications or not. The skills I lacked were the soft skills of glad-handing and networking, of aggressive self-marketing…skills grad school had done very little to develop.

I don’t like those skills. It’s a temperament thing. I don’t hide what I know, but it’s challenging for me to talk myself up to strangers. I hit a crossroads where it became clear that I needed to commit to learning new skills: either the soft skills of self-promotion or a more concrete set of skills that I could turn into certificates and resume bullet points. It took most of a year, but I had finally decided that potentially getting more education—possibly even more school—was not anathema.

In late March, I started a long-term substitute assignment that kept me in the same school with the same classes for six weeks. One of the days that first week, I came home and told my partner that I could not imagine myself ever teaching middle school full time. A few weeks later, we had a conversation about how middle schoolers are some of the most interesting kids to teach. I’ve played around with lesson plans, adjusted pacing, graded speeches and explained narrative conflict. I’ve felt like a teacher, not a substitute for one. Nothing is certain yet, but as the school year winds to a close, I spend most days expecting I’ll be back in a middle school next year.

The thousandth cut? I think it’s this essay. A few months ago I made a conscious effort to blog more on post-academic issues. It has been simultaneously therapeutic and frustrating. Being candid about the problems I’ve run into since deciding to leave is refreshing. Posting about #postac, though, often seems like empty kvetching. Sometimes it is. More often, it’s situational observation—I write more about what I have felt than what I’m feeling, describing moments rather than my state of being. It wears me down. I don’t have the same righteous fury that drives, say, Rebecca Schuman. I don’t have any desire to turn myself into a consultant for other academic leavers. I enjoy the comments about solidarity in suffering, and appreciate some of the lessons I have picked up from other blogs about how to think about my “condition.” I’m just not keen on trying to generalize my experience.

Writing about being a postac has made me feel less like one. It’s been a year since I decided not to test the secondary market. A rough year, yes, but I amplified that by moving across the country. Now, I feel like I live here, physically and metaphysically. My practical struggles haven’t changed all that much. I’ve been a substitute teacher for almost seven months. I am not certain what I’m doing this summer, never mind next year. I’m still trying to get health insurance for my kids. The difference—and this is key—is that I’m no longer approaching these problems with my past hanging over me. I’ve made a transition from “failed academic” to “guy with a PhD starting a new career.”

The postac is dead. Long live the postac.

Left and Leaving - A Guest Post

 

The following is a guest post from one of our anonymous readers. If you would like to submit your own story about leaving and finding nonacademic work, please contact us!

I guess I’m a post-ac success story. I’m a PhD (English, 2011) who is gainfully employed in a full-time, salaried position. By that measure, I’m one of the lucky ones. I never had to apply for retail work, nor did I ever need to seriously consider it. I didn’t suffer through a prolonged period of unemployment. I have benefits, a home, and a little bit of money in the bank. I’ve been gainfully employed for a year and a half now. I’m thankful for that—I really, really am.

But I’ve also been pretty miserable at times since. All those quit-lit stories that begin with the overwhelmed, jaded, or depressed graduate student who finds solace and fulfilment beyond the ivory tower? That’s not me. I loved grad school. I made great friends there. We had great conversations about all kinds of things. I liked teaching. Marking was a drag sometimes, but I was getting paid (if not as much as I’d like) to talk about stuff I cared deeply about.^[1] I loved research. Writing my dissertation was a struggle, of course. Some days it was absolutely brutal. But I really, really liked what I was working on and am proud of the result. I loved going to conferences and sharing my new ideas with fellow scholars who were interested in what I thought about Moby-Dick, and I was interested in hearing about their new work. I was in my element. Now that it’s behind me, I miss it terribly. Call it nostalgia or call it Stockholm Syndrome if you like, but I was sorry to go.

