(Almost) Real-World 2-Body Problems

I know it's been a month. It's been a busy month. And no, my diss revisions are not done yet. It's hard to get motivated on something that you know no one will read, including your committee. I'm hoping to start writing fiction soon but refuse to start until I finish the last paragraph of my revisions. Seriously, there's only a paragraph and some citations left.

So what busy things have been happening? My lease was up at the end of May, so I had to move out. I moved into my parents garage. Well, my stuff moved into the garage. I moved into the basement. It's not ideal but at least it's rent free. My parents have their moments of being pretty awesome. They're housing me, being a bed & breakfast for my brother until he finds a place in a new city, and still doubling (tripling?) as a daycare for my sister & nephew. See? Awesome!

And why am I in my parents' house and not with my boyfriend? BF has an actual career already. He needs to do one more year of residency before he gets certified and an actual full time, well-paid gig. Since I wasn't that far down my career path, I decided to wait until he knew what city he'd be heading to before I looked for a job. Well, he got a good offer last week and we now have a destination! This has led me to two very different problems:

1) I need to find a non-academic job in New City. I'm looking at non-traditional jobs at universities and for positions at large companies. These are not the only places for Ph.D.'s to get non-aca jobs - I need to stress that. That's where I'm looking at the moment because these are easier to find from a distance. And I have found some good possibilities.

But the more I look at non-aca jobs, the more people keep trying to get me to look for adjunct gigs. These are the same people who have been supportive so far about my leaving academia. However, now that reality is setting in, people just can't seem to get past the "only job a Ph.D. can do is teach" mentality. They usually couch this as "it'll be an income for awhile". Everyone seems to think that I can make a little money adjuncting. Let me stress "little money" here. I've looked up the schools in this area on The Adjunct Project and they pay about $2500/class. For the math-phobic out there, I'll crunch the numbers for you. That's $20k/year for a 4/4 teaching load. And that's assuming I can get 4 classes at one or a combination of universities. No benefits, by the way. It's aggravating.

2) I never pictured myself as a trailing significant other. This may seem like a minute problem compared to the first one but I think it's about equal. I always thought of myself as an independent woman who wouldn't give up her career and follow a man. Well, I gave up the career I was working on for a mountain of other reasons unrelated to my romantic relationship. And now I found myself following a man who is working, sometimes single-mindedly, on his career and working around that. I am glad he's focusing on options near New City, which wasn't hit as hard by the recession and has lots of possibilities. It's still hard to put my entire life on hold while he made a decision and now have to adjust to that. To be honest, I didn't think this would be this difficult to deal with. It's a lot of identity changes in one shot. I just keep trying to tell myself that this is a practical decision and in no way makes me any less awesome.

To top it all off, I seem to be the one who has to find the new place in New City for me and boyfriend commuting to two different cities and two dogs. BF doesn't seem to understand how much that is going to cost and that he may have to pick up the rent on his own paycheck for the first month or two, depending on when I get a new job and start getting paid. Oh the joys of real-world two-body problems! If he had been the trailing significant other, I could be the wage-earner and he could deal with these financial and logistic issues. Here's another place those Ph.D. skills come in. There's some serious project management skills needed to accomplish all this!

So that's what's eating up my time. I'll blog again as interesting things happen. Meanwhile, check out what's happening in other post-academics' lives through the links on the right.

Academia Broke my Optimism Bias

Here's a TED talk for you. It talks about the optimism bias and whether or not we should keep it. It has funny bits and a happy ending. Go watch it.

The last few years have been fairly unpleasant in many regards. Being blown off by my committee, betrayed by my chair, and realizing I had no job prospects in academia were not the stuff of happy thoughts. The result was that my optimism bias broke. Shattered into little pieces, like a grenade in a barrel of oatmeal. That's a line from Foghorn Leghorn but I like the image and cartoon quotes are always useful for academia.

The side effect has been that many days I don't feel like I can do anything. This is what the researchers call a pessimism bias. It's really bad for you. When you have an optimism bias, you attribute all the good outcomes to your awesome skills and all the bad stuff to external forces. With a pessimism bias, you attribute all the bad stuff to your inabilities and all the good stuff to dumb luck and reality will catch up with you next time. This pessimism bias is not a good way to live. But that's the result of all my years in academia. I read job descriptions and decide that there's no way I could ever get or do a particular job, even though I could do everything in the "Job Requirements" section. I'm working on this but it's been difficult.

