What is the point?

Tags

#education, reading

I recently edited a column in which a guy basically said – and I paraphrase – universities should focus on producing cheap labour for employers. These comments are part of a larger discourse in Hong Kong – and possibly the world – in which universities are seen as failing if they do not prepare graduates for the workforce.

The thing is, preparing people for the workforce is not the job of the university, in its historical sense. The university’s task is to educate. Full stop. If that education proves useful to the workforce, so be it. But if it doesn’t, that is not really the problem of the university. Education involves equipping young people with knowledge and hopefully the skills to acquire more knowledge.

Our modern universities are built in the European tradition, which distinguishes between universities (which perform the above function) and polytechnics which impart professional knowledge. But now it’s like people want the universities to be polytechnics, because otherwise what is the point?

Indeed. There is no point in universities in the true sense in a world in which everything is quantified in monetary terms.

In the past universities had patrons, just as the arts had patrons, because enlightened people recognised the value of funding the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. There was prestige in funding something beautiful or wondrous for its own sake. But also, there was the understanding that these pointless pursuits could sometimes yield results that would shatter human understanding and change history.

***

I also edited a letter by a student who bemoaned the growing utilitarianism of Hong Kong society – the idea that anything that doesn’t have an easily identifiable use is immediately worthless. I’d wager Hong Kong has always been utilitarian because it’s modern origins lay in commerce and in hardy people surviving by pursuing material goals. It is a pragmatism that is admirable.

But as Hong Kong has grown more prosperous, there is a seed of the desire for more. For the chance to do something that is besides the point, of doing for doings sake. And if any place has the money to fund such ventures Hong Kong has.

But still, you have people like that illustrious columnist insisting that everything must have its use … or go.

***

I am married to a man who asks ‘what is the point?’ Of a PhD for example. Spending years on something that doesn’t seem to have yielded any result to speak of.

The tedium of replying to these questions.

Before I was married, my husband’s sister asked what the point of literature is. At least architects build something, she said. She is an architect.

I recalled my iconic poet/teacher Eunice De Souza who firmly told us: “I’m not here to teach you how to sell toothpaste.” (Although many of her students did go on to do the many versions of selling toothpaste in the media).

I channelled Oscar Wilde and said: “There is no point. All art is quite useless.”

To her credit, she was silenced.

***

“What is the point of reading?” the husband asks, with just a touch of defensiveness.

The questioner in me can countenance the questioning of everything, and yet, I find this question more heretical than heresy itself. Nevertheless, I felt the need to engage with it.

The discussion was not so much about the point of reading but about whether one could gain the same knowledge without reading. I accept that there is certain forms of knowledge that are best gained through hands-on learning. For example, I never quite got why people need to do a two-year course or god forbid, a Bachelor’s degree, in journalism, when one could pretty much pick these skills up more effectively on the job. The fact that media organisations in Hong Kong screen resumes for even internships based on this ‘journalism degree background’ is another story. Admittedly, there might be some technical things to learn – though bizarrely in India the journalism courses were teaching software that was not used in newsrooms because the more updated programmes were too expensive probably – such as operating cameras and editing film for broadcast journalism maybe. And there could be some communication theory that would of of course. Frankly, I think journalists would benefit most from a cultural studies programme, which is actually worth three years of study, but I wouldn’t say it’s essential to being a journalist. But I digress.

Apart from the practical knowledge, there is more abstract knowledge – the kind one studies in a BA programme under the Humanities disciplines or some of the pure sciences – that as of now is contained in books. Some of it can be extracted and packaged in other media, which is what happens in classroom. But after a point, if you want to go deeper, this is not going to work. You are going to have to read the original – which is contained in a book. (I do not differentiate between listening to an audio book and reading here). There may come a time when books stop being the major source of knowledge – when people put their original ideas down not in paper but in film maybe – but you’d still have to grapple with book-knowledge if you want to go backwards in history.

The thing is, I don’t know a single person who has that kind of abstract intelligence, who does not read a lot.

So, it appears that the husband and I represent these two different forms of intelligence. And we each hold the other form in slightly less esteem. Ironically, this difference of intelligence was probably the very thing that attracted us to each other. But such is marriage.

***

Unfortunately, the job market prioritizes degrees, even when the degree has no real connection to the job. It’s possible that employers would prioritise work experience over degrees, but how to get work experience without a degree? It’s a vicious cycle.

This is the fault of employers, who instead of interviewing people and seeing if they seem bright enough for the job, judge them with a piece of paper. In the process, there is pressure on the piece of paper to conform to the job market, which is a pity.

***

In related reading, this.

