Metaphors for Graduate School: a post-lette

Perhaps metaphor’s not the right word.  You’d think, being in literary studies, that I could be precise about that, but then, it’s literary studies.  And I think we’re in the territory where metaphor shades into conceit.  God help me if we’re in metonymy; that would be bad indeed.

One day, my son, still in diapers, was home from day care for a demi-holiday: you know the kind, where some people get the day off and others don’t.  So my husband was working, and I was home with the boy.  Only staying home was not the best plan that day, so we went to our favorite spot(s): the playground next to the coffee shop.  Ideal.  It was a beautiful day, azure skies, big puffy clouds, light breezes, low humidity.  Exactly the kind of day when you’d run into your academic colleagues inside the caffeineteria.  Which I did.

That day, I ran into my department’s director of graduate studies.  I did that thing, that grad-student thing, where you think about pretending not to see him, and you worry that you’re out having fun rather than slaving on your dissertation, or that you’re out in public with a child, where anyone can see you haven’t taken the academic vow of celibacy.  And then I thought to myself: fuck that.  Whether I make it anywhere in the field or not, I’m going to have to go through the world talking to supervisors and colleagues, whether they esteem me or not.

So I said hello, and chatted briefly about something ephemeral, while my son scaled the stack of rectangular restaurant high-chairs, and otherwise entertained himself.

When I say “otherwise entertained himself,” I mean that when I glanced over at him, he had stuck both hands down his diaper and was hard at work.

All at once, the whole moment coalesced in my mind into a beautiful gem, a dark crystal — a metaphor for my graduate career.  And I plastered a smile on my face while I pretended the whole thing wasn’t just some big wank, said goodbye, knelt down to my son, and told him that we don’t do that in public.

No.  We do literary criticism instead.

The University and its Double

I made myself a promise that I’d post here weekly (and hopefully not weakly).  I promptly broke it.  But a habit is still a habit once you pick it back up again.  Nonetheless it’s frustrating.  It’s also just where my life is at right now.  I have two young children at home, because you go to grad school during your childbearing years, and I’m at home with them all the time, because when you get out of grad school, you’re unemployed.  Or close enough.

When I got out of grad school, three (!) years ago, I was unemployed.  I’d made the decision not to go on the market before finishing, because I’d been in too long in the first place, and had too many hurdles to overcome.  I wanted to narrow my goals down to the one main goal, and a few maintenance goals, like regaining health after surgery and raising a three-year-old.  I knew if I worried about a job search at the same time, I’d use it to derail myself from the dissertation, and vice-versa.

So I graduated, and I had nothing much to do except try to normalize my sleep patterns and wean myself off a wicked sugar habit.  And, you know, dance every day, because HOLY PAUL I WAS DONE!  I had socked away a little loan money, and had taken on a couple of dissertation editing jobs to make a little cash.  (Speaking of which: if you have a dissertation you’d like someone to edit….I could use some cash.  And I kick ass at it.)  Otherwise, it was like summer vacation, back when that meant “summer vacation” — as opposed to now, when it just means my son is home from kindergarten and wants to give me daily lec-dems on his latest Lego creations (for real).

So there I was, dancing, not eating sugar, editing, taking melatonin, and my old boss called, asking what I was up to.  This sort of thing happens to me sometimes.  Not all the time — it sure ain’t happening right now, or not yet — but sometimes, when I need work, or direction, *POP*.  It just shows up and announces itself.  It was a prestigious position at an NEH funded project, and it looks dazzling on a resume.  The pay was less than the standard graduate student stipend, and they wouldn’t budge much on that, though I bargained for conference funding.  (I’m telling you, finishing gave me confidence, and being burned making peanuts for years made me more than willing to advocate.) 

So the job I posted about last time?  I wasn’t what they were looking for.  I also interviewed for an adjuncting position for a massive state U., and I’m first on the bench.  And I’ve sent in a few more adjuncting applications, and heard nary a peep back.

I’m waiting for the *POP*.  And — since this is an outside academia blog, I’ll tell you — I have been getting all kinds of signs that this is how the next avenue in my life will appear.  (Signs: as scientific as transubstantiation, but that’s okay, since the blog is not peer-reviewed.  And I’m in literary studies, where the woo is strong.) 

The hard thing about getting signs that something will happen is feeling powerless.  It seems as though I might as well be flushing my applications down the toilet, for all the good they’re doing me.  But I’m soldiering on, sending applications in, because serendipity needs *something* to work with, even if I don’t know what that thing might be. 

In the meantime?  I need to cultivate this writing habit, because again, serendipity needs something to work with, and I need to be a full person, inside *or* outside academia.  I need to write about the woo and the kids, the dancing and the melatonin, the NEA and the NEH, the university and its double.  (There: I’ve found something for myself to do, because this wikipedia page was clearly written by a teenager.)

