Dan Mullin at The Unemployed Philosopher has a great postacademic podcast and this week, it features lovable furry old me. Want to know my thoughts on marriage, identity, debt, arrested development, having kids, and more when it comes to quitting grad school? Tune in! And check out Dan’s other eps while you’re at it.
“Stupid choices I made in my twenties might impact my life forever. That’s a drag.” – Me
Currer Bell and I wrote a little essay about what we see as the differences between alt-ac and post-ac over at How To Leave Academia. Here’s a sample:
Post-ac is primarily interested in helping the academically disenfranchised move on with life. Post-ac is focused on vocation inasmuch as you need an income to have shelter and food. Post-ac is interested in helping people find any job that can help them be healthy and financially solvent, and eventually a career path (whatever it may be, we don’t judge) that might even be fulfilling. That a post-acer may end up working in an alt-ac capacity is incidental to that person’s particular skillset and desires; we believe that it is possible to work in alt-ac but “be” post-ac. (Lauren, for example, does not consider herself alt-ac although she does work in an alt-ac capacity.) Post-ac is interested in issues of personal life and identity as well as vocational prospects. Post-ac is less concerned with “refashioning academic identity” as it is in helping people move on from their academic experience and build a new life and identity that is not centered around vocation or institutional affiliation. This is a hard process, and we acknowledge a lot of pain. Post-ac acknowledges the enormity of the crisis of un- and underemployment for grad students. Post-ac places a higher premium on being able to pay your bills than on CV lines. Post-ac is interested in survival. Post-ac has no shame about corporate employment, welfare, “selling out,” or the need to talk about dollars and cents when it comes to jobs and debt. Post-ac does not care if you finish grad school or not, and does not share productivity tips or talk about surviving the dissertation. Post-ac is a critique of the academy, its mythology, and its structure.
A year ago today I had The Talk with my advisor and walked away from graduate school. It was a terrifying and relieving experience, and I haven’t regretted it for a day. I never would have guessed that a year later I’d have a job, a blog, and a love for french braiding. This journey has been amazing.
Quitting grad school is just like this, every day. Except on days when it’s -10 degress in Iowa. Which is most days, lately.
I and a couple other post-academic grad school quittas are setting up a fabulous, free, catch-all website for people quitting grad school or leaving academia, and we need your help. If you quit grad school — if you’re here because you’re thinking about quitting grad school – please contribute to the site or the book. It’s the nicest, easiest, non-academic-iest writing you’ll do and you will help out so many people dying to hear stories from others who’ve walked this road. Head on over and consider sending me a short idea for an essay (as long or as short as you like!) for the site or e-book. We’re hoping to have all of the submissions gathered by Feb. 1st, so get on that already!
The last month has been big for graduate education reform and post-ac in general. This Chronicle piece summarizes it pretty nicely. Some new reports have told us what we already knew. We’re planning some exciting stuff. MLA is just around the corner. It’s all happening.
But all this has left me wondering if the post-ac community — the small world of which I am a small part — is really part of this reform conversation. It seems like we should be, right? It seems like all of these schools and students and programs who are desperately concerned about employment prospects for graduate students would be interested in talking more to people who have actually left. And I guess #Alt-Academy is sort of doing that, but I have already written about my problems with the concept of alt-ac as the only option discussed as legit for humanities grads. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m glad “alt-ac” is around, and I’d love to hear if it has helped any grad school quittas as they look for assistance when they decide to leave. I like what Bethany Nowviskie, a founder of #Alt-Academy, says about the ethos of alt-ac:
The #alt-ac track is not exactly filled with a Romantic brand of lunatic-as-solitary-genius. We are not the individualists our faculty mentors trained us to be. If this generation is possessed of a vision and an energy, it’s for the most pragmatic and collective kinds of reform. Strong and unconventional ideals underlie the #alt-ac project, but we… like to get things done, collaboratively, and in the real world… we’re inclined to feel the pain, to document it all, and to share outcomes and services freely in order provide a leg up to the people coming behind us… for us, “service” was never a dirty word.
But I’m uncomfortable with how, for lack of a better word, academic it is. Alt-Academy says that alt-ac is “really about an alternative academia, a new imagination for the systems in which we operate.” Which just sounds like a bunch of bullshit to me. I mean, I get it: I appreciate the refashioning of academic identity to broaden it and make room for the many folks who love working for institutions in a different capacity. But I see it mostly for grad students who plan to stay, selling them the notion that staying is wise and there are options that they can learn to love as much as they loved the fantasy of being a professor. This feels markedly different from the conversations in the post-ac blogging world, which are about breaking with the academy. Our pain is disjuncture from the identity that I think alt-ac is trying to maintain and expand. Our topics and methods feel similar, but our projects feel different.