The decision to leave was very difficult for me. While I liked academic life, I was well aware of the realities of the job market. My wife and I were picky (by academic standards) about where wanted to live. We wanted to stay in Canada, and we actually wanted to be within a hundred miles or so of at least one of our families. That narrowed things down to a small number of schools. Staying on as a part-time faculty member wasn’t a viable long-term option, either. We wanted to start a family and own a home at some point, and it was important to me to have some stability in our lives before we did. So I started looking for non-academic work.^[2]

I spent a lot of time that summer trying to figure out my next steps. I didn’t even know what other jobs were out there, much less what else I might want to do. I had a five-year-old’s mind when it came to career options: there was fireman, policeman, teacher, lawyer, doctor, carpenter, and so on. The career center at my university was well-meaning but ultimately not terribly helpful. Their assessment tool suggested I become, in order 1) History Professor; 2) Desktop Publisher; and 3) Writer. Great.

I ended up taking the approach of targeting an employer in town that I knew had hired PhDs in the past and, to make a long story short, it worked. They had an opening, I applied, and before I knew it, I had a job as a research analyst.

At first, I liked my job a lot. The first few months were great. My co-workers were smart, interesting people. I wasn’t all that interested in the material I was researching, but I liked that I was still doing research and writing (of a sort). This was one of those companies that prides itself on being a “fun” place to work; around Christmas time, there were plenty of activities like decorating the office, an afternoon of board games, and of course a ridiculous company party. I relished my regular paycheque, and re-discovered the joy of a weekend with nothing in particular to do. It wasn’t bad at all.

But the honeymoon didn’t last. The private sector moves fast, and the job that had been described to me when I was hired changed quickly. I wasn’t keen on traveling, and had been told when I was hired that my position would require little of it. But, before long we were expected to travel for a couple of days every few weeks. The company was growing, and management decided that they needed to standardize a bunch of internal processes. “Research” became paperwork, filling in blanks in forms and checking boxes. I felt more like an assembly line worker than a knowledge worker. During this time I truly learned the meaning of the word “micromanagement.”

I might have been able to endure that if I felt I was being paid enough. When I was hired, I accepted a salary a bit lower than I thought I was worth because I had been told that with my background and credentials I’d be able to move up the ladder very quickly. I understood that as someone without much non-academic work experience, they might want me to prove myself before investing in me further. I thus looked forward to my first performance review, knowing that I had more than met all the published requirements for a promotion. But, when we finally sat down for my appraisal, I was told that while I had more than exceeded their expectations for somebody who’d been with the company as long as I had (eleven months at that point) it was policy not to promote anyone before they had been on board for a year. Missed it by that much. Moreover, it was also policy that promotions only occur at the annual performance review. I’d have to wait another year before I saw any movement. I was given a pat on the head and the same raise they give everyone who doesn’t get promoted, less than a cost-of-living increase.

I only grew more frustrated after that. The level of micromanagement increased. The company took away some of our perks without giving us any notice. We were told to expect more traveling, in spite of being told earlier on that it was going to be a limited thing. By this point I had a baby at home, and I didn’t relish the thought of being away from him or my wife. I still liked my co-workers, but beyond that, I found it difficult to muster even a modicum of interest in my work. Every day I counted down the hours till quitting time; every week I counted down the days till the weekend; every weekend I counted down (with dread) the hours before Monday morning.

I started to despair that the problem was me. When I initially started looking for work, I had drank deeply from the #post-ac/#alt-ac cup and stories of lapsed or former academics who not only quickly proved their mettle in the private sector but found jobs that were deeply fulfilling. On paper, my job still looked pretty good. Again: good salary, good benefits, good co-workers. Why couldn’t I enjoy it?

But not all post-ac jobs are alike, nor are all post-ac employees. When I left, I thought I had a good idea of what I wanted out of a job: something that was time-boxed and would leave me my evenings and weekends free to pursue what I wanted. However, my day-to-day was so emotionally and psychologically exhausting that I had little energy to muster to continue, for instance, writing about those things I cared about. A personal blog that had been a pleasurable diversion for me in my last year on the adjunct circuit went to seed, and I found myself feeling bitter jealousy rather than happiness when my academic friends found success. I didn’t like it. I looked for other jobs, but found myself wrestling the same demons I fought when I first left academia: what do I really want to be when i “grow up”? What do I actually enjoy doing, anyway?

