Tips on a "Post-Academic" Career

The "So what are you going to do with that?" career seminar was very fancy. I expected your basic auditorium with a podium up front, and it turned out to be a bunch of circular tables with napkins, pitchers of water, and a full spread of cheese, crackers, fruit, and mascot-shaped cookies. Perhaps this is meant to give us a hint of the post-academic life.

Our speaker, Susan Basalla, gave us some insights into her own career choices, things she'd heard about while writing the book, and tips on how to proceed, including

• You don't have to explain why you didn't finish your dissertation. Your employer is one of the 99% of the population who would never have considered starting one, and so has an excellent built-in understanding of why you decided you didn't want to finish it.
• If turning your CV into a resume doesn't hurt, you aren't cutting enough information. Employers don't want to know about your publications and conferences you attended, they want to know what's relevant to their job.
• An academic job search is passive; a non-academic job search is active. For an academic job, you send out all your credentials and wait for the call. For the non-academic job, you tailor your arguments, follow-up with the potential employer, and are hunting throughout the year.

I think the biggest thing I took away from the seminar was that non-academic job searchers are lengthy processes. Networking is important - most people she spoke to had gotten their first job because of a contact, not a random application - and takes years to come to fruition. I'm not sure I'm cut out for that level of uncertainty.

Different Worlds, Different Accomplishments

My sister's big achievement this week is getting married. I've known she was planning to elope for a few months now; Wednesday my dad called me to tell me the wedding was scheduled for today. I haven't heard confirmation of the wedding, but then I haven't heard anything about it going wrong either. All of my siblings have now been the principle in a wedding. I feel no pressure at being the unmarried/unattached one; I'm the youngest, and I don't want to give my dad a heart attack.

My big achievement this week wasn't really an achievement; it's just that I received the official letter declaring me a Ph.D. candidate yesterday. This changes almost nothing, just the fees I'll be charged next year, but the graduate school knows. I feel a great deal of pressure; suddenly there are looming questions about when I'll be able to defend my dissertation and what the heck I'm going to do afterwards.

No-Work Weekend, All-Work Week

Last weekend I took the entire weekend off guilt-free, because I had absolutely nothing to do; my e-mail inboxes were empty, any research tasks were in the hands of collaborators, and I was three weeks ahead in my lab planning. I had a normal life for two and a half days.

This weekend, I still kind of took the weekend off, but with plenty of guilt. There were any number of things I could have been doing, should have been doing, but I was seduced by a sale on the "Chuck" Season 1 DVD, and couldn't quite pry myself away from my TV. I still got something (one, tiny thing) done, and I'm not behind - but I'm not ahead any more, either.

Much as I said in my response to ScienceWoman's poll on taking time off between semesters, and in the graduate school survival kit I gave to a friend, I refuse to stress out about my failure to get work done. I have no home life, and can make up for it by just working 10- to 15-hour weekdays. And even if I don't make it up, there's no point fretting about it now.

Still, I do need to develop a strategy for getting work done on days when I have no meetings or classes or any reason to leave the apartment. That's the downside to a studio apartment; it's impossible to have one productivity area set aside.

No Work Weekend

I did not work this weekend. I didn't do anything particularly exciting, either - the warm snap is over, so temperatures were well below freezing all day Sunday, and still are - but I didn't work. This wasn't even a choice; I was just out of things to do. There were exactly two things I could have done, both of which would have required my presence in the lab (see comment about weather, above), and neither of which was in any sense urgent. So, I tried out a new recipe for a chocolate custard, I listened to the Hitchhiker's Guide original radio series, I cleaned, I read most of a very interesting if not convincing book about the future of religion, I began writing a review of said book, I continued writing an essay I started last semester for the heck of it...In general, I lived the life of a normal person, assuming the normal person boring and snowbound and lives alone.

Such events do not occur often. There's usually something I should be doing. But the only thing I could possibly have been working on is my dissertation proposal, and since I haven't official passed comps yet that would be jumping the gun. My advisor has been sitting on the revisions for two weeks, and I have no intention of wasting this excellent excuse to take a break from the entire "progress towards the degree" idea. This is perhaps the last chance this semester or in my graduate school career when I will feel on top of things - the lab I teach is planned for weeks in advance, everything for research progress is pending e-mails from my collaborators, and there was just nothing that couldn't fit into the coming work week. Eventually I'll fall behind again, so I decided to enjoy it while it lasted.

Searching for the Sense of Accomplishment

Alone at my father's house the day after Christmas, I had two choices between activity:

a) Read as many papers on the topic of my comps revisions as my brain would handle, possibly advancing far enough to start writing the new section, or

b) Attack my older sister's former bedroom, which has been used as a storage room for the past five or six years and was knee-deep in assorted junk with not even a clear path to wade through.

