Where I am Annoyed and Sympathetic Towards HR

I've been applying for jobs at New City where my boyfriend and I will be moving. I seem to be having more luck with administrative jobs at universities, but I haven't been looking at many private companies. I have, however, developed both a great deal of annoyance and much sympathy for HR departments.

I've applied for multiple jobs at Big University in New City. BUNC requires you to fill out an online application for each job, which is then reviewed by HR before getting passed to the hiring manager for that job. Four of the six jobs I applied for, I was rejected by HR. I felt I could do all the jobs fairly well and that my experience at least applied, in some measure, to their requirements. Two of the four they rejected me for I actually felt I legitimately matched their minimum requirements, no adjusting or hard sell required. And yet, I was shot down.

At the risk of being rude to HR, I think that Ph.D. on my resume prejudiced them.

I understand that BUNC likely gets hundreds of applications every day. And that some poor, underpaid, overworked individual is forced to sort out who matches the requirements for each job and who doesn't. This is why I have sympathy for these folks. That does not sound like fun. Would you want to be responsible for deciding if someone with a nontraditional background is worth the hiring managers time or not? The need to be that objective and unbiased is bound to keep good people from making it to the hiring manager but that may be the lesser of two evils. Inundating the hiring manager with unacceptable applicants is probably going to make that (likely more powerful) individual very cranky.

On the flipside, I get annoyed with HR because I am more than capable to do any of the jobs I applied for, yet hiring managers are not seeing my materials because they can't get past HR. There isn't really any remedy for this problem. I did email HR about the two jobs that I felt I did actually meet the requirements for and they offered to look at it again and see what happened. One asked for a degree in social science, among other possible fields. I have three but my application was rejected because I "did not meet education requirements." I thought that was bunk and emailed my query about the decision. The other was a difference in what "experience in project management" actually means.

I had a similar problem with a private company I applied for. I'm hoping to find some smaller companies once I get there that may have jobs. Companies with no HR departments. This is one of the hazards of the post-academic job search. Not sure how to fix it. I'm sure whoever in HR is tasked with sorting applications is not paid enough to deal with such problems and I'm not going to ask them to unless they get one hell of a raise. I think this is where knowing the hiring manager for a particular job comes in handy.

So, the moral of the story is: build your network. If you can get to the city and talk to folks, you may be able to avoid this headache.

Send happy thoughts to Currer Bell who is currently battling the rental market in Pittsburgh. I picture this as a battle with a basilisk and all she's got is a butter knife. Send her good vibes, swords, and phoenixes! Good luck to Currer and all the other post-academics out there with their new or existing jobs.

(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.

Rejection Apathy

So, I've been rejected from the last two academic jobs I've applied to within the span of 48 hours. It's been a week, if you want to count all three. Well, I haven't actually been rejected by the third but the jobs wiki says the offer has been made for that job (then rejected and made to someone else). That was the one where they addressed me by the wrong name after interviewing me. Incidentally, the second one essentially said "We don't want you. Go look somewhere else." It was a very brusque three sentences.

Here's the thing: I don't care. I thought I would, at least a little, but I don't. Not at all. Literally, not a thing. I cared about as much as if some distant acquaintance was telling me that ze had decided to change hir shirt from blue to green because ze "just wasn't feeling it, ya know."

I thought I liked the work: teaching and research. I was good at it. If I did like it that much, surely I would care if I didn't get the job. Nope, nothing. Maybe I didn't like it as much as I thought. Maybe all the time I've spent imagining myself in some other job has paid some sort of dividends here. I don't know. I'm more stunned by the apathy than the rejection. It's not even numbness. I read the rejection and my brain just went "meh" and started thinking about how much bubble wrap I needed to buy to move my apartment.

I'm hoping this means I'm through most of the mourning period for leaving academia. Sure, there will likely be more down days to come. However, I'm much more excited about what my next adventure will be (and thankfully I have friends who phrase it that way!). I'm holding off on job hunting until I know where my better half will get a full time job, since he actually has a career.

I just want to give a shout-out to my Better Half. He's a career changer himself, three times over. He's been in and out of academia. He gets it. He doesn't press me about jobs or what I'm going to do next. He'll ask my advice on research design or quantitative analysis then go back to his work and I go back to running amok in the kitchen and reading books. I don't know if I'm as lucky as Currer in this regard but I ain't complaining.

In other news, I just got myself a kit to make my own hand-sewn hardcover book. Hmm, maybe I'll take up antique book repair. I'll keep y'all up to date on where this craziness will end next. Good luck to all those who are currently interviewing for your next adventure!

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!

Holy Update Batman!

It's been awhile but it's been a bit crazy here. I've got a boatload of posts to put up. Let me start with the biggie:

Fluffy is vanquished!

