In PhD program, trying to decide next career move.
November 4, 2014 5:38 PM Subscribe
Am I competitive enough to get a job in academia?
I'm ABD, on track to finish my dissertation in about a year, for 5.5 years total post BA. I've wanted to be a professor for a very, very long time, and I've sacrificed a lot to reach that goal. The problem is that in my particular position, I'm not sure if I'm hireable, and am starting to wonder if I should take an opportunity to do something else with my life.
My colleagues and supervisors like me, my committee likes my dissertation idea (although I'm still analyzing data and haven't actually written more than the methods and intro yet), I'm passionate about my field, and I love teaching. I have two main problems:
1. I was on a fellowship almost my entire time here, which was great in terms of getting work done, but I only have 3 semesters teaching experience, plus some odd tutoring.
2. My dad was diagnosed with cancer in 2012 and died 8 months later, in 2013. I was severely depressed for about two years (and have come out of it with therapy and time), and did not pursue independent research or go to conferences for a year after his death. Now I'm looking at recently hired candidates' CVs and am really feeling that gap, as I've only been to two conferences and had one proceedings paper. I don't think potential employers wouldn't be sympathetic to that situation, but it's not like I can put it with an asterisk somewhere on my CV so they don't put me in the rejection pile right away.
I've known since the beginning that tenure-track might not be in the cards for me, and I accepted that the PhD might just be letters tacked on my name and I'd have to change careers afterwards. But I always assumed I would try for the dream job first, and give up only if it didn't play out.
However, there's a non-academic job opportunity for me that would allow me to finish my dissertation while working in another field I like and learning skills that would make me more hireable in the long run. There is job security in this field (or at least, more than academia). This job includes well-paid training that I would not be able to get otherwise (unless I went back to school yet again). However, this program is being phased out over the next year, so it is no longer an option for me to try/fail the academic jobs market first.
I'm worried that if I don't take this opportunity, in 3 years when I've slogged away for 60 hours a week as an adjunct or postdoc for no certain future I will completely regret not doing this when I had the chance. It's not that I no longer want to try academia, but is it even WORTH trying in such a competitive field when I know I'm definitely not the most qualified, when I could have a fulfilling career and happy life in another field now?
I'm ABD, on track to finish my dissertation in about a year, for 5.5 years total post BA. I've wanted to be a professor for a very, very long time, and I've sacrificed a lot to reach that goal. The problem is that in my particular position, I'm not sure if I'm hireable, and am starting to wonder if I should take an opportunity to do something else with my life.
My colleagues and supervisors like me, my committee likes my dissertation idea (although I'm still analyzing data and haven't actually written more than the methods and intro yet), I'm passionate about my field, and I love teaching. I have two main problems:
1. I was on a fellowship almost my entire time here, which was great in terms of getting work done, but I only have 3 semesters teaching experience, plus some odd tutoring.
2. My dad was diagnosed with cancer in 2012 and died 8 months later, in 2013. I was severely depressed for about two years (and have come out of it with therapy and time), and did not pursue independent research or go to conferences for a year after his death. Now I'm looking at recently hired candidates' CVs and am really feeling that gap, as I've only been to two conferences and had one proceedings paper. I don't think potential employers wouldn't be sympathetic to that situation, but it's not like I can put it with an asterisk somewhere on my CV so they don't put me in the rejection pile right away.
I've known since the beginning that tenure-track might not be in the cards for me, and I accepted that the PhD might just be letters tacked on my name and I'd have to change careers afterwards. But I always assumed I would try for the dream job first, and give up only if it didn't play out.
However, there's a non-academic job opportunity for me that would allow me to finish my dissertation while working in another field I like and learning skills that would make me more hireable in the long run. There is job security in this field (or at least, more than academia). This job includes well-paid training that I would not be able to get otherwise (unless I went back to school yet again). However, this program is being phased out over the next year, so it is no longer an option for me to try/fail the academic jobs market first.
I'm worried that if I don't take this opportunity, in 3 years when I've slogged away for 60 hours a week as an adjunct or postdoc for no certain future I will completely regret not doing this when I had the chance. It's not that I no longer want to try academia, but is it even WORTH trying in such a competitive field when I know I'm definitely not the most qualified, when I could have a fulfilling career and happy life in another field now?
