(Post)Academia

Too Much School, so…Back to School?

Some days come poorly off the mold. Their shape is not symmetrical. The joints don’t fit. They wobble. These are not the “worst” days—those seem to come off the line perfectly shaped to suck. These poorly-formed days just suck life out of you. Minor annoyances and substantive problems scrape against each other without quite coalescing into a proper crisis. You get through them, but that’s usually the best you can manage. They’re not quite bad enough to inspire any feeling of victory when you come out the other side. Today is one of those, grumbly nearly from the get-go.

If you’re keen on integrating the following thoughts into the course of my blog, they go with the loose sequence that begins with “Of Carrots…” and continues with “Get a Job, You Schlub.” It also includes the “Cut” series, though those are more tightly tied to the practice of scholarship. There’s not really anything about writing in it, unless you count wanting to write. (You can imagine that as a subtext through the whole post.) This isn’t a plea for sympathy, just a snapshot from the inside of trying to make a life as a post-academic.

I have been living in Austin for six months. I have been looking for a full-time job pretty much that entire time. I am still looking. I substitute teach three or four days each week, usually a 30-40 minute drive from our apartment. The other weekday is reserved for hunting full-time employment. Often, I don’t know where I’m going to be working until I get up at 5 a.m. to start stalking the district’s online substitute system. (During the day, good jobs are often gone in one or two minutes. That’s particularly tough when you’re actually at a school doing your job.)

It sucks, even without mentioning the conditions when I get to work.

Like adjunct faculty, substitute teachers are not eligible for benefits…nor are they eligible for unemployment insurance. Pay is low. I make more on a real per-hour basis than I did adjuncting (where my hourly rate was based solely on the time I spent in the classroom). Oh, and my PhD? It entitles me to exactly the same daily rate as any completed four-year degree. It’s still not a living wage, and I still don’t feel “employed.” It’s certainly not a career, and it’s more supplement than support for my family.

Long-term job searches are draining as hell. The last time I had a job that I “chose” was in September of 2012. I’ve been “on the market” since then, although I did not do any serious job-hunting between finishing my oh-fer on academic applications in April and moving to Texas in August. I’ve been lucky in that my partner eventually found work, and that we had some savings. Things have gotten tight, but never quite desperate.

The problem is that looking at job listings gets a little more like staring into the abyss every week. Human resources people and departments at the kind of companies that list jobs on-line are as indentured to formulae as university search committees. Miss a keyword or have the wrong job title and you go straight to the circular file, no matter how qualified you are. The more rejections I get, the harder it is for me to look at a listing and think “I can do that” rather than “there is no way in hell I could even get an interview.”

There have been studies on this stuff , and reports. They don’t offer much positive.

My doctorate is an unhappy limiting factor. I have the option of leaving a seven-year gap in my resume or owning up to my years in academe. Mostly, I just have to hope that the relevant people read my cover letter and that I can sell them there. For entry-level positions, I seem overqualified and likely to jump ship when some imaginary university comes calling. Jobs beyond entry-level tend to require specific work experience that graduate school failed to provide, even if I otherwise have sufficient knowledge and skills. HR filters are not set to account for these things. My post-relocation network is also thin—another obstacle to getting the all-important foot in the door.

The upshot of all this is that I have too much education to get a job…no matter how many times I’m in a school and an incredulous teacher says “You have a Ph.D. and you’re subbing?” I find it very reminiscent of a recent post and the ensuing discussion over at Pan Kisses Kafka. It’s a similar catch-22 in that you allegedly need experience to land a tenure-track job, but experience as an adjunct counts against you because if you were good enough, you would have gotten a tenure-track job right away.

For me, it is looking more and more like the solution to too much education is somehow more education. That might mean doing alternative teaching certification and going from “substitute” to “permanent” secondary teacher. It might involve getting third-party certificates in various software and programming platforms. One way or another, I need to gather up some keywords and documentation to cover up all the education I’ve already got.

Nothing seasons a wobbly no-good day quite like irony, naja?

Success and the Persuasive Essay

I’ve been thinking about Rebecca Schuman’s recent Chronicle piece on teaching as a vocation, and her further rumination over at pan kisses kafka on the (temporary?) suspension of her pedagogy. I have also been trying to figure out what my life “should” look like as a PhD outside academia—what “success” might look like. I have also also been substitute teaching. Between bouts of riot control, today’s lesson was on the persuasive essay. The sixth graders had to read and break down two short articles on video games: one praising the potential virtues of video games, the other warning of their consequences. They had to suss out the author’s claim, then to note down the evidence the author used as support. They needed practice at both, but it’s the start of the unit and, like I said, riot control.

