Q2 already

No progress to report today.  Overall it was not a very good day; I felt almost as if I were coming down with a cold and my brain was in a fog, so very little got done.  I sent in some forms to an HR department and got a snarky reply in return.  Dear HR professionals: if someone sends you back a form and says that there’s a problem with it, you might want to check whether that is true before you hit send on your snark.  There’s nothing I can do with a password-protected pdf.  Sorry.  Even if I screwed up (which I didn’t), the professional thing for you to do would be to reply “I’m sorry you had trouble with the file.  You need to whisper ‘Imogene’ three times softly while you are opening it; perhaps I forgot to tell you.” or something along those lines.

I cannot believe tomorrow is April.  I almost want to cry thinking about it.  Today my landlord asked me what my plans are and how long I expect to stay in the house.  It turns out that even if I get a job in this area, I may have to move anyway, which would be exhausting and unpleasant.  The thought of house hunting makes me want to hide under a rock.

Moving on: Q2!

Main goal for Q2: get a job.

That’s it, really.  The job search is the most important thing right now.

Studying for an interview and other sundries

I wanted to share with you the following bit of humor from today’s interview:

Interviewer: I also need to let you know that because of (reasons), the person who takes this position might sometimes have to work outside of the core business hours.  In particular, you might need to stay past 4:30 on occasion.  Is that–can you do that?

Me: (dumbfounded) Um, sure.

Do you know any academic that clocks out at 4:30?  When I was teaching I sometimes felt that between classes and meetings and office hours, any work that required concentration didn’t start until after 4:30.  Reading for the next day’s class, grading, preparing lectures–most of that happened in the evenings.  Yeah, I think I can handle occasionally working past mid-afternoon because even if I stay until seven I can still leave work behind me when I go home and it wouldn’t be every night and there was nothing in there about weekends, which itself is a huge step forward.

But, friends, I am here to tell you, interviewing is no fun.  No fun at all.  It’s mostly the anticipation that gets me.  It’s like stage fright, except you aren’t in a theater and there’s no-one around to give you a pat on the back and tell you to break a leg.  The amount you can prepare is severely limited by your ignorance of what they are going to ask you.  You know that feeling when you are about to take an important exam, and you have studied intensely, and you spend the last five minutes going over your notes hoping that in those few minutes your eyes will absorb critical information you might have missed?  Interview anticipation is like that, but without crutch of notes to refer to, because you have no idea what subjects the exam will cover.

Based on my experience, I can suggest the following:

–Have a good narrative for why you are leaving academia.  This is one part you can practice beforehand.

–Prepare some questions to ask the interviewer.  Some may come naturally out of the conversation, but don’t depend on it; you can’t bluff this the way you bluffed your grad school seminars.  (hey, I did too, we all did, no need to get huffy).

–Be able to state clearly and coherently why you want the job–not a job that happens to be within commuting distance of where you currently live, but why you want that particular job with that particular company.

Ideally, you will ace all your first interviews and get second interviews and everybody you talk to will love you and offer you a job.  Realistically, this is unlikely.  I’d suggest that you be willing to look on the first couple of phone interviews as practice.  If you screw up, if you get a rejection the next day, figure out where your interview could have been improved and then practice that.  For me it was the “why are you leaving academia” question.  I should have known that would come up; it was a totally correctible oversight on my part.  In my first interview it took me by surprise, and I didn’t have a good answer.   They didn’t hesitate to reject me, in part because I couldn’t convince them that someone with a PhD from Big School was truly willing to move to Middle of Nowhere and take a glamorized data-entry job.

If you got a phone interview, and you think you rocked it, that’s awesome!  Now, go celebrate, but don’t rely on the good impression you made.  The best thing to do after an interview is apply for another job as soon as you can.  Do not under any circumstances wait for them to call you back and tell you you didn’t get the position before you continue sending out applications and networking and all that.  The best consolation for getting a rejection after an interview is knowing that you have more interviews lined up.  Or at the very least, more places that have your application and that might ask you for an interview.

I do not think I rocked the interview this afternoon.  It went ok, maybe, but I don’t really trust my ability to judge.  I know I can do the job.  I think the interviewer knows I can do the job; ze also knows there are a few pieces of software involved that I haven’t used before.  Not a deal-breaker, but if there’s another candidate who steps in without the need for a learning curve, I might not make it past this round.  On the positive side, it turns out there are two positions open, and if I’m not chosen for the first one, I’ll be considered with the next pool of applicants in four weeks or so.

