What are the Pros and Cons of a IT Career in Academia/ School campus?
June 16, 2023 8:38 AM Subscribe
After working in IT for a while I figure I want to take my career path in education/academia. Ex: University System Admin, College User Support, Elementary Computer Lab Technician , School District IT Assistant, High School System Admin or just something related to this.
Does anyone here work in an Academia related environment it doesn’t have to be IT but any non-teacher job? What’s your experience been working in schools?
Pros and cons? Do you guys get Spring Break or Winter Break off? How is Job Stability ?
Do you like working with teachers and students ?
Do you get summers off paid or do you work on projects during summer ?
How is the pay and PTO like?
Would you recommand working in Schools Long Term?
Does anyone here work in an Academia related environment it doesn’t have to be IT but any non-teacher job? What’s your experience been working in schools?
Pros and cons? Do you guys get Spring Break or Winter Break off? How is Job Stability ?
Do you like working with teachers and students ?
Do you get summers off paid or do you work on projects during summer ?
How is the pay and PTO like?
Would you recommand working in Schools Long Term?
A counterpoint: I work in central IT for a .edu and we get two weeks in December in addition to our vacation time and sick time. And we are closed (I think ten) Fridays in the summer with no requirement to make up the hours. Good health insurance and 401(k), plus sweet tuition benefits for me and my family. (MeMail me for a longer explanation.)
I manage the Unix sysadmins and the data center team, plus handle AWS and some other stuff.
I took the job for the good time off when my kids were little -- and have stayed here for 22 years already. The faculty that I have dealt with range from delightful to annoying, but most are great. Many of the staff have family working here, too, so no one is a total jerk.
Being around college kids is cool: they are learning to be People and you can have good working relationships when you find the curious, motivated ones. (We have student workers in IT and some of them are better than full time colleagues.)
We do more with less than people in private companies, but the expectations are different. I would hate to go back!
posted by wenestvedt at 9:55 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]
I manage the Unix sysadmins and the data center team, plus handle AWS and some other stuff.
I took the job for the good time off when my kids were little -- and have stayed here for 22 years already. The faculty that I have dealt with range from delightful to annoying, but most are great. Many of the staff have family working here, too, so no one is a total jerk.
Being around college kids is cool: they are learning to be People and you can have good working relationships when you find the curious, motivated ones. (We have student workers in IT and some of them are better than full time colleagues.)
We do more with less than people in private companies, but the expectations are different. I would hate to go back!
posted by wenestvedt at 9:55 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]
Also, much of IT has been WFH since March 13, 2020, though folks doing direct desktop support and networking are on campus.
posted by wenestvedt at 9:56 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by wenestvedt at 9:56 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
I am non-technical staff at a university, working in research administration. Spring break isn't a thing for us - if anything, it's a busy time because the faculty take the chance to focus on all the non-teaching admin they've been ignoring. Winter break, though, is absolutely a thing - my team essentially shuts down for two weeks. A couple of us who are higher up in the team check in on the emails every few days just to make sure nothing urgent has come in. I've been here a decade-plus and there has never actually been a winter break emergency. Summer is mostly just normal work time for us, but again, sometimes it's a bit of a busy time because faculty turn away from their teaching focus and back to their research. (Conversely, the busy times of the academic year - starts and ends of semesters, midterms - are generally really quiet for me because the faculty have no time to think about what I do for them, and that's a great time for me to schedule vacations.)
Job stability is generally terrific, once you hit a job you like and want to stay in. But some (a very small but very vocal) number of faculty are absolute tyrants to work for/with, and will absolutely not ever be reined in by anyone above their head, so it tends to be the case that specific jobs working with those specific people have tons of turnover and you won't want to stay in one if you land there.
Pay completely varies. I get paid much better for what I do at the private university where I work than my counterpart at the public university down the street. I get paid much less than I could if I took my expertise into the corporate sphere. Raises are regular but small.
PTO's decent, not spectacular, where I work now. At a different university it was slightly less but they had a whole complicated scheme where you could buy more PTO - this is just really a case by case thing.