I didn't even debate the choice. I went straight to "b", and spent almost the entire day (minus a few hours of television watching during meal times) in physical labor. I didn't have to debate, because the choice was made purely on one criterion, of what I would achieve with my day:

a) A fraction of the reading list read, a page or so of notes on how they might be relevant, some rough attempts at revisions, and the ability to write "Read X papers on comps revision topic" in my upcoming weekly update to my advisor.

b) A disaster area turned into a clean room.

This decision epitomizes the problem I've been having with grad school, which is that it never really feels like I've accomplished anything. There are only ever incremental changes in papers (from the endless rounds to the "submitted pending minor revisions", the only time there is accomplishment is those first few days after a submission is made) and in research (a slow, laborious process whose "end" results are always "here are more questions we're going to be asking in the next research project). There is no sense of "I have taken on this project, I have worked hard for a certain period of time, and now it is done", because it is never done. And I find that I would rather tell my advisor that I got absolutely no research activity of any kind done in the week of Christmas, than tell myself that I managed nothing more than "making progress".

Trade-Offs on Time: Quantity vs. Flexibility

Whenever I feel overwhelmed with the amount of work I have to do, and begin to wonder why I'm in graduate school and if it's all worth it, I try to remind myself of some of the beneficial trade-offs that come with all that work.

A few weeks ago, in the throes of comps writing, I ran into an undergrad RA at Panera Bread. She was there on a date with her husband (yes, even the undergrads are getting married); I was there as an intermediate step between the public library and Borders Cafe. The undergrad, who is considering going to graduate school at some point, was put off by the seemingly never-ending stream of work we graduate students seem to do. And I can certainly understand that impression; it was a Saturday evening, and I'd done nothing that day but work, would do nothing that weekend but work. During the school year, when research requirements are met with teaching, classes, and an amazing quantity of colloquiua, I easily work 40 hours a week; some weeks, I easily top 60.

On the other hand, there is flexibility here too that often makes it seem worthwhile. Today the weather is an unseasonal 74 degrees - in the middle of November, we're talking record highs. In a "real" job, working 9-to-5, I wouldn't be set free from work until the sun was almost setting and the chill was rapidly returning. As a graduate student, I abruptly decided to take advantage of this weather in the middle of the day, embarking on a leisurely walk to the pedestrian mall downtown to shop for a birthday present. It took a bit over an hour, and it was not my lunch break. I don't know of a "real" job that would allow me to disappear for an hour in the middle of the afternoon because I felt like enjoying the unseasonal weather.

I'm not sure this freedom always makes up for the times when I work non-stop for an entire week. I've never counted the number of weekend days I work or the number of weekdays I slack off. At the moment, however, right after a brief sojourn in the sun, that freedom to decide when I work feels like it completely makes up for the excessive amounts I work.

Real Life vs. Research

For the most part, my real life doesn't interfere with my research - there isn't all that much of it, really; I read, I take pictures, I workout. Recently, as my "workout" karate has progressed closer and closer to black belt (a much more achievable goal than the PhD, since I started karate and grad school at the same time), the risk of injury has increased.

First I sprained my finger. It sounds like a completely ridiculous injury, which it is, but it's been 7 weeks now and it still hasn't healed. The doctor's estimate was six to twelve...months. Fortunately, I only had one week where typing was problematic, so it's more a minor annoyance than a real hindrance to research progress.

Yesterday, I banged up my knee. Karate again - the same person's shin making unfortunate contact with a fleshy part of my anatomy, actually. The knee joint is fine, but a specific portion of my right quadricep is bruised, swollen, refusing to assist in extending my knee, and otherwise whining.

Naturally, this occurred the morning of the day I was going to spend the afternoon on campus programming, and instead wound up spending the afternoon in bed communing with an ice pack. Naturally, this occurred the day before I have three hour-long events back-to-back in completely different buildings on campus, one of which is a teaching presentation to the graduate teacher program that my faculty mentor (not the same person as my advisor) will be evaluating. The facts that I volunteered to do the talk and have it evaluated are not helping, and are in fact making it worse.

I see workouts as a vital means of combating a sedentary research lifestyle, relieving stress associated with comps and the rest of graduate school, and feeling like I do something with my life that doesn't involve staring at a computer. I'm holding on to the belief, completely unfounded (it's not my area of research), that the long-term benefits of my more active lifestyle are worth the short-term costs of injuries that impair my research progress. All the same, I think I should write off any productivity for the rest of the day following a karate workout.