It was during the heady days of my second year of graduate school in English that my idealism about the academic profession suffered its first blow.
Posted on the office door of a veteran graduate student was a comic from the Life in Hell series by Matt Groening, best known for creating The Simpsons. Focused on the absurdities of graduate school, the comic featured a panel labeled “The Most Bitter Person in the World.” Its subject was a grizzled, pathetic-looking graduate student unable to complete his Ph.D., find an academic job, or discover anything better to make of his life.
That comic had a far more profound impact on me than any scholarly roundtable on the state of the profession. From that day forward, you might say that as much as my ambition was to earn my Ph.D., it was also to not become the frightening caricature of Matt Groening’s satire.
Despite my own disappointments of this past year -- my limited success on the job market, where I found an adjunct position but no tenure-track job -- I’ve managed to avoid the bitterness and frustration that sometimes seems to go hand in hand with being a job candidate in English (though, to be honest, it’s gotten harder, especially as I’ve watched a few close friends land their dream jobs). I’ve been able to avoid the malaise for a number of reasons: because I did finish the dissertation in a reasonable period, because I have had the opportunity to do some full-time teaching, and because ever since reading Mr. Groening’s comic I have prepared myself for the possibility of life outside the academy. I’d like to offer my impressions of that life in this, my final column for The Chronicle.
Graduate-school mentors are often at a loss when their advisees reveal a desire to explore careers outside academe for the perfectly understandable reason that most have known nothing but the life of a professor. Having taught for two years as a full-time adjunct and worked outside the academy as an editor for the past year, I’m in a position to comment on the differences between the two worlds.
But please don’t construe anything I’m about to say as advice; nothing has annoyed me more than smug year-end columns by successful job-seekers who deign to offer their Tips For Getting a Job. It’s not that their advice isn’t sound. It’s that any advice that fails to acknowledge the essential arbitrariness of the academic job market in the humanities simply isn’t credible, in my view. There’s no magic bullet guaranteed to win you your ideal job; and even if you do get a job, there’s no guarantee it will make you happy, as one recanting columnist acknowledged here earlier this year.
So what follows are merely my personal reflections, and they may not apply to any other person or be generalizable to other business situations. Lord knows I’m no career counselor -- although I’ve seen enough of them to fake it pretty well.
I worked as a writer and editor before entering graduate school, so I’ve always known I had an interest in those fields. The company where I currently work has its particular traits: a midsized business that works at the crossroads of publishing, finance, and technology, it has outgrown the chaotic excitement of a start-up venture, but it still retains much of its earlier entrepreneurial spirit. The company has a casual work environment with a number of progressive benefits, such as paid paternity leave, flex time, and stock options. But growth has also brought on more hierarchical, corporate practices, such as strict cost controls and rigidly defined performance reviews. All of which is to say, the company you walk into might be completely different from the one in which I find myself.
Getting the job
In my experience, if you play your cards right, it’s far easier to land a job in the private sector than in academe. The dramatic difference in supply and demand accounts for a lot of this, of course. In my subfield of American literature, 300 to 400 people often apply for a single job. In contrast, the private sector has been a buyer’s market for job seekers. Things have tightened up recently, especially in the dot-com world, but there are still plenty of employers desperate for bright, talented workers.
When I started looking for nonacademic jobs last spring, I had two attractive offers within about two weeks, and each reflected a common way of getting positions in the business world. The one I did not take, with a leading Internet distance-education company, came about through a reference from an inside contact at the firm. The opportunity I did take opened up at a company where I had been doing part-time work throughout graduate school. In both cases I was virtually the only candidate for the job. The interviews were not the pressure cookers of an M.L.A. convention interview, but rather friendly conversations intended to make sure that both parties felt they had a good fit.
Taking a meaningful job while you’re in graduate school is key for anyone who even remotely thinks they may want to leave academe at some point. It’s arguable that doing so detracts from one’s academic production, and I’ll never know how much this affected my own status, but since virtually everyone I knew in graduate school had some kind of outside gig -- whether working at the library or tending bar -- I figure it might as well be strategically chosen, whether in academic administration, nonprofit groups, or elsewhere.
