#WithAPhD chat 2.0

TL;DR: We are resuming the #withAPhD chat on Feburary 6, 2017 at 12pm EST. Topic: money.

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If you’ve read my blog for any length of time (or even if you haven’t), you might have noticed a few posts about my post-PhD path. Most are navel-gazing meditations on who I am now as a person with a PhD outside of academia. For many reasons, I made the choice to go off the academic grid in pursuit of something else. What exactly that something else might be, I’m still figuring out. Leaving academia was the easy part (in reality one of the hardest moments of my professional and personal life); creating something new and meaningful has been harder still.

Searching for career options outside of academia has often felt profoundly lonely. I’ve had stabbing pangs of jealously when friends and colleagues receive funding, academic job offers, and return from their archival research trips with hundreds of documents they can’t wait to read. Talking to academic friends about struggling to find non-academic employment sometimes feels like shouting across the Grand Canyon. We can see each other, but our struggles are often profoundly different.

Career coach Jen Polk of From PhD to Life has been one of my greatest supporters during my search for something more. Though I never worked with her as a coach, she has been a consistent cheerleader for me in my quest to uncover my next steps. One of the things that has enabled me to stay focused and optimistic about the non-academic career search has been the amazing community of like-minded people that Jen has rallied under the hashtag #WithAPhD. I’ve had the great pleasure of participating in (and co-hosting) one of the best chats in the Twitterverse. The #withaphd community provides support, advice, and empathy for scholars across the humanities, social sciences, STEM, and other fields. Through the #withaphd chat, I’ve met people who have become staunch allies, friends, and colleagues. The community is as diverse and vibrant as the people who use the hashtag: academics, non-academics, students, coaches, editors, scientists, humanities people, scholars, and a whole slew of other people I’m failing to mention. What we all have in common is an interest in using our experiences and knowledge in new ways, both inside and outside of academia. Jen’s commitment to the #withaphd community brought us together and has helped people expand their visions of what people can do with a graduate degree. She has, in short, been a phenomenal advocate for all of us.

Recently, Jen informed the #withaphd community that she needed to retire from hosting the chat to focus on some other things. As she’s said, no one owns the #withaphd hashtag. It’s been great to see people using it to post all kinds of things related to new career paths and ideas. The #withaphd community doesn’t really need a leader, but Kristine Lodge and I both approached Jen and humbly suggested that maybe we’d start hosting the chat. Jen put us in touch, we talked, and decided that the #withaphd chat means a lot to both of us; we wanted to continue providing the community with an online space to connect.

We don’t own the chat, the idea, or the hashtag. Mostly, we envision doing the organizational stuff (sending out reminder emails, archiving chats, promoting it on Twitter, arranging co-hosts) and then standing back to let the community do what it does best: supporting each other, making connections, and generating ideas. The transition may be a little bumpy at first as we figure out some details (where, for example, to post stuff about the chat that isn't my blog)  and get the ball rolling. I hope that you’ll hang in there with us as we learn how to host and do the housekeeping.

With this in mind, we’re preparing to launch version 2.0 of the #withaphd chat. To be honest, I’m a little intimidated; Jen has left us with big shoes to fill. We’ll be chatting at 12pm EST on February 6, with the customary hashtag. We’ll be talking about money. Finances, debt, and money have been taking up a lot of space in my head recently, though it makes me uncomfortable. (I suspect it makes a lot of people uncomfortable.) Talking about the uncomfortable is a lot of what people with PhDs do, so I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about student debt, the economics of going freelance, getting paid what you’re worth in the real world, when "full" graduate funding isn't really full funding, and disrupting the idea that doing what you love means that you do it for free.

Hope you’ll continue to join us!      

In case you're wondering who we are, here's some basics:

Kristine Lodge:

I'm Kristi Lodge.  I have a PhD in English literature from the University of Oregon.  I trained as a medievalist, but since 2006, I've been working as an assistant director at the University of Oregon Career Center running two programs and providing career counseling to graduate and undergraduate students.  Helping graduate students, especially PhDs, figure out their career directions, is one of my passions.  I've bveen active with the #altac community in a variety of ways: I've been a member of the Graduate Career Consortium, a contributor to the Versatile PhD, and a panelist with the Beyond the Professoriate conference in addition to maintaining a Twitter feed @Kristi_Lodge. 

When I'm not trying to help people figure out their next career steps, I'm chasing two small kids, getting outside on snowshoes, bike, SUPs, hiking boots, and just generally soaking up all that life in the Pacific Northwest has to offer.  I'm beyond excited to be working with Lisa on continuing conversations at #withaphd.  