The Interview Self

Anonymity.  Good or bad?

I am applying for jobs right now.  I’m so far out of money that I don’t really know where food is going to come from in a given month, though thanks to WIC, my parents, and my mother-in-law, it always comes.  Before long, though, if I don’t get a job, I’m probably going to have to declare bankruptcy, or just stop paying credit card bills.  So I’m really hoping I get this job I just interviewed for.

You know what happens when you really, really want something, right?  You get nervous. 

It was a phone interview, so it was odd, simply because there are no non-verbal cues to read other than silence.  On the other hand, I was able to have cheat sheets with answers to common interview questions right in front of me.  I should have brainstormed more particulars, but let me tell you, making those cheat sheets was the best thing I’ve ever done, interview-wise.  I’m going to keep them, review them, expand on them, and call them George.

The worst thing I’ve ever done, interview-wise, was interview while on painkillers a week after major surgery.  It wasn’t the best time to be interviewing, but I really wanted the job, so I interviewed for it anyway.

I didn’t get it.  Probably less because I was high, and more because I couldn’t get past the academic self and into the workplace self.  You know the academic self — the one that needs to be confident to the point of pomposity to pass an oral exam.  The one that’s so used to being infantilized as a student that it misreads the question about working with others and answers in a way that basically says “I’m not a kid!” rather than, “Yes, I work well with others.”

Ironically, the position I interviewed for today is in academic employment services for a national scholarly organization — so outside the university, sort of, but inside academia.  Let’s face it: academia is what I do and what I have done.  And I love it.  I just don’t like what the employment crisis is doing to it.  Academia is all over my resume, so my next step is going to be inside higher ed in some fashion.  And to be honest, what I’d like to do, my pie-in-the-sky dream, is to do something to address the crisis in higher ed.

That’s what I should have said this time, really.  I should have said, Yes, I understand what job seekers in academia are going through, and I know it’s absurd and gut-wrenching and their livelihoods depend on it.  I’m going through it too.  I understand the difficulty of pivoting from a faculty position (and that search) to an admin position (and that search).  I understand it so much, because I’m right in the middle of it now, and I blog about it at Outside Higher Ed on WordPress.

Because of course, this national scholarly organization that offers employment services to its members and member institutions is looking for ways to address the employment crisis in academia.  My showing an interest in the crisis would have been a good thing.

But I missed the hint until late, and never mentioned this blog.  The gods willing, I’ll get the chance to mention it in an in-person interview.

The thing is, working in academia has inculcated in me an instinct to hide and protect myself, rather than be proud of what I do, think, and write.  Anything critical shouldn’t be shown.  Which is patently bullshit, because what else is academia for, except to critique, and make cool nanomaterials and discover cures for cancer?  I mean, only one of those is an option for me.

These people wanted to know that I know what’s going on in the academic job market.  I do, guys, it’s just I’m still so far inside of it that I’m having trouble speaking to it on the spot.  For so long, you see, I wasn’t supposed to.  I was supposed to keep my head down, publish a lot, survive on thin air, work other jobs that would give me a broader range of experience — just in case — and not say a bad word about anyone or anything.

Besides being bad for your psyche, it turns out this is also bad for your ability to secure employment.  I’m not sure who it’s good for.  The people that don’t want you to rock the boat?  The people who are comfortable and want to stay that way?

I mentioned that I really want this job, but it turns out that I want it differently than I thought.  I want it for the opportunity to learn more about the employment crisis in academia, how it’s being handled, and what can be done.  I want it so that I can see if there’s anything I can do to address the problem.  That would be a good use of my PhD.

The Academic Self

Christ, is it hard once you turn forty to begin anything new.  It’s hard in your thirties, too — it’s a thing that sneaks up on you.  You’re like Bugs, thinking you’re taking a nice hot bath, when all of a sudden there’s carrots, onions, and celery in there with you.

But I digress, which is a feat, since I haven’t even started. We fogeys are wont to do that.

I spent about the last fifteen years in graduate school and in the thrall of academia.  Because of the adjunct crisis, I am now beginning to extricate myself from that thrall, and to reconfigure my relationship with work, literature, education, capitalism, feminism, family, writing, passion, and my self.

My poor self.  It thought it was the career path.  There’s a larger cultural message I internalized.