Yay me

Tags

#education, #phd

So part of the reason for the silence is that I had to start prepping for my PhD oral defence in a hurry. I submitted my thesis at the end of the August last year and hoped I’d be done with the exam by the end of the year. Our department is notoriously slow about arranging the exam – which involves getting together a committee of two external examiners, two internals, one chair from the faculty and much coordination with the graduate school. To speed things up my supervisor and I identified the externals and got their agreement on being part of the committee before I even submitted. And yet, it was months before the committee was officially even formed.

At some point I gave up. I realised that I was too busy with teaching anyway to focus on an exam, and it would be better to have the exam around February, once I had settled into my new job. But when I checked in February, the admin guy told me it didn’t look like it could happen in March. So I was like whatevs, la la la while my parents and in-laws seemed more anxious about when I would finish than me.

Then suddenly I got an email from the admin guy informing me that my exam had been scheduled. It threw me into a panic. The first thing I had to do was get leave on the day. I had two weeks to prepare, which was not too bad but work turned out to be fairly busy and I had stuff lined up for the kids on the weekends leading up to the exam, so it wasn’t ideal.

I found myself thrown from the developments on the Korean peninsula and Trump’s threat of trade war into my own thoughts on single women and chick lit in India. I felt somewhat detached from the whole thing and was struggling to care.

However, I know from watching other people’s defences that this is a subjective process that can go badly wrong if one says something that ticks off a particular examiner and that the only defence is to prep thoroughly. I had had feedback from the two external examiners and there were a couple of sticky things that I did not relish the need to deal with.

I warned V that I was going to be missing in action the weekend before the exam, and cancelled a girls night out on the Friday with some regret. I barricaded myself in my room and plugged away at my presentation. I had to somehow whittle down three years’ work into 15 minutes. And I had to anticipate questions on and around the 80,000 word behemoth.

I allowed myself one social gathering – a party for Nene’s kindergarten friend – that weekend, at which I stupidly drank a glass of wine. I was fine until I got home and then had the worst headache, that prevented me from rereading my thesis as carefully as I would have liked, with the added irritation of V shaking his head and going “I told you not to drink.” (I mean, ONE glass). Finally, I turned in early, only to wake up at 2 am with the runs. So I guess I was nervous.

In the end, it went off rather well. The chair of my committee was someone I was comfortable with, the technology worked so that the external Skyping in could hear me and I her and the admin guy stuck around to switch between my slides and the examiner (something I had been worried about), and the external who I thought might be tough, was measured and polite. I had slides anticipating some of their questions, and by and large it was a good discussion, although I didn’t agree with all the feedback.

The result – passed with minor revisions.

So yeah, I’m basically there. I have to submit revisions and I should be working on that instead of typing this blog, but I’m hoping to get clearer idea of what I must do from the committee report. Then, it gets approved by my supervisor and the chair and goes to the senate for stamping.

The exam is the hardest part and I have to say that passing is a major relief. Although I had been teaching just a few months ago, I felt out of practice when it came to presenting. I hadn’t been in touch with my own thesis either for ages. But I survived, relatively unscathed.

I must have done something right because after the exam, the examiner I had been worried about alerted me to a job at her ink and pretty much told me I’d be perfect for it. You’d think as a newly minted almost-doctor I’d jump all over being on the inside track to a full time position. But I thought about it, discussed it with V (who was more into the idea than I thought he’d be considering what a mess I’d been during my teaching stint) and decided nah, I’d rather be a sub at this present moment. Being a highly paid minion suits me, and I’ll just have to find some other way to share my ideas than the prestige of academia. Not closing that door, but just sticking with what I’m enjoying right now.

Teacher teacher

Tags

#academia #recoveringacademic #teaching

Although I make it sound like it, my stint as a teacher was not all bad. I know that I’m not a bad teacher and I know that some students enjoy my classes (from their feedback and thank you notes and sharing months later). Some of the parts that I enjoyed:

1. Prepping for the classes: Putting the lecture PPT together and developing an argument. Yes, figuring out how to do this in an engaging manner across three hours is a stretch, but the yawning time aside, planning and envisioning the lecture was fun.
2. Delivering it was not so much fun. It’s one thing rehearsing in your head and an empty room and another standing up in front of a class of 30 not always attentive people and soldiering on. The zoned out kids in the back, the sound of my own voice, losing track of my script… all these things could throw me.
3. Keeping students engaged was the hardest part of my job, and I did my best, but really 3 hours is a long time for anyone, leave alone 19 year olds who aren’t the most academic to start with. (Obviously, I didn’t talk for three hours. Film clips and group discussion helped. But still.)
4. Teaching in English in Hong Kong is always going to be harder. It’s these kids’ second language and some of them struggle with comprehension. So getting engagement is hard, and in a three hour class, you count on engagement.
5. In a class of 30, you can expect 5 engaged students at best. This ratio does not work for me.
6. Odd interactions with students would affect me – someone complaining about their grade, a disruptive student, hell, someone rolling their eyes. V told me not to care so much, but I couldn’t help it. As MinCat pointed out, I’m in a hypersensitive phase. I recently met a TA who received a death threat from a student; I felt like my eye-rolling complaints paled in comparison.
7. Sometimes students would pleasantly surprise me with insightful comments, good observations during their presentation, or just indications that they got it. This is supposed to be what drives you as a teacher (since the salary sucks) and it would drive me… if it happened more often, hmph.
8. Grading is the bane of a teacher’s existence, well one of the banes. One generally expects to read a load of rubbish. But reading through the final papers of the one class I taught in my area of expertise, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised that they were actually seem to have got it. Does this mean they were actually listening and a few things I said made sense to them? I can’t take all the credit, but I’m going to take some.
9. The quality of students is hard to predict. I taught a Master’s course and the answers were appalling. Some of my higher diploma programme (community college) students were better than the Master’s students I taught. The uni students from the department I graduated from were pretty good though. Pleasant surprise. Wish they spoke up more though, and shared those pearls of intellect in class.
10. I enjoyed teaching the classes in my area of expertise more, even though they required me to prep for the lectures from scratch, to the English speaking classes where there was a textbook. I guess I do better when I know what I’m talking about.
11. I managed to remember the names of almost every student across 3 classes I taught. That’s about 80 students. Surprisingly, I didn’t get the names of all the uni students I taught in the course that went the best. Maybe because I didn’t take attendance consistently.
12. The worst point was mid-semester where everything seemed to drive me crazy. Towards the end of the semester, I actually found myself getting a bit sentimental and wondering if it was that bad. But having written this, yeah… I’m over it.

The job search annotated

Tags

#jobhunting #recoveringacademic #academia #PhD

This process has been “interesting”. It’s been a long ride since I actually started way back in July. Some things I learned along the way:

1. Don’t undervalue yourself. Though it’s hard not to when you’re getting no interest. The fact that I got no interest with 15 years of experience behind me rattled me no end. I entered the PhD thinking I had an escape route if the academic career didn’t work out, and I was stunned to realise that the door might have slammed shut behind me.

2. In the event, it turned out it hadn’t. It was a question of timing. Companies put out an ad and they like you to available in a month. I was applying two to three months in advance. Frankly, the entire process from start to finish (joining date) does take two months so I don’t know why companies are stuck on candidates who can be available in a one-month frame. Their loss I guess.

3. If you’re at the mid-senior level or above, you should use personal connections. Well, I guess at any level but at the mid-senior level, the field narrows. I don’t know how HR screens, but they’re doing something wrong.

4. Be persistent. Keep emailing the concerned person, especially if you have the line manager’s contact. You’d think people hiring would be eager to find someone, but especially in busy companies they sometimes don’t have the time. Both the offers I got, I nudged and nudged. It surprised me that this works but it does.

5. If you have a PhD, hide it. I started off explaining the PhD on my cover letters, then I stopped. I tucked it away in my resume, and I realised that several of the people I interviewed with hadn’t even noticed it. Heh. I don’t know if putting the PhD upfront in the beginning was the reason for me not getting any interest, but it well could be. There are people, especially academics, who think that having a PhD raises your stature in the job market – it does not, unless it’s related to the job in question. In the worst case, it will doom your chances because potential employers will question whether you can function in the real world, not to mention the insecurity of having a lesser academic degree themselves. I don’t have a superiority complex because of my PhD but it is assumed I do.

6. Try not to rush into the first offer your get. I tend to do this, because I want closure. The job hunt process is exhausting in a way. It is time-consuming and emotionally draining with it’s incessant highs and lows. When the last invitation to the next round of interviews came in after I had decided on the newspaper offer, I melted down for the exact opposite reason that I used to lose it at the beginning of my job search – now I had too many choices and I just wanted to pick one and be done with it. The tendency is to pick the first one. Ideally, I should have had the grit to stick it out for as long as possible and see what was out there until you get something that suits you best. I didn’t, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

7. Headhunters are pretty useless. I don’t know what they do. Okay, I know they’re supposed to screen, but they don’t seem to do anything much different from a typical HR. Moreover, they recruit for a job and once done, they don’t maintain contact at all. Okay, maybe I’m supposed to contact them, but wouldn’t it work two ways. I find it weird, that of all the headhunters I’ve been in touch with, none really followed up after the one job fell through. It is strange that when they work in a field, they won’t have other opportunities coming up that the same candidate could apply to. I had one useful conversation with a headhunter about salary scales and where I should be pitching myself, but other than that, I found them pointless and an extra step in the process that was a waste of time for me.

8. On the other hand, online recruitment websites are great. I found LinkedIn particularly useful. I should do more with my LinkedIn profile, but I don’t. I did upload a photo though. Get on all the online job aggregator sites and see what’s out there. I was on two sets of keyword alerts, the academic one and the editing one. Every morning after I’d open my eyes, I’d screen to these jobs, shortlist some and apply. I’ve lost track of how many I applied to. I wrote cover letters like a machine. I could start a side business in this. In fact, I actually polished the bios of all the employees of a friend’s company for a fee after she was impressed by mine.

