I talked with an old friend recently. She is now on the academic
'job market' after finishing her PhD over a year ago. I was in a
similar situation to her a few years back and I know how incredibly
stressful and all-consuming it can be.
So stressful, in fact, that I pretty much gave up on it after
around a year and a half (probably a similar point to where she's
at now). I still don't know if it was the right decision or not.
After all, you spend around four years researching/writing
intensely, going to conferences, teaching, etc. That's a lot of
experience and work to just throw out the window. And that's
essentially what you're doing because, aside from the usual
corporate-speak about 'transferable skills' etc., in truth your
experience and expertise is rooted in a tiny area that maybe a few
dozen people on the planet care about.
At least, that was true in my case. I found that, afterward, I
pretty much had to let go and forget a lot of what I knew. Of
course, so much of it does carry on and is useful in subtle ways,
but the details about your field, the things that you become so
wrapped up in when writing a PhD, are lost to the wind. It's not
like I can even bring them up in casual conversation, never mind a
job interview. They are really gone.
The thing was, I felt so /relieved/ to be out of it. Whenever I
wonder about whether it was the right decision or not, I cling to
that feeling. Maybe it's just a sign of weakness on my part, but
every now and then I do get reminded of all the reasons I gave up
on it.
In our conversation, my friend told me that during the summer she
had decided to email her C.V. and a covering letter to a bunch of
universities in the hope that someone could at least throw here a
few part-time teaching hours. It sounded like a good idea to me. In
most fields it would demonstrate a bit of initiative and drive,
surely the same is true in academia? Turned out, it wasn't. One
academic reported her to their HR department, and she received and
email from them saying how inappropriate her query was.
One thing I remember about the whole academic job-search process
was the /silence/. You can spend a week working to tailor your C.V.
and portfolio to a specific organisation's needs or an on-going
research project, and then never hear anything from them. And then
you do it another 20 times, and you maybe get one response just
stating that you're not successful. I never received a single piece
of feedback, positive or negative, even after the couple of
interviews I had. Nothing. Just silence. That silence can be
terrifying. It makes you constantly question yourself, constantly
revise what you think, how you present your work to the world,
until eventually you're not really an 'academic' or a 'researcher'
any more, just a thing that is trying to fit into some kind of
mould, any mould will do, as long as it has an institutional
affiliation.
So that silence, while probably a practical necessity from the
perspective of departments receiving hundreds (sometimes thousands)
of applicants per position, can be so damaging and
counter-productive (from the broader perspective of research and
higher-education). It doesn't help produce good academics or good
job candidates.
As bad as the silence is, however, I really couldn't believe a
university academic/HR department had the nerve to write to her and
tell her that her application was 'inappropriate'. It's cruel and
petty. At some level I can understand it; there isn't much room for
solidarity in a field where most are struggling to keep their head
above the water. And HR departments /aren't/ staffed by academics
(at least, not yet), so maybe they don't fully understand all that
goes into academia and the gruelling job search (although, it's not
like gruelling job-searches are unique to academia, so they
probably should still have cut her some slack). The academic,
though, should have known better. They could have at least ignored
the application, just pushed 'send to trash' on their email client.
It would be so simple.
The whole story makes the silence feel like a blessing in
retrospect, which is just sad.