I never work with undergrads. I sometimes work with grad students and they're terrific. Faculty are all over the place but mostly the tricky ones are the ones who have been around for fifty years, remember a very different time when they did not have to adhere to policies and regulations and were more or less deferred to as miniature gods, and now we make them complete forms and abide by other people's processes, and they hate it and can be really shitty to staff, who are at the bottom of the pecking order and safe to take our their aggression on. That old guard is retiring, slowly, and the generation of researchers behind them is generally a pleasure to work with. I take quiet pleasure in outlasting some of my worst-behaved faculty, and have great relationships with almost everyone else.
I love academia and don't see ever leaving it for the corporate world that would pay me more. It's a mixed blessing, really, in that any given city probably only has a handful of colleges so if you want to leave where you work but stay in academia, your options might be limited. Remote work is helping with this, and is becoming the standard in my specific field.
posted by Stacey at 10:00 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]
Job stability is generally terrific, once you hit a job you like and want to stay in. But some (a very small but very vocal) number of faculty are absolute tyrants to work for/with, and will absolutely not ever be reined in by anyone above their head, so it tends to be the case that specific jobs working with those specific people have tons of turnover and you won't want to stay in one if you land there.
Pay completely varies. I get paid much better for what I do at the private university where I work than my counterpart at the public university down the street. I get paid much less than I could if I took my expertise into the corporate sphere. Raises are regular but small.
PTO's decent, not spectacular, where I work now. At a different university it was slightly less but they had a whole complicated scheme where you could buy more PTO - this is just really a case by case thing.
I never work with undergrads. I sometimes work with grad students and they're terrific. Faculty are all over the place but mostly the tricky ones are the ones who have been around for fifty years, remember a very different time when they did not have to adhere to policies and regulations and were more or less deferred to as miniature gods, and now we make them complete forms and abide by other people's processes, and they hate it and can be really shitty to staff, who are at the bottom of the pecking order and safe to take our their aggression on. That old guard is retiring, slowly, and the generation of researchers behind them is generally a pleasure to work with. I take quiet pleasure in outlasting some of my worst-behaved faculty, and have great relationships with almost everyone else.
I love academia and don't see ever leaving it for the corporate world that would pay me more. It's a mixed blessing, really, in that any given city probably only has a handful of colleges so if you want to leave where you work but stay in academia, your options might be limited. Remote work is helping with this, and is becoming the standard in my specific field.
posted by Stacey at 10:00 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]
An additional perk in academia is that you and your children may be elegible for free or greatly reduced tuition. I got a masters and my kids went free to a local university in my city while I was working there - I was a staff member, not faculty. Faculty at the Ivies have expanded levels of free education beyond staff, usually.
I recently worked a contract position at a fabulous local private K-12 school where tuition is $30k for kindergarten and $44k/yr for 12th grade. All faculty and staff kids went for free, probably to compensate teachers for the modest salaries they make.
Your working schedule in summer and on vacations is probably sector - university, private k-12, school district - specific, and there are often strong unions in public schools for staff and teachers where benefits and salaries are based on the contract.
posted by citygirl at 10:01 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
I recently worked a contract position at a fabulous local private K-12 school where tuition is $30k for kindergarten and $44k/yr for 12th grade. All faculty and staff kids went for free, probably to compensate teachers for the modest salaries they make.
Your working schedule in summer and on vacations is probably sector - university, private k-12, school district - specific, and there are often strong unions in public schools for staff and teachers where benefits and salaries are based on the contract.
posted by citygirl at 10:01 AM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm a computery person and I have been working in the .edu sector as a researcher, sysadmin, engineer, and manager for thirty years. Everyone's experience is different, and every school is different, and every department is different. My experiences are all in large state colleges in the US.
Does anyone here work in an Academia related environment it doesn’t have to be IT but any non-teacher job?
Yes! Me! And others.
What’s your experience been working in schools?
It's been fine. I'm not getting rich, but that's okay. It's important to me to not be part of the military-industrial-financial complex. Whether working for a university in the USA really gets one out of that loop is debatable, but for me it's enough to work for institutions where at least on paper their mission is education and the public good.
Pros and cons? Do you guys get Spring Break or Winter Break off? How is Job Stability ?
Cons - money isn't great. The politics can be a drag once one gets into management. "The politics are so dirty because the stakes are so low" as someone may have said at some point.
I don't get spring break or winter break off, but some people with families take that time off.