Lisa Munro:

I'm Lisa Munro. I have a PhD in history from the University of Arizona. I finished in 2015. My research, which I still love, focused on cultural relationships between Guatemala and the U.S. during the 1930s and included fashion shows, textiles, Tarzan movies, the history of archaeology, and world's fairs. I've managed to leave my heart somewhere between Yucatán and Guatemala and hope to return to Latin America sooner rather than later. Iṽe had a weird career path that has given me a lot of weird job skills: veterinary tech, Peace Corps volunteer, medical assistant, crisis line operator, PhD student, teacher, and most recently, crime victim advocate. My memoir will likely be titled Continuity Problems. I'm still figuring out where I'm going in the post-PhD world. I'm most easily reached (and will respond!) on Twitter: @llmunro.

In my spare time, I'm getting outside, taking pictures of Colorado skies, knitting, writing, and advocating for the rights of adopted people.

Report from the Field: #AHA17

Last week, amid freezing temperatures and snowstorms, the members of the American Historical Association met in Denver. (No, I don’t know who decided that meeting in the dead of winter in Denver was a good idea. San Diego, people. San Diego.) The snowstorm delayed flights causing many panelists to miss their presentations. Participants, including me, snarked our indignation about the lousy weather on Twitter. Our histrionics caught the attention of the local news.

Welcome to Denver! Hope people packed warm coats and snowshoes. ;) #aha17

— Lisa Munro (@llmunro) January 4, 2017

The first time I went to AHA as an unaffiliated person, I felt a little weird about it. This year, I felt more confident about my unaffiliated status. I did not present any research or chair any panels. Since last year, I’ve managed to get a job at a non-profit dedicated to crime victim advocacy. Being gainfully employed and getting paychecks that didn’t make me laugh a bitter laugh increased my confidence considerably.

“Um…so …where are you?” people asked. They meant which university.
“Here in Denver,” I responded. “I had to get a day job. I work in crime victim advocacy.”
“Oh, wow…that sounds…difficult.”
“It is. But responding to crime scenes beats grading.”

Don’t get me wrong. AHA has some great parts: seeing old friends, meeting new ones, and taking full advantage of available open bars at receptions. I loved hearing about the adventures of former colleagues and classmates. I was genuinely happy for the people who got the tenure track jobs they wanted. I felt pained for those who reported that they were still adjuncting.

I went to a few panels. I listed to the speakers at a panel on travelers in Central America. Hearing papers on early 20th century travelers and tourism to Guatemala made me think that my research was still relevant. I began to think that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t totally washed up as a historian or an academic. I schmoozed people after the panels. I talked to the panelists about my research and people still seemed to think that I had something worthwhile to say.  

Besides the panels focused on individual research, some highlighted the state of the profession and the ongoing job crisis. Kevin Gannon, a fellow Twitterstorian, argued that many history departments train their PhD students for a job market that hasn’t existed for thirty years. Though I wasn’t able to attend the panel because of a conflict with another panel, I was heartened to hear that many people attended. The job crisis can no longer be ignored. In my own cohort of graduate students, fewer and fewer seem to be getting academic positions. I’m no longer convinced that good students still get good jobs. In years past, people used to assure me that the job crisis was temporary. I now think that the dismal job prospects for PhD students are the new normal. If the AHA continues to advocate for the profession as a whole, it must address the job crisis and work to expand the definition of success in the field. If it can’t meet these challenges, it risks becoming irrelevant, the main advocacy organization for a dwindling number of professional scholars.

The Woes of the Academic Conference-Industrial Complex

In the unspoken rules of the academic world, participating in the annual meeting is almost mandatory. On the plus side, conferences can be great fun. They present immediate opportunities for self-promotion and networking with major scholars in the field. People jockey desperately to impress one another with the prestige of name badges. Jobs are also won and lost at the annual meeting. Despite the AHA’s attempts in recent years to promote alternative careers for historians, academic jobs and careers remain the focal point of the conference, as evidenced by the dreaded job center. Junior scholars and graduate students on the job market must do everything in their power to appear like serious scholars with that magical quality: potential. Some of the people who have job interviews at the conference will be invited for campus visits; the majority will not.

The ugly side of conferences is that they operate on a pay to play model that excludes many people. Conference attendance, the yearly gamble on the job market, is expensive and has no guaranteed payoff of the coveted tenure track job. I realize that in the world of huge corporations, the idea of paying $1500 for a conference is truly small potatoes. However, for academics, it is sometimes a serious burden. A small breakdown of costs at the big conferences goes something like this.

Plane ticket: $400
Hotel room: $750
Eating/bar: $350

This comes out to be a grand total of $1500. In January. Right after the holidays. A good number of people, including myself, can’t afford this without institutional support. To add insult to injury (and some cliches), no one is interested in giving travel grants to random scholars unaffiliated with any university. I have lamentably not discovered any way to generate huge sums to cash on demand. Adjuncts, alt-ac people, and graduate students struggle to attend.  