I'm feeling better these days. Not because of graduating or leaving, I still haven't found a next job. I'll probably move back in with my folks when my lease is up at the end of this month. That's not really uplifting, quite frankly.

No, I'm attributing my improved mood to avoiding revising my diss, a great deal of wine I'd rather drink than move, and the playlist on my ipod. Mostly the playlist I think, though the wine does help. Seriously, I loaded my ipod with all the cheery, triumphant songs I could find. Recovery-from-breakup songs are also a good choice. If your optimism bias breaks, music is a good replacement. It can greatly improve your mood and makes you think that you too can find a nonacademic job that pays enough to cover your student loans and still let you eat something other than ramen noodles. It's like an optimism prosthetic.

Unfortunately I have not yet decided on what I want to be, on the off-chance I grow up someday. I'm currently applying to adjuncts visiting lecturer positions. I like these jobs, not because I think they'll lead to a TT job, but because they give me 9 months of adventure somewhere else in the country and of time to figure out what I'm going to do next - all without commitment. Yes, I'm embracing the commitmentphobe-ness of nonacademic jobs. If you don't like the first one, finish out the contract and find another one. Awesome.

I still want to be a writer. I know this is not a job one normally supports oneself on. However, that's what I want to do. When people ask me what I would do if money were no object, I say I'd like to write fiction. Sci-fi, fantasy, or dystopic fiction. That's what I read and that's what I'd like to write. Alas, a near-decade of academic writing does not lend itself well to creative fiction - creative nonfiction maybe, but I don't feel like writing journal articles at the moment.

So, I'm planning to do a bit of creative writing and maybe finding a reading buddy to keep me honest. And I'll keep looking for other jobs to support my wine or pez habits. Maybe I'll be a barista or a sommelier or an incredibly nerdy chef…or a number-crunching cubicle monkey. Who knows! Knowing I could do just about anything doesn't really help in limiting the nonacademic job options. And I don't really care what I do to make money. I want to write. The rest is just paying bills.

To those out there hitting a rough patch with your transition, I wish you good luck, good hope, good booze, and cheerful drinking buddies. And listen to cheerful, happy music. Listen to the uplifting, triumphant stuff at the end of big blockbuster movies where the hero/ine gets what they need. You'll get to your next triumph and the next adventure soon!

Treading Dangerous Waters

Here's the first of my stories from the back log. Over my spring break, many moons ago, I went to Major City where my boyfriend is currently employed. They have many museums there where I could theoretically find either employment or an avenue to continue a "life of the mind" as a post-academic and do my research.

I met with Big Wig at one of these museums to talk about working as an independent researcher there. Ze assured me they had no jobs and weren't planning on getting any soon. They were already operating at an absurd level of budget crunching as it was. The research thing seemed doable. Depending on the job, I could even volunteer there (you have to commit to a certain amount of time during the week) which would come with free membership and parking.

It all seemed potentially doable. Sure, there were constraints, but it wasn't out of the question to continue my research. I do actually enjoy research and teaching. I could still do it as a post-academic. The conversation got a little weird when Big Wig didn't know specifics about things ze should know but otherwise, all good things.

However, as I rode public transit back to my boyfriend's apartment, I got this gut feeling. Maybe it was all the posters advertising The Hunger Games on the trip but I got this feeling that I was treading very dangerous waters. It wasn't a niggling feeling where you think maybe something's off. It was full on, swimming-with-sharks feeling. Seriously, I felt like I could practically see the sharks. My instinct is shockingly good. It hasn't failed me yet, even when I've failed it.

I should point out this was not an instinctive "NO, DANGER!" feeling. My gut wasn't saying no, don't do this. It was more of an "Oh, by the way, there are large things swimming nearby with big, pointy teeth which may suddenly decide that you are crunchy and good with ketchup. Just an FYI. Try not to look weak or otherwise edible." No, my gut doesn't talk to me but that's a good idea of how the feeling was interpreted.