9. When I signed up for one of the online sites, I could offered a free resume consultation. I took the offer, expecting it to be some generic comments. Turned out they sent me a personalized and detailed critique of my resume, obviously offering to polish it for me for a fee. I turned them down, but I took some of their critique on board. I barely acted on it, however, because I just didn’t have the time to overhaul my resume. I landed the offers I did with my sub-standard resume and networking and straight out cold applications. So there’s that.

10. When you have two possible career paths before you, you have to be clear what you want. I wasn’t for a longest time, until my unhappiness brought it to a head. Even then, I thought out my options clearly given my current situation. I talked to career starters in academia and got a realistic idea of what my life would be life and the money would be like if I stayed in the game. I talked to people in academia in India, and realised that given my need to restrict myself to one city at the start of my career, my options were limited. I wanted out of academia for emotional reasons, but I thought it through rationally. The fact is I don’t have the energy to gamble my reserves of time, money and EQ (what little of it I possess) on a career that would take at least two years to get reasonably started, if at all. If I was enjoying the work at the moment, it would have made the gamble more appealing and probably I would have stuck with it. In the event, it wasn’t and I found I didn’t have the stamina. I won’t say that this is the end of academia for me – I still have to do my defense and formally get my degree, and if a fulltime job opens up, I might apply. I might beef up publications which will help that, something teaching gives me no time to do. I plan to write more about my academic interests online (including here), again something I’ve wanted to do for ages but haven’t had the time to.

11. The reason you need to be clear about what you want is because everyone you talk to will have an opinion, and many most opinions, though well meaning, are based on that person’s own need not your own. A lot of people found it hard to accept me dropping academia after a PhD. I had to comfort them and explain (I do have a tendency to overexplain that I need to curb). I got their objections, but I had already been through that process and was beyond it. A lot of it is tied up to a preconceived idea of what should happen and status. I won’t say I’m immune to the prestige of certain jobs, but it’s never been my primary motivation. I like tangible things like how happy I actually am in the job – can I do it without losing my mind and my life outside the job – and money. Yes, their reaction contained disappointment on my behalf, but tinged with their own mixed up feelings. Many well meaning people liked the idea of having a friend who is an academic, just as when I was with the newspaper, they liked the idea of a friend who was a hotshot (kinda) reporter. Even when choosing between the newspaper job with its cool brand and the more stable corp comms jobs, people had a stake in telling me what to do, which is influenced by their own biases towards certain jobs that have a higher status. I can see this because I also hold those biases. But I refuse to act on them, at least not to the detriment of the two things that I really value in a job.

12. Particularly in academia, which frankly is cultish, there is this feeling if you choose to opt out you failed. I won’t say this doesn’t affect me but a) I have already have a very clear view of life outside academia and can compare the two somewhat more objectively than people who have never been outside academia (the case with most academics). People in academia bitch and moan about the neoliberal takeover of universities but if you cite these very things as reasons for leaving, they look at you strangely (or sympathetically, as my supervisor did at lunch yesterday).  b) I came across this post on The Professor is In (which is a great resource for grad students and young academics) on ‘recovering academics’ (I can’t find the exact one I read which was brill so not linking to it, but just google and you’ll find many). I knew I was likely going to be one – a person outside academia who thought like an academic in her free time – and it gave me comfort that were people out there in the same boat.

 

 

So

Those of you who have been following my intermittent updates might have cottoned onto the fact that I was not happy. The irony is that I was not happy … with pretty much if not exactly the situation that I had been hoping for before the PhD ended.

I had been hoping to get some teaching opportunities so I could work towards an academic career and I did. I got a decent amount of work even though the money was not great. You would also know that I had been wavering over whether I should pursue the low paying (for the short to medium term) academic path or ditch it and go back to commercial work. In the event, I didn’t get much commercial interest and having committed to teaching careers I was loathe to renege.

And then the semester started. And the reality of teaching FOUR classes hit me. To non-teaching folk this doesn’t seem like much but these are three hour lectures in which I have to prep all the material (to keep a bunch of 18-21 year olds for whom English is a second language engaged fir said three hours). In addition, there were a tonne of admin tasks from the three low paying gigs. On top of that, I took on some freelance work because a) wanted the money b) wanted to hold on to the clients in case I didn’t get teaching jobs the next semester.

That’s the thing with part-time teaching. Until possibly you have built your cred, you aren’t guaranteed a job next semester. You aren’t even guaranteed that you’ll be offered the same course you taught before. Even when you’ve built relationships, budgets change. Contracts are also confirmed last minute so don’t know up to the last minute whether you’ll have a gig or not.

