Job Search Saga: The First Six Responses

By the middle of January, I had applied to 18 jobs, with "review of application begins" ranging from October 15th to January 15th. I tried to keep a positive outlook, telling myself that fully half of those applications were too early in the review process for me to even guess what I would hear, but the first five responses were far from encouraging.

The first response was neutral, but still discouraging: Search canceled because funding not approved. I didn't really need any reminder that I was on the wrong end of the supply and demand equation, competing with any number of newly minted PhDs for a very limited number of jobs.

Three other responses came in purely negative: Position has been filled. One of these letters declared that over 100 applications had been received, so I knew that my calculations of the odds had been correct, that for any application I submitted I had at best at 5% chance of getting an interview and only a 1% chance of getting the job. Still, I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with my application, that I would never make it to the top of anyone's list.

The fifth response was incredibly obscure; I couldn't decide how to interpret it. The search committee had reviewed the applications, and had decided to cancel that search and re-open it later with a modified position announcement - but the applicants were invited to respond to the new announcement. I wasn't sure how to take this. Why would I bother applying a second time when my first application apparently didn't meet their intended requirements? It was just strange.

The combination of these negative responses and the stress of my dissertation research led to a very negative outlook on the future. No matter how many times I tried to tell myself to give it another month, to give the various search committees more time to review the applications and make their initial decisions, I felt that I was not going to get a job an was not even going to graduate. It was, to say the least, a depressing start to the new year.

So when I checked my email one Friday in mid-January and saw an email referencing one of my applications, I felt not the least expectation. There was no ceremony or expectation to opening it, merely some straightforward business-as-usual in stepping through every email. And I was almost awestruck to read that the faculty was "most impressed" with my application and wanted me to come onto campus for an interview.

I was even fortunate enough to discover this email at a small local conference, that my advisor had returned from sabbatical to attend; any other day I would have to email her the news, but this one day I was able to speed-walk across the conference room to share the excitement in person. The thrill would last throughout the weekend, although after those first five minutes it was touched by a hint of stress: They wanted me to interview person, halfway across the country, within the next ten days. After three months of interminable waiting, feeling that the search committees were dragging their heels, the pace sped up exponentially.

Struggling for Motivation: Why Care What Others Think?

I find myself feeling the same toward my dissertation and ultimate defense as I did toward my black belt test several months ago. After years of training, I know exactly what I have learned, what I have accomplished; the only reason to stick around through the final strenuous test is to get an official acknowledgment of what I already know. But I can't quite bring myself to care about that official piece of paper. It'd be nice to have, but I'm not sure it's worth all the hoops I have to jump through to get it. It's just a piece of paper.

When I expressed this lack of caring to my advisor, and to a teaching advisor, the reaction was the same: You might not care about that piece of paper, but other people care! Word for word, both times - other people care. This, to me, is a ridiculous response. Sure, I care what other people think, but only to an extent. As a researcher, I care about what other researchers with expertise in my field think of the quality of my research, but only whether it is well designed, executed, and communicated, not whether it's worthwhile. As a teacher, I care about what my students think of my lessons, but only whether the lessons are effective and engaging, not whether my class is "fun" or "easy". Certainly I care about what other people think, but not enough to bend over backwards for them; not enough to subject myself to six strenuous and unpleasant months doing things I do not enjoy, sacrificing things I do enjoy, for the sake of other people's opinions.

And who are these "other people", really? A tiny, tiny percentage of the population attempts the PhD. Those who do not attempt it, those who attempt it and ultimately decide against it, they might - might- admire me for doing it, but they aren't going to think less of me for not doing something they did not do. So really, the only "other people" who care would be those who have a PhD, and think less of those who don't get one. In an administrative sense, it cuts me out of jobs that only look for the PhD itself as a marker of knowledge and skill; that cuts me out of a number of research jobs I didn't want anyway, and makes it more challenging to get a liberal arts professorship (or impossible, of "ABD considered" is only lip-service), but still leaves plenty of perfectly acceptable and interesting career opportunities open.