Maybe my standards were too high. Maybe it was too much to expect to feel comfortable at the place at which I was going to spend eight hours a day. I still don’t know. But I suppose I’ll find out. I’m pleased to report that I was able to find a new job, one that sounds like it will be a much better fit for me. It’s in a field that is something I care deeply about, and it will let me write actual paragraphs. My new employer told me that they strongly felt that my PhD is a great asset for the role they have planned for me. I’m excited to see where this goes.

At the same time, though, I can’t help but be ambivalent. A former professor of mine, who I’m now happy to count as a friend, asked if she could put my story in the department newsletter. The point is to celebrate the accomplishments of the program’s graduates, whether they found it in academia or without. I think that’s great, but I’m uncomfortable being held up as an example in case my story gets spun into one of those “Look at all the things you can do with PhD in English” marketing spiels that, at some point, I started to find unconscionable. I haven’t replied to her request yet. I’m still thinking about it.

But I do hope my story has some value to those who are embarking on a similar journey. If I could offer any advice, the first thing I’d say is that it’s not you. It’s probably not your fault you can’t find a job in academia. It probably won’t be your fault if you can’t find one without, at least not immediately. It’s really, really hard. The second point I want to emphasize is this: there are a lot of good, well-meaning #post-ac and #alt-ac advocates out there. There are also a good many who mistakenly think that because they found a job where they daily use the skills they built during their advanced degrees that everyone can and will. I’ve spoken to a few who are convinced that regardless of what kind of a job you get, you can “make it your own” and bring those skills to bear. This person obviously didn’t work where I did. If you end up in a situation where you realize the value of your degree on a regular basis, bully for you. But not all of us will be so lucky, and I think many who are that lucky don’t realize just how many factors had to come together to make it happen. And finally, there’s a lot to be said for mindset. I think a good part of my problem was that I still was—still am—an academic in my own mind. I don’t know what I can do to break that mindset yet. If you figure it out, let me know.

---

^[1] I am in no way suggesting that the terrible conditions endured by part-time faculty are in any way “worth it” because they sometimes to get to teach topics they care about. If it were, I would have never left.

^[2] Since leaving academia, there has not been a single permanent, full-time job posted in this country in my field. I guess it was the right choice.

 

What is the "Right" Postacademic Job?

Crossposted from JC's blog.

As you may have just read (and if not, go read it now!), my fellow post-academic and co-editor Kathleen has landed herself a new fulltime job working for an online university! She will be working with and mentoring university students, teaching a few online classes, and will be staying in the geographic location that she is currently living in without having to relocate. Oh, and it will also pay her a generous full-time salary with benefits. Yayyyyy Kathleen!!

(Because I feel like I should say this: I know what school she will be working for, and it's not one of the "diploma mill" online schools that are often criticized. Though for reasons that I will outline below, I wouldn't care if it was ... because I firmly believe that any nonacademic job is a valid choice for people who leave academia.)

So, the other night when Kathleen emailed Lauren and me to tell us about her new job, she was a little worried that she would be considered a "postacademic impostor" once she announced her new job: that she would be criticized for not taking the "right" kind of postacademic job (because online universities have come under fire lately from folks in academia and postacademia), or that taking a job that involved teaching and mentoring was not far enough outside of traditional academia to truly qualify as a postacademic job.

As I told Kathleen last week, I don't agree with that assessment at all. And thinking about that conversation has actually motivated me to write my first blog post in a long, long time.

I've been out of academia for nearly three years now, and the postacademic blogosphere and world have changed considerably during that time. Most of that shift has been wonderful - we are getting national press coverage and having public conversations about leaving academia, and the decision to leave is losing a lot of its stigma and the people who do it are being brought out of the shadows.

But along with the growing visibility of the postacademic blogosphere, I've also noticed a not-so-great shift in the types of conversations we're having.

