Escape the Ivory Tower

How long should you keep trying?

The inimitable Sisyphus, who has been looking for a job for a while now, describes an all-too-common situation in academia:

A while back I had decided that I need to just give it up and move back into my parents’ house, but then little things keep popping on the horizon that look like possibilities, and I think, hey, I might be able to get this one and why bother dealing with moving if I’m going to be moving somewhere permanent soon anyway? Then that oasis turns out to be a mirage, and I keep crawling along.

Anyone who’s struggled with finding a job has had this experience — the just-missed, the nearly-there, the what-if. It’s the incrementalism that kills you. “But this next one won’t take much effort, and what if it’s the one? But this next one won’t take much ….”

So how do you decide enough is enough and it’s time to move on?

Give yourself the gift of a limit

The problem is, there’s no clear cutoff. There’s a limit to how many times you can take the bar exam, but there’s no limit to how long you can spend looking for a job.

And that means you have to create limits for yourself.

This is most easily done at the beginning. How long are you willing to do this? One year? Six months? Two years? What feels reasonable? What feels like enough time to find out what’s what?

And then you mark it down somewhere, make a date with yourself to reassess.

It doesn’t mean you have to stop at that limit. It only means it’s a point at which you stop, you look around, and you see what there is to see.

A few things you might see

When you do stop to look around, there are a few things that are worth thinking through.

  • Has anything changed? That is, has something happened externally to improve the situation? Has something happened internally to improve the situation? What’s different now than when you set off on this particular phase of the adventure? What does that suggest about moving forward?
  • How close have you come? If you’re repeatedly getting almost-there but not quite, it may only be a matter of time. If you’re knocking on door after door and not getting much response, it may be better to cut and run.
  • Do you still want it? We can be creatures of inertia and bull-headed to boot. Do you still want this or is it now mostly a matter of pride? If you got the job tomorrow, would you be exhilarated or would you think, “well, shit”?

And now what?

Depending on what you find when you stop to look around, you may want to set another “let’s look around” date and keep going, or you might want to take this opportunity to choose something else. What else is appealing? What else can you do?

That’s not to say either is an easy choice, just that you have the choice. But you won’t consider your choices unless you give yourself the time and space to do so.

What if the beginning was a long, long time ago?

If you’re in the midst of it, see if you can take a break right now.

Ask yourself the questions above. How long have you given to this? How long are you willing to give to this?

It’s really easy to be motivated by pride and it’s shadowy sister, shame, to just keep pushing through, to keep trying, to make one last effort for the 57th time.

But stop and look. What do you want now?

Also? This sucks. And it’s not you.

Whereever you are in the process, though, and whatever choices you make when you stop and look around, know these two things.

This process blows. It’s distressing, demoralizing, and crazy-making. The process itself, the time it takes, the amount of work, will make your head explode even if you’re successful. And if you aren’t getting the offer you want, then it’s even worse.

And finally, it’s not you. You’re fabulous and wonderful and smart and talented. The system is pretty broken, and “success” here looks a lot like “sheer, unadulterated luck.” Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don’t. It doesn’t have to mean more than that.

The myth of merit

One of academia’s very favorite myths is that everything within it is based on merit. Only the best students are accepted to the graduate program. The best students get fellowships and scholarships. The best students get the best jobs. The best work gets published. The best candidates get tenure.

And then there’s the flip side: If you didn’t get in to the program of your choice, it’s because you weren’t good enough. If you didn’t get the assistance that would have enabled you to actually get through the program, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough or you weren’t smart enough. If you didn’t get a job, it’s because you weren’t savvy enough, weren’t skilled enough, didn’t publish enough or strategically, didn’t have the right people behind you. If you didn’t get published, it’s because either your work was crap or you weren’t persistent enough. If you didn’t get tenure, you’re clearly not cut out for this system.

Even when we choose to walk away, these stories of failure dog us. (In our own minds, if nowhere else.) Leave before tenure? It’s because you couldn’t hack it. Decided not to go on the job market because you didn’t want to stay in academia? You wouldn’t have gotten a job anyway. Decided not to finish graduate school because it’s making you hate the universe? You weren’t smart enough to finish.