I do have my black belt now. So how did I motivate myself through it, and can it help with the dissertation? Well, I didn't make it through my black belt test for the prestige of having that recognized symbol of martial arts prowess. I did it as a challenge to myself, to prove to myself that I could survive the most physically demanding seven hours of my life, that I wouldn't quit when my body started cannibalizing itself for energy. Knowing what I would think of myself if I quit kept me going, except for one moment of semi-despair when the knowledge that I had carpooled to the test and would have to watch the remainder of the test kept me going.

Unfortunately, the dissertation is different than the black belt test in two critical ways. First is the time factor: putting yourself through seven hours of hell is strength, but putting yourself through three to six months of hell is masochism. Second is the criterion for success: Earning my black belt required demonstrating specific skill and convincing a single Master to promote me, but earning my dissertation requires demonstrating "a significant contribution to the literature" and convincing five academics with disparate viewpoints to promote me. I walked into my black belt test knowing that if I stuck it out and did my best I would pass; there is no such guarantee at the dissertation defense.

Dorothy Syndrome

Somewhere on the Top 10 Signs It's Time to Graduate there must be: You return to school from a trip to Kansas and spend days dreaming you could go back.

I never really understood Dorothy's insistence on getting back to Kansas. Oz was cool; she got to explore, meet talking animals, animated scarecrows and tin statues, and experience magic. Sure, often that magic was started by the wicked witch and aimed against her, but that should just add to the adventure. I blamed this on the late-19th-century opinion of the good girl and a female's place in the world.

Now I find myself drawn to Kansas for the same reason she was, or a very similar one: my sister, brother-in-law, and brand-new nephew. And grad school is no Oz to distract me. There is no magic or sense of adventure, just a list of chores to be completed before the new semester starts, the continuing drudgery of Dissertation Experiment 3, and a great deal of will required to show up to work every day. It's hard even to get excited by the prospect of applying for jobs, because the jobs seem scarce and it's just more work to cram into a busy semester.

I'm still not certain I would ditch Oz in favor of my family, but I'd certainly ditch grad school for them. Which provides a great deal of motivation to get through just...one...more...year.

Countdown to the End of the Semester

Welcome to the last week of class. In the next week, I have only 2 things that truly need to get done: 1) write a 7-9 page term paper for my thankfully nothing-to-do-with-my-major class, and 2) grade 21 research proposals. The term paper is due Friday or Saturday (my professor is lax, as he should be, since it's been over a month since I turned in the last paper and I still haven't gotten it back); the graded papers have to be finished by Monday afternoon so I can offload them to my students at their final exam.

Looking back at the semester does not make me feel in any way successful. Let's review.

Study #1 - At my advisor's insistence, I continued to collect data on a project after the initial data analysis revealed that the manipulation wasn't work. Final data analysis shows exactly the same pattern, and the additional data points didn't make anything more significant than it had been. This project is a complete wash for anything except doing a follow-up, and I probably won't do that because it doesn't fit into my dissertation.

Study #2 - The downside to collaborating with my advisor and her husband is that they both go on baby leave at the same time. Delays in getting responses to emails and a shortage of programming resources in our lab means that I barely managed to program the experiment, and am squeaking out a minuscule amount of pilot data before the semester ends.

Study #3 - My senior thesis student collected all the data for this project. The follow-up to an early (under revision) project is mixed; the replication is only marginally significant (pending massaging of data), but the expansion is significant in ways we don't know how to interpret yet. The thesis data (another of my ideas, with my student's help) turned out to be a wash, just like every other research project I've conceived myself (except my master's, which was just unpublishable).

Comps - Completed the review paper, reading approximately 150 journal articles, writing 10,000+ words (final draft), and answering every question I outlined in my proposal. My committee decided that I should have asked two additional questions, and instructed me to add these questions - which essentially means reorganizing and probably rewriting the entire thing.

Corrections Draft - My advisor has been sitting on this for almost four months, so I have been unable to make any progress. I'm close to losing my faith in research ethics over this; we found out that the published results were inaccurate almost 10 months ago, and still haven't told anyone. I set a firm deadline for getting revisions back, lest I lose all self-respect.

And...that's my semester. There was teaching a class, and some "lead" teaching activities, and helping out my thesis student - but as far as my "real" activities, demanded for research, the only thing I've managed to completed (Study #3) was really completed by an undergrad; I've just had to do the data analysis. I can't even count my two accepted conference posters, because they were submitted in the summer, and it just took this long to get the acceptances.