Stability is excellent. No job is entirely safe - funding disappears - but the odds of being laid off because "efficiency" are small. Universities are typically very risk averse and very hesitant to fire people. You have to screw up really badly to get canned, and it can take a long time. Some people take advantage of that, which can be incredibly frustrating - there are a good number of people who basically very little all day with no consequences, which is maddening sometimes if you need something from them. There are few ways to apply pressure if they just don't give a crap.
The bureaucracy is sloooooooow. Hiring takes FOREVER.
Work/life balance is good.
Do you like working with teachers and students ?
I don't work with teachers and students, I work with network management infrastructure.
Do you get summers off paid or do you work on projects during summer ?
I work a full calendar year. My work and the work of many people in non-academic positions is not tied to the academic calendar in any meaningful way. As others noted, times when students are out are often busier in some ways, because that's when work that may disrupt teaching can be done (like major system upgrades.)
How is the pay and PTO like?
Pay is not great compared to the private sector, especially at the lower levels. I make a comfortable three-digit salary, but I've been doing this for a long time. Ay my institution, PTO is excellent - a minimum of six weeks paid time off, plus public holidays. You can bank unused PTO to use as sick days.
Would you recommand working in Schools Long Term?
Depends. I've made my career in academia and it's worked for me. I value stability. Sometimes I look at friends and peers I went to college with who have made literally orders of magnitude more money than me, and I think it would be nice to have a holiday home or retire decades early. But I also see them sacrifice their health and time with their partners and families and.... well, selling their souls to the machine. Maybe it's just a different machine. IDK, and some of them seem very happy being rich. To each their own.
posted by buxtonbluecat at 10:25 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]
Does anyone here work in an Academia related environment it doesn’t have to be IT but any non-teacher job?
Yes! Me! And others.
What’s your experience been working in schools?
It's been fine. I'm not getting rich, but that's okay. It's important to me to not be part of the military-industrial-financial complex. Whether working for a university in the USA really gets one out of that loop is debatable, but for me it's enough to work for institutions where at least on paper their mission is education and the public good.
Pros and cons? Do you guys get Spring Break or Winter Break off? How is Job Stability ?
Cons - money isn't great. The politics can be a drag once one gets into management. "The politics are so dirty because the stakes are so low" as someone may have said at some point.
I don't get spring break or winter break off, but some people with families take that time off.
Stability is excellent. No job is entirely safe - funding disappears - but the odds of being laid off because "efficiency" are small. Universities are typically very risk averse and very hesitant to fire people. You have to screw up really badly to get canned, and it can take a long time. Some people take advantage of that, which can be incredibly frustrating - there are a good number of people who basically very little all day with no consequences, which is maddening sometimes if you need something from them. There are few ways to apply pressure if they just don't give a crap.
The bureaucracy is sloooooooow. Hiring takes FOREVER.
Work/life balance is good.
Do you like working with teachers and students ?
I don't work with teachers and students, I work with network management infrastructure.
Do you get summers off paid or do you work on projects during summer ?
I work a full calendar year. My work and the work of many people in non-academic positions is not tied to the academic calendar in any meaningful way. As others noted, times when students are out are often busier in some ways, because that's when work that may disrupt teaching can be done (like major system upgrades.)
How is the pay and PTO like?
Pay is not great compared to the private sector, especially at the lower levels. I make a comfortable three-digit salary, but I've been doing this for a long time. Ay my institution, PTO is excellent - a minimum of six weeks paid time off, plus public holidays. You can bank unused PTO to use as sick days.
Would you recommand working in Schools Long Term?
Depends. I've made my career in academia and it's worked for me. I value stability. Sometimes I look at friends and peers I went to college with who have made literally orders of magnitude more money than me, and I think it would be nice to have a holiday home or retire decades early. But I also see them sacrifice their health and time with their partners and families and.... well, selling their souls to the machine. Maybe it's just a different machine. IDK, and some of them seem very happy being rich. To each their own.
posted by buxtonbluecat at 10:25 AM on June 16, 2023 [3 favorites]
Response by poster: Yea Education seems to be where I will take my end game. A long time ago I worked in two corporate jobs that I got let go of and didn’t last long
Honestly if I could help it myself I would avoid corporate America. I have only had good work experience working purely in education.
