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.

Commencing the job search hardcore

This post is likely to be some sort of linkspam type deal, put together from the discoveries I've made this afternoon while researching how the hell to get myself out of academia and into some sort of suitable job.

Questions that I've been wrestling with as I've been researching:
- how do I turn my CV into a resume that is attractive outside of academics?***
- how do I translate 7 years of working my ass off in graduate school into a set of skills that makes sense to the outside world?**
- how do I locate jobs to apply for that I'm not simultaneously over- and under-qualified for?*

* fuck me on this. I'm still trying to figure this out. One of the main purposes of going to my university's career center was to figure this out. The career center gave me some books and sent me on my way. This was NOT HELPFUL. So I'm relying on my researching skills to figure this out.
** I'm researching buzzwords. 6 years as a writing tutor: "good at coaching in one-on-one situations" etc
*** lots of revising, I assume


Things I have discovered:
http://www.leavingacademia.com/ - so far, the most helpful site I've come across in terms of being honest, cheerful enough that I don't regret pursuing the Ph.D. every moment of the day, and realistic enough to say 'yes, you will need to network, etc.'

http://www.beyondacademe.com/ - more of the world of "get me out of here"

#alt-ac : the current twitter hashtag going around for alternate-academic (read: non-professorial careers in the ivory tower) (I'm not as of yet on twitter, but I think I may have to change this)

www.phds.org/jobs/nonacademic-careers/nonacademic-employers-that-hire-phds/ - fairly self-explanatory - a list of employers who actually think that the training that goes along with a Ph.D. has some sort of usefulness to the outside world

listservs - wrk4us is a prime example (which I think I'll be joining)

I also read that it would be worthwhile to join theladders.com - that site that prides itself on the $100K job listings. The point of this isn't to start grubbing for money - apparently the site has some spectacular career advice. I'll be joining up to see what all the hype is about. I'll report back here if there's anything worthwhile.


Anyway, that's what my doings of the day have looked like, despite my sunny and happy "Spring Break is for lovers" post of yesterday. I was hit with a blinding 2am panic attack that I have 5 more paychecks coming before I'll be thrown out to the wolves. Ergo today=work on that.

Spring Break: A Panegyric

This being the last of my years in academe, this is the last of my Spring Breaks. Younger me would think that I should be marking the occasion by going on a trip. Grad school paychecks being what they are, however, there won't be any major trip.

Honestly, though, I'm okay with that, or perhaps even sort of happy. This break is going beautifully (albeit way too quickly, as per usual). I'm working out every morning (still doing the Jillian Michaels 30 Days of Hell dvd, which is toning me up something fierce), I'm ACTUALLY EATING BREAKFAST (this is a new and very unusual thing), I've been crocheting (the stupid scarf I've been working on since January is finally almost done), and I've been noveling again (FINALLY). I've gotten a couple thousand words so far this week. Nowhere near my November pace, but it's good, and I'm back to the characters having conversations I wasn't planning on them having and having those conversations drift off in directions I hadn't seen before they happened and I've re-planned out how the novel will begin and things are generally going swimmingly. It feels really good to be writing again. It's also really nice to have the week to write and think and write some more without the nagging constant guilty feeling that I'm supposed to be focusing on my teaching and trying to force some work on the damned dissertation and work on the job hunt and everything else.

Even better: it's been in the 50s all week. After the snowiest winter I have ever lived through, the concept of the 50s is near-tropical. We even saw the sun here for a couple of days!

Tonight, Brownie and I are going to attempt to make duck. Why? We have the time, and I have some Wegmans gift certificates from my birthday to play with. On Saturday, we're taking our tax returns on a day trip to NYC. We're hitting the Strand for books (I refuse on principle to look for dissertation books), and I will finally (!) get to go play at the CB I Hate Perfume gallery. I mean, Cloudburst Accord. Wet Lawn Accord. And then we're going to go get some food somewhere. And maybe hit the Brooklyn Brewery while we're in Brooklyn.

What I'm saying is that I'm happier right now than I have been in months, if not longer. I think it's because I've given myself permission to spend a week not in academics, not surrounded by thoughts of the Ivory Tower, not wallowing in the overabundance of guilt and feelings of abject failure that I associate with my dissertation. I'm just taking care of myself and working on things that I find interesting and fun and productive. It feels awesome.

I know that when I get out of academics in May, I will be surrounded by the stress of a job hunt and then (preferably soon!) the stress of a brand new job in a brand new field and that leaving the academy does not mean that I'm leaving stress behind forever. To get this week, however, to devote to putting my emotional health back into some semblance of tolerability has been an absolute godsend.

So fare thee well, Spring Break. You've been good to me and I will miss you when you're gone. And I will probably try my level best to take a week off when possible in the Spring, just to see if I can recreate the sense of calm I feel right now.

