The Ph.D. and the Nonacademic Job Search: A Spectacular Albatross?

In my ongoing post-academic (inter-academic?) transition, one of the very practical questions that keeps coming up is - how do I present my Ph.D.?  On business cards, on Linkedin, etc  . . . I'd be a pretty hopeless 'strategic communicator' if I didn't realize that referring to myself as "Dr. David Z. Morris" made me instantly seem like an asinine boor.  But what about "David Z. Morris, Ph.D.," or just "David Z. Morris," with the Ph.D. tucked on the back of the card, the third or fourth line of the resume, etc?

You can find different takes on this.  The authors of "What Are You Going To Do With That?" (which I strongly recommend) are predictably upbeat, considering their audience of almost entirely MA and Ph.D. holders.  They emphasize the skills and accomplishments indicated by the Ph.D.  Penelope Trunk, on the other hand, is brutal, saying that if it's not directly related to your field, you should Leave Grad School Off Your Resume.

In my case, my graduate degree could hardly be more relevant to the field I'm pursuing work in - my Ph.D. is in Communication Studies, and my work is focused on media technology and culture.  I've taught both business communication and strategic communication for nonprofits, which believe me, is far more educational than simply taking those courses - plus, now I have some actual experience applying what I learned/taught.  So I don't feel much conflict about listing the Ph.D., and even highlighting it.

But still, there are moments when it's overkill - I'm applying for some entry-level positions along with more senior positions,  and in those cases I provide a little caveat as part of my cover letter.  What do you think, though?  Should I just be leaving this off?  But no, no, there would be insurmountable, inexplicable gaps in my timeline.  Nothing to be done but acknowledge that I'm a huge nerd who did something impractical with his 20s.

Separation Anxiety: The Symbolic Trauma of Sacrificing Your Academic Identity

If you read contemporary job search guides (or if you're just a commonsensical tuned-in person) you'll know that your social media presence is nearly as important to how you're regarded by potential employers as your resume.  For someone transitioning careers, this can be tricky.  In my case, there are still people who follow/know me as an academic, but if I leave my online profiles oriented towards that audience, I'll be putting up a big STOP sign for potential nonacademic employers.

So, I'm slowly making changes - like changing my twitter bio and the bio on this page to something that acknowledges my 'transitioning' status (I feel like I'm announcing a sex change . . . ).  I still haven't tackled my main website (davidzmorris.com), where for a little while longer you can read what I have to say about myself as an academic first and foremost.

These are all strictly practical moves in the game of life.  And for a lot of people, they would be simply practical decisions.  But for myself, and I'm sure for many others in similar situations, there's a kind of existential dread that accompanies changing social media profiles. It's really not at all different from the dread that accompanies turning a C.V. into a resume.  There's not much room in either of those genres, and boy, wouldn't it be tragic if people didn't know HOW AWESOME I AM?  Didn't know all the great articles I've published, all the awesome grants and fellowships I've earned?  There's the threat that one will remain too attached to those old achievements.

I'm trying to view it as a moment of freedom.  I have actually accomplished things outside of academia - but more importantly, I have GOALS outside of academia.  This is a chance not just to change how people see me online, but to rethink how I see myself.  Watch this space as I tweak, poke, and prod that self-presentation/self-perception.

P.S. There is another practical concern.  Even as I'm looking for real-world jobs, my plan is to continue applying for academic jobs for the upcoming cycle, pretty much in case I end up really loathing wherever I end up.  I will have to carefully calibrate my self-presentation so that academic hiring committees really understand where I'm coming from.

The Quest for Freedom: Why I'm Leaving Academia. Temporarily. Maybe.

Today is a big day. Many of my friends and family know about it, but this is the first time I've posted here on the blog about a major transition in my life. In about three weeks, I will no longer be employed by the University of South Florida as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. My two-year contract is expiring, so there's nothing terribly dramatic about that. What's more notable is that I'm not, as most academics at this juncture would be expected to, packing up and shipping off to another city to start either a tenure-track job or a visiting assistant professorship somewhere.  Instead, I've spent the last few months fine-tuning a resume (not a C.V.), thinking about what skills I've acquired in my time in academia, and, starting a few weeks ago, applying for jobs in copywriting.

In other words, I'm leaving academia.

I don't know if this is a permanent bail.  Probably not.  Right up until the end of my fellowship, I seem to find working on my academic book proposal (for my book on Japanese Underground hip hop) way more compelling and interesting than the task of finding a real-world job, so we're already experiencing some nostalgia.  But for a number of reasons, I feel I have to take some time to discover what the alternatives are, and whether I feel they might fit me.

