Blog – Page 67

February 9, 2010

Would anything have kept you out of graduate school?

Thomas Benton has published another one of his thought-provoking columns in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. This time it’s about “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind.'”

He’s writing, as he often does, about the cruel bait-and-switch that happens when professors encourage people to go to graduate school because it’s the embodiment of a fabled dream.

[Professors who still bleat on about “the life of mind”] absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, “there are no guarantees.” But that phrase suggests there’s only a chance you won’t get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.

Some professors tell students to go to graduate school “only if you can’t imagine doing anything else.” But they usually are saying that to students who have been inside an educational institution for their entire lives. They simply do not know what else is out there. They know how to navigate school, and they think they know what it is like to be a professor. …

Graduate school may be about the “disinterested pursuit of learning” for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.

I think he’s right that the myth of the life of the mind is held up as a Good to which the best and brightest are called, while they stand little real chance of gaining entry to the profession as, well, professionals.

I don’t agree, however, that professors and departments and disciplines are, as a whole, being duplicitous and self-serving. I think many professors and departments and disciplines are, in fact, trying to communicate clearly with their students about their very real chances. But it’s not working. Why? Here are just a few reasons

Location, location, location

Benton makes the point that professors are talking to people who have spent their whole lives in school, so asking them to imagine something else is pretty difficult. But, by and large, professors and administrators have spent their whole lives, their whole careers, and their whole identities in school and academia. They’ve got very little experience, if any, outside the confines of academe, so asking them to give students a real, balanced, contextual sense of their chances is kind of crazy. How would they know how it compares? Why should we expect them to?

It really was different in their day.

In his review of Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas, DeanDad highlights some salient facts:

From 1945 to 1975, the number of undergraduate students in the US went up 500 percent, but the number of graduate students went up 900 percent. Since then, growth of undergrads has slowed dramatically, but graduate students just keep increasing. Menand pointed out that from 1989 to 1996, the number of graduate students in most liberal arts disciplines increased steadily, even as the number of undergrads nationally declined every year. As he correctly put it, by the 90’s “the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life.”

They’ve largely been inside this phenomenon, and their perspective is focused on a very small handful of students, maybe one or two of whom defend in any given year and go out on the job market. They’re wrapped up in these students as individuals — as they should be — and that means any explanations they have of why people do or don’t get jobs is going to be wrapped up in their students as individuals — not as individuals confronting a system.

Personal appeals to logic don’t work.

When there’s something you really want to do, when it’s held up as a Good, and when the person telling you not to do it is in fact embodying the thing itself, how likely are you to heed the “do as I say not as I do?”

My graduate director spent half of our PhD acceptance letters telling us in no uncertain terms what the reality of the job market was — and not a one of us listened. Because we would be different. Because she was just being mean and raining on our parade. Because we were special. We’d gotten this far, hadn’t we?

There’s a fundamental mismatch.

Whether or not it’s encouraged as such, people go to graduate school because they believe in the life of the mind — it was what they encountered in undergrad, it’s what they fell in love with, all that reading and thinking and talking and talking and talking. Graduate school largely continues that fable — and then we spit people out onto the cold shores of The Profession, only the very edges of which they would have — could have — seen from graduate school. (And let’s leave the professionalization discussion for another day.)

Telling young people applying to graduate school how bad the profession is — how hard to get into, how different from their dreams — is the equivalent of suddenly talking about purple pigeons. It’s just not the same conversation, because the reality of that is the better part of a decade away for people for whom five years is a full quarter of their lives.

Higher ed is not just torturing people for the sake of torturing people.

We can argue the merits of any individual member of the academy until the cows come home, but I continue to believe that most people are good-hearted and doing their best. I don’t think anyone is trying to exploit anyone.

However, the financial realities of higher education have changed, and those financial realities have meant it needs lots of cheap teachers in order to get butts in seats and therefore income into the school. Yes, that means adjuncts, but it also means graduate students, who are both cheap teachers AND butts in seats. Two birds, one stone.

It’s not that universities are trying to exploit people (although they are, in fact, exploiting people). They’re trying to survive. Badly, yes. With a lot of whistling past the graveyard. But trying.

My point, and I do have one

In short, I don’t think individual professors talking to individual students is the answer. The problem is structural, and the answer, too, needs to be structural — but the structures are in crisis, and the solutions only make them more so.

I don’t have an answer, but I don’t think it’s as simple as “just tell them it sucks!” So let me ask you: What would have dissuaded you? What would have changed your mind about going to graduate school — not “knowing then what you know now,” but then, in all of your youth and hunger?

February 4, 2010

Getting things done without falling apart

One of the biggest struggles a lot of us had / have in academia is the problem of overwork. At 7pm on Sunday, there are nearly always papers to grade. Over the winter “break,” there are syllabi to write for the following semester. Summers often require teaching to pay the bills, and research happens in the nooks and crannies of time left over from the teaching and administrative tasks we’re actually paid to do.

