“Be ready to move.” That was the advice of my supervisor and other faculty members in the final months of graduate school.
Be ready to move? Are you kidding me? I was born ready to move. I’ve lived in countries outside of Canada, where I was born, for long periods of time and am known to be a nomad, always off to somewhere new. For me, “be ready to move” sounded less like words of caution and more like a challenge. I was eager to take my shiny new Ph.D. from a top research university out into the larger world of academe and see what it could do. I was looking forward to seeing the world through the eyes of a full-time academic instead of as a slightly scruffy backpacker or as the ubiquitous adjunct English instructor.
So I moved. I started the summer of 2010 by walking into my convocation ceremony wearing my cap and gown and, weeks later, I was boarding a plane on a one-way ticket to Ireland. With my student debt and degree in hand, I moved to a country that was on the cusp of being ground zero for the collapse of the European economy.
I am pretty sure my adviser meant I was supposed to be ready to move to a tenure-track post or even to a low-paying postdoc at a prestigious university. But I must have missed that part of the advice. Yes I had a one-way ticket, but when I stepped on the plane, I didn’t even have a job offer. What I did have was an Irish partner of five years who wanted to return home for two years to do a master’s program.
A year later, I can say that my relationship is A-OK and my academic career is, well, ... in flux. I’m not so much an academic these days as I am a Ph.D. in academic support. I’m sure many of you reading this already have an opinion on whether I moved for the right reasons or the wrong ones.
It was a year before convocation that I made the big decision to head across the pond. I handed in my dissertation and, while waiting for my defense and the inevitable revisions, I worked two part-time gigs to save some money and buff up my CV. I was lecturing at a university other than my alma mater, working at a nonprofit in my field, and doing some research on what the ivory tower over in Ireland would be like. I read up on the universities and any blogs that had their finger on the pulse of higher education in Ireland. I spent hours scouring university Web sites to find out which ones had departments where I would be a good fit. I had an RSS feed from all of the Irish universities’ job-vacancy sections. All in all I felt I was pretty on top of the situation.
Then I came upon this blog post about a “recruitment freeze” in Irish higher education. The Higher Education Authority in Ireland had instituted a hiring freeze for all Irish universities. The post quickly zapped all of the confidence that my preparation had instilled in me.
All was not completely lost, as Irish universities could still hire staff members if their salaries were paid from external sources such as government grants. However, those positions were few and far between, and usually for people who had prefixes like nano-, micro-, and bio- in their research interests.
The night before I left Canada, I applied for the job I have now. I had woken up that morning stressed, with the usual last-minute list of things to do before a flight, and with a gloomy cloud of unemployment over my head. I know most Ph.D.'s don’t graduate with a job waiting for them, but the idea of being unemployed and just graduated and in another country seemed to take postgraduation blues to a whole new level. I started my day much as I had every day back then: scouring Irish job boards for hope. By that point, I had broadened my search from strictly academic positions to academic-support jobs and to some nonprofit jobs, as I had experience in that field as well.
Maybe broadening my search was a bad idea, I don’t know. I’m not trying to write a “how to” here; in fact, I might actually be writing a “how not to.” Maybe taking a nonacademic job after earning a Ph.D. is like the kiss of death for a young academic’s career. All I know is the day before I left home I saw an academic-support job advertised in Dublin. I knew the job wouldn’t let me do any research or teaching, but it was only a yearlong contract, and I figured I would work on publishing findings from my dissertation on the side.
And anyway, my extremely modest Canadian savings was not going to go far in the Euro zone, so I couldn’t afford to be picky. I spent my last night at home putting together a job application.
Two weeks later, I was called for an interview, and within a month, I had myself a job at an Irish university. Sure, I was working with lecturers and not working as a lecturer, but who’s splitting hairs?
Last November was my one-year anniversary here in Ireland, and I’m still trying to figure out if the move was the best thing for me career-wise. I guess time will tell. As things stand, I kept to my intentions of publishing my dissertation findings on the side. I’ve published one article and have another under peer review (fingers crossed). My manager (academic-support staff members have managers here, not department heads) has been really supportive of my commitment to my academic career by giving me leave to present at conferences and keeping an eye out for me for academic posts (fairly easy because they don’t really come up much anymore).
Unexpectedly I have probably learned more about the Irish higher-education system in this academic-support job than I ever would have in a teaching position, as I work behind the scenes supporting a collaboration between all the Dublin universities. And I’ve learned a lot about the field of academic support. How did I not even know this field existed when I was a lecturer at two universities?!
My plan was to work one year in this temporary job and then get back to lecturing, but, as they say, “we plan, God laughs.” (I have never actually heard anyone say that, except on a television show.) The job situation is as grim as ever here. I was offered an extension to my contract, and I struggled with what to do. I don’t see my future in the field of academic support, and while I respect the work done and I seem to be pretty good at it, it just isn’t me. I worry that if I spend too much time in the position, then it will be harder and harder for search committees to look at my CV and see me as an academic.
In the end, however, I accepted the renewal. I would have been a fool not to in this economic climate.
But I find myself wondering, what next? At the start of this column, I said the move was for two years, so my partner could finish his degree, and then we would go back to Canada. Here’s the thing: I love it here. I love being so close to the beautiful cities and coastlines of Europe. I love surfing on the west coast of Ireland. I love bank holidays (there seems to be so many of them).
I thought when I graduated that the only thing that would make me happy was a job lecturing and doing research, but it turns out that wasn’t the only path. Don’t get me wrong, I still want a traditional academic career. But now I’m searching for that elusive teaching position on this side of the Atlantic—not because I have to, but because I want to.
This year could well determine where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing. I’ve broadened my search to Britain, where universities have taken academic titles to another level: readers, lecturers, professors. Their academic hierarchies leave me sketching out organizational charts to try and make sense of it all.
So did I move for the right reasons? Who knows. But I’m going to try to move again. And this time, I’m ready.