Why alt-ac and not post-ac? Does one encompass the other? How much overlap is there in our Venn diagram?
I just don’t know if I or we are really a part of that, even though it seems like “we” (?) ought to be. Within the last few years, post-academic blogs have flourished (in that there’s, ya know, many of them where there used to be few). In fact, it seems that every few years, there’s a new crop of websites, blogs, or books devoted to post-academic life written by grad school/academic quittas that are subsequently abandoned (seem to have a shelf-life of 1-2 years — see postacademic.org for a great example). Even within post-academic blogs that are still active, posts focusing on quitting, job hunting, skill development, and the transition out of academia seem to peak for about a year or two and then fade away as life goes on. I’m sure that will happen here, to my blog. Life goes on. Maybe post-ac is different from alt-ac, or from the reform movement, because eventually it leaves these concerns behind, instead of rehashing the same concerns and points all over again, or trying to make academic conversations out of our daily lives and occupations.
* * *
I was really amused to stumble across a series of posts on Postacademic.org from two years ago (2010), after MLA President Sidonie Smith made some proposed reforms for the dissertation. Caroline Roberts wrote:
“It’s great that Smith is taking such a sincere and proactive stance challenging one of the sacred cows of the Ph.D., the dissertation, so it’ll be interesting to see how her words translate into actions. While I hate playing the naysayer–OK, maybe I don’t hate it so much!–conceptual solutions can only go so far in a profession that is, in many ways, defined by looking backwards and not forwards.” The Latest from the MLA: Acknowledging the Problem is the First Step
And then:
“Before we go into greater detail about our admiring skepticism as to how plausible the possibility of change is, we do have to give Pres Smith credit for her foresight in attempting to take on the most ingrained and daunting of academic hazing rituals, the dissertation writing process. Beyond any issues folks have at a personal level maintaining their own sanity, balancing their finances, and figuring out their day-to-day lives through grad school, Pres Smith identifies the consequences the dissertation process has on the profession as a whole, stunting the development of young scholars at the start of their careers who may be investing too much into the diss manuscript as the end-all, be-all first book.” The Latest from the MLA: Is the Diss Extinct?
A few months later, Caroline @ Postacademic commented on grad students who had been writing to Salon for career advice. The columnist encouraged the students to stick it out, and this conversation happened in the Postacademic comments among Worst Professor Ever, Caroline, and Eliza (the three most active and “high profile” post-ac bloggers at that time):
WorstProfEver said: And so it begins — have you seen the PhD on this weeks’ PostSecret? I predict more people will need your Sense & Sangria!
Eliza said: “That dream will turn into a nightmare, though, if all you have to show for your PhD is a massive debt load.” Well put! Now if only more unhappy academics would ask the post-PhD community for advice rather than well-meaning, if clueless, advice columnists who are well and truly out of the higher ed loop.
Caroline Roberts said: WoPro, I did see the Post Secret! And that postcard will be appearing on Post Academic sometime in the near future. Eliza, I totally agree. While I have no doubt that these advice columnists have good intentions, I wish the people asking the questions about academic job dissatisfaction turned to the post-PhD community more often!
WorstProfEver said: Agree! But it’s been really hard to find people who are willing to talk about the issue honestly even though I’ve been looking pretty hard. I think we are the post-PhD community!
I think it’s interesting that there are all these conversations happening within institutions like #Alt-academy, which is institutionally housed, funded, and run by senior researchers, but there’s so little overlap between the alt-ac world and the post-ac world. I don’t think any alt-academy people are readers of post-ac blogs (Bethany Nowviskie popped up on my last post, but I don’t think she’s a regular!). I don’t think any of us have contributed to #Alt-academy, even though ostensibly many of us “count” (certainly me), and some stuff there is terrifically helpful and relevant. Is our how to leave academia project redudant with #Alt-academy? It doesn’t feel that way, but I’m curious if people who are in the process of quitting are finding the answers they seek over there.
Two years ago, WorstProfEver said that “we are the post-PhD community,” meaning the bloggers, the quittas. I wonder if that’s still true. What do y’all think?