Apparently I wasn't feeling so ambitious

So much for the "I'll try and post every day between now and turning 30" if this is only my second post of the month - whoops. No guilt, though, because I refuse to allow myself to feel guilty about a blog right now. If I have a blog that becomes important for some strange reason, I'll feel guilty about it (er, I'll probably update more, since that would seem to be important). Anyway.

So let's see. A bio prof in Alabama was denied tenure and shot and killed some of her colleagues. I feel horrible for the families of everyone involved in the tragedy, and I hope that they're able to mourn and to work toward healing in whatever manner they need to and without prying media bullshit surrounding them. I hate that I'm not surprised that it happened, however. What I'm surprised (and thankful) about is that it doesn't happen more often.

Brownie got a signature for his dissertation on Monday, which is bloodyfuckingfantastic in that he's finally relaxed enough that he's been able to talk about things other than his dissertation or the job search for the first time since roughly July. So we topped Monday off by getting into one hell of a "discussion" about acceptable levels of stress, the job market, academics and so on, and somewhere in there Brownie announced that he doesn't think he wants to do the academic thing because he hates what it's been doing to our relationship. I hate it too, and have for a long time, and view the problems academic careers can cause in a relationship as one of my major reasons for getting the hell out, but I've also always figured that him staying in or also getting the hell out is something that he needs to decide for himself. He's always seemed to lean toward staying in, and I've dealt with that as best I can by figuring that we are really happy together and that a lot of that happiness comes from being together at home - all the cooking we do together and so on - so that maybe it doesn't really matter where we live, etc., as his going into academics means that we get no say in where we're living.

So then Monday he announces he thinks he wants out, that it just isn't worth it.

Cue me bursting into eleventy hundred tears, because it's the first time in months (maybe longer) that I've started to feel like maybe I'd get some kind of say about where we'd be living. And all of these realizations I've been struggling desperately not to have - that the whole job search thing has been entirely about him and his career, that I'm shoving my career off to the back burner for him, that I'm having a lot of anger towards myself for doing that, that I've been feeling by and large unimportant for a long time because of all of this - all this comes tumbling down all around me. Suffice it to say it's probably good that I've been sick and snowed in all week. Not that I ever lack for introspection, just that the sick has kept me from wanting to cry as much as I probably would otherwise, and the snowed in has meant that the sick hasn't been as in the way as it usually is.

Anyway, we've pretty much narrowed it down to a move to either KC or to Portland, OR. KC is where I grew up - Brownie loves it out there, I have a ton of friends and most of my family out there, and it would generally be (relatively, anyway) an easy move. Plus: thunderstorms. YAY! Oregon, however, is this place that we've both always kind of wanted to live, despite the fact that neither of us has ever even visited - just from the sheer aspects of food, beer, wine, and love of exercise, we both want to live out there. Plus it's fucking beautiful. So as much as I'd love to be around my family again, there's a part of me that wants to move to Portland too, I guess because I have a sort of feeling that if we don't do it now, we never will.

Brownie tells me today while we're out getting drinks that he's not sure he's ready to give up on academics yet. That he might do the job search again next year. And that he really wants to focus in on moving to KC rather than Portland because of all the pro-KC reasons I just mentioned and because for him, it's an adventure either way, which he then acknowledges (albeit jokingly) as being selfish. I'm objecting to the idea of getting rid of Oregon yet simply because this whole "I get some level of say in this" idea is brand fucking new, and I'm not about to close off options any earlier than I have to.

This is probably not a line of thinking I should continue on, because I'm writing myself into more anger than I felt initially about it, and I probably don't need to do that. It's making me think that I do need to reopen the whole "how I've been compromising v. what I've been getting in return and vice versa" conversation, since I'm apparently still pissed. I'm pissed for two reasons. One, that I had allowed myself to hope that we might end up living someplace I'd actually like to live - really, that I'd allowed myself to hope when hoping in this whole mess has done nothing but make me more disappointed than I'm already typically feeling. Two, that he could change his mind and say sure, maybe we could move halfway (or all the way!) across the country come May (or June or July), but don't consider it to be an assurance that we could actually stay there since he may very well decide to do the academic job search again, meaning we'd just end up moving again in another year.

I think I'm starting to reach the end of my ability to push myself and my career off any more than I already have. I need to figure out exactly where my limit is and draw the line, because I am tired of feeling more excited about nail polish than my future career prospects.

It's ten to midnight on a Sunday. I've been playing MarioKart Wii in hopes of unlocking new characters and eventually getting to the point where I can play the Mirror Mode. I'm starving so I've turned on the oven to heat up some pizza rolls, which I'm not entirely convinced are food, to fuel the rest of my evening.