Yet another semester at graduate school, with nothing to show for it.

The Future

I didn't go to grad school so I could use the degree; I went to grad school so I could get the degree. It wasn't an attempt to lay the foundations of a career, although that was certainly a possibility; it was because it was a challenge and the topics were interesting and I had nothing else pressing to do. I refuse to be trapped by my education. If I decide I want to write children's books, become a police officer, join the peace corps, learn carpentry, start my own dojo, teach kindergarten, work for a non-profit, or run for political office, it is not a "waste" of or disservice to my education. Doing something just because it makes use of my PhD would be a waste of or disservice to my life. I can only assume that anyone who says otherwise stayed on a lifelong path set by a decision made in college and thinks everyone should suffer the same fate.

What Am I Doing With My Weekends?

Recent posts on ScienceWomen about striving to find balance between work and the rest of life dovetail nicely with my own ponderings this past weekend, about what work I had achieved and whether it was sufficient.

My obsessive time-keeping experiment is over, so the weekends are no longer a push to get up to the theoretically correct hours of work done for the week. Instead I try to focus on accomplishments, starting each day with a short list of things to accomplish and trying to manage it despite whatever comes up during business hours. Still, there is a temptation to see weekends as "wasted" time: time that could be spent in the lab coding on computers that are suddenly free from people, or working on comps in chunks of time uninterrupted by visitors, meetings, and incoming email.

Overall, I have no hard concerns about the balance I am achieving in my life. If I am unbalanced, it's in favor of "life" not "work". This comes of having no ambition whatsoever, a "maybe I'll just join the Peace Corps" philosophy to what I'll do after graduation and what I'd do if I left the program. I have no stress over working on weekends because I know I'm spending a decent chunk of my weekdays on things unrelated to my research - either teaching, which my advisor is not going to see as particularly productive, or doing something completely unrelated to graduate school.

So I spent my weekends not working, and feeling like I should because I also spent some of the weekdays not working, which is an entirely different take on "I didn't get enough done this week!". I could just declare my "weekend" to be Thursday and Saturday - the typical days for getting no work done - but I think the five-hours-a-day, five-days-a-week schedule suits both my ability and my will for getting work done.

The only real question is whether I'm productive enough in my focused time slots. Tick tock; the semester's deadlines for data collection and comps defenses are rapidly approaching.

New Year Career Crisis

Two weeks ago, I was not entirely successful in my struggles not to cry in the middle of a presentation directly relevant to the current section of my comps paper. For most of the past week, I have had an intense urge to either put my head down and cry onto my keyboard every time I have received the latest draft of four of the five papers I'm co-authoring. Diagnosis can go one of three ways:

1. Depression is rampant in our society, and every member of my immediate family (except maybe one sister) has been on medication for depression or manic depression at one point or another. I msyelf have a dubious diagnosis of depression hanging over from my freshman year of college. Perhaps it is time for professional help in regards to regulating neurochemicals.

2. Workaholicism also runs rampant in society and in my family. The pressure to get two abstracts submitted by Friday, two papers submitted before Advisor's impending delivery, help a student with her paper before that deadline, and get through a huge hurdle of my comps paper before Advisor's impending delivery, while attending two major multi-day conference/workshop sessions in two weeks and organizing the new TA orientation, has created an overabundance in stress. I spent too much of the past week and weekend working (i.e., pretty much all of it, aside from ~2 hours of exercise or leisure reading each day), and have no reserves left from my day at the beach in San Diego. I need to take a day away from campus, email, my work laptop, and reading in general.

3. What the fuck am I doing in graduate school? Progress is stalled on my comps because I have no interest in tackling the huge theoretical debate I have to tackle, but everyone else finds this interesting and worthwhile (it was the participant debate that set me off at the presentation). Endless drafts and post-review revisions and trying to write three papers on the same research is what academia is all about, so I should be thrilled to have so many studies worthy of submitting after the dearth of worthy reserach my first two years. Obviously I'm not cut out for this. Perhaps I should consider a brand new career path, maybe flipping burgers.