The postacademic blogosphere used to be primarily about how individual bloggers were leaving academia without a net or a guide, and about their success (or lack thereof) at finding some job - any job - that would help them fully break free from academia's totalitarian culture and strict guidelines for what was acceptable. We had popular postacademic bloggers who worked as temps, as secretaries, as office managers, and even those who were unemployed for a while as they tried to find a new job. But we supported each other, and we reassured each other, and we talked about how even our not-so-glamorous jobs were terrific in comparison to adjuncting! And that our stable jobs (no matter what they were!) were better than begging for graduate funding every year while we took multiple futile stabs at the academic job market. At that time, leaving was the end goal for postacademics. It didn't matter what you did next, as long as you broke free of academia.

In contrast, today's postac blogsophere has been more focused on scathing critiques of higher education and academia, and on profiles of successful people who have left academia and are well-established in new careers. I think that these types of pieces are certainly useful for new postacademics to read (scathing critiques abound in my archives, of course!), but this new focus has left a noticeable hole in the blogosphere. The highly personal, individual stories about the struggles and ups and downs of individual people as they are initially leaving academia and trying to find some stable footing elsewhere are all but missing in today's postacademic world. (Though such stories abound in our e-book, which can be bought here or here!)

That's understandable, to a point - as postacademia becomes more public, the types of conversations that we have will change. But to tie this back to my conversation with Kathleen--in which she worried that her new job meant that she was "doing postacademia wrong"--I worry that the absence of stories about the struggles and hard decisions that many postacs go through as they leave may inadvertently make future academic leavers feel anxious or apprehensive. If new postacs don't know what kind of career they want after they leave, is that okay? Because most of what they will read in today's blogosphere is about people leaving and landing awesome, elite, PhD-level jobs.

Similarly, if they don't land a perfect, academically-approved postac job right away, are they doing postacademia right? If they wind up temping for a little while as they figure out what comes next, should they feel like failures? If they get a good job with a generous salary and benefits in an industry that other postacademics are criticizing publicly, should they stay quiet because it's not a "good" job??

I worry that if postacademia continues to highlight only the biggest postac successes, they will be inadvertently ignoring people whose paths out of academia aren't quite as blessed. And in turn, I worry that we may be doing a disservice to the people who will be looking to the postac blogosphere for advice in the future, especially if they don't know exactly what they want to do next. (You know...people like Kathleen and me, 2-3 years ago.)

So in today's shifting postacademic blogsophere, I want to be clear about something that I believe with every fiber of my being (and that I do believe most postacademics believe, for the record): short of contract killing or drug trafficking, there are no "good" or "bad" postacademic jobs. There is no "right" or "wrong" way to do postacademia. 

In order to do postacademia "right" (according to me), you need to find a job that fulfills two goals: (1) one that pays you enough money so that you can live a stable life, and (2) one in which your employer treats you better than how folks are treated in the worst aspects of academia.

Those are the goals you should be focused on. You shouldn't be wasting your time thinking about whether you're getting the "right" job (according to your former academic colleagues or according to what you read in an interview with a successful postac that one time). Just find a job that breaks you from traditional academia and that lets you live a stable adult life.

Goal #1 will vary based on your individual circumstances. Maybe you have a big savings account already or a wealthy partner, so you can afford to work sporadic, one-off jobs after you leave. Or maybe you have a well-paying academic job that you don't despise, so you decide to hang out in grad school or in your faculty job until you land the perfect nonacademic career you're dreaming of.

Great!! Good postacademic-ing! Keep on looking for that job you really want!

But some people can't hold out for that dream job. Maybe they can only find academic work as an adjunct or on a one-year VAP post across the country, and they need more money and stability than that. Maybe they have kids, or a mortgage, or student loans...whatever it is, their situation is not sustainable in academia. They need to leave now, and can't afford to keep adjuncting (or freelancing part-time or interning for no pay) until their perfect job appears.

So for those people - and I want to be very, very clear about this - taking any job that offers financial stability is a wonderful postacademic move.

Even if you are working for the most soul-sucking, nasty, for-profit corporation in the world, you are doing postacademia right. Because you have broken from academia and you are making ends meet, and you have therefore given yourself the freedom to pay your bills and think about what comes next for you, career- and life-wise. Maybe you will land a "better" career at the perfect nonprofit think tank you've always dreamed of next. If so, great! But the point is - if you don't, that's great too! Because you are a successful postacademic at the very moment that you break free from academia.