Add in a family, a hobby or two, and some friends, and it’s no wonder so many academics are running around bemoaning their to-do lists and glaring at their calendars. In fact, the sheer levels of exhaustion many people experience in academia directly contribute to their misery in the profession.

Think about that for a minute. There are many people — and you may be one of them — who love this profession, love this work, and yet are miserable because they’re always buried under more things that need to get done, more people who need to be taken care of, and fewer and fewer opportunities to do the things they themselves love, including spending time with their loved ones.

That’s more than just a recurring personal problem. Academia needs the people who love it, and it needs them whole and happy and engaged, because the work people do in academia — expanding the world of knowledge and ideas and training up the next generation of professionals and thinkers — it’s vital, important work.

Now, like most jobs, the structures of academia aren’t set up for personal satisfaction or balancing anyone’s workload. But unlike many jobs, academia comes with few boundaries around time or work. It’s the dark side of all that vaunted flexibility — sure, you can get your oil changed at 2pm on Wednesday, but your whole life can get eaten up with the kind of work that expands to fill the time it’s given.

In other words, we have to set some boundaries. And before we get started, let me say this: I’m not pretending any of the below is easy. It’s not. It’s incredibly difficult because of the way we’ve been socialized into the profession, because of the way the profession is structured. And so, in enacting some of these things, it’s important to listen to the resistance that comes up and investigate it — because often it’s the messages we’re sending ourselves that keep us trapped.

A few practical strategies to see the forest instead of the trees

So let’s talk about some strategies for managing all of the overwhelm.

Know that you aren’t alone. For all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that everything is judged by a jury of one’s peers, academics tend to boast both about their endless, overwhelming workloads (and there’s a kind of perverse competition — whoever has the worst one wins) and yet imply that while they’re harried and can’t possibly do what you’re asking, they’re also on top of it better than you are and if you can’t handle the heat, best get out of the kitchen. It’s a lie. Every academic I’ve ever talked with has struggled to figure out how to balance everything, and then they have to do the same thing the following semester when everything changes.

Think A B and C time. Some of the best advice I ever got about writing my dissertation was from a book by Eviatar Zeruvabel called The Clockwork Muse, and it’s applicable much more broadly. He pointed out that we all have times when we work best and times when it takes all of the caffeine in Starbucks to get anything out of us. (Okay, he didn’t say it like that, but you get the point). If you can figure out what your personal rhythms are, you can schedule your work to take advantage of them.

I, for instance, am a classic morning person. My best thinking time happens between, oh, 8 and noon. I’m okay in the afternoon until about 4, and I’m useless for thinking work after that. For me, then, blocking off morning time to write, teaching and having meetings in the afternoon, and relaxing in the evening worked well. A friend of mine was useless early in the day, needed something scheduled to get him going, was okay in the afternoon, and really hit his stride after 6pm. He liked to teach in the late morning to get himself out of bed, have meetings and do teaching-related work in the afternoon, and write after dinner.

Whatever your particular rhythms are, the more you can let them drive what you’re doing when, the more energy you’re going to have for the right tasks.

Learn to say no. Service tasks proliferate, and they’re a direct consequence of faculty governance. However, younger professors, and especially women, can get buried in endless committees and support work. Figure out where your contributions will be the most valuable (because of your particular skills and interests), say yes to those, and say no to everything else.

One of the most successful female academics I’ve ever known was a master at saying no. Now, she didn’t say no more than the boys did — but she said no a hell of a lot more than the girls did. And she got her book published and sailed through tenure when most of the other women we knew were sweating it out.

So it’s not about not doing service. Service is a crucial part of participating in the academic community and making the whole enterprise work without creating a cadre of managers who aren’t on the front lines of teaching and research. But it is about being choiceful, doing what you can excel at and manage, and not picking up work because “someone has to do it.” Someone may have to do it, but it doesn’t always have to be you.

Build in self-care. Self-care tends to drop to the bottom of the list, because there are so many other things to get done and they have deadlines! And people who will be disappointed! And there’s a tenure case or promotion case to build! But let’s face it — we’re none of us as effective when we’re exhausted and stressed out as we are when we’re well-rested. Have you ever had the experience of taking a really good vacation, the kind where you spend three days face down and by the end have actually rested enough that you’re excited to go home and pick your work back up? What would it be like if you could do that every single week? Every single day?

Don’t you think your teaching would be more energetic, your research more creative, your service more effective, if you felt filled up with the joy and fun of the universe? Build it in not just because it’s a good idea or good for you — build it in because it’s critical to your work.

So figure out what fills you up and what helps you recover and relax, whether it’s cheesy novels, hikes in the woods, playing fetch with the dog, sleeping in late, or painting. Build it in.