posted by iwantworklifebalance101 at 10:27 AM on June 16, 2023
Honestly if I could help it myself I would avoid corporate America. I have only had good work experience working purely in education.
posted by iwantworklifebalance101 at 10:27 AM on June 16, 2023
I worked for ten years as a "Senior Programmer" at a large school district in California. A school district is a complex beast beyond academics; there are also ordinary accounting, payroll, inventory, bus route management, child nutrition services and network systems to deal with, and frequently these diverse systems need to interoperate. (Example: the HR system hires teachers; the teachers need to appear in the student system so that they can be assigned to classes or courses.) So system integration is very important, particularly when districts purchase third-party software (like mapping software for bus routes or emailing systems for parental notifications).
And there's a whole world of state- and federal-level reporting to consider. Since this involves the generation and submission of data files, "it's an IT problem." Except that it often involves money, so it's a high-priority to get done correctly on time.
The work takes place in seasons. Obviously, the start and end of the academic year. But also the start and end of the accounting year (which is related to but not the same as the academic year). The state and the feds have deadlines for their submissions. There are holidays to work around. I often thought that IT work in a school district was a kind of migrant labor, where you toil to harvest various crops of data depending on the time of year. There's no real "slack time."
My old school district is still using "work from home" for it's IT workers. This is in part because the district re-purposed the old IT offices and the new offices will be ready... eventually.
I came to working in a school district after a long career in the private sector. It was nice to finally get weekends off. It's stable work, but requirements always change so there are new problems to solve. Also, I obtained a pension that provides me a useful monthly income in my retirement; something to consider if you're a long-term planner.
posted by SPrintF at 11:03 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]
And there's a whole world of state- and federal-level reporting to consider. Since this involves the generation and submission of data files, "it's an IT problem." Except that it often involves money, so it's a high-priority to get done correctly on time.
The work takes place in seasons. Obviously, the start and end of the academic year. But also the start and end of the accounting year (which is related to but not the same as the academic year). The state and the feds have deadlines for their submissions. There are holidays to work around. I often thought that IT work in a school district was a kind of migrant labor, where you toil to harvest various crops of data depending on the time of year. There's no real "slack time."
My old school district is still using "work from home" for it's IT workers. This is in part because the district re-purposed the old IT offices and the new offices will be ready... eventually.
I came to working in a school district after a long career in the private sector. It was nice to finally get weekends off. It's stable work, but requirements always change so there are new problems to solve. Also, I obtained a pension that provides me a useful monthly income in my retirement; something to consider if you're a long-term planner.
posted by SPrintF at 11:03 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]
I've worked in higher ed IT for a very long time (17ish years all told), the vast majority of the time as a software developer/admin by default type (i.e. I wrangled the web servers on the on-prem boxes because I knew how the best). Most of this at this point has been at a mid-sized public university in the South; now I'm at an Ivy League. I did a stint in small/medium-sized corporate as well. Most of what people have already said is true but I will note a few things:
- The fact that the pay sucks (comparatively) also means that finding coworkers sucks. How much of a problem this is will depend on what you're doing specifically but expect it to be harder to hire people for salaried positions. (The corollary to that is the folks that get hired tend to stick around for a long while if they're a good match for academia.) But, I'm talking about staff positions here; if you're doing things that you could hire student workers for (in a higher ed setting), it's less of a problem.
- Depending again on what specifically is going on, there is indeed some down time, but it's not necessarily between semesters. When I worked closer to the helpdesk (which included lab techs and smart classroom support), the middles of the semesters would be noticeably quieter (with a bump in activity around midterms) where summers were very busy as that was prime time for equipment refresh. Even without that, there's often more pressure and scrutiny around semester starts and ends unless you're, like, supporting a purely research part of the org.
- Benefits are often real good. When I left the state school, each time I walked away with several months of back pay from accrued vacation. (Some people are smarter than I am and took said vacation; I did not.) Where I am now also has pretty great benefits but they're not as good as I had (at least from a time off perspective). They both beat corporate, in my experience, especially in that no one really bats an eye about unplanned time off or using your vacation or anything like that. (If you want numbers, both gave me 15 hours/month of PTO and 7.5 of sick; they both capped PTO accrual but the old place caps at a ridiculous number that goes up based on longevity and the new place is up to 4 weeks or something. I think my cap at old place was around 390 hours of PTO. Really absurd but nice.)