Hello, hello! I hope you had wonderful holidays. I completely and utterly enjoyed my first post-academic Christmas, the first time in my life I did not have stacks of papers to either write or grade while also doing the shopping and card-sending. It was blissful and rejuvenating.
I’m back in the office the day after Christmas — so this is also the first Christmas in my life where I had responsibilities that instantly resumed at the close of holidays! But I’m not complaining: there are only 6 other people in my office, and once I answered a few student emails, I have been able to do whatever I want, which has included teaching my office neighbors to crochet, watering other people’s plants and hermit crabs, and working on our post-academic project.
(Please consider contributing!)
So I’ve been reading through archives of other post-ac blogs — mostly defunct ones — mining them for the best content so we can try and include all relevant info and not have to reinvent the wheel when we set up the website. We’re curates in a number of ways, and it’s occurred to me more than once that this feels like an historical project (in that we’re assembling a bit of history and crafting a narrative, not that we’re making history). I’m reminded of a few archival projects I did as a grad student in American Studies — one on the Hoover Presidential Library, and one on the KMA Kitchen Homemaker Radio Show — in that I’m gathering, gathering, gathering info from archives with no organization beyond chronology and at some point patterns start to emerge and the story matures in a way that’s meaningful and more importantly, writeable! (Except this time, I’m doing it for fun, with friends, and no deadline, and more than 1 person will read it).
I’ve been putting together a timeline that I think traces the roots and chronology of the modern “post-academic movement.” This is a placeholder/umbrella term I’m using to indicate the counter-academic movement within and without institutions broadly: critiques of academia from within (institutional critiques, etc), including concerns about labor structure, grad student exploitation/experience/professionalization, and the contingent faculty movements that have sprung up; and the proliferation of post-academic, ex-academic, and anti-academic blogs and advice books outside the academy. Not that these are equivalent in terms of impact, but more that they’re concurrent. I’m connecting dots here. This is a draft, it’s totally incomplete, and reflects my own background in composition theory and American Studies. Please, suggest additions, ask questions, question the premise, etc.
1967:
1960s-90s
1987
1993
1993-2003
1997
1999
2000
2000s
2001
2003
2004
2005
2009
2010
2011
2012
This post also appears at HowToLeaveAcademia.com
Have you left academia? Or are you currently in the process of leaving? Share your story!
As post-academic bloggers, we know firsthand that there is a desire for stories that explore more than just the career aspects of leaving the ivory tower. People want to know how, when, and why you quit; emotional issues related to quitting; and examples of post-academic success. We envision this book as a source of advice and support for readers who have quit graduate school before getting their Ph.D., people leaving academia even after they have finished their degrees, and people who are adjuncting or working in academia who are looking to leave. Many stories of the post-academic transition have been told on personal blogs and websites, including our blogs and web site www.howtoleaveacademia.com (forthcoming), but this is the first collection has been organized to speak directly to people’s experiences leaving academia.
We’re looking for thoughtful, personal pieces (non-fiction or creative non-fiction) that tell a story or develop a theme related to the process of quitting academia. Like any good paper, the essay should have a core thesis or concept that you’re exploring through your writing. We prefer submissions that are relatively jargon-free and more casual in writing style. Your essay can be any length, with a general goal of 5-10 pages double spaced (but we’ll consider shorter or longer!).
If you have poetry, art, or other (digitized) creative work that explores these themes, we’d be interested in that, too.
This collection will focus primarily on what happened after you quit; thus, we are not interested in treatises about the failures of grad school or the problems in higher education. You’re welcome to explore the reasons and circumstances under which you left, but please continue the narrative forward from there. You can be as anonymous as you like, although please include enough detail that the reader can be drawn into your story. We invite you to explore the messiness, difficulty, and contradictions in the quitting process. Not every story has a happy ending, and that’s OK. We encourage submissions on any of these topics, as well as proposals for essays that explore any gaps between them:
If you want to share a simpler or more straightforward story of your post-academic journey, please consider submitting to the website (email Lauren or Currer at the addresses below and specify that your submission is for the website).
Timeline:
Email submissions with “E-Book Submission” in the subject line to Lauren at lauren.nervosa@gmail.com or Currer at projectreinvention12@gmail.com by Feb 1 2013.
Posted in Grad School Quittas, The Alt-Ac Life
Tagged academia, alt-ac, cfp, e-books, grad school, higher education, leaving academia, leaving the ivory tower, post-ac, Quitting
I wrote this on April 17, 2007, the day after the Virginia Tech shooting.
