There’s been a theme in my conversations with clients lately. They’re at a crossroads in their life and career. Something has shifted for them. They’re trying to figure out what to do next.
Everyone around them is making suggestions for that next, suggestions that seem to make a lot of sense. These suggestions are direct outgrowths of degrees my clients already have, or interests they’ve already expressed. These loved ones are even offering to put money behind their suggestions.
My clients want to like these suggestions. They think they should like these suggestions. But really, the idea of carrying out these suggestions make them want to lie down on the floor with the dust bunnies and never get up.
Oh, stability. How we long for the idea of you.
All of these practical suggestions have certain things in common.
- They’re full-time jobs with reasonable benefits packages.
- They’re in existing career fields that have a certain level of professionalism or prestige. They’re “good” careers, in other words.
- They’re coming from a place of fear.
If my clients were jumping up and down at the very idea of getting to do this work that’s being suggested to them, I would be jumping up and down with them. Yay! Work you want to do! Paycheck! Yee-haw!
But my clients are not jumping up and down. They come to me because they’re afraid that the fact that they aren’t jumping up and down means that they’re ungrateful or entitled or lazy or impractical, and they want to talk it out with someone who has no stake in the outcome of their choices. (I don’t claim to be objective. I’m firmly on the side of my clients.)
As we talk, it becomes clear that there is something they’re passionate about, something they dream about doing, but it doesn’t fit a neat career path, and they don’t know how to turn it into a job, and they certainly don’t know how to explain it to the people who love them, who only want what’s best for them, dammit.
And so they’re stuck. They think they should want the practical option, but they almost never do.
Yes, paying the rent is important
It’s not that practical things don’t matter.
I’ve not talked to one client who wasn’t interested in paying the rent or buying groceries, and a fair number of clients have been more than happy to get a part-time or full-time “just for now” job to ease the pressure of financial necessity while they figure out what they really want to do and how to make it happen.
But let’s be honest here about work and how it fits into our life. We have this story that we work to pay the bills, and that that’s good enough.
If the work is reasonably challenging (i.e., not boring), pays well, with good coworkers, maybe that is good enough. It’s not boring, it’s not conflictual, it’s not undervaluing you, and it gives you the freedom to pursue the things you really care about in your free time. (Assuming there is any. A 40 hour a week job takes up about 35% of our waking weekly hours, and that doesn’t account for the commute, self-care like eating and showering, or life maintenance like laundry.)
But most of us got into academia precisely because that kind of job wasn’t something we wanted. We didn’t want good enough. We wanted vocation. We wanted engagement. We wanted to follow our own intellectual curiosity.
And that means that to get out of academia, a good enough job (which is different from the “for now” job) may not cut it. We may need that same sense of vocation, engagement, and curiosity in a different venue.
It just doesn’t look practical
Many of the clients in this predicament have a cluster of things they want to do.
Maybe they love teaching and want to keep 2 courses a semester as an adjunct. Maybe they just had twins and recognized that there’s nothing out there to help new moms of twins figure out how to, for example, sleep train two kids at the same time. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be a writer and they thought academia would scratch that itch and it so didn’t. Maybe they love making and selling things on Etsy. Maybe they’re passionate about ethics in adoption and want to help train prospective parents.
They get stuck because they can’t figure out how to make any one of them into a full-time, traditional job. And they get frustrated because they don’t necessarily want to choose only one.
The reality is that you don’t have to.
The goal is not a traditional full-time job, necessarily. The goal is doing meaningful work that helps you meet your family’s financial needs and goals. A traditional full-time job is one way to meet that goal. But there are others.
Let me say that again. The goal is doing meaningful work that helps you meet your family’s financial needs and goals.
Once you shift away from assuming a traditional job to recognizing that a traditional job is only one way to meet the real goal, you open yourself up to other possibilities.