Given the negatives, I found teaching part time too much work for too little reward. I was told by teachers that typically only 10% of the class will be engaged. In Hong Kong this is exacerbated by teaching in English to kids who are not fluent in English and the three hour timings coupled with kids who sleepy because of staying up all night/extracurricular plus the new phenomenon of iPhones/laptops in class and the distractions. Students see themselves as customers to be entertained and know the power of the teaching evaluation. In addition, there is soooo much admin work and ironically the lowest paid job require the most documentation.

At one point, at the height of my frustration, I started applying again to jobs outside academia. A conversation with a friend persuaded me that I should use my network. I don’t know why I’ve been hesitant in the past – mainly the fiercely independent streak that wants to a) do it all myself b) not be obligated to anyone. The fact though is that building the contacts that I would ask for help has been work (some were old colleagues who know my work) and whether I am obligated or not, I help people.

Slowly I began to get call backs to interviews and then suddenly in a flood towards the end of November I found myself in high demand. It came to a point where I was juggling offers and dictating my expectations. I had started out putting out a very low salary expectation, convinced that my PhD made me commercially unhirable. The HR of one company actually wrote to me to ask why I had specified ‘that figure’. They disregarded it and made me an offer that not only met but exceeded my previous salary, one that I was convinced was over inflated and would not be able to match. That happened right after a meeting with a headhunter who told me I was undervaluing myself and should ask for more.

The fact is that I was desperate. I wanted stable employment and I was willing to compromise heavily to get it. I couldn’t play the bluffing game … until someone made me a fair offer and then I wasn’t bluffing anymore. I had been spooked by the lack of interest in the past few months, and I’m still not sure why that was but I believe it was timing. Closer to the date I was available, the offers really picked up.

With one offer in hand, I was in a position to negotiate. I had to turn down the first offer I got though I did give them the opportunity to up their offer. Every time I though I was done with the process, I got asked to another round.

Finally, I signed with the good offer that I had to work with the newspaper I had in the past. Their package was surprisingly generous, the only catch being that there might be some weekend work and the leave allowance sucks (but that’s HK). Even after I signed that contract, I was contacted by a company I had written off after the first interview.

I’ll admit I just wanted the process to end. V pushed me to continue, saying that I should be open to better offers – well, basically a better deal on leave and working hours. I had a meltdown because I just wanted to sign off and be done with it. In the end, I wrote back and told the company my expectations and they couldn’t match them, so it looks like I’ll be going back to journalism. Which I’m not unthrilled about.

I haven’t had time to celebrate, except the first flush of joy when those initial offers came in, because I’ve always been in a sort of limbo with new offers coming in that I’m forced to consider, but I have an inkling I’m going to be just fine. Exhausted, thrown in at the deep end, but okay.

Things that keep me up at night

1. Keeping students engaged for THREE hours
2. Timing material accurately so that it is exactly three-hours long
3. Weird admin things that I suddenly while peeing at 2 am realize I forgot to do.
4. Teaching so much I cannot find time to write so that I will be condemned to forever teaching so much.
5. Finding a job outside academia to escape all this.
6. Finding a job outside academia and realising I forsook all this.

I can’t win.

Ending

 

I submitted my PhD thesis this week. Woo hoo.

I had planned to submit it earlier, the middle of the month, not the second last day before the deadline, but I kept proofreading and finding errors and I did not want to inflict the 70,000 word beast on a friend so I plodded on myself, until I ran out of time.

In between, as you know, I was scrambling with the job situation, and prepping for the FOUR courses that I will teach together. Ok, actually prepping for two, because I don’t know what is going on with the other two because it was only confirmed I was teaching it last week, and that’s when I got the textbook and a flood of info which I have only glanced at. And I still don’t have a contract.

I had all these plans for the way my PhD would end. I would submit at least a month in advance and use the last month and plentiful library access to write and submit a paper. That didn’t happen because a) I didn’t finish writing as quickly as I expected b) I realised I’d better prep for courses if I was going to take on enough work to make a liveable wage (by this I mean at least as much as my PhD stipend, oh how the mighty have fallen).

Then I planned to submit 15 days before and be completely prepped for the courses I would be teaching. That didn’t happen either. Well, I finished writing but the editing didn’t end, and I didn’t finish all the lecture PPTs, though maybe that was unrealistic too.

I held on to my 80 something books till the last minute because another of my grand plans was to scan everything I needed. Didn’t happen either. I did scan the material for the courses and got all of it (I hope) and some extras, but nowhere close to everything I would have wanted done. Finally, I just had to let go.

Returning my entire collection of books was the hardest part. In the end, I had to take a little suitcase to office and make two and something trips down to the book drop and finally, my bookcase was empty, and so was I.

