Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.

Lennard J. Davis rocks

I was fascinated last week by a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed in which Lennard J. Davis, a professor at the University of Illinois – Chicago, outlined how he mentors his graduate students.

He goes far beyond the obligatory “the job market sucks” speech. When they first become “his” graduate students, he outlines the baseline requirements to even get into the job game and reminds his students how slowly academic publishing moves. He tells students to plan their dissertations and their committees with the job market in mind. He personally walks students through the book displays at conferences and introduces them to editors. He takes their job materials well in hand and helps them shape those applications to their best possibilities.

In short, he believes a significant part of his job as advisor is to explicitly professionalize his students.

This is not usual

While I hope that this kind of explicit professionalization is happening more and more, I have to say, in my experience this kind of support is rare. And there are reasons why it is so rare.

First, many academics, whether they’re aware of it or not, still subscribe to the myths of merit and intellectual purity. In this story, what gets jobs is the best intellectual work, and the best work naturally rises to the top, like some special thinking-flavored cream. In this story, shaping your work to get a job is pandering, because it’s supposed to be the work itself that matters. In this story, the good students will get jobs, regardless of how they’re positioned vis a vis the market.

Under this myth, the job of the advisor is simply to get the best intellectual work out of the student, and that not only keeps everyone in the realm of research and writing, if often leads to work that doesn’t fit nicely into disciplinary categories, further complicating a job search.

Second, few academics were properly mentored themselves. Even those who battled job markets that were, in their day, notable, were rarely given this kind of explicit instruction or support. They muddled along with the hints and the unspoken expectations, trying to figure out how journals ranked, how many pubs they needed, and how to get them.

So many of academia’s rules and procedures are unspoken, assumed, and passed along through a kind of departmental or institutional osmosis that they’re hard to articulate at all – much less pass along to graduate students who might themselves be clinging strongly to the myths of merit and intellectual purity.

In other words, it’s not your fault

It’s not your fault that you couldn’t intuit early enough or quickly enough what the rules were and how to play the game at the highest level.

It’s not your fault that the rules weren’t laid out where you could find them.

It’s not your fault that you didn’t get this kind of explicit advising and mentoring.

It’s not your fault that you landed in the worst academic job market for the liberal arts without the tools you needed to maybe make it work for you.

But it’s not their fault either

While I would argue that it is every graduate advisor’s responsibility to professionalize students and help them learn the game, it’s not surprising that it happens so rarely. So many structures are in place to maintain the intellectually pure status quo that it’s the rare person who can buck so strongly against it.

But the bottom line is that, if you weren’t given this kind of support and mentoring, you were left without some of the key tools you needed to succeed in this profession.

Would it have made a difference? Maybe yes, maybe no. The bottom would still have fallen out of the academic job market. The national economy would still be in the toilet, and states would still be responding by cutting higher ed allocations right and left.

Maybe it would have given you an edge. Maybe that would have been enough.

But when I talk to people who are struggling because they didn’t get a tenure-track job in academia, what I hear is self-blame, when what I see is a set of structures that didn’t much allow for success to begin with.

The state of the job market is not your fault. The quality of the advising you got was not your fault. Even the naivete most of us start off graduate school with isn’t exactly our own faults – it’s part of being young, part of being passionate, part of following the dream.

Sure, there were things we might, in hindsight, have done differently – chosen a different advisor, chosen a different topic, chosen a different school, asked more direct questions, made a different kind of plan. But there’s no guarantee that it would have changed the outcome. And there’s nothing to say things couldn’t have turned out differently even with the choices you made.

All of which is to say this

Try not to beat yourself up too much, wherever you are in the process.

Yes, if you haven’t gotten that tenure-track job, it’s disappointing. It’s horribly disappointing. But let it stay disappointing. Don’t beat yourself up over things you only had a little bit of control over. That turns disappointment into self-loathing. Disappointment we can recover from. Self-loathing is much harder.

If you got in to graduate school, you’re by definition smart and capable and interested. Whatever has happened since you got that acceptance letter, all of those things are still true.

Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.

So, something has changed

We deal with change all the time in our lives – a company discontinues our favorite lip balm, the city installs a new traffic light, we get a new sweater. But most of the time, change doesn’t tweak us for more than a few minutes.

When something is purely change, then we might have a few minutes of disgruntled or confusion or forgetting, but soon enough we’re acclimated. We buy a different lip balm, we remember to stop at the light, we enjoy the new garment.

When change affects our sense of who we are or who we could be, however, it’s more than change – it’s called transition. Change is external, but transition is internal, and transition is really hard.

Lots of transition

Transition is hard whether the change is something you want (you got a tenure track job! Yay!) or something you don’t want (you’re considering leaving academia). Transition shows up whenever we have to reconceptualize who we are to ourselves.