Maybe it’s working two or three part-time, flexible, at-home gigs. Maybe it’s finding a traditional job that meets your needs. Maybe it’s moving back and forth between traditional jobs and non-traditional options.
Yes, part-time work can be low-paid and casual, the way adjuncting often is in academia. But it can also be incredibly lucractive and flexible, depending on your skills, your clients, and your goals.
Like everything else, work varies.
And so do you. You are a unique expression of life. What might work for someone else doesn’t have to work for you. You only have to figure out what you care about and where that might take you.
I say “only” like it’s easy, but it isn’t easy. If you want support figuring out what you bring to the table, check out Choosing Your Career Consciously, a course designed to help you figure out what else you could do. A new course starts in March.
Before I was able to take the actual steps that would let me leave academia, I spent a lot of time daydreaming. You know, of that perfect job I didn’t hate, of being able to ride off into the sunset of a different life.
What I really wanted was to not have to decide to leave academia. I wanted it to just happen, so that I didn’t have to take responsibility for making this hard decision, for explaining it to skeptical friends, for doing the work of figuring out how to translate my academic work to a non-academic audience, for moving us away from a town we loved that had no jobs to a city we didn’t love that had opportunities for us.
I wanted to skip all the parts I didn’t know how to do and move right into the better part. That included the emotional stuff — I wanted to skip right over the grief of leaving, the disorientation of reimagining myself, the having to meet new people.
And from this vantage point, years later, I have so much compassion for the me who was struggling through this. Of course I wanted to skip the hard parts. Of course I wanted to just fast-forward to the next bit. Why wouldn’t I?
But at the time, I alternated between wanting the magic wand and beating myself up for not just getting a grip and doing things already. As you can imagine, castigating myself didn’t actually make me any more likely to do anything.
What finally did get me moving was hitting my own personal breaking point, that moment when it felt easier to do anything, anything at all rather than stay where I was.
I know some of you are in this space now, the dreaming of other possibilities while being stuck with the actual practical steps. If you can avoid beating yourself up for this and instead accept that this is part of the process, even a necessary part of the process, it’ll be easier on you. You’ll hit the point when it’s easier to make change than to stay where you are, and when you do, you’ll make change.
I can’t promise it’ll be easy. But when that day hits, you’ll be shocked at how fast you can change your life.
I have a friend who is heading a tiny little tech start-up. He and some friends have been dreaming and coding and testing and talking it up, all in the spare hours around dayjobs and with whatever money they can scrounge from their budgets and their credit cards.
A few weeks ago, he was offered some venture capital funding.
It’s what every start-up wants, right? You might think so, but my friend is really conflicted about it for all kinds of reasons.
Basically, it looks good on paper, but it doesn’t feel like the right choice.
Paper lies
We’ve all had the experience of having something or someone look perfect on paper and not work out in reality. Or look like a disaster on paper and be absolutely fabulous in reality.
The guy who has all the right degrees and interests, but is really annoying in person. The job that looks really odd, but is really fun when you’re actually doing it.
When we say something looks good on paper, what we’re really pointing to is that is makes sense within the cultural narratives that apply. Good benefits, good alignment with our degree, a good job, a good family.
A lot of our lives get left out of the cultural narrative. Our quirky personalities. Our specific histories. Our actual likes.
Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, has as one of her Secrets of Adulthood this gem: “You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you LIKE to do.”
Trying to force ourselves to like what we don’t like – however much it makes “sense” in some way – is a sure-fire way to making ourselves quietly miserable.
Academia loves paper
There are a lot of things that “make sense” in academia that run counter to many people’s actual experience.
The flexibility is to die for – unless you want to work reasonable hours and have things in your life other than work.
Professoring is the best job in the world – unless it doesn’t work for your particular personality and skills and needs.
Etc. I’m sure you can think of lots of others.
The problem is not you
The problem is a cultural narrative that insists that certain things are universally good – for everyone, or at least all good people.
But you know what? People vary. Even within communities like academia, which bring people together around some shared values or goals, people vary.
