Making Academia Livable

October 6, 2012

Geography matters

It’s no secret that I disagree with the general academic credo that geography matters less than getting a job in your field. For many of us, location is at least important to our long-term happiness as the job itself.

I know a fair few people who landed an academic job in a location they didn’t prefer, and, in the end, the lack of resonance with the place undermined any goodness they were finding in the job. Then they were faced with either going on the job market again, with a more limited geographic range, or leaving academia. It just postponed the dilemma.

As in all things, people vary. I also have friends who landed academic jobs in Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Texas, Illinois, Missouri, Georgia, Alaska, and Arizona who have grown to love landscapes and cultures they were not previously part of. It’s not that you can’t possibly make a good life somewhere you might not have otherwise chosen to live.

But if you turn out to be unable or unwilling to put down roots somewhere, that doesn’t mean that you’re a failure, or that you’re insufficiently committed, or that you really just do need to suck it up.

Your Place or Not Your Place

For all kinds of complicated reasons, we resonate with some places and not with others. It’s not that any place is bad; it’s that some places are Our Places and some places are Not Our Places. Even if a place has everything you think you want, it can still be Not Your Place.

The metaphor I always use is dating. You’ve probably had the experience of meeting someone who, on paper, seemed like a perfect fit for you — and you had no desire to ever see them again. Maybe there was nothing wrong, per se, but there was no spark, no connection.

I’m a Navy brat. We moved less than some — only about every three years — but every move was over a significant body of water. While we (nearly) always lived on coasts (did you know the main supply base for the Navy is in the middle of Pennsylvania? Neither did I), Scotland is not Puerto Rico is not Virginia is not Hawaii. After I left home for college, I started in Illinois, went to Pennsylvania, then West Virginia, and then DC.

In other words, I know from moving geographies and local cultures. One of the skills I got from that upbringing was the ability to root myself and make a home anywhere.

I can move and make a really good life anywhere. And there are still places that are My Places and places that are Not My Places.

DC is a liberal, vibrant city with lots of culture and a good public transportation system. It is Not My Place. I have friends for whom it is definitely Their Place. It’s not whether DC is good or bad — it’s whether I have a connection to the place, whether we resonate together.

There’s a study that agrees!

A recent study looked at residents of Boston and San Francisco, cities that on paper have a lot of similarities but which are very different. It found that residents of those cities had different definitions of success and happiness. If you’re a person who experiences success the way Bostonians do, you won’t be super comfortable in San Francisco and vice versa.

Place matters, and not only because of the landscape. Place matters because every place grows and attracts a certain kind of person, for whatever reason. If those people feel like Your People, the place will work for you. If they don’t, the place probably won’t. If the place feels actively antithetical to Your People, run. You will be miserable.

It’s not as simple as coasts v. “flyover states” (how I hate that term). It’s not city v. country, or blue state v. red. It’s this particular culture in this particular landscape with these particular people.

You can certainly surprise yourself by discovering a Your Place that you didn’t expect, or not resonating with a place you were convinced would work. I have a friend who dreamed of moving to Taos, who moved to Taos and hated it. Life can be surprising.

Your choices are legitimate

If you choose geography based on a job, that’s legitimate.

If you choose geography based on the needs of your family, that’s legitimate.

If you choose geography based on the kind of life you want to live, that’s legitimate.

If you choose geography based on weather and climate, that’s legitimate.

If you choose geography based on people you like, that’s legitimate.

If you choose geography based on a whim, that’s legitimate.

Geography matters. Of course it matters. And you’re the only one who can decide how it figures in to your decision-making, and whether a given place is a reasonable choice.

October 10, 2011

Value your time, work, and expertise

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.

September 19, 2011

Why routines are your friend

Now that the academic semester is ramping up, everyone I know is starting to wilt.

The excitement of new classes and new students have worn off. Committee meetings and other service has begun in earnest. Students are actually showing up in office hours. And all those great plans we had for being organized and on top of things are starting to fray.

It’s not just academics, although the vagaries of the academic semester make it more visible. Many workplaces are a little more casual over the summer. People are on vacation, so decisions happen more slowly, and work slows down as a result. But once Labor Day passes, everyone’s back. The cooling of the air makes everyone a little frisky. Suddenly it’s a long, hard slog to the holidays.

All those things you wanted to accomplish this semester or season are starting to feel further away and less possible.

You need a routine.

What we know about people

For a long time, we understood “willpower” to be characterological. That is, some people (the good people) have it and some people (the bad people) don’t. The good people were able to make the “right” choices (always the ones aligned with longer-term goals) because they were simply better or stronger.