The meeting seemed like the usual awkward but good conversations nerdy academics find themselves in all too often. Nothing raised red flags. And yet I had this feeling of lurking danger in the whole escapade. I think there are three possible reasons for this:

1) I could just be paranoid. It's a fair possibility. Now that Fluffy is finished, the whole career change thing is a lot bigger and change is scary. It could just be fear. Except that my gut is usually not swayed by such things and this all happened before Fluffy was even half-drafted.

2) It could be a reaction to what keeping up with my research would entail. It means having to go out of my way to get access to journals on the cheap. It means giving up free time and possibly work time to collect and analyze data. It means that this is likely where any free time I gain from the real world would go. On the one hand, it wouldn't be that big of a change from academia: working all the time so that I can spend my free time researching. On the other hand, that defeats one of the reasons for leaving academia: free time.

3) There really could be something fishy going on here. The weird thing about gut reactions is that sometimes they seem to have more available info than you do. Maybe there was something in what Big Wig said, in hir body language, that gave away some serious issues that might come up to bite me if I followed through with this plan.

This feeling has only intensified since then and led me to abandon at least this avenue for continuing my research. Even now, if I seriously think about doing this, my gut responds with an ever increasing sense of danger. It's something specific to this particular situation.

I don't mean this to be a diatribe against maintaining those practices from leading a "life of the mind" that make you happy. Clearly, there are ways to do it. This is meant more of a caution to think about what continuing to do those things will do your new life. If you're in a field like mine, it means having to track down data in one form or another, possibly having to travel to get it. It means having to find a way to run statistics and, of course, to keep up on recent research in journals. These are not un-doable. They are highly inconvenient and expensive at times. I'm not sure I'm ready to walk back into a situation my gut tells me has a high probability of ending badly.

If this last academic job offer falls through (a likely scenario), I think I'll just rip off the bandaid and leave academia entirely. My instinct tells me this is the better plan for me. Of course, then it spirals into a self-loathing depression as it contemplates 9 years of sunk costs. Sometimes I think it may be either defective or mal-adaptive. I know, those costs are already sunk. No sense in raising the Titanic here. No one's going to make a major motion picture out of it. They probably wouldn't even look good in 3D. But I digress, frequently.

My rambling point is that I looked into keeping up with my research and it seems possible. Maybe not a good idea but a possibility nonetheless. But I think there are strings attached, at least for this particular scenario, and depending on your field, those strings could be made of razor wire. Proceed with caution but don't give up hope. And now, for your moment of zen...

If you need a laugh, Google image search "flying shark". This meme has legs...err, fins!

Happy Pi Day

Given the animation I have in lieu of a profile pic, I thought I should at least post again for Pi Day. That's right, it's time to celebrate being irrational!

I do think we need to celebrate the irrational in our lives more often. It'll keep you from taking yourself too seriously. So, in honor of the day, try to think of at least five things in your life that are illogical, irrational, or otherwise lacking in reason but make you happy. Here's some of mine:

1. I have a wind-up toy of a monkey riding a horse. This is my dissertation in a nutshell. It is currently sitting in the middle of a chess game being played between my house mammoth and wooden spider monkey. There's a disturbing amount of potential symbolism here.


2. My boyfriend is teaching me how to play the ukulele. He plays in a ukulele group. Yeah, 10-15 people get together in a tiny corner coffee shop and play ukuleles together. It's awesome. You should try it.

3. I am obsessed with getting a card game called Killer Bunnies. Your goal in the game is to take out other people's bunnies and protect the magic carrot. I think Fluffy would approve of this game and I really want to play it, post-defense, while drinking an immoderate amount of wine.

4. My dog is obsessed with tennis balls. We think he imagines by catching and hoarding tennis balls, he is somehow saving the world. Maybe he is. I don't know how the universe works.

5. I own a top hat. It sits in my living room, on top of my filing cabinet. I guess that means my filing cabinet also has a top hat. I bought it at the Renaissance Festival where I wore it to the smoking tent. The pirates put on a show there where they offered the best advice I've heard for grad school: "Get in! Get out! Quit F&$%ing about! Yo ho! Yo ho! Yo ho!"


Other new posts will be coming soon on such entertaining topics as a life of the mind after academia and can an academic job be a "next job." Stay tuned.