- Upward mobility can be pretty limited. I've known folks that have been in a position for years and years and haven't moved up or gotten much in raises because there's not really anywhere for them to go, and it can take ages for positions to be created/reclassified. This is maybe more of a problem at a smaller school, or a state one.
- Your budget is always, and will forever be, constrained. Management will generally try not, in my experience, resolve budget by culling employees. But you'll probably have the same computer for 7 years and you're probably gonna have to spend time extracting 110% out of some software system or swapping vendors because whatever is too expensive now (looking at you, Atlassian).
- I've found stability to be pretty great - after I left and did the stint in corporate, I had to be in interviews and it was sort of surreal, because I walked into a room full of people I already knew real well.
- Depending on what you want to get into, you may not actually have to interact with students and professors. If you're doing a lab manager or end user support type job, then you obviously will, but if you decide you want to defect and go work with the DBAs then you really probably won't anymore. (As a systems guy, I hardly ever interacted with non-admin folks.) Or, you can have the opportunity to move even more into academia. There've definitely been folks I've known that got out of IT and.. taught history or whatever instead. Or did that on top of their IT gig. (Actually, the latter is pretty.. not common but it's definitely not weird either.)
posted by mrg at 11:46 AM on June 16, 2023
- The fact that the pay sucks (comparatively) also means that finding coworkers sucks. How much of a problem this is will depend on what you're doing specifically but expect it to be harder to hire people for salaried positions. (The corollary to that is the folks that get hired tend to stick around for a long while if they're a good match for academia.) But, I'm talking about staff positions here; if you're doing things that you could hire student workers for (in a higher ed setting), it's less of a problem.
- Depending again on what specifically is going on, there is indeed some down time, but it's not necessarily between semesters. When I worked closer to the helpdesk (which included lab techs and smart classroom support), the middles of the semesters would be noticeably quieter (with a bump in activity around midterms) where summers were very busy as that was prime time for equipment refresh. Even without that, there's often more pressure and scrutiny around semester starts and ends unless you're, like, supporting a purely research part of the org.
- Benefits are often real good. When I left the state school, each time I walked away with several months of back pay from accrued vacation. (Some people are smarter than I am and took said vacation; I did not.) Where I am now also has pretty great benefits but they're not as good as I had (at least from a time off perspective). They both beat corporate, in my experience, especially in that no one really bats an eye about unplanned time off or using your vacation or anything like that. (If you want numbers, both gave me 15 hours/month of PTO and 7.5 of sick; they both capped PTO accrual but the old place caps at a ridiculous number that goes up based on longevity and the new place is up to 4 weeks or something. I think my cap at old place was around 390 hours of PTO. Really absurd but nice.)
- Upward mobility can be pretty limited. I've known folks that have been in a position for years and years and haven't moved up or gotten much in raises because there's not really anywhere for them to go, and it can take ages for positions to be created/reclassified. This is maybe more of a problem at a smaller school, or a state one.
- Your budget is always, and will forever be, constrained. Management will generally try not, in my experience, resolve budget by culling employees. But you'll probably have the same computer for 7 years and you're probably gonna have to spend time extracting 110% out of some software system or swapping vendors because whatever is too expensive now (looking at you, Atlassian).
- I've found stability to be pretty great - after I left and did the stint in corporate, I had to be in interviews and it was sort of surreal, because I walked into a room full of people I already knew real well.