How do you convince somebody of something? We’re bombarded by competing notions of success in everything from car advertisements to religion to quote-images plastered all over social media. Especially in advertisements, success and happiness are elided by the smudge of money. When we get into more metaphysical notions of success, we lose some of that equation of success and happiness. We can even reverse the connection between success and happiness. (Think about the “inspirational” gym pictures that one friend of yours always puts up about pain and gain.)

All these success-mongers want to persuade us that their mode of success is the best. It’s the coolest. It’s the most ethical. It’s the one that will take you furthest in the world. Whatever. Digging down into the supporting evidence is too often a rabbit hole: claim follows claim follows claim. That’s rhetoric, but it can take ages to get down to evidence. My sixth-graders today were easy to catch with that hook, which was part of the point. Teaching people to really read means teaching them what kinds of evidence are important to which varieties of argument.

The persuasive power of success models is wholly contingent on what kinds of evidence we are willing to buy. Is success a new Lexus (something the TV told me everybody gets for Christmas), having a car younger than your kids, or living car-free in a place with viable public transport? Is success turning your every waking effort toward improving the world, volunteer tutoring on a Tuesday evening, or being a responsive partner in your relationship? Is it traveling first class? Is it traveling with all your worldly possessions in a single backpack? When we pick a model of success, we’re being persuaded not by the claim, but by the evidence. The claim comes afterward. It’s how we gather our favorite pieces of evidence together.*

When we write, our ideas about success are just a few of the many that creep onto the page. When we’re looking at our screen or our paper, we reflect in other ways on success. Is success making a reader feel something? Is it getting “enough” hits on your blog or sales of your self-published book? Is it making a living from your work? Is making Good Art enough by itself? Those are the questions I’ve been grappling with. They’re complicated, as they are for so many of us, by our competing roles in life. Where does success as a partner and father fit in? Who do I allow to persuade me?

More importantly, how do I persuade myself of something? The latter is what I am working on these days: convincing myself that some direction or other is worth pursuing. I need to move from “convince” to “conviction.” We measure success in a hell of a lot of ways, but which ones are the most persuasive? Thoughts?

(*As a contrasting example, contemporary U.S. politics put the claims first and the evidence much, much later.)

A Year After Horns and Horses

December 7. Pearl Harbor Day. In 2012, it was also the first day since September when I could get all of my dissertation committee into the same room so I could defend.

That morning, I posted this clip to Facebook:

There were a lot of reasons to pick it. First and foremost, I’m a geek. I grew up on this stuff. When I got older I became a bit of a geek about language, too, and developed an enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. When I am psyching myself up for a challenge, Theoden’s speeches (this and the one from Helm’s Deep) are part of my repertoire (along with the “March to the Scaffold” from Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and the James Bond theme). As done in the movie, the scene has just about everything you could ask for: an excellent little speech, delivered well; the right hits in the score with horns and the Rohirrim theme; dramatic lighting; panoramic shots of the whole battlefield to give a sense of scope. The score cuts out at the right moment and sneaks back in wonderfully.

In hindsight, this was a terrible choice. The Rohirrim fully expect to die on their charge. You do not get quite as much sense of it in the movie, but those guys on horses are outnumbered more than 5-to-1. The bad guys have war elephants and Nazgûl. The Rohirrim end up losing their king, and would surely have lost their whole paltry army if Aragorn hadn’t shown up with Rangers and (in the movie) ghosts. I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was just psyching myself up and killing time on a day I’d spent years preparing for. Posting a video, like making cookies for the public portion of the defense, was a nice diversion.

Were I having a glass half-empty day, I could easily push the comparison with the Rohirrim’s charge further. The horde of orcs could be, say, the job market. The gloomy bravado of Theoden could easily be any grad student’s conviction that the market might be bad, but we can take arms against the sea of troubles. There aren’t any Rangers of the North coming to save us. Und so weiter.

Even if the doom and gloom are true, I don’t want to spend more time on them today. It has been a year since I defended my dissertation, and nearly that since I completed the final round of edits and submitted it, eventually resulting in this:

Bound Copy of the Dissertation

408 pages, appendices included

The past year has been the most unsettled one of my life. I’ve been up and down. I’ve applied for jobs, not gotten them, dramatically switched up the kinds of jobs I’m applying for, and not gotten those either (yet). My family moved 1200 miles from a place where the temperature hasn’t gotten above 0 degrees Fahrenheit for a few days to a place where people are freaking out because it’s 25. For nearly half of the year, there hasn’t been a “normal.” There has been so much waiting, so much anticipation and hope and sometimes hopelessness.