I’m really upset about the V-Tech shootings, which is not helping my productivity this morning.
I remember the Columbine shootings; I’ve taught about them. I have cried in the dark of my classroom watching the footage of students being killed by their peers.
I keep thinking about the Virginia Tech shootings despite being in medias Master’s Exam. I keep looking around my campus here, a school very much like V-Tech. I keep thinking about how I’m making my life’s work about these schools, these huge schools where students get lost, where you may not even know the people who live in your dorms. Where what happens upstairs or less than a mile away may as well happen a world away. I know that over the next weeks/months/years, enormo-versities like V-Tech will be scrutinized. My school had a similar (much smaller scale) tragedy fifteen years ago, when a grad student shot a bunch of people in his department when he failed to secure a fellowship. Why don’t you know your students better? Why don’t you have better communication? Why did this young man flip? Why didn’t you prevent this?
I imagine that the hostility between students and teachers at Universities – evidenced by Rate Your Students, Rate My Professors – will become a focus for anger and blame. Universities will have to figure out how to get information to people in some way OTHER THAN EMAIL. And we (teachers, parents, world) must ask ourselves these hard questions, because I feel like there has to be something that connects the anonymity of the “beer and circus” mega-school to this guy’s ability to kill the crap out of people he didn’t even know. Columbine was a big suburban high school. V-Tech is the kind of place that Columbine grads would go. It’s a place just like here. It’s a place like where I will work, always, for the rest of my life — where I will work with students, and teach in buildings.
I imagine that new TAs and RA Hall managers will have to learn how to deal with the possibility that someone might try to kill them, and their kids. ME and MY kids. I teach a 9:30 am section in a building crammed with classes. It could have been me, hearing gunshots, huddling with my own kids, my international students and struggling freshmen and returning students, against the wall of my room which (I can hear my silent prayers of thanks) is one of two doors that automatically locks in the entire building. What if I was in a basement room where there are no door locks, where the ground-level windows would mean easy entry, easy visibility? (I guess we could have escaped through them).
I don’t know how to talk to my students about this. Will they even register this as something that affects them? Will this penetrate their whirlwind lives of finals, papers, and end-of-semester bar crawls? Are they quietly worrying while they sit in lecture, like I’m worrying sitting in this coffee house, watching three undergrad women stare at the V-Tech footage on the muted tv? Will my Korean students be in danger? What is going to happen?
I’ve been thinking a lot about loving my students, about dealing with hearts and minds and whether that’s even a good thing. Would I die for them?
Posted in Memoir
Tagged higher education, memoir, school shooting, teaching, virginia tech
Based on the responses to my previous entry, and some others as well, Currer Bell, JC, Jet and I are going to try and create a website and e-book resource for those leaving academia.
We envision the website as a hub where people can get basic info and resources, and lots of reassurance. We hope the e-book will focus more on the contemplative/emotional aspects of leaving. “A book to read in the tub,” as one commenter said.
If you’re interested in helping out or contributing, let one of us know. You can comment here or email me at lauren.nervosa@gmail.com. If you do graphic design, can help us make a website not look sucky, have a specific topic or insight you’d like to share for other quittas, or are thinking you’d like to contribute a more thoughtful and polished essay to an e-book, please be in touch. Thanks!
Thanks for all the kind comments on my last post. Things are looking up. Sometimes drugs really do help.
* This post was edited to make clear distinctions between my personal experiences and personal conversations about grad school and my professional work as an academic advisor. Under no circumstances would I ever tell an advisee what they should do with their lives, or say “You should not go to grad school.” That’s not my role. — lauren
Work is busy, busy, busy and I’ve been thinking about how I could reframe my sad mindset about having lost something I love, and instead focus on new opportunities to learn that are available to me now. One interest that keeps pushing its way to the forefront is working with honors or high-achieving students.
This is new to me: I spent the last 5 years teaching in developmental programs for at-risk students, at 4-year and community schools. Most of my PhD studies the second time around focused on literacy instruction for struggling college students. I’ve spent my teaching career really interested in that trailing end of the bell curve, and believe deeply that most students are capable of success with the right support.