For me, I’m done gambling. I no longer believe that gambling $1500 in conference costs brings a huge academic payoff in the form of an academic job or book deal. I’m already struggling with a huge amount of debt (a post on my debt situation coming soon). I have a day job that is paying me enough to cover my bills, but not much more. My goal this year is to pay off a tiny part of my student debt that is collecting a huge amount of interest. Because of this, I don’t have a whole lot of disposable cash.

I went to Denver this year because I live here. This was by far the cheapest conference that I’ve ever attended, largely because I commuted from home to the conference center. I probably didn’t get as much out of it as I did last year, but the cost-benefit ratio seems more distorted to me every year. Next year, AHA is in Washington, D.C. I doubt I’ll go. Then it’s Chicago and New York. Ditto.  

It’s hard to participate in academia as an outsider. If the AHA is really serious about about career diversity (and I have some doubts about this), participation in the annual meeting needs to be easier for people who are paying out of their own pockets. Establishing some sort of travel funding for the unaffiliated would be an awesome start.

Just thoughts, as usual.

Self, 2.0

I’m riding emotional waves about the wisdom my new life as a former academic. Some days, I’m convinced that I’m on the right track. Other days, I’m positive I’ve made a huge mistake.   

I have moments of self-reflection, recrimination, doubt, confusion, despair, and sometimes, joy. Being an ex academic feels a little bit like being fourteen years old. I’m trying to figure out who I am. AGAIN.   

It’s sometimes hard to stay positive in the middle of emotional upheaval. But I’m also convinced that the journey of an ex-academic includes a plastic decoder ring hidden in the bottom of the cereal box that actually works.

Here’s the gift: we get to re-invent ourselves.

We get to have a second adolescence. (Yes, that sounds horrible to me too, but hear me out, willya?) Self-invention of the teenage kind is painful and confusing. Self-re-invention at 40 is even more painful and confusing. Metamorphosis and transformation are never beautiful on the surface. Nevertheless, in struggle, we come to know ourselves. We try on new personalities, professions, and dreams and take them off again. We move in fits and starts. We make progress and then make progress in the wrong direction. We think about what’s truly important to us and what we believe about the world. We decide how and who we want to be. Some paths lead nowhere. Through all this sputtering, the way becomes clearer. Self-re-inventions is a place of pain, but also of profound power and possibility. (And alliteration, apparently.)

This week I’ve been wondering: does leaving academia mean that we stop following our intellectual passions?

Breaking up with my research hurts because I still love it.  My research felt deeply personal because it grew out of interactionswith real people in Guatemala. I wanted to do something to understand their struggles. My research challenged some ideas about how we think about people in the past. The act of creating that knowledge felt like birthing. Leaving it behind feels like getting a limb amputated, complete with phantom pain. I feel sad about the bigger picture, too. I wonder how much knowledge about the world we’ll never know because of scholars (particularly adjuncts) who choose to leave academia.

(For the record, I’m not hating on people with academic jobs or publishing contracts. You’re doing important work, too. I just think that its a little harder to be a so-called independent scholar.)   

I wrote last week about the idea that universities are not the only places in the world where teaching can happen. Likewise, the idea that we can only have a meaningful “life of the mind” inside universities has begun to seem equally absurd to me.

Is nurturing intellectual passions outside of a university the same as having an academic job? Of course not. No one pays me to do research. I’m not eligible for funding. I’ll never have a sabbatical. I no longer get summer breaks to jet off to an archive. Research and publication are not going to further my career. For example, I wanted to add a fifth chapter to my book manuscript about the Guatemalan zoo. Lack of funding and sanctioned research time makes this difficult, if not impossible.

On the other hand, learning is everywhere. We don’t stop learning and growing just because we’re no longer academics. We are still learning, though in new and different ways. Perhaps we’ve even got intellectual ideas and passions that couldn’t be nourished in an academic setting. Maybe we’re growing new ideas with tiny roots.

I recently learned a bit about local histories in the city where I live. And the historian wheels started turning. I felt that amazing sense of wonderment again, like when I see geese take flight out of a pond and can’t figure out how they do it.

In my own backyard, I have:

• A City Beautiful Movement
• A now demolished Training School for Mental Defectives
• A city once deemed the Celery Capital of the World
• A Cold War era nuclear weapons plant
• A wave of Italian immigration
• Some KKK activity in Denver

My other blessing is a blog where I write anything I want to write about. Nothing needs to be sanctioned by a panel of experts. I receive no reviewers’ comments or rejection letters. I can publish whenever I please. I don’t have to worry about my precarious labor contract if I should write about something unpopular. Perhaps most blessedly, there are no student evaluations.

I don’t imagine that I’m going to undertake any large-scale research projects that will culminate in book projects. I don’t know where my interests in these things will take me. For now, I’m re-imagining myself and how I engage in scholarship without a university.