Work styles
I have found the business world to be a far more collaborative place than the university. Most professors are used to working either in isolation (doing their research) or autocratically (as the sole ruler of the classroom). In my two years of teaching, I rarely had conversations with other faculty members. Now, I interact daily with a variety of people -- graphic designers, computer programmers, quantitative researchers -- who often provide feedback on my own writing. This aspect of the work world appeals to more gregarious types, I think; it’s been something of an adjustment for me, although I recognize its value, and the people I work with are genuinely smart and interesting.
The cubicle architecture of many companies (like mine) lends itself to this more open communication. I often miss the private office I had as a visiting assistant professor; of course, the norm for most adjuncts is a shared office space, if that.
Work demands are also more immediate and results-oriented in the business world. People don’t want you to dwell on a decision for hours, much less days. Quick answers and production are prized, often at the expense of contemplation, that cherished academic value. The positive side of this is that you see results of your work more immediately, and often are recognized for your efforts. While it requires a shift in mindset to go from “I’ll write that book in five years” to “I’ll have that project done Friday,” it’s satisfying to see concrete products emerge quickly from your labor.
Work environment
Control over your time is a significant difference between the university and the business environment. Anyone who’s actually taught knows that the myths about professors who teach three hours a week and spend the rest of their time on the golf course are patently false. At the same time, it’s true that you shape your own schedule to a remarkable degree in academe. When I was teaching, if I wanted to head home in the middle of the afternoon after teaching, I’d do it. Yes, I’d pay for it by staying up past midnight grading papers, but the time was mine to choose.
I don’t have that luxury working standard business hours. But I also leave my work at the office, and I rarely have to stay late (not the case for everyone in the business world). As a teacher, my nights were constantly haunted by the burdens of work not yet done -- lectures to prepare, papers to grade, articles to write. I don’t miss that pressure at all, or at least I wouldn’t if I wasn’t still working on academic projects most nights.
Another pleasant surprise of the business world has been the diversity of my co-workers. While diversity is a veritable mantra of the modern university, in fact, my work as a teacher brought me into very little contact with people who were different from me, either ethnically or educationally. By contrast, in my company I have African-American and Hispanic colleagues and I work regularly with immigrants from China, Poland, Korea, Italy, and Russia. The stereotypical image of the business world as privileged and lily-white has not been the reality of my experience.
Intellectual Substance
When underemployed Ph.D.'s ponder the “outside world,” the key question they ask themselves is, Can I find work that will be intellectually rewarding? The answer for me is a qualified “yes.” I spend my days writing, editing, and advising on a range of editorial projects that run the spectrum from utterly mundane to fascinating. Some hours I am bored to tears by my job, others I find it gripping. I suppose this is the norm for most jobs, and on balance, I find the type of work I’m doing challenging and enjoyable, with a lot of potential to evolve, whether at my current job or elsewhere.
But here’s the truth for me: Nothing can quite replace the joy of engaging deeply in an intellectual question connected to a subject about which you are passionate, which for me means literature.
Working outside the ivory tower provides a useful dose of reality; it’s bracing but illuminating to realize that most people don’t care one iota about the minutiae that occupy most academicians. And my business-world colleagues are hardly philistines: They are eloquent and informed about a range of artistic subjects, from music to poetry to comic books.
Yes, I agree with my fellow columnist Kevin Walzer that you can continue to do academic work while working another job. But absent the nurturing context of colleagues, students, and an institution that truly value your scholarly work, it becomes much harder to sustain the motivation.
I suppose that’s why, even given all I’ve come to appreciate about the private sector and disdain in the university, I’ll probably continue to try to get that tenure-track position until the door is irrevocably slammed in my face. Call it obstinacy. Call it persistence. Or just call it for what it is: the way we live now.
Aaron Leonard is the pseudonym of a Ph.D. in English who earned his degree from a Midwestern university. He wrote a regular column on Career Network about his search for a tenure-track job this academic year.