But now I get to work with the opposite end of the bell curve: students who were high school rock stars, or kids who just started college and are feeling that rush of “Ahh! This is what I was waiting for! This is my place! I’m really good at this!” These are my double majors, my smart asses, my “can I minor in Spanish AND do a certificate in entrepreneurship AND a double major in psych and bio? How about study abroad?” kids. These are my kids in the sense that, they are who I was as a college student. Continue reading
When I named our blog Mama Nervosa, I thought it was sort of ha-ha funny. Oh, I’m so neurotic! It’s so amusing! But time has shown that it was a rather uncannily accurate descriptor, at least for me (maybe not as much for Jen). Obviously, a lot of my writing, especially around quitting grad school, has dealt with dark and intense emotions. And sometimes, my writing about motherhood veers towards the anxious, confused, or unhappy. Since day one, I’ve wanted to represent myself and my reality in a frank and hopefully funny way, although it’s not as funny as I wanted it to be.
Thing is, this has been a tough six months for me. Quitting grad school is incredibly difficult, as we have documented, and I have struggled with it. But really, it’s more than that: quitting grad school shook me to my core, and now it’s bringing up a bunch of really messy, dark stuff that’s been dormant, too. I’m now dealing with deeper, more longterm problems that have been on hold or deferred or ignored while I was in grad school. The last 2-3 months have been extremely hard for me, emotionally, even though on the surface everything worked out fairly well (I have a good job and necessary income: things could be so much worse). But I liken it to lifting up a rock and peering at all the gross stuff beneath. Or cleaning a room that seems rather messy but then you get in there and realize, oh shit, this is going to take me all day. The depression and unhappiness that led me to quit grad school is just the tip of the iceberg. The confusion and identity shifts that quitting brought on go way deeper than just the vocation I was aiming for, or the kind of student I wanted to be.
JC has written eloquently about the mental health problems that plague graduate students. Grad school is a breeding ground for depression, hopelessness, and disillusionment, and I certainly suffered from all of those problems as a student. But I think that even beyond the obvious stressors, the culture of graduate school sort of arrests our development and growth. We end up trading water in a stage of life that’s not quite adulthood, but beyond adolescence. The continuous cycle of renewal — a new school year, a new job market season, a new semester, a new round of courses — can (at least for me, I imagine for many) act as a feedback loop which it’s very hard to break out of or think beyond. The endless chance of renewal makes it so much easier to wait and see and defer dealing with a problem. I’m unhappy in school, but maybe next semester will be better. I hate coursework, but let’s see if getting out of it makes me feel better. I no longer love this field, but this other one over here is really exciting and I can move in that direction.
Thus, you never deal with the problems of right now. You can deny, deny, deny, until you break down and quit. You can be terribly unhappy but certain that a solution is right around the corner. It’s so alluring to stay in that world because then you don’t have to face the fears and horrible outside world. I know because I lived that, over and over again. Fear kept me in school. Certainly, the grad school culture of perpetual hope and refusal to discuss/acknowledge anything negative or weak or worrying encouraged me to avoid pain and avoid dealing with problems in the same way it encouraged me to go into deeper and deeper financial debt.
I think that I expected quitting would break that cycle and that stepping into the light of the real world would fix me. I mean, I knew it would be a tough transition, but I truly believed finding a paying job would fix me in a certain way. That the benefits of real life, money, time, etc — all the things denied to me in grad school — would overwhelm the sadness and uncertainty. That I wouldn’t be sad anymore.
But now I am not only dealing with the fallout from quitting, I’m dealing with a backlog of personal issues that got denied and deferred for most of my twenties. I’m dealing with my psychological debt, in a way: suddenly facing a huge payoff because I kept borrowing more time. I’m dealing with immense darkness and feeling awful. I’m spending a lot of time meeting with psychiatrists and therapists. (I’m so deeply relieved that I have health insurance and the means to pursue these options.)
I’ve wrestled with sharing this because I am afraid that people will be like fuck that! I’m staying in grad school! I still think quitting was the right thing to do. I’m glad I have a job. I’m glad I’m not still stuck in that cycle of magical thinking. But I want to be honest with you and everyone about the toll grad school may continue to take on us, long after we leave. Anyone who’s ever been in a 12 step program or faced dealing with some major trauma knows that you reach a point where you can’t go on living this way anymore, but you are also terrified to try to live without the things you’ve been clinging to. It becomes both impossible and necessary to change yourself completely. I’m standing on that precipice right now. The only thing I know for sure, from past experience, is that hope is on the other side. I’d rather be struggling towards hope than running in the opposite direction. I had to quit to get this point.
So, quitting might not always be pretty, but I still think it’s better.