It isn’t all better, but a year out, I feel like I’ve got better perspective on both that video clip and that UMI-bound black book. Defending my dissertation was not a life and death conflict. (If there was one of those, it came after, and there was nothing so tangible as orcs to fight.) Literature is not feeding me poetic lines to spout at neat points in a structured narrative, nor is Hollywood supplying a dramatic score to remind me what I should feel at important moments. I wrote a book. It has some good bits and some bad bits, with enough insights to convince a collection of professors of my worthiness to share a rank with them. That’s cool. It hasn’t made the last year any better. That’s also cool.

Now, anyway. I don’t think I was cool with that six months ago. I certainly wasn’t cool with it ten months ago, when the cold and dark of northern winter were far too apt a metaphor for my life.

We often overplay the importance of finishing things. We wrap stories around our lives because we hope to make sense of them. We want the happily ever after, or the brilliant last stand that proves to be the tide-turning sacrifice. If we carve our lives into a series, we want each volume to come to a tidy caesura. Defending a dissertation could have been one of those caesuras. I could have my victory, walk across campus to turn in my paperwork in wonderfully picturesque snow, and then…we skip to the next book, where I am busily occupied with whatever the author wants me to be doing when she throws the next plot arc at me.

In life we cannot—to steal a line from Elmore Leonard—leave out the parts people skip. I have had a year I wouldn’t mind skipping (or at least reducing to a kick-ass training montage). I still get to cook dinner and do laundry and write blog posts. I’ve got a good chunk of a novel that I am working on turning into something the non-rhetorical you can read. I just watched my daughter just fall asleep on the couch with a book in her lap.

What have I learned, a year out from my personal Pelennor Fields? That the parts that people skip are not always bad, even if they don’t come with horns, horses and dramatic speeches.

NaNoWriMo vs. Dissertation

Round One! Fight!

Hello, December. Is it safe to come out yet?

November’s comparative blog quiet is owed to National Novel Writing Month (secondary sponsor: the passive voice). I spent the month writing (part of) a novel. I dutifully scraped together my 50,000 words despite having a conference paper to write and present, the holiday, and a rather ugly spat of job applications and rejections. NaNoWriMo.org gave me this fancy image as an award:

My winner's banner. Nifty or tacky?

My winner’s banner. Nifty or tacky?

When I validated my novel, I couldn’t help comparing the certificate (there’s a certificate, too, that you can print out) with one I earned at about this time last year: the one that says ‘doctor of philosophy’ on it. The NaNo certificate is much more lively. The thought seemed worth developing, though. I present here a hasty compare-and-contrast of salient features of writing a dissertation and undertaking National Novel Writing Month. (Not included: the effects of either on my future employment.)

Coffee

Caffeine is life for writers. I was surprised at how many of my co-NaNos preferred various kinds of soda or tea to coffee, though. I drank coffee more regularly in November than I had for…since I finished my dissertation, actually. One of my more vivid memories of my defense is that problems with the A/V setup took so long to resolve that my coffee was cold by the time I was able to start.

I also realized that I get more out of coffee than just caffeine. When I’m writing, really writing, I still need the brief pauses afforded by sipping a hot beverage. (Maybe that is why my characters spent so much time with tea or coffee at hand.)

“The only good dissertation is a done dissertation.”

As I mentioned many posts ago, I hit a turning point on my dissertation when I stopped worrying about obsessing with my research and instead chose to obsess with getting finished. It was a grander-scale version of the process most of us have gone through with a paper. You come up with something that is at least a little interesting, you gin up some ideas, do some research…and then you realize you have to submit the paper twelve hours from now, that it’s supposed to be 25 pages, and why did you think you would get any sleep anyway?

At some point in the dissertation process, your thoughts turn away from ‘what is best for this project as I envision it’ to ‘what will my committee sign off on.’ Some people hit that point earlier than others, but I think everybody who finishes reaches it. You tell yourself “I’ll fix that when I do the monograph” or “It’s not worth fighting committee member X over this any more” or “I really ought to research this properly, but I can get by with throwing the right citations into a footnote.”

NaNo is different, because it starts with this ethos. The goal is to get 50,000 words by hook or by crook. The writing coaches repeatedly advise you to keep your fingers away from your backspace key. You are supposed to keep everything, even if it’s bad. (One of my favorite write-in moments was “now we’re going to do an 11-minute sprint of total crap. The crappiest crap you can crap.”) Get the words on the screen. You can edit later.

And damn but some people get words on the screen. 1200 words in a fifteen-minute sprint. 150,000 words in a month. Who knows how much of it is crap? Who knows how much of it anybody else will ever see? Some people clearly write streams-of-consciousness. Others are just that fast. Just as some people struggle to get halfway, others write whatever they please.