I had also planned to hold on to my office key and use the office till the last day (or obnoxiously more) but a) I realised there were new students coming in, and they were being assigned the not-so-nice desks because we were still occupying ours b) I like abiding my the rules, but mainly c) something in me clicked shut when I saw my empty bookcase, and I cleared out my desk that very day and carted everything home in my little purple suitcase and handed back the key. And that was that. Happily it turns out that because I am part-time teaching I will get a desk in some other office, or at least some sort of office space, so I won’t be totally adrift.

I was soooo tired from a) lugging the six copies of my PhD across campus in the hard sun only to land up from at the Graduate School counter to an unceremonious “what?” from the inept woman there who acted like she had never encountered a student submitting a thesis before b) clearing out the office and lugging the admittedly stuffed suitcase to the MTR c) the emotional intensity of the ending.

The next day I felt incapable of doing anything, although there was so much to do, so I went for a run and cut myself some slack by sitting in the bath for like an hour, reading fittingly Bridget Jones’s Baby and when I finally got myself to emerge, I had finished half of the (slim) novel and so said what the hell and basically read the whole thing. That evening, some of us grad students met in a bar to celebrate/drown our sorrows and it was nice, though the sad thing is, I don’t think these people are my friends, not really. You can tell I’m in a maudlin mood, right?

At drinks, the other two people who submitted described their feeling as empty. I don’t feel empty, just… detached? I had finished writing and disengaged from the thesis a while ago, and had moved on if not made peace with to the next phase of my life which is being an underpaid adjunct, though there was something about having to give back my books that made me feel like I don’t know something died.

It really is the end of an era. The other day, I was grumbling to V about our department and he said that you shouldn’t say such negative things (eyeroll), you spent so long there, why did you do this anyway. And I said, don’t get me wrong, I loved it. When I look back on my life, I will look back on this as one of the best periods of my life. Despite all the disappointments, the lack of money or being made to feel like I wasn’t bringing in enough money, the imposter syndrome and questioning whether I was good enough, the insecurity about what now after and the fact that it appears I cannot go back to where I was even if I wanted to, spending three years immersed in ideas surrounded by books and people similarly preoccupied was the experience of the lifetime. Maybe our desire to extend this experience into a career is unrealistic, and maybe even more unrealistic is that the experience will not be sullied by the realities of ‘career’ but can you blame us? Not to mention the travel for conferences, getting hotels paid for and exploring a city on my own. The sitting alone, entirely alone in an office for days on end, and writing about something that probably noone else cared about but which I was being paid to do anyway. And the not small achievement of writing essentially a book, finally forming an argument even if not the most groundbreaking one (well, of course I’m going to downplay it).

So yeah, for this I am grateful.

 

 

 

 

unZen and the art of job hunting

One of my kids’ books features a zen monkey who quotes Lao Tzu: “At the centre of your being you have the answer: you know who you are and what you want.”

But do I? This job search has taught me that I don’t really.

At one point, having seen what making it in academia would involve and realizing what academia is – not that well paid, badly organized, full of egos – I had convinced myself that I would be happy to give it up and go into a non-academic job. But then I found myself faced with the choice of one decently paying commercial job and a handful of not-so-well-paying, precarious teaching jobs, I had a mini identity crisis. What did I want?

In the teaching jobs corner:

1. They are in line with what I’ve been doing for the past three years, and give me a foot into the door of a new career.

BUT

1. They pay shite
2. Teaching takes a lot of effort, and I’m not sure I want to do sooo much teaching that I don’t have time for anything else.
3. There is no stability. Next semester, I’ve have to start this search all over again.

But the thing that really pissed me off about these jobs is how unprofessional these places are. They are vague with info, and provide no proper confirmation about anything – whether you really truly have the job, how many students, hell, when the semester starts and ends. In order to withhold this info for whatever mysterious reasons – I guess amazingly because they don’t know either – they don’t even reply to email. I heard from one friend that one of the places that I was slated to teach at confirmed over email that she would teach a coach, and then silence, until nearing the start of the semester, she emailed to ask them for details, and they told her that they found someone inhouse to teach that course #sorrynotsorry. This made the vagueness of communication unnerve me further.

In a fit of pique one morning having again not received a response to an email query, I fired off an application to a non-academic job. And to my complete and utter shock, the HR replied right away. They asked me to state salary expectations, a category I had left off my application because my real expectations are high but I’m willing to compromise? Pressed on this point and suspecting that if I put in my last salary, I might scare them away I asked around and found a former colleague had worked there. Although she told me the pay would probably not be amazing, the place was a good one to work at, I got excited.

The thing was that two weeks or so before the start of semester, I felt bad to back out of the teaching jobs. But two weeks or so before the start of semester said teaching jobs were being vague and hadn’t even signed a contract yet.