It turns out that, like most cultural characterological judgments, it was completely wrong.

It turns out that willpower, otherwise known as the ability to make decisions and favor the logical brain (the long-term plans) over the emotional (whatever I want now) brain, is a limited resource in every single one of us. We can easily exhaust our store of willpower, making it impossible to force ourselves to choose along our long-term goals. Instead we fall into habit, fall into whatever we want in the short-term, or simply get paralyzed.

No matter what your long-term goals are – whether it’s a dissertation, your next book, your next project at work, finding a way to get out of academia altogether, or running a marathon – to meet a long-term goal you need the willpower to go on that run, head to the library, sit down at the computer for a frustrating session of writing. These things aren’t necessarily fun, even if we value the long-term goal. That’s why we have to bring our willpower to bear.

Most of us have had the experience of running out of willpower right when we need it. It’s cozy and warm inside, and it’s cold and dark outside, so maybe I’ll run tomorrow. I planned to write tonight, but I’m tired and there’s good television on, so I’ll write tomorrow.

It’s totally normal.

It’s easy to get mad at ourselves later, castigate ourselves for lack of willpower, but what we know now is that if we’ve exhausted our store of willpower and it hasn’t had time to replenish, then we can’t actually force ourselves to do anything that doesn’t appeal to us right this second. No one can, even those people who think they have so much willpower.

This is where routines come in

We often think about decisions as only big-picture things – where to live, what to study, where to work. But we make decisions all the time.

What should I have for breakfast? What time am I getting up? Should I read this research or grade papers? What should I wear? Should I go to the wine bar with X or get Thai food with Y? Should I start this article with this anecdote or that quotation?

If you actually recognized how many decisions you make every day, you’d have to go back to bed from the sheer exhaustion of it.

If, then, you have a long-term goal that is important to you, invoking the power of routine will enable you to conserve your willpower for the places you actually need it to make that long-term goal: going for that run, sitting down to write, logging on to research alternate careers.

What we mean when we talk about routine

A routine is nothing more than a single set of decisions that play out repeatedly. That is, you decide once instead of over and over – at the beginning of the semester, say, or once a week for things like meals.

You decide to get up at the same time every day, which means you don’t have to think about what time to set the alarm for.

You decide to spend Tuesday and Thursday mornings at the coffee shop writing, so you don’t have to think about what you’re doing today or when you’re going to write.

You decide to go running every evening after the kids go to bed, so you don’t have to decide how you’re going to fit it in today.

All those decisions you don’t have to make give you space for the decisions you do have to make. Do you want to run a marathon? What will you write your next book on?

It’s infinitely easier to tackle big, long-term projects when you aren’t exhausting your ability to figure things out on stuff that doesn’t actually have a meaningful impact on your life.

It doesn’t have to be boring

Many people despise routine. They despise anything that doesn’t vary.

Fair enough. I know plenty of people who feel that way. And if you do, and you’re able to get done the things that march you towards your long-term goal, then power to you. Seriously. Routine is a tool, not a manifesto.

But plenty of people who despise routine are also struggling to get things done. If you’re that person, then build variety into your routine.

For example, if you would love to plan the six dinners you’re going to cook at home, because deciding every single night what you’re going to eat frustrates you and takes forever, but you can’t bear to stick to “Monday is spaghetti night,” pick six meals, make sure you have the ingredients on hand, and pick one at random every night. You still get variety and surprise, but you aren’t having to make a decision or choose between options.

Routine doesn’t have to mean rote. It simply means taking as many decisions off your plate as possible to make room for the ones you want to be making.

Work with yourself, not against yourself

We humans like to think we’re so logical, and if we can just convince ourselves of X, we’ll do it.

But we’re messy, complicated, layered organic systems. There are parts of our brains that developed when we were consumed with finding food and avoiding being eaten, and those parts aren’t so much into things like writing books or running marathons. They’re older and much bigger than the parts of our brain that can read text and plan things out for the next five years.

That’s why we have to pay attention to how we actually function instead of how we’d like to function.

So think about what you can automate. Think about what you can decide once instead of over and over. Think about how to put those decisions into practice.

Experiment. See what happens when you block out your time based on your classes or your projects or your commitments. See what you get done. See where things fall apart.

There’s no virtue in routine. There’s no virtue in willpower, either. We all have it, and we all exhaust it.

Like any tools, routine and willpower are available to help us reach the goals that matter to us, no matter what they are.

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.