The idea of doing this first emerged about nine months ago, and I blame love.  There was a woman, and I felt things that I hadn't felt about anyone in a decade.  She opened me up - and I thought to myself, how can I leave this? It's the expectation, the way the model works - from postdoc in place A to Assistant in Place B, with no choice, nothing but the luck of the draw.  And the profoundly dated presumption that as a primary breadwinner, a professor could pick up and carry his (presumptively, his) entire brood anywhere.  But now marriages dissolve because neither spouse can or wants to compromise on their job.  Which, for me, seems like mistaken priorities.

That love affair ended in blood and fire - itself a transformational lesson in how callous humans can really be - but in the meantime other thoughts had crept in.  Last November, I visited my friend, an assistant professor at a private liberal arts college in a very small town.  I went there, and I saw he and his wife putting on a triumphant performance of mutual tolerance, and I took the three-minute walk to the only coffee shop in the three-stoplight town, and I heard the stress in his voice as he lamented his three year review, and the amount of pressure put on his teaching evaluations.  He seemed worn, old.  Another academic friend of mine indirectly revealed that for her full-time professorship, she was being paid barely more than I was earning doing only research.  The professorship that I'd been dreaming of all these years began to seem like a less alluring reality.

I powered through graduate school in Iowa City and nearly had a breakdown from loneliness and life-threatening weather, maybe because I could not conceive of a better alternative.  In Florida, though, one is given a profound window onto the possibilities afforded by money and flexibility.  I began to think I might someday want to be able to be spontaneous.  I might want to have great experiences that didn't involve reading.  I would perhaps really someday like to have sex on a boat.

Maybe a catamaran.

This is not to say that I want to get rich, but it will at this rate be another seven years before I can pay off a small amount in student loans.  This is an oppressive thought for me.

There was another, perhaps even more profound, because more immediate, factor.  About a year ago - just before everything went so horribly with a woman I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with - I connected with the principal organizers of The Venture Compound, an art gallery and performance space manned entirely by lunatics and flame-headed igniting angels.  I'm in its grip, fascinated and immersed, now committed to really make this place survive, committed to insane dreams of building something.  I maneuver city politics and I meet people from all walks of life, furniture makers and architects and witches, and because we are generous with our secret selves, our darkest thoughts, they feel that they can be, in turn, and so they stand there nothing but men with their skin on.

I am in the world, suddenly, I am of the world.  I have completely inverted my relationship to being.

And so now, I'm fantasizing about a new life, where I am part of a team that pursues a great goal together, instead of a series of piddling goals separately.  I want to think about the least predictable ways what I'm doing could impact, not just a few elites, but a true public.  I want to intervene in something other than debates.

I don't know if I have it in me.  Sometimes I look at myself and I just see some passive eunuch.  And I look at the world and it seems bleak, how do all those people do it out there without an institution behind them, without some superficially benign branch of the nanny state at their back, massed rifles just out of sight?

No, I don't really feel that way.  Education is a vital public good.  But still, how can I live if the government isn't forcing those Iowa farmers to support me?

But I think I'll figure it out.  I really do.  After all, people do it all the time, right?  Every day.  And it's not necessarily comfortable, or easy, there's that feeling of some small hook pulling your belly down hollow from the inside.  But in return you get the certainty that you have lived.  We as humans have been so diabolical to one another that, within a strictly bureaucratic framework, we have constructed a subjective experience that on a day to day level, for many people, is as terrifying as being stalked by a jaguar.  People kill themselves because they don't think they can handle the whole contraption, all of it put into place by nothing but humans working with and against fellow humans.

Wish me luck in the insanity.

I would like to thank Penelope Trunk and her utterly fearless integration of her personal struggles into her blogging about the professional world for inspiring me to pursue some new directions in my writing.  For the next few weeks or months, I'll be trying to combine my subjective experiences with some genuinely helpful and substantive reflections on the passage from academic to post-academic.

Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Is Freelancing Viable for an Underemployed Academic?