The ethos of “wordcount first, everything else is just details” was one of the few things about the month that bugged me. Yes, there is a tremendous freedom in allowing yourself to just write. It is useful to shove your inner editor in a closet. Words in your head never mean as much to your work as words on the page. The obsession with wordcount, though, puts somebody who churns out 70,000 words of 90% crap ahead of somebody who grinds out 35,000 words that are only 40% crap. (See the next point, though—both of those writers will be cheered equally by their fellows.) Others rationalize heftier wordcounts by including blog posts, brainstorming, forum role-play, and anything else that involves typing. NaNo is a competition only to the extent that you’re competing with yourself, but sometimes the whole wordcount thing seemed too easily gamed to me. It is a structural element of the project. It still rubs me wrong…even though 50,000 words is such a usefully concrete goal.

A Community of Fellow Striver-Sufferers

Academia is competitive. Resources are too scarce for it to be otherwise, even though scholars rely on each others’ work. When you write a dissertation, you want it to stand out from—or at least stand comfortably among—the work of your peers and predecessors. At the same time, your fellow graduate students are usually the only ones who understand what you’re going through. They’re also likely to be most of your social group. With my cohort, at least, we all honestly wanted each other to succeed. That got murkier when we started gunning for the same jobs, but few things unite a community like suffering. The community developed organically. Anybody who passed their first semester and remained gung ho about the whole graduate school experience got funny looks. We traded in commiseration, and still do when we get together at conferences.

NaNo is not competitive. At all. The closest thing to competition comes during sprints or word wars. Having the highest wordcount for a sprint might get you a piece of chocolate or some amiably jealous congratulations. That’s it. Everybody cheers for everybody. Gung ho attitudes are pervasive. As much as the participants love writing, NaNo seems to me as much about the social activity as the work itself. I feel comfortable putting it in the same category as, say, CrossFit or Tough Mudder: it is a shared individual experience. We give each other advice and encouragement. We attempt something challenging (see the next point). It is social. Ultimately, though, we’re doing it for ourselves, as individuals. Twenty people in a gym doing complicated push-up routines is not so far from twenty people furiously clattering away at their laptops in a coffee shop. It’s a cultivated, inorganic experience…a kind of manufactured community. That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun—I am not certain I would have gotten my 50K without the support of the folks I was writing with.

Writing. A lot.

In one month and by wordcount, I wrote an equivalent to about four chapters of my dissertation. Depending on where you put my “start” date for dissertating, I averaged about two chapters each year. With the dissertation, of course, there were many thousands more words of brainstorming, planning, and notes. There were pages of footnotes and bibliography, conference papers extracted and reworked along the way. A dissertation, on the humanities side of things, is an enormous pile of work and words.

In that respect, NaNo isn’t so different. The work is not the same. Rather than research, it is about persistence and watching a little bar graph go up. Some people work in manic weekend sprees, others manage a steady, workmanlike pace of 1500-1800 words each day. I was somewhere in between, breaking a thousand words each day but making up the difference with a few long Saturdays and Wednesdays. However you slice it up, NaNo involves producing a substantial word pile in a rather short amount of time.

A dissertation, though, is not just a word pile. It is a finished piece of scholarly work, crafted with varying degrees of care and haste over the course of many, many months. The words are hopefully all in the right places, and the right placement matters more than the quantity. For NaNo, 50,000 words is the only benchmark. My 50,000 are from all over the probable novel, and do not come close to completing it. As much as writing is writing is writing, the ways in which NaNo and a dissertation count as “a lot” diverge considerably. (As they should.)

Validation by an Impersonal Machine

Do you want to see how you’re doing? Copy-paste your draft into the handy NaNoWriMo.org word counter/novel validator. (Do this before the very last minute, because it counts words a little differently than most word processing platforms.) The website will plot your progress on a bar graph. Hopefully those bars will climb up to and eventually top the steadily ascending gray line that tells you what “par” is for each day. When you’ve convinced the site that you’ve written 50,000 words, it will take you to the winner’s page, where you can get yourself various icons, certificates, and swag.

Validating a dissertation is more personal. Slightly. I say that not as a knock on my committee—it was an awesome group of scholars who had important feedback and guidance for me along the way. In the last stages of convincing the University that I deserved a degree, though, those committee members were too often reduced to the names and signatures needed for forms. So many forms. Then I had to submit the whole thing electronically, anyway. It was an uploaded document rather than a copy-paste, but still…

I will say that, whatever the future of my incomplete manuscript, I feel more satisfied by my NaNo project than by my dissertation.

…but it might just be the coffee talking.

Get a Job, You Schlub!

The other day, a friend of mine posted this article about why people with PhDs don’t just leave the soul-sucking, sub-living wage world of the adjunct. It’s a brief piece, one focused mostly on the short notice adjuncts have when taking jobs and the feelings of obligation to their students (and sometimes institutions) that prevent them from abandoning a course mid-semester. What’s missing from the article is just how hard it is to quit.