Of course, on the day I apply to something else that writes back, the woman from the teaching position replies to my email saying sorry I was on leave (on leave replies are not a thing that exists in academia I’ve come to understand, eyeroll). Anyway, I went in for the editing test of the commercial job, and while I liked the place, I disliked the politics they espouse which are on the (economically) right wing of the spectrum. Nevertheless, I could swallow that for financial security. Unfortunately, I think I did rather badly on the editing test.

While waiting to hear back, I wondered why I was ‘wasting time’ prepping for the teaching jobs. If I did indeed land the commercial job, then all these PPTs on Pride and Prejudice would be for naught. It all very well to say carry on as if you weren’t getting the job, but the fact is that if I were to get the job, I should have been trying to get a paper published not prepping for courses that I wouldn’t teach. The problem is that depending on my future path, the claims on my current time would change. Not knowing what the future held became even more frustrating because it gave me the sense that my current effort might be entirely a waste of time.

Anyway, I didn’t hear from the commercial job for a few days in which time, given the alacrity of their first response, I had given up on them. I was fine, except my ego was bruised. I knew my test hadn’t been stellar but I didn’t believe it was so bad as to write me off the second interview. That’s the other thing about job hunting, the sting of rejection.

Then, of course, just as I had given up hope, I got called in for the second interview. And of course it happened on the same day that the institution I would be teaching with contacted me to ‘double confirm’ that I would be available and said they would start processing a contract.

Now with the possibility of the commercial job becoming real, I had to figure out what to say about the teaching. I could of course back out of the teaching altogether – and given the lack of professionalism and low pay, why not- except:

1. I didn’t entirely want to close the door on an academic career given that I did have a PhD and it was a path I wanted to explore (but not risk bankruptcy for)
2. Although I had established that these institutions wouldn’t treat me the same way – they have a clause in their contract that if 10 students don’t sign up the course gets cancelled – I did not feel comfortable backing out at the last minute. If nothing else, these were not bridges I wanted to burn entirely.

Finally, I did the kind of Libran balancing-act that my conscience would be comfortable with even if it may not have been the most sensible course of action. I told the interviewer that I could start in two weeks but I needed to be out of office a couple of half-days to teach for three months. They didn’t seem as fazed by this as I expected. And I really liked the manager which helped ease my misgivings about the politics of the place.

Then came the agonizing what-ifs. Even if they agreed to my conditions of being out of office for a bit, I would need to cancel two teaching jobs. And the whole arrangement of a full-time editing job and two teaching jobs was going to be crazy hectic for me. Now, I realized that I needed to speed up prepping for the courses because if I did get the job, I would have zero prep time during the semester.

The idea of being so crazy busy that I wouldn’t have time to breathe began to give me a minor panic attack. But more than that I was stressing about cancelling two of the four – yes I need to teach four courses to make slightly about my student stipend – teaching jobs I had committed to (but not yet! signed a contract for) .

The time between these call-backs is agonizing. The well-meaning advice is apply and forget about it, but it’s hard to when you are in the interview process. It’s hard not to what-if, or in my case at least have a game plan about what to do with the other balls in the air.

So what happened in the end?

I haven’t heard back from the commercial job. I’m a little miffed ego-wise, but for now, I’m okay with it. I had told myself when I started applying in April, that I would prioritize teaching jobs for the first semester to give that career path a chance and having actually got four offers, it seems silly to close off that option even though they lack stability. I might as well get that experience on my resume. And the money all put together is not that bad.

The commercial job would have given me stability, but it was going to be a nightmare doing it together with teaching. So I’m actually fine with it not coming through except for the unease about what I’m going to be doing three months down the line and whether this means that I’m unemployable commercially.

To go back to the quote that started this post, the answer may be at the centre of my being, but I don’t know what it is. I feel easier fate having made that choice for me.

 

 

I write letters

Tags

#phdlife

Cover letters. Applying to jobs. Every other day.

Are cover letters necessary? Couldn’t one just forward a CV? Well, in my case, I feel the need to explain why I’m still competent even though I’ve been stuyding for a PhD.

Yes, even though the PhD. It seems as if a doctoral degree is like krypton to commercial employers. I’m beginning to think I should leave it off. It seems weird that 10 years of media/corporate editing experience at some pretty good firms counts for nothing in the face of the stupidity of pursuing a research project for a little less than 3 years. Now I know what those mothers who took breaks to look after the kids feel like. Except, ironically, I never took a break to look after the kids. I never even took a break from commercial work, I kept freelancing throughout. But I guess the fact that I got accepted into a programme for abstract thinkers that very few people get accepted to makes me untouchable now?

And why do I want to go commercial again? Well, because academia will qualify you but not employ you. That is, all the jobs want teaching experience even though you just got your qualifications. It seem impossible to get even a part-time teaching job (which by the way pays less than my PhD stipend) without teaching experience. That old chicken and egg thing. The way around this is to know someone. Basically, many positions aren’t advertised, and when they are, it’s a formality and they already have someone in mind. Yet, the ad makes the poor sods out there who don’t know enough people think they actually might have a chance and so you apply (‘to the void’ as my colleague put it because noone ever replies). The only two gigs I’ve secured are through people I know, which should make me happy but makes me sad instead. These gigs pay so little there is no point celebrating them,.