Law of Dissertating Inertia

It's been awhile since my last post. I figured that out by looking at the date on that post today. Yeah, I know - it's obvious. However, it's just after the holidays where I did absolutely nothing productive and it's taking some time to start thinking again. Don't judge me! The whole situation reminds me of the law of inertia.

You read that right. It's the law of inertia: a grad student in motion tends to stay in motion while one at rest tends to stay at rest, unless an external force is applied. Click here for a description of this for comic fans. Well, this grad student has been at rest for awhile. A long while. Alas, this must change.

As per the events of my last post, I've been looking into a career in R&D. I like the idea. I enjoy research and discovery. I also enjoy being employed and having free time. R&D appears to be better aligned with such ideals than academia is. See any of the blogs to the right for a multitude of views on work/life balance, the crappy academic job market, or lack of intellectual freedom. Though R&D seems to be a better job market than academia, I have a nontraditional Ph.D. (read not STEM) and will likely have to take a more guerilla job search approach. Since that can be time consuming, I'm rabidly trying to finish my dissertation draft before the semester starts.

On a fairly random tangent, I like the word "rabidly" for describing dissertating. Such an activity should automatically conjure up a sort of unhealthy, foaming-at-the-mouth image. It really is a pointless exercise. Even as I'm writing my diss, I know it is unlikely to ever to be read or to be worthy of another's time. And that's before my committee gets there teeth in it.


I firmly agree with Einstein that if you cannot explain something simply, you do not understand it well enough. As a result, I can explain my entire dissertation research in under 150 pages (I think - I haven't finished it yet). The last two dissertations that passed in my department were ~250 and ~300 pages respectively. I really don't want to fluff my dissertation to such a bloated state just to satisfy faculty egos. I'm not going into academia anyway. Only in academia could you get a final product that is both dense and fluffy. "Fluffy" is used here to mean light and lacking in substance while "dense" refers to something that is impenetrable, for those who need definitions of everything. Let it be transparent! Let it be substantial! Let it NOT be painful!

Anyway, that's what I'm doing when I'm not posting. I'm hoping to defend by March 16th, mostly because I'd like a really good reason to be really trashed on St. Patty's day. Since I'm not adverse to drinking any other day of the year, I feel like I should have a reason to do it on St. Patty's day. You know, it makes it "special" that way. So, I must finish this beast and allow the faculty to begin their shredding of it. I'm sure there will be at least two rounds of revisions before all is said and done.

Wish me luck in my endeavor. I wish you luck in yours, whether it is leaving academia, finding a job, or otherwise maintaining what's left of your sanity. Cheers to us all!

Diving for Icebergs

Icebergs have always freaked me out. You can only 10% of an iceberg above the surface. The rest is beneath the surface and you can only tell what's there either by diving into frigid water...or running into it a la the Titanic. The same principle applies to most of human society. You really only see 10% of what's going on. The other 90% takes a bit of diving. Unless, of course, you prefer the collision method in which case, I suggest you stock up on life boats.


The first step, according to pretty much every book, blog, and website about career transition, is to identify why you want to change careers. Using a variety of metaphors and anecdotes, many strongly urge diving below the surface to see the rest of the iceberg - before you run into it. What are the real reasons for wanting to change careers? The big ones? The small ones? Do they matter? So, let me tell you about my iceberg.

As I said in my first post, I decided I didn't want to be a professor because I had seen how a professor lives I wanted something else. That's the 10%. Here's the rest:

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action. -Frank Herbert

1. I want a different life. Many faculty are often accused of having only one goal, one measure of success for a Ph.D.: a tenure-track faculty job. I thought the same thing long before I ever met college faculty. The faculty are not to blame. It's the kool-aid. Many of the newer faculty haven't yet succumbed to the kool-aid. They will at least admit that there are few jobs, you have to work like a dog to get them and to keep them, and getting a job is not entirely the result of merit. Does that count as progress on the system?