You have removed desperation from the equation. You're no longer frantically wondering if the academic job market is going to come through for you, or what you're going to do if it doesn't. You're no longer eyeing the impending cancellation date for your graduate or VAP health insurance and wondering how the hell you are going to pay for a new plan when you may have no salary if another institution doesn't pick you up. And you're no longer researching how long it will take you to get food stamps for your kids if you find out in June that your adjunct contract won't be renewed for the following year. You are outside of the traditional academic structure and now you can look forward and figure out what comes next.

And this brings me around to goal #2 - how do you know whether your new postac job is "good enough" for postacademia?

In my opinion...if your new job treats you well (however you define that) and your job title is not "Professor," you are a postacademic success story. No matter where you work.

Any job that gives you whatever benefits you, personally, need (on top of a solid salary) is better than the worst aspects of academia, in which you're expected to work for any amount of pay and any crappy benefits that an academic institution is willing to charitably bestow upon you.

Any job that does not demand that you have to suck it up and move to a geographic location in which you don't want to live (and that you are told to be grateful for, because there are 1000 people who would love to be in your shoes!!) is better than the worst aspects of academia.

Any job for which being fired or laid off would qualify you for unemployment benefits is better than the worst aspects of academia.

Any industry that hires year-round, rather than during the same four-month schedule every year (and too bad for you if you need a job in May!), is better than the worst aspects of academia. Bonus points if your interview for said job took place in an office, rather than on a hotel bed.

Any job where you're treated like an employee rather than an indentured servant who should be grateful for the opportunity is better than the worst aspects of academia. I don't care what industry you're working in or what your job title is ... if academia is forcing you to live in poverty or to be utterly miserable, any other job is an upgrade from that.

So my job at a consulting firm (with fulltime salary and benefits in the town that I want to live in, on a contract that has no foreseeable end) qualifies as a postacademic job, and a success. Kathleen's new job as a mentor/instructor at an online university (with fulltime salary and benefits in the town that she wants to live in with a contact that has no foreseeable end) qualifies as a successful postacademic job. My friend who works at a research center at our old university (with the same benefits as above) is a successful postacademic. The secretarial job that the old blogger Recent Ph.D. got after she left academia (fulltime salary, benefits, city she liked, indefinite contract) made her a successful postacademic.

Every one of those people is a successful postacademic because they have found something better than they could get in academia. The point is not what your job title is or what your qualifications are, but that you are refusing to play by academia's batshit rules anymore. You are declaring yourself as a qualified and educated adult who deserves some stability and a living wage. And once you have that, you are a successful postacademic.

So if you find that stability and a living wage in a teaching/mentoring position without the title of "professor," then that's great! Good postacademic-ing! If you find that in a secretarial job, then that's great! If you find it in a freelance or entrepreneurial career, then that's great! High-five!

Because no one - NO ONE - who leaves academia should feel bad about the type of job that they get. (Again, unless they are becoming a contract killer. If you are doing that, you should feel bad.)

The point of postacademia isn't getting a certain type of socially-approved job. It's about breaking free of academia's bullshit rules and of getting yourself a sustainable adult life.

So no matter what kind of postacademic job you get, be proud of yourself. I sure am.

Life Coaching: Working with One, Working As One

Posting on behalf of Kathleen "Currer Bell" Miller.

We at How to Leave Academia have observed the growing popularity of the life coach, both as a resource for folks transitioning out of academia, as well as a new career path for those billing themselves to post-and alt-ac individuals. Since a few of our readers were uncertain as to what a life coach does, how to locate a coach that’s a good fit for you, and what to expect from life coaching, Kathleen “Currer Bell”  has designed this handy-dandy guide to life coaching full of general information with examples from her own practice and knowledge. She is nearing completion of an intensive training seminar with Martha Beck (author and monthly columnist for O: The Oprah Magazine) and is currently working toward her life coaching certification. She is happy to announce that as part of her certification process, she is taking on clients for a very low fee.