Quitting is tough because all through grad school, we get a variation on the Game of Thrones truism: “You win or you die.” As long as you can stake a valid claim to be a player in the game—even if you’re more Karstark than Stark—you’re not dead. Leaving is failing, even if failing in this case means “failing to be exploited by a system that simultaneously turns your hope and your desperation against you.” Who sets out to fail? We wanted to be professors because we had professors we loved, because we love teaching and/or our fields. For an adjunct, quitting academia is like breaking up with a fiance/e who keeps refusing to set a wedding date (or just keeps pushing it back). Even if your friends are all telling you to break it off already, your emotional investment keeps you plugging away, dreaming about flowers and centerpieces and organ preludes.*

The other bit that makes quitting tough? What else are we going to do when we’re out? No matter how many odd jobs we’ve held during or interspersed with our studies, it’s hard to build a foundation for an alternative career while trying to build the foundation for the one you expect to be your lifelong occupation. Even if you smuggle the education section to the bottom of your resume, you’ve still got that “PhD” stuck there, begging for explanation. In my case, where I’ve even gotten to the interview stage, it’s usually the first or second thing to come up. An enormous amount of education, a small amount of relevant experience…this is not a formula for an easy job hunt. Given the choice between months of unemployment—remember that adjuncts typically don’t get unemployment insurance—and a crappy job, most of us will stick with a crappy job.

Academic conferences these days usually feature a panel on “non-academic” employment. I’ve stopped attending these. They’re a useless gesture, tending to highlight a small klatsch of of folks with PhDs who have carved out lives outside the professoriate. Just, you know, not very far outside the professoriate. (The organizers are no doubt limited by the need to draw panelists from within the professional society…or actually pay presenters for their time.) I went to one of these panels a year ago in which half the speakers worked for universities. One of them even still taught courses every other semester or so. (The other half of the panel? Somebody who worked for a foundation and somebody who worked for an early music publisher.) This was the precious outside I was so interested in? Never mind that the panelists had taken spectacularly idiosyncratic paths to reach their current positions, most of which seemed to involve knowing somebody who’d been able to offer them a job at the right time. The tl;dr version of these panels boils down to “Look, here are some people who did it! You can, too! If you want to, you crazy person.” Who, precisely, is that supposed to help? And how?

As for me, I’m still working on carving that idiosyncratic path, hoping that I can either strike up an acquaintance with the right somebody or get my foot in the right door to get out of this application-rejection cycle. Just remember that no matter how stupid it might seem to stay on the Academy’s Skid Row, leaving can feel just as stupid.

*Aside: my partner and I had an extended discussion about wedding music well before we even considered getting married to each other.

The 983rd Cut: AcademiConference

I don’t know when the thousandth cut will come, the one that will move my lingering academic dream from hospice to the boneyard. I do, though, strongly suspect that the conference I came home from yesterday will be the last American Musicological Society event that I attend. Three and a half days—of papers, panels, and the far more important conversations that happened in hallways and the hotel bar—were not enough to pull me back in. More surprisingly, I think, they were not enough to reopen the old hurts.

This was my first year presenting at AMS. Any AMS, even the twice-yearly chapter meetings to which I religiously sent paper proposals. My research and the Society’s interests had apparently never been compatible. Looking over the conference programs, I could almost see why. Research into post-1945 American art music was scant. Research that also took odd methodological tacks, that engaged different elements of music-making, was even rarer. It wasn’t this year. I spent most of Saturday hearing papers on post-war American music. The presenters were not just engaging scores or composers. There was a whole Saturday morning panel about music and branding. The papers were excellent. Here were scholars doing the kind of work that had pulled me out of composition into musicology in the first place: asking why, and who, and how, and why we should care.

Peter Kupfer presented a partially data-driven paper on classical music’s use in advertising, and managed a beautiful balance of data, interviews, and analysis. Mark Samples, in addition to ensuring that I’d spend the rest of the day with fragments of Tom Waits song bouncing around my head, drew out useful distinctions between Waits’ voice as a matter of legal identity and the varied use of that voice as a performing tool. John Pippen actually went and did what I thought I was going to do when I started my doctoral research, exploring the ways in which new music ensemble eighth blackbird balances technique and publicity to sustain the “friendly virtuosity” that undergirds their professional lives. Jessica Wood showed off a bunch of delightfully weird Bach-Rock material from the 60s, and went one better to place it in its historical context in marketing counterculture. As an added bonus, Phil Ford was up front, moderating the panel with his hipster guru beard.