I don’t usually post personal stuff here, but I think my situation might be shared by quite a few people towards the end of their graduate school work, and it seems relevant to academia in general, albeit somewhat tangentially.  This year, due to major budget cuts at the University of Iowa, I got much less funding than I was expecting, and have been pretty significantly underemployed for about eight months now as I put the finishing touches on my dissertation.  In the fall I was teaching just quarter-time at the UI and now I’m teaching two classes at the local community college.  Neither of these pays badly for the amount of work involved, and I love teaching, but they haven’t been quite enough to cover my expenses.   Even with some part-time work on the side, I’ve managed to rack up more student loans over the last six months than over the course of my entire undergraduate and graduate career before that.  It’s still far from crippling, but it’s really bothersome.  I've been able to do some amazing things in the past because of my lack of debt, and taking it on now feels like mortgaging my future freedom significantly.  Even worse, the low-wage jobs I picked up to (try to) fill in the gaps ended up distracting me from the job search somewhat, and it’s seeming increasingly unlikely that I’ll find a full-time teaching/research position by next fall.  I’ve since quit those side-engagements so that I can focus on the last few months of the job search – in fact, yesterday was my last day working as a cashier at the university’s parking garages.

I have enough loan cash that, combined with my income from teaching, I don’t need to worry about money for about four months.  I also have several thousand dollars in stocks which I can fall back on, though I think I might face a tax hit for cashing out.  And like many grad students, I have parents who can help me out if I absolutely need it.  Those last two don’t really appeal to me, though (particularly the parents part), and although I anticipate having to look for an office job starting in the summer, I’m really hoping to take advantage of the possibilities of this little interregnum of being under relatively few obligations for the first time in several years – my dissertation largely complete, only working about 20 hours a week, and suddenly casting about for a purpose in life. With that backdrop, I’ve decided to spend the next three months or so on a kind of experiment - making money doing freelance writing.

Before I came to grad school, I had some interest in freelance writing as a way of making a living.  Now, even more than then, I have a head full of esoteric interests and I’m an above-average (and perhaps as important, fast and prolific) writer.  I didn’t have any success as a freelancer in my early 20s because I just tried to pitch a few articles here and there, mostly focusing on things I 'wanted' to write about.   I had a romantic vision of the freelancing life – persuing high-concept stories, executing them beautifully, eventually compiling them into book-length collections.  But the reality is that volume and diversity are the survival tools of the average ‘lancer, facts that are becoming clearer as I try and learn the lay of the land.   A lot of the cash in freelance writing has obviously migrated to the Web, where Search Engine Optimization and slow drips of ad revenue over time seem to be the model that has prevailed over pay-per-piece.  Still, I have some serious ambitions as a Writer with a capital W, so I’m trying to conceive a strategy that, over the next three months to six months, will begin to produce a small income stream and will potentially allow me, in the coming year before I have to plunge headlong back into the academic ratrace, the freedom to pursue some non-academic writing projects I’m interested in for less financial reasons.  My strategy, as far as I’ve thought it through, breaks down to several parts:

1.   
       1- Quick and Dirty writing for ad- and referrer-revenue based sites like Squidoo and eHow.  These are very, very tiny drips of money, and it’s hard to say whether they’ll turn out to be worth it, but it’s clearly possible to make a living just writing about fitness, cooking, and etc. for sites like this. 
        
       2 - Pay-per-piece freelancing through sites like Guru.com and elancer.com.  These are sites where people looking to hire writers put up projects.  I have a pretty deep archive of work, so I should be able to get some unglamorous but paying work this way.

3.    
       3 - Putting together my own revenue-generating website.  My brother and I are collaborating at Haterade Gaming, which may end up becoming a small revenue stream if we can stick with it.


       4 -Conventional story concepts and cover letters for commercial magazines.  This market is dying, and maybe too competitive to be worth my while, but I have published in glossy magazines and have some real writing chops, so it would be crazy for me not to at least devote some effort to it.  My real goal here is to get someone to pay for me to go to India this summer and study Kerala martial arts.

My bigger goal is to try and make next year (assuming I don’t get an academic job) productive and fun, rather than just marking time.  I don’t want to move back in with my parents, but I also don’t particularly want to go out searching for a real job.  I’d rather figure out some combination of freelancing and part-time work to keep me afloat, but still free.  I see and hear about people living this lifestyle all the time, and it seems incredibly appealing.  Now’s when I have a chance to work towards having it for myself.

Who in their Write Mind . . .

This is likely an instance of retroactively justifying something that I initially did out of desperation, foolishness, or because of a minor stroke, but . . . the reason I've spent the last six years pursuing a PhD is that I want a life that allows me to write.  As much of an assault on the ego as being on the job market is - as much as I feel threatened by the grim prospect of ending up with a 4/4 teaching load, or some other situation where writing isn't officially part of my job - even these grim scenarios include a quarter of each year spent with no competing responsibilities, in which I can work on the passel of essays on obscure topics knocking around in my head.

After I graduated from college, I made some brief, abortive attempts to become a freelancer for magazines.  I wasn't successful, and part of that was because