What is life coaching?

In a very general sense, a Life Coach helps people clarify and articulate what they want most from life and how best to achieve it. More specifically, coaching helps people get past their obstacles in order to create the results they want in life, work, relationships and spiritual growth. Coaching is like having a “personal trainer for your soul.” Life coaches don’t tell people what they should do; rather they ask powerful questions in an effort to help the client find the answers that always lie within. A good life coach will not tell you what to do. Coaching is particularly helpful if you feel out of balance, i.e.; working too much, playing too little (or the opposite); if you feel something is missing but can’t put your finger on it; if you want to pursue a new career or change jobs; or perhaps you simply want more joy in your life. Coaching gives you someone who holds the space as you grieve and grow, and promotes accountability for your own transformation. Change can be difficult and it’s useful to have someone navigate the journey with you.

 

You can see why life coaching would make sense for people in the middle of the huge transition out of academia, especially if you have no clue where you are going or what to do next. But people in many life situations might want to consult a coach: people going through a divorce, folks who are navigating empty nest or retirement transitions, or people who have just lost a job, are changing jobs, or who are facing a medical diagnosis that means lifestyle changes are imminent, etc.

 

Coaching is not a substitute for therapy

Let me clarify that coaching is no substitute for therapy. It is not for people with serious emotional problems. Coaching is about creating results, not dealing with crises. It focuses on the future and, as a result, can assist to change attitudes resulting from past experience. Life coaching might be a great option if you have processed your emotions and are ready to make a next step.

 

How long does coaching last?

Coaching is an individual process and so clients may sign up for sessions ranging from 1 to infinity. However a good coach ultimately wants you to be able to coach yourself. They will teach you the tools to do the work of coaching on your own; a good coach doesn’t want to set up a codependent relationship. Clients may benefit most from 3-6 months worth of coaching, or even up to a year in some cases. After all, making long-term changes in thought patterns and behavior isn’t work one does overnight! But there should be an end date to a good coaching relationship. You can discuss finances up front, and most coaches can come up with a flexible range of services to maximize your value while working within your personal budget. Newer coaches in the process of certification (see below) often offer services at a discount or even for free as they establish their credentials.

 

How do I pick a coach?

Most life coaches will offer a free 20-30 minute information session. During that time, you can ask questions related to the coach’s training and experience, how sessions typically progress, reimbursement, etc. Your potential coach may offer a brief sample of his/her coaching technique in order to help you decide. Remember, this is a time for your coach to interview you, but it’s also a time for you to interview and determine the fit of your coach.

 

While picking a life coach, you may want to consider the rapport you have over the phone or Skype. Does the coach’s voice resonate with you--its pitch, tenor, pacing? Do you enjoy your coach’s energy? Does your coach laugh and joke around? Is s/he more serious? Do you get the sense that he/she is listening and responding to your specific situation and desires? Personal communication preferences will be key here, so pick someone who complements your own energy and communication style. Go with your gut.

You should also look at consider the program your life coach completed. Coaching is an unlicensed industry, so people can declare themselves life coaches without training or certification. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is taking steps to make life coaching a more regulated industry and if working with a coach from a coaching organization is important to you, you may want to search the site for someone who is ICF certified.

Life coach training programs are very diverse, and some are pyramid schemes designed to get money from trainees, so investigate the program with which your coach is affiliated. Reputable programs like Mentor Coach and the Martha Beck Coach Training Institute are respected programs with articulated philosophies for their approach to life coaching. Some programs adopt a positive psychology approach, while others are devoted to goal setting; others are more holistic in their approach. You can imagine that the philosophy under which a life coach is trained says a lot both about their own values as a coach, and the advice and style they will offer you.

A program like the Martha Beck Coach Training Institute draws from Eastern philosophy, Western medicine, mind-body coaching, cognitive behavioral therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I was drawn to Martha Beck’s holistic approach, as it used the tools of many different philosophies to push back against painful and limiting beliefs we have about ourselves and our stories. Plus, Martha Beck is a former academic and her scholarly, but humanistic approach, appealed to me. Coaches trained by Martha Beck are also encouraged that their most powerful coaching comes from their own “to-hell-and-back” story. Life experiences then become a powerful indicator of choosing a “right fit” coach - and this might be a good strategy for you to use as you look for your own coach.