You are allowed to vary. You are allowed to be your own particular, fabulous self.
And you don’t need to apologize for that.
Academia tends to spin our emotional compasses until we don’t know which way is north. If you’re feeling lost, I offer one-on-one coaching to help you figure it all out.
I’ve had several conversations lately with clients who are feeling caught between their old plans and their current selves.
Once upon a time, they knew how their lives would go. They would go to graduate school. They would get a job directly related to their degree. Everything else would fall in place around that.
Except somewhere along the line, something changed. Maybe they got married. Maybe they had a kid. Maybe they got interested in something else.
And now they’re anxious that not following through on the original plan means something bad about them, that they’re lazy or weak or insert-your-favorite-self-insult-here.
All it means is that your plans changed
There’s a famous adage in both military and entrepreneurial circles that goes something like this:
Plans are useless, but planning is priceless.
It reflects the reality that baby, this world is complicated and chaotic and it keeps right on moving, so there’s no possible way that any plan could take into account all the different variables so completely that everything will turn out as you planned. Life happens.
And yet, it’s still helpful to plan, because planning asks us to articulate our goals and think about how to solve that problem, and that gets us further along the path than picking daisies. (Not that I’m against picking daisies!)
All of which is to say, of course your plans have changed
Many of us started graduate school in our early twenties. I would really hope that things in our early or mid-thirties are different than we expected back when we made our master plans back in our early twenties.
First of all, that’s another ten-odd years of life informing us. Complicated, messy, rich, beautiful, life. We know things now we didn’t then. We understand what’s important to us in a way we might not have then. We’ve probably had a few more hard knocks and challenges to help us put things into perspective.
Second of all, the world hasn’t stopped. Stuff has changed around us, and maybe the world doesn’t offer the same opportunities we thought it would. Jobs exist now that didn’t then. (Whole industries exist now that didn’t exist when I started grad school. The internet didn’t exist for everyday people when I started grad school.)
In other words, I’d actually be a little bit worried if nothing in your plans had changed since you started grad school.
We are not computers
There’s a cultural narrative that suggests that we should follow through completely on everything we start, that quitting is, well, quitting. But that’s so very computer-metaphor-driven.
We aren’t computers. We’re organic systems. And organic systems flow and adapt. We respond.
In other words, your plans changing based on your life progressing? That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.
So, if you can, try not to beat yourself up for the reality that plans change. Plans always change, because we live complicated, messy, long lives. And isn’t it beautiful?
Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.
Hello lovely Escape Artists! I hope you had a lovely winter holiday season, complete with a renewing and rejuvenating turning of the Gregorian calendar.
I took a bit of time away to rejuvenate myself and think about what I wanted to bring to you all this year. In addition to the one-on-one coaching and resume writing (which I suspect will always be a staple of what I do), I’m working on an ebook about tools to help you decide if you should stay in academia or leave and home-study versions of the two classes I teach, Choosing Your Career Consciously and Becoming Post-Academic. (A new round of the latter starts next week!)
My goal this year is to provide practical, useful tools for every stage of the post-academic journey. Thanks for having me along on yours.
Deserve. It’s such a little word for such a big, tangled set of things.
I want to spend a little time untangling it today, because it’s underneath so much of our pain and our grief.
Two, two kinds of deserve (ah ah ah)
Deserve tends to show up in two different ways.
The first has a tinge of self-righteousness to it. “Don’t I deserve a good job after all the hard work I did?” Well yes, you do deserve a good job. But so does everyone else.
The second has a tinge of despair to it. “I don’t deserve a good job / nice colleagues / decent pay because I haven’t worked hard enough / someone else is better / I’m not good at X.” Oh sweetie. You deserve all kinds of good things.
Both versions of deserve are predicated on two assumptions:
1) That we’re somehow special, different, set apart. (Those other people, they didn’t work as hard as I did, or they aren’t as smart as I am, or they have special privileges I don’t get to have, or they’re all competent and I’m the lone idiot.)