Though I was prepared with an arsenal of Holy Hand Grenades of Antioch and an army of killer bunnies willing to protect the magic carrot, Fluffy died with a whimper, not a bang.

Let me back up briefly. Two days before my defense, I was doing a dry run of the presentation with my chair. Hir only suggestions for improvement were to add a few summary slides so that ze wouldn't have to pay attention the whole time. Just as ze was getting ready to leave, ze says that there are some people in the department who think I'm stubborn and willful and might try to put me in my place. Though I am both willful and stubborn, the only person who would attempt such a petty move would be my advisor. Yeah, I got threatened by my advisor two days before my defense because ze's passive-aggressive and petty.

I posted this threat on facebook and asked for suggestions for a response. Some serious, some funny. My personal favorite was from a family friend who suggested creepy late night phone calls full of vague threats. That seemed on par with the transgression and liked the image. No, I didn't do it but it made me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

The appointed time arrived. I was armored in a business suit and pumps. FYI: patent leather shoes with a broken big toe nail is really unpleasant. Anyway, I looked awesome, there was coffee, and several of my killer bunny army brought food. We discovered years ago that it is much harder for people to be arses if their mouths are full.

The presentation went well. Everyone laughed at the appropriate points. Important people nodded agreeably throughout. People had only those bizarre questions they come up with when they can't think of anything relevant. Folks got hung up on something that was utterly inconsequential but it made for easy questions. Most importantly, my advisor didn't get a chance to be an arse.

And then, that was it. It was done. Some revisions are needed. Papers were signed. The food was cleaned up and taken care of. Friends went out to lunch with me. And...well...that was it. Not with a bang at all. I went home and took a nap. This is apparently a typical ending.

I haven't really recovered from the stress. Some of that is due to going pretty much straight from the defense to a conference where I also gave a paper. And then there was a job interview there. But it hasn't kicked in yet that this whole escapade is over. Really. Seriously. I don't feel a thing. It's a little weird.

But that's why posts haven't been forthcoming. Hopefully soon I'll catch up on this backlog of posts. Here's some teasers for some upcoming ideas:

- Treading Dangerous (Psychological) Waters
- WTF! Where'd that interview come from?!
- Deciding When to Hold 'Em and When to Fold 'Em

Can an Academic Job be a "Next Job?"

So, a VAP has come up in my field. It is a one, maybe a two year gig with a 4/4 teaching load. There will be a TT line offered for this position in two years but the department head freely (and honestly) admits that whoever takes the VAP may have a leg up for that line but no promises.

I'm considering applying for it. No, not because I think it'll somehow magically turn into a TT line. I want the job because of where it is. It's in a place I've wanted to live in since I was a child. My significant other still has at least a year and half before he's done with his residency in Major City. So, this seems like a good time for an adventure. For the curious, said significant other forwarded the job ad to me, so he already knows about it and was a little hesitant to send it, knowing my view of academia these days.

Granted, this job would require moving across the country and away from family. Most of my friends these days are academics, so spatial separation there is inevitable. And it would mean at least another year in a long-distance relationship, but that too is looking more and more inevitable too.

But the academic culture doesn't appeal to me so why, in the name of all things holy and unholy, would I consider applying? Because I want to live there, at least for a bit. I want that adventure. If I happen to add anything to my CV during that time, what a bonus. Yeah, no exclamation point there - read it deadpan, with a sarcastic twist.

Given my ambivalence (leaning towards bitterness) towards academia, a 1-2 year gig actually sounds appealing. If one or both parties decide we'd be better off separated, I finish off the contract and no hard feelings. It would also give me a more time to figure out what I want to be if I grow up...or at least which direction I'm heading off in. And I would have a better sense if my bitterness is due entirely to academia in general or just to spending the last near-decade in a dysfunctional department with an advisor who has turned into a despot.

Notice, I did not mention research or publishing in there. If you're paying me for a 4/4 load, that's what you're getting. If you also want me publish too, you either need to pay me a serious salary or I will laugh in your face. I research the cost-of-living differential and I know what my bills and student loans will be. When negotiating, it's important to know your bottom line. And unlike some of my colleagues, I know there's a life outside of academia and I'm not above just saying "(Oh Helllll) No" to an unacceptable academic offer.

Don't worry about the school. They'll get at least 30 applicants. On the outside chance that they actually want to hire me and can't afford me, some other poor desperate schmuck will take them up on the lowball offer.

It's just a personal thing. I feel like I should at least apply. I can at least say I tried and academia officially did not want what I had to offer. On the upside, I'm getting more confident in the idea that there's something better out there...and I could still do my research. But that's a story for the next post.