The gym today was a total bust. You know how people always say that you may not want to go to the gym, but you'll never regret having gone? Today I totally did. I had some sort of nervous pent-up toxic energy that I figured would be awesome for running off on the treadmill (too friggin' cold and rainy to run outside today), but I managed to run the toxic energy off in something like five minutes and was dying for the last ten minutes on the treadmill (that I spent 15 minutes only on the treadmill tells me that I was tired), followed by another 12 or so on the bike, followed by a weak and pathetic attempt to lift weights, all of which ended in me realizing that I was fairly sure my heartrate had been too high for a while and that I was feeling faint and getting dizzy, so I decided to go home rather than risk passing out. On the way home I stopped into the bookstore to get the one book that I didn't receive a desk copy of and stopped again to run into Walgreens to pick up a protein bar. By the end of both trips I was weak and shaky and really ready to sit back down in my car and pant for a moment before driving again. Many hours later I'm not as tired as I was, but I have no idea WTF was going on with me today. I've had bad workouts in the past, but nothing like that.

If I have one working braincell that still has the desire to finish this stupid Ph.D., I will email my advisor this week. Preferably tomorrow. I need to schedule a meeting with her so we can figure this shit out. I'd love to say I've done something about the diss since the last time I talked to her, but mostly I haven't. Okay, really I haven't at all. I suck. Twenty year old me wouldn't have this problem - twenty year old me would be done by now, or very close to done and about ready to start collecting signatures, because twenty year old me was tenacious and worked on school stuff from eyes opening in the morning until eyes closing at night. Twenty year old me would have fought harder for one of the topics she really wanted to work on, rather than letting my advisors decide what they thought I should be doing and then weakly agreeing with them, hoping that my capitulation would help it all end quicker.

Nearly thirty year old me feels much smarter and more experienced than twenty year old me ever was or could have been, but nearly thirty year old me has zero drive to get anything done. I still have some sort of ambition, I think, however unfocused - I'd like, when near death, to be able to look at my life and say "this was important; I am proud to have done this and proud of how it made a difference for others." I wish the goal of this ambition were rather more in focus - I feel like if it were then I'd have some sort of path to follow, some sort of (however vague) script to run my life along again. When I was still planning on the academic path, I had a script. Diverging from that path feels like the right thing for me to do, but it does leave me scriptless, and I wonder how much of my current lack of motivation to do anything is because I don't feel like there's a reason to do it.

All of this, I presume as well, is exactly why I have such a hard time getting out of bed in the morning (to wrap back around to where I was 11 hours ago). I'm going to hit the vitamin D supplements hard for a while and see if that helps with anything - maybe killing some of the SAD will help me feel a bit more able to accomplish something, I hope.

the (*&^%!#@ing academic job search and life in general

So after much durm and strang and gnashing of teeth and application after application after application sent out, Brownie finally has an interview for a nine-month renewable assistant professorship at Small College in nearby, state next door. In a town he'd never heard of, no less, despite having grown up roughly 20 minutes from the apartment I'm currently sitting in. The only thing we know about the town other than that Small College is located there is that Favorite Bartender apparently grew up one town over and was fully ready to recommend the town as a fantastic place to live because it meant we'd still be close enough to come visit during our drinking times. Beyond that, I'm refusing steadfastly to bother doing any research about the town unless he gets a campus visit because I'm tired of looking at towns and going "ooo, that'd be neat, and that'd be awesomesauce" only to see the rejection letter come floating in via carrier pigeon a few days later. I'm tired of feeling hopeful only to be crushed again.

The worst version of the hope/crush feeling happened today, when I woke up to an email from my MOTHER of all people with a job listing for the community college out by them. I would kill to move back there - not to live even all that close to my parents, per se, but to live around the Kansas City area again and to enjoy the insanity that the Midwest refers to as "weather." (Nothing says "Fantastic Drinking Entertainment" like watching helicopters swarm around tornado-producing thunderstorms!) Anyway, so I got way too excited about the job posting and sent it to Brownie, who promised to apply and who then went straight back to prepping for the job interview tomorrow (which, well, obviously that would be the priority). I come to find out later (as I'm dreaming of starting a KC-centric beer blog) that while he's still planning on applying, it's without much of a hope of actually landing the job since they're asking for someone with different specialties than he has. He's still applying, but it's probably going to end up being a waste of time. And so my first (and thus far only) chance of living in any of the cities I'd actually want to move to has 95% poofed away into thin air yet again. The only reason I like the idea of Brownie getting the job at Small College is because it provides a paycheck and a place from which to launch yet another grueling awful job search. I don't understand anymore why anyone wants to go into academics, because the way the field treats its workers is beyond appalling.