It depends a lot on the field. In my field, what your advisor says in their letter matters more than anything else. This isn't easy, but you just have to go up to your Ph.D. advisor and say, am I going to be competitive on the academic job market in my field? That can be a hard question to ask, but you have good reason to ask it, and your advisor gets that.
posted by escabeche at 6:00 PM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by escabeche at 6:00 PM on November 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Also, if you describe a post-doc as a "slog," do you really want to stay in the field? If you can find a funded post-doc, that's the kind of work you'd be doing as an academic.
posted by sweltering at 6:03 PM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by sweltering at 6:03 PM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
First off, I'm sorry about your dad.
It is difficult to answer your question without additional details such as your field and whether you have applied for this other opportunity and have an actual offer on the table, or if you are just *thinking* about applying. If you haven't applied, you should.
When writing letters of recommendation, faculty members can, and often do, point out personal difficulties graduate students have faced in order to explain away gaps. And there is plenty of backchannel communication between faculty members during the hiring season. So, while you can't put an asterisk on your CV, there are other ways to disseminate this information.
I don't think you should let a few lines on your CV stop you from applying for academic jobs, assuming certain background conditions are satisfied; very often, those coming out are hired on the basis of their promise, as opposed to their actual accomplishments. If you are coming from an excellent program with well known advisors, your gaps will not hold you back. If you are coming out of a so-so program with people who don't publish very much....well, things don't look so good.
Having said that, I think anyone who can figure out how to do anything else should run away as fast as they can from a career in academia.
posted by girl flaneur at 6:09 PM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
It is difficult to answer your question without additional details such as your field and whether you have applied for this other opportunity and have an actual offer on the table, or if you are just *thinking* about applying. If you haven't applied, you should.
When writing letters of recommendation, faculty members can, and often do, point out personal difficulties graduate students have faced in order to explain away gaps. And there is plenty of backchannel communication between faculty members during the hiring season. So, while you can't put an asterisk on your CV, there are other ways to disseminate this information.
I don't think you should let a few lines on your CV stop you from applying for academic jobs, assuming certain background conditions are satisfied; very often, those coming out are hired on the basis of their promise, as opposed to their actual accomplishments. If you are coming from an excellent program with well known advisors, your gaps will not hold you back. If you are coming out of a so-so program with people who don't publish very much....well, things don't look so good.
Having said that, I think anyone who can figure out how to do anything else should run away as fast as they can from a career in academia.
posted by girl flaneur at 6:09 PM on November 4, 2014 [3 favorites]
To be blunt: no one is competitive to be hirable right now in academia.
Are you willing to go on a national job search to look for an academic job (tenured or not)? Are you willing to move to upper timbuktwostan for a job and then possibly live there forever? Are you willing to put up with a job where the default expectation is that your weekends and evenings are fair game for work, where you may have colleagues who haven't sat on a committee in 20 years so you end up doing more than your share because someone has to run the place? Do you want to have to explain over and over again why you're not answering emails from students at 3am about their advising code? Are you willing to trade some pretty significant life inflexibility (my butt had better be in class at my scheduled times unless something's pretty wrong) for larger chunks of unscheduled time? (It's not off, heh.)
Don't get me wrong; I love what I do - most days. And there are some significant life advantages - I never have to worry about shift bids, whether I'm going to get the holidays off, or if I can take my mom to her doctor's appointment (if dad remembered to check my calendar before making the appointment). But there's a lot not to like about the job, too (and don't forget, if you do happen upon a tenure track position, that you need to be able to turn out the research to keep your job.)
Paid training, time to finish your dissertation, job security, and presumably things like paid vacation time and sick time and so on? Take the opportunity now. You can always come back - you can adjunct to scratch the teaching itch (and as an actual PT thing, not a hodge used to try to pay the rent, adjuncting isn't bad) - and people do work in industry and then come back to academic jobs. But I'd urge you to take the surer opportunity now.
(Also, don't forget, there are academic opportunities that are not teaching - someone has to direct the undergraduate sciences advising center, run the IRB, supervise the compliance office, run the multicultural affairs office. These kinds of staff positions often hit the sweet spot between being an academic and having a normal 8 to 5 job, and these kinds of jobs often find job experience outside the academy a strength, not a weakness.)
posted by joycehealy at 6:11 PM on November 4, 2014 [13 favorites]
Are you willing to go on a national job search to look for an academic job (tenured or not)? Are you willing to move to upper timbuktwostan for a job and then possibly live there forever? Are you willing to put up with a job where the default expectation is that your weekends and evenings are fair game for work, where you may have colleagues who haven't sat on a committee in 20 years so you end up doing more than your share because someone has to run the place? Do you want to have to explain over and over again why you're not answering emails from students at 3am about their advising code? Are you willing to trade some pretty significant life inflexibility (my butt had better be in class at my scheduled times unless something's pretty wrong) for larger chunks of unscheduled time? (It's not off, heh.)