Forget part-time teaching, I have not heard back from teaching assistant jobs. Maybe because it might make the actual teachers who are not PhDs insecure, I suppose.

Okay, to be fair, I still don’t have a PhD (I haven’t submitted and done the exam yet). Though honestly a PhD as a part-time teacher is overqualified. But okay. Fine. Maybe all this will miraculously change when I have that piece of paper.

But what won’t change is how little they pay. After spending 3 years, at best (at worst 5-7) on this thing, you have to spend a couple more doing part-time work or if you’re lucky a postdoc before you can actually get a job that basically pays less than my previous job correcting people’s English.

This makes me feel so angry that I want to chuck the whole dream posthaste (and I would if someone would offer me something else to do. See part on commercial sector cold shoulder). The poor pay, exploitative working conditions for part-time staff and general lack of transparency makes me want to smack the next academic who starts sanctimoniously critiquing the commercial sector.

Because you know, in the commercial sector, if you apply to advertised positions, you actually stand a chance of being considered based on your resume. Well, it seems like a better chance than in academia which really does seem to run on influence at the lower levels anyway. And that sector pays better. And you get nice tea in the pantry. For free.

This morning when I was reading a story to Mimi I was thinking that I could apply for a teaching assistant job. At a kindergarten. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

By the way, those are the jobs that seem plentiful. The teaching English. At all levels. That I am not actually qualified for, because I don’t have TESOL qualifications, but I know that doesn’t matter in the lesser institutions, if you’re the right colour. Which I’m not. Too much cafe in my au lait.

I really should have gotten a TESOL qualification if I wanted to diversify my career path (which I didn’t. I thought of the PhD as a passion project and that I would get back to editorial work after. Except the blemish of the PhD it appears is overwhelming).

When I started this job hunt, I was wracked with indecision about what I wanted to do. Ha! Now I’ll take whoever will have me.

 

 

Conference notes

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#phd

It never fails to amaze me how weird academic conferences are.

At a conference I attended recently, the first session I went to, one of the presenters mumbled about logistical problems and then proceeded to read from her paper at super high speed. Yeah, people were mostly ‘reading’ not presenting. All the while she was pulling her hair in different directions.

Another panelist in an attempt to be helpful turned out the lights during the presentation so we could see the visuals. But the lights system turned out to be more complex than anticipated and for a while it was a disco in there while hair pulling woman kept on going. Instead of giving up, the guy seemed to be obsessed with getting the perfect lighting, only when he did, it was time to turn the lights back on. Turns out he was this really famous scholar too.

In another sessions, the moderator timed the sessions using a standard watch instead of a digital timer, got into a passive aggressive thing with one of the speakers, and sliced her finger across her throat to indicate that speakers had to stop, now! Then at one point in the discussion, she burst out, “Well, I’ve been clinically depressed” to complete silence.

It struck me how this would be considered totally bizarre in any other setting. But here everyone remains totally poker faces through these shenanigans. Don’t get me wrong, I kind of love it. But it does make me want to laugh out loud sometimes.

As I’ve observed earlier, people seem to come to these things in groups and stick to these groups so while there is an illusion of networking, people are just largely talking to their friends while the monitory of us who didn’t come with a posse stand around FOMOishly. When you do reach out to someone they politely spend about two minutes with you before moving on. Except in this part of the world no one passes out cards.

Nevertheless, there were some really good papers and the discussions were some of the best I’ve witnessed. My own panel attracted a small audience partly due to being scheduled early in the morning but I got a great response from those who were there, so that was lovely (and frankly a first and a welcome change from the blank looks I have sometimes been greeted with).

On the final night, there was a dance party with a full-on brass band contracted to play, and it was great! I dithered over whether to go or not, seeing as I didn’t have anyone to go with, but finally FOMO and wanting to listen to the band got the better of me and I went, and it was fun. There were people from the age of 80 down dancing up a storm. I had lengthy conversations with more people here than I had had the entire conference, and ended up getting sweaty as hell dancing, resulting in me having no clothes to wear to the conference the next day and having to attend in a flannel shirt and slightly torn jeans (which again is perfectly fine at these things. heh.). I also noticed a couple of women dragging guys onto the dance floor and then getting really flirty, while the guys looked uncomfortable. One of these was a woman who had been quite aggressive to a guy during a panel, but then I saw them going to dinner together so they had clearly made up, only then she tried to get more handsy with him and he didn’t look happy and then she left.

Overall, this was one of the best conferences I’ve been to, and I think conference should always open with a dance party.