Meanwhile, his landing of an interview has made me sit back and try and figure out what the hell I want to do with my life since I'll be telling academics to suck it once the dissertation is done (which I should, uh, probably do something about but whatever). I've come to a few realizations:
- I haven't the foggiest fucking clue what I want to be when I grow up
- I do know that I don't want to be an overacheiver anymore, since that hasn't exactly panned out so well for me
- I'm not sure I've done anything of note this entire year except continue on in my existence and be the good, calming, caring wife for my stressed-out, job-seeking husband
- I don't particularly want to be a productive member of society, but I also don't see that as optional
- I hate that general upsetness/disillusionment/disappointment with my career choices thus far radically outweigh everything in my life that's good when I go about taking inventory of my life, but I've yet to figure out how to stop that line of thinking
- I wonder if I'll ever come up with something to do with myself that doesn't make me feel like the last five years of grad school were a complete and total waste (I don't feel that the MA was just for sheer critical thinking/research skills, but I do feel like the Ph.D. has been)

And so all this shit just circles around in my head and I get stuck and spend a lot of time on the forum or crocheting or playing MarioKart or cooking or whatever because I'm lost on trying to find answers. In accordance with the wide world of astrology, I'm mid-Saturn Return right now, which I bring up only because that does feel roughly like my life right now - everything I've held onto as a way to define myself up until now (read: overachiever, student) has disintegrated around me and I'm left standing here thinking "so that's nice and all, but the fuck do I do now?" I typically tell myself that this is in some way good because this opens up new ways for me to define myself or time to focus on areas of my life that I'd generally left unexamined before and all that rot and all of that is good but I still spend far too much time thinking "well, shit" and then finding a beer. Some sense of rebuilding would be nice - even just a glimmer of an idea of a way to begin figuring out how to rebuild would be nice at this point.

Mostly I really hate that every time someone asks me about my life, I'm prone to telling them about Brownie's life rather than my own because there's so much more going on in his. I won't tell more than a handful of people IRL (and the entire fucking internet, apparently) how I'm actually feeling - the last time I told Brownie how I was actually feeling he said "damn, that was a lot to dump on me" before realizing that he sounded like an ass, apologizing, and then admitting he didn't have a clue what to say and giving me a hug. I'm sure the reaction from anyone else would be at least as charming. DNW.

I sort of suspect I'm probably drinking a bit too much lately, but that's neither here nor there and anyway it's the holidaze. Seriously, though, Sunday's been the only alcohol-free night in a week. The holidays have been really lovely. (Er, one huge screaming fit at my father-in-law aside wherein he had no clue the rage he'd produce in me by saying that it was Rihanna's fault that Chris Brown beat her, but everything else really has been great.) I think I've put on five pounds from all the eating - it's way too cold to go outside and run so I'm at the mercy of my brother's WiiFit once we get to KC on Thursday. Here's to going home for a couple of weeks to attempt to decompress...

After a morning of facebook stalking

The facebook privacy changes have been fun. I've gotten to see much of the profiles of various mythical figures which has been all kinds of good fun. Probably a little creepy, but definitely good fun. I'm a bad person. However, I've also found some fantastic bad poetry, figured out that one guy is creepier and weirder than my wildest imaginings, that a friend has a crush on a damn hot guy and so on, so it's been fun.

I'm also up to three students friend requesting me on facebook, which is some kind of record for me. All three were awesome, so I've actually accepted them.

Beyond that, the semester got me into some really bad food habits - I got up at 10:30, had coffee, and after playing around have realized that it's almost 2 and that I haven't actually eaten anything. It's been like this most of the semester. I've been getting up, having coffee, and then mentally pretending that the coffee (which I take black) is food until some point after normal people have eaten lunch, when I realize that I'm starving. And then I have a huge dinner and don't eat again until the next day. So I'm eating what amounts to probably three meals worth of food, just lumped together twice and mostly at dinner. And I wonder why (stress aside) my stomach has been so ripped apart painful ouch lately. I've got to cut this shit out and start eating on a more normal schedule again. It'll help me feel better when I exercise too.

Bad news on the academicjobsearchfront - the one school that had so far requested more info from Brownie apparently called everyone yesterday to set up MLA interviews and he didn't get a call. So that's out. That was also the only one in an honest-to-god city, so we're off to podunks now. I'm hating this, but more I'm hating what it's doing to Brownie - he's having a hard time not taking all the rejection personally (which is understandable even if it is a bad thing to do) and I just want to give him a really big hug, but really big hugs don't help anything (I'm doing it anyway). I'm scared to fucking death neither one of us will have a job come June first and won't know where our next paychecks are coming from. The current paychecks are already too small to be able to save anything as it is.

The noveling is going relatively well. I've got one conversation that I've already re-written twice to try and get it closer to right - I know I'll have to revise it again later, but it has to end in the right place and have gone in the right directions or it'll screw a bunch of things up. But I'm still plugging away (often til 3am or so), and really am enjoying it. I'm hoping I can have near a draft ready by Christmas so I can take some time away to do the dissertation and then return to it and see if I can make it shiny.

Now to eat before I hose my blood sugar levels or something.