Don't get me wrong; I love what I do - most days. And there are some significant life advantages - I never have to worry about shift bids, whether I'm going to get the holidays off, or if I can take my mom to her doctor's appointment (if dad remembered to check my calendar before making the appointment). But there's a lot not to like about the job, too (and don't forget, if you do happen upon a tenure track position, that you need to be able to turn out the research to keep your job.)
Paid training, time to finish your dissertation, job security, and presumably things like paid vacation time and sick time and so on? Take the opportunity now. You can always come back - you can adjunct to scratch the teaching itch (and as an actual PT thing, not a hodge used to try to pay the rent, adjuncting isn't bad) - and people do work in industry and then come back to academic jobs. But I'd urge you to take the surer opportunity now.
(Also, don't forget, there are academic opportunities that are not teaching - someone has to direct the undergraduate sciences advising center, run the IRB, supervise the compliance office, run the multicultural affairs office. These kinds of staff positions often hit the sweet spot between being an academic and having a normal 8 to 5 job, and these kinds of jobs often find job experience outside the academy a strength, not a weakness.)
posted by joycehealy at 6:11 PM on November 4, 2014 [13 favorites]
You're deciding between a purely academic career path, and taking a less-academic branch that's still related to your field. Yes, job prospects are a major factor in this decision, but the other thing is trying to evaluate what job you really truly want.
Make some lists:
- your favorite things about your field, favorite things about being a grad student
- what you think would be your favorite and least favorite tasks if you had a professorship: the teaching? (the classroom presentations, or one-on-one?) talking/writing about big science concepts, or solving small practical lab problems? The project planning, or the execution? Handling large amounts of money and/or managing a team of students?
- what you think would be your favorite and least favorite tasks in this other career path?
For my career decisions, this really helped me to realize that professors spend a lot of time doing things that I don't like doing, and that one of the reasons I was so insecure about my job prospects was because I was aware of other candidates who really wanted to do those parts of the professorship job.
posted by aimedwander at 7:43 PM on November 4, 2014
Make some lists:
- your favorite things about your field, favorite things about being a grad student
- what you think would be your favorite and least favorite tasks if you had a professorship: the teaching? (the classroom presentations, or one-on-one?) talking/writing about big science concepts, or solving small practical lab problems? The project planning, or the execution? Handling large amounts of money and/or managing a team of students?
- what you think would be your favorite and least favorite tasks in this other career path?
For my career decisions, this really helped me to realize that professors spend a lot of time doing things that I don't like doing, and that one of the reasons I was so insecure about my job prospects was because I was aware of other candidates who really wanted to do those parts of the professorship job.
posted by aimedwander at 7:43 PM on November 4, 2014
Maybe I'm missing some constraint here but...it looks to me like you don't need to make this decision yet. IF it's the case that 1) the time you'd dedicate to your dissertation while at the other job is fungible, and 2) you're in a field where it's ok to publish dissertation content before the dissertation is defended, you are potentially in a very enviable situation.
Here's my suggestion: Take the other opportunity. Immediately start dragging your feet on your dissertation, because you don't want to graduate prematurely and let your Ph.D. get stale while you're working in your new job. Using the time you would have been spending on your dissertation, submit at least one, preferably two, papers to decent journals for peer review (maybe one single-authored, one co-authored?). In the year or so it will take your paper(s) to get through a couple rounds of revisions, get the dissertation into basic shape. Let's say this whole process takes 1.5 years. Or maybe you're going a little slower because of the other job so this whole process takes you 2.5 years (if you don't like the idea of writing two journal papers and a dissertation while working a job, you might not like being a professor).The key thing is to not graduate until you're ready to go on the market -- in other words, don't decide to crank out the dissertation as fast as possible and then write the papers. Put the publishing wheels in motion, then dissertate, then graduate.