Good enough is good enough. There’s no clear finish line for any academic project, whether it’s teaching a class or writing a book or chairing a committee. There’s always another source to read, another experiment to conduct, another hour you could spend preparing for next week’s lecture. Instead of torturing yourself with what else you could be doing for this particular task, figure out what “good enough” looks like in terms of the objectives and hit that. Then stop.

No one makes it out of graduate school, in my experience, without a pretty crazy work ethic. In fact, there’s no way through graduate school and the dissertation experience without a pretty crazy work ethic. So when your inner critic starts flagellating you for “not working hard enough,” take a real look at what it’s talking about — because I’d bet cold, hard, cash that it’s not operating in a reality the rest of us would share.

Create no-work zones. Having defined periods of time when you are not working — not answering work email, not grading papers, not planning anything, not writing proposals or articles or book chapters — can help you be present to everything else in your life. And in doing so, it can help you be fully present to your work when it’s time to work because the rest of your life has already been attended to.

So consider closing down work email after 7pm. Consider reserving Saturday or Sunday as a no-work day. Consider blocking off an hour for lunch every day. Consider taking a solid week over the winter holidays and two weeks in the summer for the rest of your life and only the rest of your life. Everyone’s no-work zones will be personal and particular — but having definite time will help limit the resentment and enable you to actually get some energy back.

Spaghetti arms…

Academia, because of the way it’s structured, doesn’t have many boundaries. Long before smartphones and vpn let everyone else take their work home with them, academics had little separation between work life and home life. And so we have to impose boundaries upon it, because those boundaries are what enable us to work in academia sustainably and happily.

If you really love the teaching and the research, if you thrill to watch a young adult finally find the thing that excites him or her, if you’re passionate about education, don’t let academia walk all over you until you hate it. It’s too important and you’re too valuable.

February 1, 2010

Unsticking the stuck in applying for jobs

So let’s say you’ve made the decision to leave academia, and now you need to start poking around for a whole new career. Or you’ve realized you love academia, you just hate this particular university, and you need to look for other jobs to apply to. Or you love your institution, but you’d like to move into administration.

In other words, for whatever reason, you now have to gird your loins and put together … a job application package.

Here’s what happens next for most of us (and yes, I happen to resemble these remarks).

“Oh my god, I have to explain to someone else why I want this job.”

“Why do I want this job again? This is too much work. Where I am isn’t that bad.”

“Who am I to think I could get a better job?”

“No one’s going to hire me anyway — I’m both overqualified and underqualified and this is just doomed.”

“Am I really qualified for this? I’m not qualified for this. Why would someone hire me for this when they could hire X?”

And the next thing that happens is that we’re somewhere — anywhere! — other than sitting in front of that particular computer file or piece of paper.

It’s not you

Putting together a job application package, especially when you’re trying to change careers, is not just a simple, concrete, measurable task, however neat and precise the @nextsteps are in your GTD planner.

Tasks like this have enormous, weighty, complicated emotional tasks attached to them, and those emotional tasks get in the way of the practical next steps.

There’s grief attached. Fear. Confusion. The stumbles of being new and learning a new language, even enough to apply to something. And most of all, the shift of identity.

It’s really fucking hard to portray yourself as the perfect museum curator / frog handler / graphic novel editor when, inside, a little voice is saying, “but really, we’re a historian / biologist / literary scholar.”

And getting from point A (academic identity) to point B (shiny new identity) is also really difficult.

And the combination of hard — the fear, the grief, the identity work — just sits there in the way, putting lie to any attempt to tell yourself that “it’s just not that hard, dammit,” or “just do it.”

Let’s experiment

If it were your best friend in this situation, what would you do? You’d probably give him a hug, make her a cup of tea, fold yourself into the corner of the coffee shop and let him vent and rage and stomp his feet, tell her of COURSE this is hard! Look what you’re doing!

In other words, let’s try being compassionate. To you. Right now.

What do you need in order to feel centered about this shift in your life? What do you need in order to feel secure and comforted even though this is scary and hard and intimidating? What do you need to express about this whole mess so that you aren’t exploding from all of the held-in emotions? What do you need to hear in order to move through the fear and the anticipation and the uncertainty?

Get a hug from someone who loves you. Spend fifteen minutes visualizing success. Play desperately sad music and cry along. Go for a long run. Turn the music up and dance like a fool. Write a nasty letter to academia. Write a love letter to the life you’re walking towards. Make yourself a cup of tea. Hell, make yourself a chocolate cake!

But however you do it, acknowledge that this is hard. Acknowledge that telling yourself to just get a grip and do it isn’t likely to work. Acknowledge that there’s emotional stuff that needs attention, and then give it some compassionate attention.

And then notice how much easier (not easy, just easier) it is to sit down and work on that application that has the potential to jump start the next phase of your fabulous life.

(And in case you missed it, I’m doing a free teleclass on Wednesday about how to work through the issues specific to leaving academia in job applications. You can read more and sign up here.)

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