I had a realization tonight, while I was nursing my daughter back down to sleep: I internalize a lot of things.  The realization started when I was viewing XOJane‘s 116 “bikini bodies” — defined as any body that puts one on — and realizing, from the sheer onslaught, and from a comment about focusing on parts of the body, that we are each one whole, and dressing that whole, for whatever reason — to flatter it, to feel the air, to run comfortably, to impress — is what it’s about.  It’s not about fat.  Or skinny.  Or deflated baby bellies.  It’s about people, who all look rather distinct, which is what we like about them, when we’re honest, though we so rarely are.

Even with ourselves. If I were honest with myself when I was very young, around ten or twelve, I would have shrugged off what my neighbor said.  She’d asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Or perhaps she’d ask what I wanted to do.  Six of one, half dozen of the other, in America anyway.  I told her I liked math, and I wanted to do something with that.  She assumed I meant be an accountant, and told me I was too pretty to hide behind numbers.

I believed her.  I have a credulous streak, but let’s be honest: kids absorb this stuff.  We say it because we want them to believe it.  What I believed, though it boggled my mind exactly how one hid behind numbers, was that one could be too pretty to do so.  Message: you are female, you are your looks, what you do does not matter, what you do is only a reflection on how you look.  I didn’t understand, at the time, that I believed that.  I just thought: Right, so math is not the right thing to do.

Had I really wanted to do math, I’m sure in my teen years, I would have told that idea and that neighbor to fuck off, since I was telling pretty much the world to do that anyway. For all that she could be dramatic, my teen self knew a thing or too that I have since forgotten, or perhaps only mentally mislaid.

When I went into graduate school, I thought it was a career move.  It was; it’s just that it was a bad one.  At the time, I was also casting about for an internal compass.  I was having a crisis of values.  As the result of a rather difficult split from my family, I discovered that I had NO IDEA what was important to me or how I thought the world worked. All I knew was that I didn’t want to do it the way they did it, and I didn’t want to do it the opposite way in reaction, either: I wanted a genuine, solid foundation.

This is a crisis of faith.  It’s taken me the better part of twenty years, almost half my life, to put that together. It’s a wonder I graduated high school with that intellect.

Since I didn’t realize it was a crisis of faith, I didn’t start casting about for a religious practice until several years in, and I didn’t really commit to that until it became the linchpin in my psychotherapy.  It’s sort of the opposite of the Bugs thing: I was dipping my toes in very slowly to get used to the idea.

But this is not a blog about religion.  Or maybe it is.  I don’t know.  If this blog is outside academia, then what is it inside?  What is at its core?  That’s where I want to start — not with the answer, but with the question.

As I was saying.

Crisis of faith.  Starting graduate school.  Two great tastes that taste great together!  You got your peanut butter in my chocolate! Iced cold milk and an Oreo cookie!

Boy, do they not go well together.  Because academia encourages you to identify yourself with it.  Sure, some people warn you not to.  They are the exception that proves the rule. The whole force of the thing is to remake you.  It culminates in a ritual challenge, and if you make it through, they give you a new name.  They tell you you’ve got to have the fire in the belly to do it.  Then they tell you you should work as an adjunct for the love of the work, and not for money.

HA HA HA HA HA!

said Sallie Mae, and my landlord, and the rising cost of groceries, and my car that keeps breaking down.  And, and, and.  And the power of love is strong, but damned if it can’t actually get you to work on time. By the time you’re through graduate school, if you are not independently wealthy, you are broke, and so identified with academia that you can’t really imagine what else to do for work.

And that’s just to look at the thing from a personal perspective.  What does it say about our culture that we train people to learn and research and teach, and then tell them we don’t want them to do that?  Because that’s what we’re doing when we won’t pay them something they can live on.  What is says about our culture is that we are stupid, and we love stupidity.  We don’t want our teachers to teach; we don’t want our researchers to find things out, and we don’t want our students to learn.  Second perhaps only to the opposable thumb, the human brain is what enables us to adapt and thrive.  Apparently we don’t give a shit about doing that any longer.  Because capitalism.

Ironically, what might be my saving grace here is making the degree actually about myself. By that I mean, understanding graduate school not as a career move, but as something that I did, something that I learned from, something that changed me and I internalized — and something I moved on from.  In one way or another, I’m back to the project of establishing a base for my self, and I’m moving on.  I have two criteria, I think: that I need to find a livelihood, and that I would like to actually “use” my PhD in a way that makes an actual contribution to human society. Because I didn’t do this for nothing.

My immediate goal is the livelihood thing.

I want to use this blog, for now, as a place to meditate further on what it means to be trained as a PhD, with skills and knowledge useful for the betterment of humankind, and then be locked out of making that your livelihood.  Once I have employment, what resources will I have left over to make a contribution? How far outside of academia do I want to go? Will I actually throw my hat in the ring one more time, or will I give it up entirely as a bad boyfriend?

This blog is my way of writing not about things ending, but things starting.  May it be so.