Sitting in that Saturday morning panel, even moreso than in the Friday afternoon session featuring my presentation, I felt like I had made it. Here was a collection of smart people, mostly junior scholars, chasing the same answers I spent years chasing. We had somehow managed to chase them straight into the often-stuffy corridors of AMS. I could have collected e-mail addresses to wrangle together a group for an edited volume, or panel discussions for future conferences, or just to compare notes on all the Cool Stuff…

…and I didn’t. Before the conference, I had talked about not having anything to prove this year, but I hadn’t realized what that would look like. I enjoyed being able to approach the presenters with sincere compliments, to share short conversations about our work, and to move on. I wasn’t compelled to network or position my research vis-a-vis theirs. I could appreciate the coolness of the cool stuff and get on with my day.

If I were still invested in the game, I don’t know as I would have enjoyed the conference much beyond those papers. Most of my conversations with colleagues were about bureaucracy or the job hunt. Neither subject had much sunshine in it. Even the young academics who are collecting awards and doing awesome research do not seem especially sanguine about staying inside. The faculty who mentored me through my doctorate are making noises about or plans for retirement. My impression is that we have gone beyond hand-wringing over the state of academic affairs. We focus on our work and our students as best we can. People push for small changes where it seems possible (or push back against inane institutional fiats), try to stay aware of the ways the system is jobbing them, and resign themselves to “reality.” (And reality bites.)

I laughed last weekend, more than I have recently. I caught up with people I hadn’t seen for months or years. I had too much coffee and not enough sleep. I sat outside panels and worked on my novel (still far behind NaNoWriMo par). I used my Twitter account more in 72 hours than I had in the previous 72 days. Despite all that, it felt like a farewell tour. Not a victory lap, mind, but that one last walk around campus before everybody goes home for the summer…

…and I don’t have to measure my life by semesters anymore.

Post-script: The following two articles are tangentially related to the above post and some of my earlier ones about leaving academia. 

Write Like a Motherf*cker  from Karen at The Professor Is In. It’s not as profanity-filled as the title suggests. The short version is that it’s a post about not letting academia define you. The long version is the one you should go and read by clicking that link.

“Please Stop Saying ‘Not Everyone Is Suited for Academia’”  by Rebecca Schuman of pan kisses kafka. Schuman is probably best known for her “Thesis Hatement” on Slate, but this one’s also worth the time to read. Like Karen’s, this is a post about de-academizing yourself. It’s rather more confrontational—justifiable given that she’s become one of the faces of post-ac. At AMS, anyway, I did not get the feeling that anybody was looking down their nose at me, even when my session chair read aloud “Since finishing his degree, Josh has moved to Austin, Texas, where he works as a substitute teacher.” The post does, though, get at many of the conversations I’ve had at work (and in interviews) about what exactly I’m “doing with” my PhD.

The 967th Cut: Writing, Writing, and Writing

I’m currently on course to triple-bogey NaNoWriMo. It is too early to panic, and I’ve got several hopefully word-lucrative weekends to go in the month, but I’m something like 6000 words off “par” depending on how much I get done today. It is not for want of writing that I’m behind. I suspect that, if I included everything I’d written since the flip between Halloween and All Saint’s Day, I’d be far closer to my goal.

What have I been writing? Posts for games (including a lengthy training montage involving a Chinese truck driver), professional correspondence, lengthy sub reports…but mostly I have been expanding and polishing the paper I’m presenting Friday afternoon at the annual American Musicological Society meeting in Pittsburgh. It has been a while since since I’ve touched my research, never mind tried juggling it with fiction writing, blogging, and my usual keyboard recreation. It has provided an opportunity to reflect on writing, on what changes and what remains the same as I shift characters, genres, and function.

Here’s the important thing: words matter.

I knew words mattered a long time ago. I wrote a lot of poetry in my latter teenage years, tinkering with every word and sound to get what I wanted. I knew about lightning and lightning bugs, to crib a bit from Twain. By the time I started grad school, I had incorporated that sensibility into my fiction writing. It never occurred to me that I could pay the same attention to my academic writing, though. At least until I had a fantastic advisor (Carol Hess) who deployed her inimitable mechanical pencil to mark up my papers like they hadn’t been marked up since I started at Atlantic College.

From Dr. Hess, I learned just how many of the lessons I’d learned writing poetry and fiction could apply to formal writing. She argued with me about word choice, about syntax, about varying sentence length. It was not enough to have good ideas. Nor was it enough to express them clearly. To get past “clear” to “compelling” takes work. It takes choosing the right word every time. It requires killing your darlings.