Excuse my language, but this is all a fucking load of steaming crap.

Even a cursory look around the academic landscape will reveal dozens of people you know personally who are brilliant, savvy, hard-working, and persistent and who have not “succeeded” in all of the ways academia suggests they will, what with all of those meritorious traits.

Brilliant and well-published graduate students who can’t find a job to save their lives because the job market sucks.

Smart, interesting researchers who don’t get published because their work doesn’t quite fit the neat little boxes of disciplines and journals or because they aren’t in the middle of the latest hot topic or trend.

Fabulous researchers and teachers who didn’t get tenure because they got caught in the gender politics of service.

I’m not saying that merit has no place in academia. But I am saying that, by the time we’re even as far as graduate school, absent true outliers, the differences between the “best” and the “worst” are, in some ways, often too small to be meaningful. Academia has been winnowing the pool since kindergarten, after all.

I am saying that the myth of merit doesn’t do us any favors. It doesn’t make most of us feel expansive and energized — it makes us feel small and scared and clenched. It doesn’t motivate most of us — it makes us avoidant and procrastinating and miserable. It doesn’t build us up — it makes us live in fear that, any day now, someone is going to figure out that we aren’t as smart as they think we are, and then they’ll kick us out.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a lot of merit to that situation.

We need to be suspicious of the myth of merit. We need to pay attention to how much outright luck contributes to “success” and “failure” in academia. We need to cut ourselves some fucking slack and begin to imagine that we are, in fact, smart, capable, wonderful people who, for various reasons, had a certain set of experiences with academia, some of which we had something to do with and some of which we didn’t.

There is no One True Calling

We have a lot of baggage around the idea of a calling, we people of this century.

Sometimes, the whole enterprise seems, well, self-indulgent and stupid. My mother’s father, for example, wouldn’t have recognized the question. He fought in WWII and sent money home to his family, he worked in the quarry, he volunteered at the fire department and the police station and the water station, he raised three girls with a wife he loved, and when they retired, he dragged my grandmother all over the country on special elder-tours. By all accounts he was satisfied with, even pleased with, his life, without ever engaging the idea that he needed to live out a special mission.

Sometimes people take it too far. I’ve watched more than one college near-graduate refuse to take a job on the grounds that it wasn’t inherently fulfilling to them, blithely neglecting to remember that the only way that works is if someone else, who isn’t necessarily thrilled with every moment of their job, either, subsidizes the project. (I suspect this is rarer now than it once was, the economy being what it is.)

And sometimes it sounds just a bit too religious for our intellectual, post-humanist selves.

Most of us, however, end up somewhere in the middle — longing for a sense of meaning, connection, and purpose while simultaneously not being convinced that anything we’re running up against is It.

It’s like we believe that what we need to do is just find our (avocational) soulmate, and then everything will be fine, everything will unfold after that, but this avocation has a bad sense of humor, and that one is too uptight about money.

This is why leaving academia can feel like divorce, right down to the question of who keeps which friends. We found our One True Love, but what happens when the shine is off that particular rose? Does that mean we’ve failed? Does that mean we’re doomed to marginal happiness ever after?

Just like there’s probably not one person in the whole world who will automatically make you happy forever, there’s no one calling that will make you happy forever. Rather, there’s no simple conception of your calling that will make you happy forever.

Your calling, just like your marriage, your relationships, your life, and you yourself, is always growing and evolving. You’re always learning more about it. New possibilities are always opening up. And that means that what was right five years ago isn’t necessarily right now, and what’s right now isn’t necessarily what will be right five or ten or twenty years down the road.

Because so many of us experienced our fields and our work as a calling, it can be brutally troubling to run up against dissatisfaction. Because we felt called to academia, realizing that call is no longer there is painful.

I don’t want to suggest that those losses shouldn’t be mourned if you’re experiencing grief. I do want to suggest that you open up your conception of yourself to see what you’re being called to now.

Parker Palmer talks about your calling as the place where your deepest desires meet the needs of the world. In other words, while there are any number of things you’re probably good at, and while there are infinite problems in the world to solve, the particular configuration of your heart and this moment illuminate what you’re being called to now.

What are you being called to now? How well does that calling work within the structures of academia?

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