If you’re struggling as a new divorcee, you might want to consider looking for coaches who specialize in relationships, or for those who have been through experiences like divorce or single parenthood themselves. Of course, it is definitely possible that a coach who has not been through a particular life event can offer excellent coaching on that topic, but you may find that someone who has navigated the waters you are venturing into may be particularly resonant in their advice for your situation. So along those lines, if you’re a post-ac leaving academia, you may benefit from a coach like Julie Clarenbach who has made the transition, conducted a successful post-ac job search, and worked outside the academy.

How to Contact Me

If anyone is interested in my services or has additional questions about coaching, they can contact me at kathleen.miller127@gmail.com.  I look forward to speaking with you!

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:

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!

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.

Before You Leave ... Take Advantage of Your University Benefits

If you know that you're planning to leave your grad program or faculty job in the near future, one thing that I'd recommend you do is to think about any good benefits that you get through your position at the university ... and go take advantage of them for the last time (or for the first time!).

Unlike people in the nonacademic world who put in their two weeks' notice at a job (or worse: are fired or laid off without notice), you will most likely have a few months or more where you will know you're leaving but where you haven't officially "left"  yet. Therefore, you will still be able to take advantage of any good benefits or perks you get through your academic position.

And I think that - now that you know you're leaving and you aren't working on academic stuff 24/7 anymore - you should take full advantage of as many of the perks of university life that you possibly can.

Now, of course, we can't tell you exactly what "things" you should take advantage of. Every university and department is different, and the perks of being a tenured faculty member as opposed to a grad student or an adjunct are vastly different. And you obviously shouldn't do anything unethical or that might get you into trouble. Don't download the entire archives of The American Journal of Basketweaving to post on the internet, and don't ask your department to fund your trip to a conference in six months if you haven't told them you're leaving in three.

But while you're moving through the odd in-between period where you know you're going to be leaving but you aren't gone yet, you should take stock of the various things you have access to as part of the university, and see if there are any that you should take advantage of while you still can.

• Maybe you've met the deductible on your health insurance. It might not be a bad idea to squeeze in a couple of doctor visits or a few extra prescription refills before you switch to a brand new plan with a new deductible (or, gulp -- no insurance at all. See our other articles on covering these necessities here.).


• Maybe your university offers discounted computer software or upgrades to faculty and students (that can be taken with you when you leave). If so, maybe it's time to take a quick look at what's available to you.


• Many schools subscribe to e-learning services like Lynda or Skillsoft, which are a great way to learn technical skills (website design, Excel, Photoshop, javascript, social media marketing, etc). A subscription to Lynda costs an individual $250 but might be free to you as a student -- spend your time learning skills you might actually use at a job.


• If you get free dental cleanings or psychotherapy visits through the university, you might want to get one more before you go. If you've been meaning to download that document that has your great-grandfather's signature on it from Ancestry.com through your university's subscription, now's your chance.


• Has your spouse been wanting to take a class at your university using your tuition discount? Do you keep forgetting to print out a copy of your last publication, just so you have it? Have you been wanting to check out that free kickboxing class at the university gym? Have you always meant to use your student/faculty discount to go to the opera or theater or sporting event or whatever other university events you've always been interested in? Now's the time for season tickets to women's basketball! Have some fun -- really!


• Don't forget about your institution's Career Services office. They can help you practice interviews, polish your resume, and likely have some inventories and career search resources available for free or at a discount. Check those out now!

Well, now you know you're leaving ... you're not feverishly working toward the next step in your academic career anymore. So now's the time to do that stuff.

Think about the things you have access to, the benefits that are going to be worse at your next job, or the things you've always meant to take advantage of but never did ... and while you're waiting to move onto your next step, do them. Save yourself a little money and/or have a little fun. You deserve it.

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.

John Patrick Robichaud via Compfight

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.