This is especially true for presentations. The presentation format amplifies everything that turns good ideas into bad writing. Nobody in a conference room has the luxury of re-reading a muddy sentence. As a writer, I have to make sure that the paper makes sense read out loud, that I don’t choke it with jargon or polysyllables. At the structural level, arguments need careful scaffolding so that they catch in listeners’ minds.

Turning literary wordcraft to academic ends has made all of my writing better. Without being able to skate by on mere fluency in any of my word work, I’ve had to develop better habits. Even in my least formal writing, the stuff I do for games, I find myself striking out extra words and focusing on vivid verbs. Focusing on sound and register has helped me improve my dialogue writing. (Games have actually been incredibly useful for that, as a Cypriot smuggler, a high school guidance counselor, and a Cajun werewolf are all going to speak…rather differently.)

Writing is writing is writing. As long as we do it attentively, we learn from it.

Expect an update on the conference and the NaNo progress this weekend.

The 962nd Cut, and Signs of Regrowth

Yesterday I had a screening interview and took some tests on vocabulary, grammar and proofreading. It seems possible I’ll have a job, of a sort, next week or not too long thereafter.

Leaving academia is like pulling off a bandaid. I suppose it’s possible to do it with a quick rip—if the right opportunity presents itself and you know just what you want. For me, the bandaid’s coming off slowly. It started slipping with applications for tenure track jobs. It began to rip when the rejection letters arrived. Moving to a place just to live there, not because of a job? That was another tug.

Simply applying for nonacademic jobs hasn’t affected me all that much (though it’s not especially entertaining going through the standard early-career professional pains of  “four+ years of experience required”). I’ve had more practice than I like hurling cover letters and my resume out into the void. Getting to an interview, though, taking concrete steps to start a new job…that was an unexpectedly sharp yank on the bandaid.

This prospective job isn’t glamorous. It is vaguely in my new field (words). The pay is worse, on an hourly basis, than most adjunct jobs. On the other hand, I’ll be getting paid for all the hours I work, rather than 20% of them. I’ll only have to go to one site. When I leave work, it will stay there. It’s just not the kind of thing I imagined doing at any point during graduate school. Even though I made plenty of noises about plans B when the job market came up, I’d always imagined something more than contract-to-hire proofreading. Funny how they don’t invite those folks to the “nonacademic careers” panels at the big conferences, huh?

By most of society’s metrics, I’m taking a step down. That is not fun, even though my reasons are good. PhDs aren’t “supposed” to schlepp, even if they’re schlepping words. Years of studying discourse provide me many ways to talk about that step down, about social constructs and material circumstances, about freedom and necessity…but they don’t really change my feelings. I get by by reminding myself that this is a step. It’s motion. I’m not sure yet whether it’s progress, but I’ve been in a holding pattern for a long, long time.

Even holding patterns yield occasional surprises. The most recent surprise for me is that I’m feeling the urge to write music again—snatches of melody, bits of orchestration. Aside from some occasional pieces and a handful of incomplete songs, I haven’t composed anything since leaving Ohio. I thought that part of me had withered, killed by seven years of too much scholastic sun and not enough artistic water. It must have had deeper roots than I thought.

I think that when I get a paycheck, I’ll invest in some nice manuscript paper.

Of Dreams, Carrots, and Towers

If it wasn’t for disappointment/I wouldn’t have any appointments
—They Might Be Giants, “Snowball in Hell”

Sometimes I miss being asked about my research. Not many people have asked since I defended my dissertation and earned the right to start signing my e-mails with “Dr.” The reason I don’t get asked very often is tied to another question: “did you apply for {insert tenure-track musicology job}?” Last year, the answer to that second question was almost always “yes,” with the exception of a few searches whose early deadlines I missed. This year, my answer will be “no.” When I was finishing my undergraduate work, I thought that professors had the best job ever: flexible schedules, the chance to work with smart young people, the vague but appealing “life of the mind.” I went to a small, selective liberal arts college and my idea of “adjunct faculty” began and ended with the applied instrumental teachers who held down performing jobs and usually had studios at several of the local colleges.

Ten years later, I know a hell of a lot more about adjunct faculty. I’ve been one of the now-ubiquitous adjuncts. Most of the academic workforce in higher education operates off the tenure track. Even so, the tenure-track job I dreamed about when I began graduate school is still dangled before graduate students and contingent faculty like the carrot before the donkey. With a little luck, the right shift in the winds, and a precisely-timed lunge, the donkey can snatch the carrot. The smartest, hardest-working donkeys have a slightly better chance at the carrot than the rest, but only slightly. You have to be a pretty smart, hard-working donkey to get through a doctoral program in the first place.