As I mentioned in my first post, my advisor told me honestly about the job market early on. I thought that I still wanted to be a professor, so off I went. Several years down the road, I realized what all was needed to succeed as a professor, a good one. You need to be able to come up with original research that will be funded by grant agencies, preferably ones with lots of money. Your research must be published, published, published. This research should preferably lead to projects for lots of grad students whom you're mentoring to become professors like you. It's helpful if you're also a good, engaging teacher but that's not essential. You also need to sit on committees: university committees, department committees, student committees. You need to be active in your field, including sitting on committees there too. You should also be chairing sections in conferences. All this and you should be doing outreach with the community too. You must be willing to make your work your life.

As a result, a work-life balance, particularly in the first few years is highly unlikely. Hopefully, you like your job. As much as I like my research, and as much as I enjoy teaching, I'm not willing to make the sacrifices needed to be a professor. I want a life to call my own. I want to spend time with my significant other and my dog. I want hobbies. I want to see my family. I respect those who choose to be professors, but I am not one of them. I want a different life.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path. -Buddha

2. I want to control my destiny. The academic job market is an interesting place. Many claim it is based solely on meritocracy. This is a lie. If it were true, you can hire someone based solely on paperwork and that doesn't work in any field. A meritocracy is good in theory; however, human psychology renders it an unattainable utopia...or a sure road to a dystopia depending on one's viewpoint and grasp of history.

On the academic job market, positions are listed for various places around the country. There are not many. Your best chance at a job requires you to apply to any and all you may have a chance at. Limiting yourself to some desired geographic area(s) will severely limit your options. So you don't get much of a say in where you live.

The academic job market is also a weirdly passive place. You send out your applications. These usually entail 2-3 page cover letters, long CVs detailing your entire grad school and post-doc life, a teaching philosophy, potential syllabi, etc. And then you wait. There's little to no follow-up. You just wait. If the department is polite, they'll may send you a really nice rejection letter, or any rejection letter. Usually you get nothing. If you're lucky, you'll get an interview that lasts 3 days where you have to be on and functioning for nearly the whole 72 hours. I've always been a bit disturbed that the highest compliment that can be paid to a job search committee is that its process is humane.

I wanted more control than this. I wanted to choose where I live. I want to know that my success or failure is my own doing. It should never be placed in the hands of others who may never meet me, may never speak to me, may judge me, my worth, and my potential based on little more than paperwork and their perception of my department and faculty. In the academic job market, my future could potentially be tied to strangers' perceptions of other people. I cannot live that way. I have to know that my path is decided by me. Not by the geography of any given year's job market. Not by granting agencies. Not by the reviews of an ever more apathetic student body. By me. Only me. I know that the environment one lives in, professionally, personally, etc. is not entirely under one's control. However, that is only the raw material you work with, not who your are. My success or failure should be based on my will, my desire, and my effort. I need to control my destiny.

The first quality that is needed is audacity. -Winston Churchill

3. I need hope. The last few years have been rough. I've come to accept that I've been battling depression...and losing. Having been depressed before, I recognized the signs but couldn't find the source. As the possibilities of finding a life outside of academia began to emerge, my depression lessened. As a scientist, this evidence led me to conclude that trying to force myself into an academic life was causing my depression. Somewhere in my mind, my heart, I must have known that the contortions needed to get a job in academia would cost me too much. My personality doesn't subordinate itself to others' desires particularly well.

The beginning of this journey has already taught me much. It showed me how much I gave up to survive the last 9 years. I used to be willful and wild. I could feel myself losing this, diminishing, in order to survive. But this is not surviving. You must live life with your whole heart. You cannot live a half life. You cannot lock part of yourself away. Never let anyone tell you that you are not good enough as you are. That you are too much. Too strong. If that means you must chew through the leash and knock over the fence to be free. Do it. Try not to set the barn on fire but if that's your only option - let it burn.

So, I have decided to return to myself. I will not be the same person I was. Grad school has changed me. But I still remember the better parts of me. I'm going back to get them - and to find a new path. I no longer wake up dreading each day. I've stopped thinking about my more self-destructive tendencies. I have hope again. I didn't know that I had lost that. I didn't know how much I needed it. I need hope and I've found it in the sheer possibilities outside of academia.


It's not going to be easy. Change never is. But it will be fun. A new adventure. A chance at a new life. One I can be proud of. One I can live with. As me. How cool is that? Stay tuned. This is going to be one wacky trip up the rabbit hole!

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy [or gal] who'll decide where to go. - Dr. Seuss