An Odd Brief Moment of Honesty

The Writing Center I work in has meetings every two weeks where we either talk over recent tutoring issues/problem cases/what do I do in X situation or we meet with the head of some group or other on campus to talk over writing issues on campus.  The meetings consist of the Writing Center director (a faculty member in my department) and the tutors, all of whom are Ph.D. candidate-level grad students.

This past Thursday, we had two people from the Career Center come in to talk to us.  One of them came in for the reason we were expecting - so that we could talk over expectations for med school/law school/grad school personal statements.  We see a ton of them in the Writing Center, so it was good to have someone else's version of what it is that each type of school is generally looking for.  Good times and all.  Productive. As an aside, I was amused when she said that successful law school personal statements tend to sound arrogant.

The other person from the Career Center was the Grad Student Career Counselor (the same one I met with a few weeks ago).  She came specifically and only to talk to us about things that people can do with English Ph.D.s.  We weren't expecting her at all - she was someone the director invited along without warning any of us. 

If it hasn't come across by now (given my reasons for being mostly anonymous in this blog), being in the humanities in the academy and acknowledging that you're leaving is often a recipe for disaster.  Typical reactions include being shunned, being called a failure, being told one isn't sufficiently committed to one's scholarship and so on.  I've heard of people saying they were leaving academics and being told that their committee didn't see the point in letting them finish the degree.  I think it's the combined effect of working in a little understood field, one which is desperately difficult to get into, and one which requires pretty much complete dedication to in order to survive.  Add to this the fact that the people who make the decisions on who stays in and who ends up being forced out are themselves professors of the same subjects who themselves have had to maintain decades of complete dedication in order to survive, and you end up with a situation wherein the casual mention of "I think I'm going to do something else" can feel, to those staying in, like a personal attack.  Hence the repercussions I've already mentioned.

Anyway.  Having someone walk into the Writing Center and point out to a group of 15 English Ph.D. candidates - in front of a faculty member - that most of us will end up doing something not-English-professor with our lives was dead shocking.  It felt like the first honest career discussion I've ever had in that building, the first time anyone has allowed us to acknowledge openly that the job market sucks giant donkey balls and that getting out is not only something that we need to consider as a Plan B, but quite possibly something we should consider as a Plan A.

I'm writing about it here because it felt like a breakthrough, at least for my department.  If we're allowed to discuss so-called "alternative" careers openly, maybe it will help cut the stigma that not going into academics is synonymous with failure.  Given the fact that only 1/5 of graduating Ph.D.s will actually get the pipe dream tenure track job within five years of graduation, it seems like the ONLY intelligent thing to do is to have one (or two, or three) backup plan(s) ready to launch.  It's good to know that at least somewhere in my institution, this is something we can finally discuss.

I'm asking the Writing Center director to be one of my references when I'm in tomorrow.  I've worked with him for seven years now so he knows me well, and I know now that I can ask him to be a non-academic reference without worrying that asking him could have some kind of blowback for me with my dissertation committee.