Now all of a sudden you're a fresh Ph.D. going on the market with a couple serious papers under your belt, some cool work experience that says you are both an intellectual risk-taker and responsible adult, and the freedom to look at your options with clear eyes because you aren't panicked about having no back-up plan. This is as damn near perfect a scenario as I can imagine. You can skip doing the applications to teach a 6-6 in upper Timbuktwostan; you can ignore the VAP racket. And if, by that point, you've decided you love your new career and are no longer interested in being a professor, well then you can skip the bullshit of the academic job market entirely and just enjoy the fact that you now have a happy life and a Ph.D., awesome.
posted by ootandaboot at 11:33 PM on November 4, 2014 [10 favorites]
Here's my suggestion: Take the other opportunity. Immediately start dragging your feet on your dissertation, because you don't want to graduate prematurely and let your Ph.D. get stale while you're working in your new job. Using the time you would have been spending on your dissertation, submit at least one, preferably two, papers to decent journals for peer review (maybe one single-authored, one co-authored?). In the year or so it will take your paper(s) to get through a couple rounds of revisions, get the dissertation into basic shape. Let's say this whole process takes 1.5 years. Or maybe you're going a little slower because of the other job so this whole process takes you 2.5 years (if you don't like the idea of writing two journal papers and a dissertation while working a job, you might not like being a professor).The key thing is to not graduate until you're ready to go on the market -- in other words, don't decide to crank out the dissertation as fast as possible and then write the papers. Put the publishing wheels in motion, then dissertate, then graduate.
Now all of a sudden you're a fresh Ph.D. going on the market with a couple serious papers under your belt, some cool work experience that says you are both an intellectual risk-taker and responsible adult, and the freedom to look at your options with clear eyes because you aren't panicked about having no back-up plan. This is as damn near perfect a scenario as I can imagine. You can skip doing the applications to teach a 6-6 in upper Timbuktwostan; you can ignore the VAP racket. And if, by that point, you've decided you love your new career and are no longer interested in being a professor, well then you can skip the bullshit of the academic job market entirely and just enjoy the fact that you now have a happy life and a Ph.D., awesome.
posted by ootandaboot at 11:33 PM on November 4, 2014 [10 favorites]
To me it is a total no-brainer that you take the job. If you hate or feel it is a mistake you can always quit.
This depends on the field, but in my experience tenure track just isnt there as an option unless you have a stellar CV. Those I know who have made it have the holy glow about them. The CV radiates with accomplishment. In my opinion it is not even worth trying unless you are in that league or you see a clear path to getting there.
I took a job in my last year of my PhD and it was the best thing I could have done. It gave me focus and it re-anchored me. And then not depending on academia gave me agency in the face of all this uncertainty. It also made me a better scholar. My research and dissertation were bolder, because I wasnt worried about my career or trying to please other profs. I chose to stay full time in my new career, but if I had decided to pivot back to academia I would have been in a much better headspace and with a clearer sense of what I wanted from my career.
posted by PercussivePaul at 11:53 PM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
This depends on the field, but in my experience tenure track just isnt there as an option unless you have a stellar CV. Those I know who have made it have the holy glow about them. The CV radiates with accomplishment. In my opinion it is not even worth trying unless you are in that league or you see a clear path to getting there.
I took a job in my last year of my PhD and it was the best thing I could have done. It gave me focus and it re-anchored me. And then not depending on academia gave me agency in the face of all this uncertainty. It also made me a better scholar. My research and dissertation were bolder, because I wasnt worried about my career or trying to please other profs. I chose to stay full time in my new career, but if I had decided to pivot back to academia I would have been in a much better headspace and with a clearer sense of what I wanted from my career.
posted by PercussivePaul at 11:53 PM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
Most of the people I went to school with have ended up outside academia, even those who were supported by parents or spouses through post-docs. A couple had bizarre good luck in finding a post where the chair just happened to really like them and they stayed there - but they are stuck at a school in (e.g.) Iowa and they fantasize frequently about leaving their tenured position to go some place that would make them happier.
Nothing you do will make your future more certain - and your depression didn't make your future uncertain, the destruction of the academy did. You could be the perfect applicant some place. My advice: be realistic about the prospects of getting an academic job. Finish your dissertation while working and making a life outside the academy. Try to get an academic job as good opportunities present themselves. Concentrate on your strengths.
posted by sweltering at 5:58 PM on November 4, 2014 [2 favorites]