Deeper consideration suggests it can't just be #3. I'm giving myself a pass on my comps problems, because the huge theoretical debate is addressed in my comps only as a stumbling block: "if this take is correct, we can look at this cool manipulation; if not, well...". I would be totally into my comps if they would have just let me say #(*% the debate, it's not going to get resolved, and the evidence in favor the useful take is convincing enough to proceed. There are reasons I'm stuck with four drafts on the same idea (revisions to a publication I wasn't even part of are half of them) that are unlikely to repeat at any other point in my career (please!). There has been an ongoing career crisis in that direction for the past year or so, however.

Addressing the work overload is difficult. Thanks to comps, there's always something that needs to be done pressing on the back of my mind, so it's a matter of just ditching work rather than getting to a good stopping place. Re-evaluating assorted commitments means Friday, and probably Saturday, are now Grad Student Skip Days. My newly re-validated bus pass and I are taking off for anywhere not here. I am turning off the computers, ignoring the books, and either getting some sunshine or getting some expensive sugar.

Addressing the career crisis is less difficult. A very timely email has pointed me to a "Turning Points" career workshops just for graduate students. I will totally pay $60 for a six-week course on figuring out what I want to be when I grow up and how to be it. (Mild paranoia that three more people won't sign up to meet the 10-person minimum is adding to my stress load, however). And, I've enrolled in an entirely irrelevant education course I know nothing about (the title is probably Religion, Spirituality & Education, but abbreviations make it diffiuclt to tell) becuase I'd already maxed out tuition and fees anyway, so it's free!. Technically this adds to my workload, but the possibility of having non-optional chores with absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my research is well worth it.

And, this day is ending early. There is absolutely nothing I have to do that is better off being done today poorly than tomorrow (hopefully) rejuvenated.

Graduate School Is Not My Entire Life...I Spend More Time Sleeping

The second achievement of my obsessive time-keeping experiment was to demonstrate exactly how much time each week I have been dedicating to graduate school, specifically my research and my comps paper. This could alternatively be described as "not as much as I should" and "exactly as much as I feel like". The actual number is around 25 hours per week.

Keep in mind that this is time actually spent working on a task, not time spent in the lab but surfing the internet. Still, the number seems a bit sparse, given the usual informal expectations of graduate student time commitments; hence, "not as much as I should". I can come up with various excuses - no time-consuming data analyses to run, assorted stalls in attempts to spend time collecting data, no summer classes - that would explain how the summer has been an aberration. The reality, though, is that time spent is "exactly as much as I feel like".

If I don't feel like working in the evening, I don't work. It doesn't matter if I slept in, and only spent 4 hours of work on graduate school so far today. I have no deadlines; even meetings with my advisor have become "sign up if you want one". I have no significant other breathing down my neck to get on with it already, no parents demanding surcease from tuition payments. The only thing making sure work gets done is my own interest in getting it done.

This provides some excellent perspective. Sometimes it feels as if graduate school eats up my entire life; days where I stay at the office until 7:30, going home only to eat dinner at the desk while continuing to work (last Tuesday, I believe). The constant nag of assorted deadlines, imagined pressures, "I should be doing...", and doing work on the weekends makes it feel like the workload never ends. The workload might never end, and my subjective perceptions might be off, but I'm obviously very good at not spending excessive amounts of time on grad school.

Or, I'm obviously very good at not spending sufficient amounts of time on grad school...but that's all a matter of opinion. There is no exact number for time on task (our lab coordinator does have to keep such track of time, and the random conversations with undergraduates never seem to be made up elsewhere).

There is a lot to be said for working more efficiently, not longer. On the other hand, if I were truly a driven grad student, I wouldn't take that efficiency as a cue to take a break; I'd take it as a cue to excel and get the Nobel prize or get published in Science. Reflections on whether I will start spending more time on work come later.

Back to the Daily Grind

One of my siblings, taking a week-long vacation from the wage-slave grind to coincide with my week-long vacation from...not that much work at all, really...informed me that the vacation was a test of sorts, to see if getting a break from a six-day work week of customer service would make her job any more tolerable. If not, she would seriously start looking for another job. I would not say that I returned to the lab with any great enthusiasm, but I'm certainly in better shape than that. My somewhat leisurely return to work has more to do with needing to catch up on a week's worth of Internet browsing than with any reluctance on my part, since I didn't even maintain the pretense of taking the laptop with me.