2) That our inherent worth has anything at all to do with things like jobs, degrees, or self-improvement.
It’s the combination of these two assumptions that leads so many of us to believe that if we didn’t get the job, it’s because we suck as a human being, or to believe that we have no options, or to believe that nothing we’ll do will change our situation.
And both of those assumptions are based in fear. Fear of being different. Fear of being not good enough. Fear of failure.
You deserve everything
You are inherently worthy just as you are right now. And I mean right now, with bedhead and unfinished to-do lists and applications that have gotten no responses and complicated relationships and more pounds than you would like.
Right now. Just as you are. You are worthy. You are a gift of the Universe.
You deserve happiness. You deserve a good job with good pay doing work you love. You deserve amazing relationships that buoy you up and challenge you and help you grow. You deserve a nice home.
And so does everyone else.
Our modern economic systems aren’t set up to support everyone having what they deserve. When we get good things, there’s an element of luck to it, because there’s someone out there who worked just as hard who didn’t get this blessing. And when we don’t get good things, there’s an element of luck to it, because there’s someone else out there, with all of our faults and problems, who did get this good thing.
Sure, qualifications and hard work and being nice, they all matter. But this world we live in is powered largely by luck.
The economic and racial and social situation you were born into is a matter of luck. Being born here instead of someplace else is luck. Fitting a job situation well enough to get an offer is luck – there are lots of applicants who could rock any given position. Being born at a moment in time when there are more jobs than applicants or the reverse is luck.
Sometimes it’s nice to have a good wallow in deserve. It can be cathartic to rage at the universe because you deserved that job that someone else was offered. It can be almost pleasurable to moan about how we don’t deserve the good things because we didn’t eat our carrots.
But when we get stuck there, we stop taking action on our own behalf. And that’s a sure-fire way to not getting those good things you want.
Do this instead
Don’t take it personally that our modern economy isn’t set up to actually take care of actual human beings. That has nothing to do with you. Yes, that’s true differentially, that is, it’s set up to take more care of some people than others, but again – that’s not about you as an individual.
Okay, but how do you do that? (I hate it when I’m told to stop taking something personally with nothing else – exactly how am I supposed to do that?)
When you start noticing yourself using the language or assumptions of deserve, don’t try to stop yourself. What we repress returns even stronger. Instead, take a page from Barbara Sher’s book and ham it up!
If you think you deserve better than you’re getting, then go all diva on the Universe’s ass and tell it so, as dramatically and expressively as possible. Keep pushing yourself to get more dramatic and more demanding, until it’s so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. (“And you know what, Universe? I deserve a PONY!”)
If you think you don’t deserve goodness, then go all diva on the Universe’s ass and tell it so, as dramatically and expressively as possible. Get more dramatic and more self-pitying until it’s so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. (“I don’t even deserve to have a nose to breath air through! I should look like Voldemort!)
The feelings you’re having – the feelings of grief, of sadness, of anger, of fear – those are real. Those are what are underneath our language about deserving. When we give voice to them in these over-the-top ways, it’s a way of acknowledging them and giving them some room to breathe.
When they have room to breathe, then they aren’t in charge. And when they aren’t in charge, we can act on our own behalves, knowing that society isn’t fair, that there are roadblocks, that everything isn’t necessarily going to work out just as we had planned.
And that we’re worthy beings, either way.
Academia tends to spin our emotional compasses until we don’t know which way is north. If you’re feeling lost, I offer one-on-one coaching to help you figure it all out.
When the eight months that marked finishing the dissertation, defending the dissertation, and being on the academic job market simultaneously finally ended with an accepted offer, all I could do was exhale. Well, exhale and lay on the couch blearily watching television, sick as a dog.
Once I recovered, I was in touch with the committee who hired me, letting them know when I planned to arrive in town (a month and a half before my contract started) and that I would get started program-planning once I got settled in.
