Getting started (over)

Around the time I was finishing my PhD, I realized that the ongoing pandemic had killed my interest in going on the academic job market. While a tenure-track job was always a long shot, I had originally, and throughout most of grad school, intended to go after it. But the pandemic cracked a lot of faultlines wide open and while I still love what I was doing, I realized that I wanted a better life/work balance and a more stable income.

I love teaching, but ever since I passed my qualifying exam, I’ve been teaching as many classes as I could get. Our program has us teaching our own classes pretty early on, and as soon as I could, I started taking on extra jobs grading for other professors or working as a research assistant, as well as adjuncting on the side. This meant I was sometimes teaching three classes on two campuses in addition to working on my dissertation and doing a little nonacademic freelance writing. I did this because I live in the Bay Area and I have three kids and grad school doesn’t pay the big bucks, even though landlords here charge the big bucks. Grad school has always underpaid, but that underpayment, like wages generally, has not kept pace with inflation.

I’m proud of the scholarship I produced in this time, but I do feel frustrated that I couldn’t spend more time focused solely on that scholarship. Money was a huge obstacle. I’ve been privileged enough to spend seven years studying and writing, and I loved doing it, but it took a huge toll on my family and earnings, and my need to make money impeded my ability to advance in academia. I’m tired.

The thing is, academia was never my dream. I know it is for many people, and I understand why. I’ve loved it. I’ve had a weird academic path, though, and it was never supposed to send me to grad school. I started out as an illustration major at art school before dropping out and having a kid, getting married, having more kids. When I went back to undergrad, it was initially to better prepare myself for a job search, but then it turned out that I loved school, and moreover, school loved me back. I had a wonderful time and when I finished, I won the graduate purse, an award given to one student in a graduating class who is deemed a good prospect for a graduate education. The award usually went to STEM or social science majors, so it was a pretty big deal when I got it as an English major. By then I wanted that graduate education, and here was this prize that said that I could get one.

So I went for it and you know how it ended up because here I am now, with a PhD and a lot of really wonderful experiences and some very frustrating ones attached to that title. If one could be said to stumble into a PhD program, then I did that, though you can’t be said to stumble into a PhD. That takes stubbornness and a dogged focus and maybe a little foolishness as well. I remain grateful to the many, many kind and generous people who helped me get here and mad at American society’s attach on academic knowledge and labor and also excited about a future in which I’m once again trying something new.

So I’m starting over, which is a very weird place to be at this time in my life. I’ve spent months reevaluating what my priorities are and trying to figure out what drives me. One thing about me that made academia tough: academia loves specialization, and I’m a generalist at heart. When I say academia was never my dream, that is because my dreams have never been limited to a single field or idea or profession. I love to make things and I love to learn things and I love to listen to weird nerds talk about the things that they love and I love to take what I’ve learned and translate it for people who, like me, are not specialists in that field. I wanted to be a visual artist and an actor and a novelist and a journalist and a zoologist and a traveler and and and and and

I’m (trying) to look at grad school as my time in a major league sport. For most people, that isn’t a long term career. It’s something you get an opportunity to do and then, for most people, it’s over. My husband is the one who gave me this metaphor, long before I was ready to hear it and long before I was ready to accept it.

So as I’ve been evaluating my priorities, desires, and options, a few things have struck me. I want more control over my time, so I can play around with more ideas and more of the things I love doing, not just the ones associated with my academic career. Academia is paradoxical about your time. More than many professions, you have the ability to structure your own workday, but because you care about the work and because there’s always more to do, the workday is never foreclosed. Ideas related to your project often stubbornly refuse to conform to your imagined schedule. I want a schedule that’s a little more orderly, where the goals and deadlines are closer together and less nebulous.

I want more money. This is naked, as statements go, but it’s not like this isn’t important. We live in a society, as a famous clown once said, and it turns out you need money to live in this society, and opting out isn’t an option available to me. I’ve spent my adult life chronically underpaid, and doing work that you care about but cannot devote yourself to as you wish because of a need for money is less fulfilling than one might think. As I said, I’m a generalist; it is not as though there is a single path or job that will fulfill me or make me happy.

I love doing research. It is one of my favorite activities. I’ve learned in recent years that I still enjoy doing research when it’s not for my own passions. Research is like solving a mystery or putting together a puzzle. How do you find this information? How do you compile it? How do you translate it for an audience? How do you figure out who’s in that audience? That’s fun and compelling work, whether it’s for a project of my own design or for a client who wants an article about their own field.

All of this very long entry is to say that in going through my current needs, interests, and hopes, it has led me to the conclusion that instructional design feels like a great fit for me. It utilizes many of the skills I’ve gained as a teacher, while also pulling on the design and research skills I’ve honed and love utilizing. I’m going to write about my process as I design an interactive module in Articulate Storyline, because I’m learning and I’m excited to learn something new. My current project is a module about writing an email. In my next entry, I’ll talk about how I picked my topic and what analysis I did before getting started.