Did I mention it’s hard? It’s hard. It’s always hard. And that means that, if you’re going through transition right now and it’s hard? Totally normal.

Varieties of hard

Regardless of whether or not you think the change is a good one, the first thing that happens in transition is loss and grief. Why? Because you’re leaving a part of yourself behind, and that part had a lot of good things about it.

For example, however much we might all be ready to be done with graduate school already, there’s a lot of security in being in a situation where someone else has made the rules and we’re just playing the game. There’s a lot of security in having an advisor. There’s a lot of security to being in the same place we’ve lived for half a dozen years.

But now, no matter what happens next, we’re graduating, and we’re losing all of those points of security. Even if you’re excited about where you’re going, that part will be hard.

After the loss and grief comes what William Bridges calls “the neutral zone,” but that’s much too nice a term. No, what comes next is the wilderness. What comes next is the underworld. What comes next is not knowing what the hell you’re doing or how this transition and change is going to manifest.

In the wilderness, you’re a beginner again. You’re lost, you’re confused, and you’re trying to get your bearings. Maybe you’re trying to find your balance as a professor. Maybe you’re learning how to get along outside of academia. Wherever you are, it’s new and it’s unfamiliar and it’s scary.

And after the wilderness comes the new beginning – the new identity, the new situation, the new you. Even if it’s a transition you didn’t want to experience, this part comes with its own rewards in the form of relief, of feeling more secure, of maybe even being a little bit excited about where you are.

In other words, it’s all normal

Rage, grief, exasperation, impatience, fear, hope, curiosity, despair – they’re all totally and perfectly normal when you’re going through transition. They are exactly what you’re supposed to be feeling.

They are not a sign that things are wrong. They are not a sign that you should go back (which you can’t do anyway). They are not a sign that you’re messing it up.

They are, in fact, a sign that you’re right where you’re supposed to be.

Transition isn’t fun. At all. But it comes with the territory of being human, and it’s what we go through when we change and grow.

And knowing that it’s normal to be sad that you’re leaving behind something you’ve decided you don’t want can help you stop beating yourself up or second-guessing yourself. Knowing it’s normal to be lost and confused and feel helpless can help you stop panicking and trust the process. Knowing it’s normal to get a little excited at your new prospects even though you didn’t want this change at all can help you stop the self-recrimination.

You’re doing it just right. I promise.

Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.

Have you heard this one?

Something I hear frequently when I talk to people is some variation on the following: “Well, I shouldn’t feel so bad – at least I got a job.” Without fail, people will dismiss their own pain because someone else in the world has it worse.

By that logic, only the person who has it the absolute worst in the whole entire world is entitled to his or her pain. Given that the world’s population is now somewhere north of 6 billion, that means somewhere on the order of … 6 billion people should just suck it up.

This is not the Pain Olympics

We are not in competition for who has it the worst. And we are entitled to our pain no matter how small, how petty, or how much worse off we could imagine ourselves being.

Sure, it’s good to remember, every now and again, just how freaking privileged we all are, on the whole.

But just because we’re privileged in many, many ways doesn’t mean we don’t experience pain or that our pain isn’t legitimate.

Also? It doesn’t work

I don’t know about you, but when someone says to me, in the face of something I’m struggling with, that at least I’m not living in a hovel in Mumbai / I didn’t lose a baby / I’m not being raped in a war zone / put your favorite “worst” here, however gracious and polite I am on the outside, I pretty much just want to punch them in the nose.

On the odd occasion when I somehow take it into my head to say it to myself, I want to punch myself in the nose.

Because saying such things neither makes us feel better nor helps us deal with the very real pain we’re experiencing.

What they do is make us feel ashamed of our pain, of our struggle, of our complaining, of, yes, our whining. The not-so-secret message is that our pain doesn’t matter.

Our pain does matter

Sometimes, no matter how privileged we are, things suck. We didn’t get the job we wanted. We didn’t have the defense we had hoped for. We didn’t win the scholarship or the grant or the award. Our parents get sick or our kid gets sick or our dog dies or our car is totaled in an accident.

Every pain is legitimate. Every one. Even yours.

And in fact, when we are able to legitimize our pain, when we’re able to take it seriously and recognize it as a sign that something is wrong, then we can respond. Acknowledging our pain creates the space for making change.

So the next time you’re tempted to dismiss your own pain and your own struggle, stop. Acknowledge to yourself that you’re hurting. Acknowledge that it’s okay, even if it doesn’t feel okay. Notice what a difference it makes, to your own mood and to your ability to transform the pain into something else, something that might even, after a while, feel better.