- Depending on what you want to get into, you may not actually have to interact with students and professors. If you're doing a lab manager or end user support type job, then you obviously will, but if you decide you want to defect and go work with the DBAs then you really probably won't anymore. (As a systems guy, I hardly ever interacted with non-admin folks.) Or, you can have the opportunity to move even more into academia. There've definitely been folks I've known that got out of IT and.. taught history or whatever instead. Or did that on top of their IT gig. (Actually, the latter is pretty.. not common but it's definitely not weird either.)
posted by mrg at 11:46 AM on June 16, 2023
I agree with pretty much everything that’s been said above, but would just add that you might keep in mind that upper admin in IT deal with a lot of very angry, very entitled faculty who are all fighting over the same scraps and don’t want anyone, especially a staff person, telling them what equipment they can have, what security measures they have to take, etc. In my experience 80% of faculty are normal pleasant human beings and the other 20% would be fired on the spot for their appalling behavior if they worked in the real world, but have free rein to abuse anyone lower than them on the .edu totem pole.
posted by HotToddy at 12:29 PM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by HotToddy at 12:29 PM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]
I worked in education (SysAdmin, university for a non-academic department) and it was the best gig I ever had from a PTO standpoint, but there were things I didn't like. You won't get paid top of the private market range, there's going to be bureaucracy and stupidness from university higher-ups and central IT (unless you work for central IT), as staff, some faculty may look down their noses at you, and there are lots of quirks to be found. But, everyone is in the same boat on all those points, and you're there pulling a load to get students and faculty across the finish line. I miss it, but I also don't think I could have stood being under the thumb of two finance czars (university VP and the department VP) in a chronically underfunded department for more than the 4 years I was there.
posted by deezil at 12:39 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by deezil at 12:39 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
A lot of truth in here. I work year round, have great benefits, and a healthy relationship to work and the rest of life.
I've been in higher education IT for over 12 years now. Four years at a highly selective private liberal arts college and now eight at a huge Big 10 university. I get paid better at the Big 10. The fancy school could keep staff by simply being fancy. The university pay scales are widely variable, but I work for a big research institute that pays much closer to market. I'm still leaving a ton of money on the table compared to what I could make in the private sector, but I make comfortably over $100k in the midwest US. Benefits beat most employers around here.
Prior to this, I worked in state government, which was a magnification of all the cons of higher ed. Grossly underpaid, over regulated, and full of bureaucracy and the souls it has crushed. Higher ed is so much nicer than that.
Honestly, I think the sentence I said earlier about pay varying widely applies to everything at the university. There are some places I can't imagine a happier workplace (besides money) and there are some that you could never pay me enough to go near. There are great jobs at the university if you are willing to take the pay, and there are terrible ones. Network with people on the inside so you an tell the difference.
posted by advicepig at 1:01 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
I've been in higher education IT for over 12 years now. Four years at a highly selective private liberal arts college and now eight at a huge Big 10 university. I get paid better at the Big 10. The fancy school could keep staff by simply being fancy. The university pay scales are widely variable, but I work for a big research institute that pays much closer to market. I'm still leaving a ton of money on the table compared to what I could make in the private sector, but I make comfortably over $100k in the midwest US. Benefits beat most employers around here.
Prior to this, I worked in state government, which was a magnification of all the cons of higher ed. Grossly underpaid, over regulated, and full of bureaucracy and the souls it has crushed. Higher ed is so much nicer than that.
Honestly, I think the sentence I said earlier about pay varying widely applies to everything at the university. There are some places I can't imagine a happier workplace (besides money) and there are some that you could never pay me enough to go near. There are great jobs at the university if you are willing to take the pay, and there are terrible ones. Network with people on the inside so you an tell the difference.
posted by advicepig at 1:01 PM on June 16, 2023 [1 favorite]
Before you install all your eggs in one academic systembasket, my PSA is: One midsized college in my town recently outsourced most of its IT to India. Another brings in almost all its IT from an outside firm (the IT staff are therefore considered contractors, not university employees, and don't get benefits like free tuition that professors and other FT administrative staff do). So just be aware that events like that can happen, and can happen with no (or very little) warning.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:59 AM on June 17, 2023
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 4:59 AM on June 17, 2023
This thread is closed to new comments.
Pay is variable by region/institution.
Working with academics can be challenging. There is a pecking order, and administrative staff are near the bottom. Imagine the Big Bang Theory. If you’ve seen Sheldon, you can imagine what having him as a client would be like. It’s not for everybody, but those who like it, like it a lot.
I see from your question history and username that work life balance and things like having Christmas and New Years off is important to you. This may be a good fit. Lots of colleges and universities in California if you are still located there - perhaps other MeFites can speak to the competitiveness of the job market in your area. Best of luck.
posted by Juniper Toast at 8:49 AM on June 16, 2023 [4 favorites]