The chase for the carrot goes on. My friends and I compare notes on which programs write the most respectful rejection letters. We do our best to cheer each other’s successes. With conferences and publications, that’s easy. As a generation of scholars, I think we’re doing fascinating, worthwhile work. When it comes to jobs, though, it’s harder to be earnestly enthusiastic about friends’ success. The odds are good that you applied for the same position, the same fellowship, the same grant. When that happens, you have to be a better person than I am to avoid shading happiness at a friend’s success with hints of jealousy and disappointment. Living in academia is like living in a small town: everybody knows everybody, and even friends step on each other’s toes for want of space to move.

I was more desperate to get out of the actual small town I grew up in than to get out of this metaphorical small town of academia. Like a small town, academia can be comfortable, familiar. My dream lived there. I walked around Minneapolis feeling dissatisfied that my coursework was filled with Continental theorists. I would, I was sure, develop ideas that could elbow their way into the western body of thought alongside Deleuze and Bourdieu and Adorno. I’d use my work in comparative studies to beef up my credentials for musicology positions. I’d make time in my schedule for my kids, even if it meant staying up late and getting up early.

Eventually, nobody had to dangle a carrot in front of me, because I’d made my own carrot, held the stick in my own hands. Although it was much more miserable, it wasn’t that different from my teenage internet romance, where I’d been in love with the idea of being in love rather than with the person I was exchanging letters and books and cassettes with. As I trudged through my dissertation, I had to sell myself on the idea of being done with my dissertation. I finished it in part to spite my only intermittently-supportive institution, in part because I’d already sunk years into my PhD, and in part because I’d sold myself on that idea of being done. Being done would make everything better.

Being done did not make everything better.

I graduated in December. Because of some quirks of academic scheduling and a particularly odd adjunct position I’d taken, I wasn’t teaching in the spring. I took care of my daughter and sat on my hands and waited for something, anything, to come back from the applications I’d spent October and November sending all over the country. I was miserable. I had begun to understand some of the consequences of my mutually laissez-faire relationship with my advisor. My CV was far too thin to insulate me from the chilly job market. I told myself that I’d chase the one-year positions that begin to be announced in the spring. I told myself that I’d get an interview invitation any day now…

…I told myself that I was worthless, that I’d thrown away seven years of my life chasing a degree that was going to get me something between jack and squat. After a decade in graduate school, I was somehow even less employable than I would have been straight out of undergrad. I’d made my wife work full time through our kids’ preschool years, made her live 1200 miles from her family. I was convinced I was failing my family. Late one night it got so bad that I cried for an hour, great wracking sobs that I couldn’t stop. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d been alone. My wife helped me get through that night, and the days that came after.

In March, I went to a conference, hoping it might renew my enthusiasm (and because I had a paper to present). I heard more interesting papers than I’d heard at any previous conference. The society members were supportive. They understood my research and some were excited about the way it fit in with their own work. It was the best conference experience I’d ever had. A week later, I was more convinced than ever that leaving academia was the right next step for me. My peers at the conference were all gunning for the same jobs I was. None of us were optimistic about our immediate futures. The early career professionals committee meeting was filled with too-familiar laments, even though my fellow scholars were excited by and committed to their work.

I admire and respect my friends who are staying inside. They are doing fantastic things in the classroom and in their research. I wish they didn’t have to fight the system so hard to do them. It is inspiring to me that they can draw so much strength from the love of their work, even when they’re shoved on yet another committee or have their course load jerked around for the umpteenth time. I’ve realized I don’t love the work enough to put up with all the rest of it.

Giving up a dream is hard. It’s hard even when you know that giving it up is the right thing to do. It’s hard even when you know the dream isn’t really your dream anymore. Graduate school gets inside you like any other sixty or seventy-hour-a-week job does. It becomes a huge part of who you are. It had become a part of me that I didn’t like, but I couldn’t just cut it away. There are parts of academic life that I enjoy, parts that I’m good at. Ultimately, though, they’re not enough. The calculus of happiness is all wrong. (The financial calculus isn’t any better.) When I was busy sliding down the post-defense slope, none of the things that slowed me down came from the work I had done or thought I wanted to do. That dream of my favorite professor’s life was the thing pulling me down, even though it had shrunk from teaching at my ideal program to teaching anywhere with a reasonable salary and benefits. To get out of my hole, I had to let that dream go.

It would be a better story if this revelation had come in a cinematic beam of light, or while playing with my kids, or while noodling around on the piano. It has been slower than that, an ongoing process without any narrative tidiness. I want to make my life with my words, which is good. Writing is satisfying, and it feels right to me in ways that academic work never quite has. Starting over was, I think, the right choice. But it is still starting over. I apply for entry-level positions while keeping my eyes open for those elusive jobs outside academia where my degrees might help. The doubts don’t go away.

I’ve got dreams to chase again, though, and I like my new doubts better than my old certainties.