I immediately received an email in return from one particular committee member, castigating me for working ahead of my contract and announcing (with plenty of cc:s), that clearly I wasn’t up on the most recent Marxist theory. (Thank goodness Marxist theory wasn’t my area of expertise.)
The rest of the committee, to their credit, swooped in to blunt the damage of that email and make me feel welcome.
The problem is, he had a point
One of the problems of academia is that it has no boundaries. The vaunted flexibility that means we don’t have to be in an office between 9 and 5 every day also means there’s no container for our work.
Despite media and political claims to the contrary, academics work far more than 40 hours a week. In fact, you could argue that academics work all the damn time. They work evenings. They work weekends. They work holidays. There’s always more work to be done, more tasks that need to be squeezed in between classes and research and advising and all of the other commitments that constitute academic work at every level.
And yet despite working around the clock, on vacations, on holidays, (American) academics are typically paid for the nine months of the year that map onto the fall and spring semesters’ teaching. (Yes, some schools pay the 9 months’ salary out in 12 months, but that’s not the same as a 12 month salary.)
And that’s only if you’ve been lucky enough to get a tenure-track or post-doc position – adjuncts get paid by the course. The logic of the academic wage is made most explicit right there.
Forget overtime. There’s an immense amount of unpaid labor built in to the academic system under the rubric of vocation. You’re supposed to love it so much that you do it even though you aren’t getting paid. One might even argue that you’re structurally forced to do it, because it’s all that unpaid labor that gets you tenure or a promotion or a slim chance at a job that 400 other people are also applying for.
The unpaid labor is what is structurally rewarded. The less-valued labor is paid for.
This is some messed-up shit.
Straight to burnout
The most successful academics I know said no. They said no to committee work that didn’t serve them and wasn’t in line with what their colleagues were doing. They said no to being too flexible with teaching schedules. They said no to working all their waking hours.
And yet, the job market being what it is, graduate students are urged to take on more, do more, publish more, teach more, serve more, all in the name of trying to beat out peers to win that job that has, let’s face it, something like 400:1 odds.
Better departments protect assistant professors so they can achieve tenure, but the downsizing of the faculty means that assistant professors, more and more, are being burdened with too much work to do the work that gets them tenure.
This is unsustainable. It’s unsustainable personally, and its unsustainable institutionally.
I hear story after story of people who are burnt out, who have no enthusiasm or energy left for the work that they love or at least like, because they’ve had no time to recharge.
This does not make for happiness, and it’s unlikely to get better.
There are other options
There are options other than working crazy hours for not enough pay.
Set reasonable time boundaries, and triage your work. You know as well as I do that some work actually matters, and some doesn’t. Spend the bulk of your best time on the work that matters. Do the rest as well as you can given the time remaining.
Benchmark yourself against your colleagues. If you’re doing more than they are, either in teaching or in service, let some things go.
Know that there are non-academic options that really are 9-5, which leaves an unbelievable amount of time free for things that aren’t work. And they pay all year round, too.
Value your own time, work, and expertise. They’re worth a lot.
Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.
Are new graduate programs a good idea? Lee Skallerup Bessette asks and answers.
Penelope Trunk explains why grad degrees are a bad idea.
The scholarship of teaching isn’t being given a lot of credit, especially in promotion and tenure cases.
Post-docs are becoming more usual in the humanities.
Two career guides explain how to make it through the first-round interview.
Leonard Cassuto demystifies the dissertation proposal.
The economy means that even established professors are stuck where they are.
The job market for geographers has taken a turn for the positive.
Should you use a dossier service in your job search? As in everything else in academia, it depends.
Do you know what a given interview question is trying to get at? You should.
After Academe talks about how to quit adjuncting.
Meanness is not the same as being critical.
Overseas opportunities exist for American academics, but there are some significant risks, including challenges for families.
Graduate enrollments are down for the first time in forever, but it’s unclear what that means.