It's not just the Internet browsing, of course. It's the fact that my annual vacation is arranged around my birthday. I am now 25. I need a new plan. I have begun implementing the new plan, as tenuous as it is. It occupies more of my thoughts than research at the moment, but the pressure of a meeting with my advisor - specifically, the fact that the meeting is themed "that huge critical point of your comps paper" - should help turn things around quickly.

Dual Tasking

Yesterday's lab meeting opened with a message passed on from my advisor: people notice when grad students take laptops to colloquia/seminars/things where a crowd of people gather to sit and listen for an hour or more, then spend the time listening with half the brain and doing work with the other half. The general consensus of these "people" is that if you're going to do that, you might as well not come. My advisor is at least willing to admit that we don't actually have a choice about attendance to most of these events, but discouraged dual-tasking all the same.

There are four grad students in our lab, all of whom have laptops we carry around just about everywhere. It was a general message, but I know I am one of the worst offenders. I briefly considered making it a personal rule not to take the laptop to these meetings (unless I'm actually taking notes on the talk, which happens fairly often), but then I started wondering exactly why this is considered to be such a big problem.

There's disrespect to the speaker; this would seem to be the most likely culprit. And yet, the back rows of chairs at these events are lined with faculty who showed up 5, 10, 15 minutes late. How is that less disrespectful? I'm not just sitting there and ignoring the speaker, so I probably only miss as much of the talk as the people who show up late. When the speaker and others in the audience get into a nuanced debate I have no hope of understanding, I lose nothing by running a quick lit search or composing an email to someone.

There's missing the details of the talk; this was my advisor's tack. The point of attending these events is to learn more about other fields, and to learn how to ask good questions. The problem here is that I am not the best learner from the colloquium format. There are too many details, and the slides are too poorly organized, to get a grasp of a talk without interrupting in the middle, which we're not supposed to do. I'm rarely going to do better than getting the gist of the talk anyway, and checking the weather or typing up a blog entry bit by bit is not going to change that.

It doesn't matter how often someone tells you that there are no stupid questions; you can tell how few graduate students buy it by how few actually ask questions. Surrounded by faculty, in a talk far out of my own area, I'm not going to ask what might turn out to be the most basic fact imaginable.

Then there's the appearance. Showing up at a talk and only paying half the attention it might be merited reflects upon you as a student (and your advisor as an advisor, which is probably why we got the lecture in the first place). All those other members of the faculty see that you aren't dedicated, and this is bad, so at least look like you're devoting your entire attention to the talk.Since I can see at least one faculty member doing the same thing, such an angle is slightly hypocritical.

The problem with any of these reasons is that removing the laptop treats the symptom, not the cause: boredom, loss of attention, inability to follow what's being talked about. The worst case was when I watched my lab mate give a practice brown bag, then give the actual brown bag, and then give an extended version for the new summer series. The talk got better each time, but it also got old; the best strategy for attendance was to follow the new information and listen with one ear while he went over the unchanged slides. Hence, the laptop. I'm currently listening to the fourth or fifth iteration of another lab mate's talk, and obviously the umpteenth explanation of the phenomenon she studies does not hold my entire attention.

No one has ever suggested that I have ADHD, but I am a product of my generation. I put a CD or DVD on while I work, I move around cleaning house when I'm on the phone; I multi-task as a way of life; the only time I don't is when I read a book, which is accompanied by a lot of meta-analysis on writing style and possibly upcoming plot turns.Perhaps I should cultivate the ability to put my entire mind behind a single task, but this almost seems counter-productive. I've been involved in several long discussions about "what is intelligence", and to me multi-tasking is a critical component.There may be arguments for how it can be better to get a lot out of the one thing, but there's not clear case for one or the other that might make me put the effort into changing my own thought patterns.

I suppose the real question is this: If hearing about research and findings stimulates my brain, and I'm stuck in an environment where that creative energy can't be channeled into discussion and brainstorming, why is it so wrong to caputre as much of it as possible on my electronic notepad?