The National Science Foundation responds to research that documents science culture’s hostility to family building (especially for women), with new policies designed to make it easier to do science and have a family.
Lennard J. Davis calls out academia for neither including disability within categories of diversity nor being able to talk about it.
Just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean you won’t get asked that question in an interview. Here’s how to handle the inappropriate query.
Struggling with academia? I offer one-on-one coaching by phone and by email to help people articulate and work through where they’re stuck.
It’s not news to say that much of academic work is invisible.
The parts that are visible – publications, classroom teaching – are often thought to be all there is, which gives rise not only to the “you only work 9 hours a week and no summers” accusations from well-meaning family members but also to the political attacks on higher ed we’re seeing in places like Texas.
All the rest of the work is invisible. Planning classes. Grading papers. Doing the research to design courses. The long hours in the library or the lab, gathering the materials that make for those publications. The long hours of writing and revising. Advising. Serving on promotion and tenure committees. Serving on governance committees. Supporting student organizations. Orienting new students and new teachers. Directing student research.
It’s this very invisibility of so much academic work that makes it so hard for academics to grok that we have a lot of skills and a lot of experience to offer.
Silence and invisibility
I’ve said this before, but so many of the skills academics have are invisible because they aren’t explicitly taught or rewarded. Because they aren’t explicitly taught or rewarded, we often don’t realize we have them.
Public speaking, for instance. Pretty much everyone you come into contact with in higher ed teaches, for obvious reasons. It’s what we do. But that means that everyone around you has experience with and various levels of skill in public speaking.
Leave academia, though, and you’ll find out soon enough that there are plenty of very smart people who can’t really present information orally. They don’t know how to organize information for listening, they don’t know how to extrapolate from notes instead of reading, and they don’t know how to make eye contact and use their voices.
If you’ve been in the classroom, you’ve had to learn that skill even if no one taught it to you.
Or how about research? Again, if you’ve been in graduate school, earning a PhD, you’ve done research. That means you know how to frame a question. You know how to search for relevant information. You know how to put information together to create the current landscape. You know how to identify what we don’t know. You know how to fill in a gap in the knowledge. You know how to present that research.
This is not something most people know how to do. However painful your dissertation was or is, you’ve got a skill there that’s not all that common.
But let’s not leave out service
Since service is always the poor country cousin to research and teaching, we tend to ignore it as something distasteful that has to get done.
There’s a lot of experience and skills that get obscured by that distaste.
Collaboration. Setting mutual goals. Program management and evaluation. Program design. Event planning and management. Personnel management. Long-term planning. Grant-writing. Reporting. Negotiation.
And you know what? There are even academics who actually like service work. They like the collaboration, they like the negotiation, they like the debate. They like planning and programs and people.
Recognize what you have
I’m reminded of these truths over and over when I work with people to craft their Master Resumes. They come to me telling me they don’t have any experience or skills, and then I get their filled-out forms all full of this committee and that project and wouldn’t you know it? There are a lot of skills and experiences built in there.
You, too, have a lot of skills and experiences that can serve you inside or outside of academia.
The challenge is finding them behind our assumptions and our fears and our doubts.
Uncovering our skills and experiences – not to mention our penchants and our wants – is one of the things the Choosing Your Career Consciously course does. If you’ve thought about leaving academia but aren’t sure what else you could do, or if you simply want to consider academia as one possible choice among others, consider joining our next round, which begins October 6. You can click here to find out more.
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Free Teleclass! Overcoming the 3 Barriers to the Post-Academic Job Search. Learn more by clicking here.Sign up for the newsletter!
Myths and Mismatches eCourse Now Available! Jo VanEvery and I have put together a free eCourse on the most common myths and mismatches we see in people who are unhappy in academia.
It's one lens through which you can examine your own unhappiness and better diagnose the problem -- which makes finding a solution that much easier.
Find out more by clicking here!
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