The March of the PRAs

Our Lab Coordinator (LC) is going to graduate school, so the next few days/weeks will be taken up with interviewing potential replacements. We only advertised locally, and still got a pile of applicants, and are in the middle of an interviewing marathon: three days in a row, we bring an applicant in for a four-hour interview process. I'm only involved for a half-hour of each, joining another graduate student in a team interview, but it's a very all-consuming process for the lab in general.

This will be the second time I've been involved in LC interviews, and the third time I'll be involved in the early stages of training a replacement. Since I worked in this lab the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I'm the only student (graduate or otherwise) to have worked with every LC to work here. So far that's four; by my expected graduation date it will be six.

I could see this as a strong connection to the lab, a badge of honor for the length of my tenure (although not unreasonably long for a dissertation). At the moment, all I see is four to six people who have spent a year or two in a given job and have since moved on to other things, while I have stayed here with the same people and the same non-productive research projects. It roughly translates into: they've made progress in their lives, and I'm still here. Granted, I'm here with a master's degree, and I get paid more than a PRA (once you factor in full-time summer appointments, anyway), but there's a definite hint of stagnation.

What A Difference A Year Makes

Let's reiterate the "you didn't really think I could do this, did you?" nature of end-of-year progress report/plans with a side-by-side comparison.

Now:

"Following completion of the doctoral degree, I plan to continue in the academic field. I prefer to enter a teaching-focused university, where I will teach during the school year with options to continue research either during the summer or on the side. Depending on the level of experience I gain with future TA positions, I may seek one- or two-year terms as Instructors to replace professors on sabbatical before I attempt to get a relatively permanent position as an assistant professor. I prefer to take on a teaching position where I will be able to teach [my field] and statistics, and where I can focus on teaching critical thinking and writing skills. I also prefer to take a position east of the Mississippi, in order to be within easier traveling distance of my immediate family."

Then:

"Following completion of the doctoral degree, I plan to continue in the academic field. I will seek employment as a postdoctoral researcher, preferably doing work that is related to my graduate research but branches off into new theoretical territory or skills. Ideally I would complete two two-year postdoctoral positions. At least one of these would continue in [my field], although a second may [be related field]. I have no strong geographic or technical constraints regarding where these postdoctoral positions are, although I would probably not actively search for positions in the Southeast. I prefer to complete two positions to allow more variety in travel before starting a relatively permanent position as an assistant professor. I will most likely seek positions with an emphasis on teaching and mentoring rather than research exclusively, as I have found my work mentoring individual undergraduates to be some of the most satisfying in my graduate career thus far and expect I will feel as strongly about teaching when I have more in-depth experience."

Rejection Junction

My advisor has announced an intention to give a "rejection" talk to the lab sometime this summer. This may or may not be related to a post (on my personal blog) linking the intense need for a vacation and the series of rejections I've received this past year. I'd welcome a discussion, but I'm not sure a talk would help.

Being told that it's part of the process, that it's common even for the big names, is nothing new. Being told not to take it personally is besides the point. I have not been particularly attached to any of my rejected applications - I didn't really need funding/to attend a workshop/whatever; my motivation could easily be summed up as "that would be pretty cool". It just doesn't matter how unattached or thick-skinned you think you are; a rejection is a negative event that puts at least a small dent in your mood and casts a mild pall over all future attempts. Without some clear breeze of an acceptance to clear the air, future rejections just pile up, even over the course of a semester.

At a guess, my advisor has lost touch with the sensations of uninterrupted rejections. Congratulations are handed out to some people in the lab on a fairly regular basis, and they are all shared by the Head Honcho. The advisor gets some kudos on any accomplishment, that "look what we've done; it was a success!" Except that it's harder for a graduate student to share in the success of another grad student; it's more "look what they've done; so why can't my stuff get published?". The rejection train (hence the Schoolhouse Rock reference in the title) already pushed me into "I need a vacation"; even with this morale boost, I'm not sure how much more I can take before I cross the line into "Why bother?".

It's probably not about thick skin or detachment at all; it's about needing to be successful. People who want to go into academia will keep going despite rejection because they're determined to succeed. I don't have enough ambition to care about getting published or otherwise showing off my professional aspirations. The rejection may hit less, than if I thought these things were all important, but there's less reason to bounce back.