Positive developments today:

–You may recall that I applied to an Interesting Job last week.  It turns out that HR apparently did appreciate my cover letter!  They wrote to me this morning and said they’d like me to take a timed test sometime in the next month.  First of all: yay!  The cover letter worked!  (It was atypical.  Some day when I’m feeling brave I’ll share parts of it).  Second: oh curses, a test.  Timed, no less.  Well, I guess it’s time to brush up on my SQL.

–This afternoon I got a bizarre e-mail from an HR person at a university I can’t remember applying to.  Ze sent me the standard voluntary disclosure forms (no, I’m not going to do much for your diversity profile, no, I’m not a veteran, no, I don’t have a disability).  I was really puzzled by this for a good few minutes.  Did I actually apply to this place and just forgot about it?  It doesn’t seem familiar…surely I would have remembered?  Given the job title referenced, I think that it is related to the fellowship I applied for in December.  If it is, and if HR is sending me forms, maybe that means I’m under consideration at that institution?  One can hope so, anyway.

Tomorrow:  I desperately need to catch up on my networking correspondence.  And I need to pick up the phone and call a connection who very kindly offered to talk to me.  I hate the phone.  But I need to do it.

Goals, finishing, and freezing

The race started at 7:30 am.  We walked from our house to the starting line in the not-yet-dawn light.  It is a great idea to get an early start on the running season: get everybody psyched up and ready for a great spring, summer, and fall of running.  On the other hand, it was cold this morning.  Fifteen degrees when we left.  I believe that legitimately qualifies as very cold. The first winter I lived in Boston I discovered that I could run outside most of the time, but that when it got below 17º it was too cold for me no matter how many layers I put on.  PILW won’t usually run when it gets below freezing.

Even so, there were hundreds of people in the race.  Maybe thousands.  Everybody with hats and gloves and leggings, except for one guy who was wearing shorts and a tank top.  He ended up being very, very fast and winning his race.  Whatever works, I guess.  Since I wasn’t running I was in charge of holding PILW’s extra hat and warm-up pants.  I have to confess, as I watched the thousands of eager runners bouncing up and down and stretching and gathering in a big mass before the starting arch, I regretted not registering for the race myself.  The sun was just coming up over a hill.  It was the kind of morning that reminds you of waking up early when you are camping on a mountainside and it gets chilly at night.  You almost expected to smell burnt coffee and campfire on the air.  There were two stripes of pink in the sky.  The national anthem was played; some runners even took off their hats.  Then they started moving.  As I watched them go I was thinking: this is one of the things you have to love about America.  The fact that there are thousands of people of all ages eager to get up before dawn and run 3, 6, 13, or 26.2 miles on a freezing morning.

(Not just America.  People run races everywhere but I had just heard the national anthem played at dawn, so I can forgive myself a bit of US-centeredness in that moment).

Last winter was a terrible, terrible winter.  There were three months when it was difficult to get to the gym.  One of the reasons I didn’t register for this race was that I wasn’t sure how running this winter would go; I didn’t know if I’d be ready to run a race this early in the season.  I’ve been quite impressed watching PILW’s training progress over the bitterly cold months.  The two races planned for this spring gave him an extra reason to go to the gym, a reason to work on increasing his mileage, and something to look forward to.  He started recording his daily and weekly mileage and working on his pacing.  He ended up placing in his age group and was happy with his time: success all around!  I’m not really that passionate about running; my goal is more like “finish the race”.  But I am capable of working out a simple equation such as: in early December I could easily run 4 miles (slowly).  By the end of March I want to be able to run 6.  Therefore I’d better do some treadmill work when the snow gets deep and add some distance gradually.  Also, I once ran a marathon, so I’m pretty sure I could work myself up to a longer run eventually, assuming my knees hold out.

The thing is, I know how to set running goals that are achievable.  I’m not going to say “I want to run from here to Alaska”; that is unrealistic.  I would need different genetics, a dedicated trainer, total funding for a few years to get in shape, and an assistant to work out all the lodging and safety issues.  It’s likely that I’d still fail through injury or accident.  I’m not going to say in December “I think I’ll run a marathon at the end of March” if my long runs recently have only been 5-6 miles and I’m not certain of regular running over the next three months.  Given where I live and my other obligations, I couldn’t train adequately.

I was talking to my Mom this afternoon and she said I sound better than I have in a while.  Yes, I told her.  Actually, I feel ok.  Because even though job searching is terrible, and uncertainty provokes severe anxiety, and I’m worried about finances and possibly moving and when, exactly, I’m going to be employed and whether I’ll be able to work for a company that isn’t an agribusiness behemoth or a car manufacturer…  even though this is not a comfortable place to be, I have a clear goal and I’m pretty sure I can meet it.  I’ve done this before.  It’s not easy, it might take longer than I’d wish, I might initially end up in a less exciting position than I’d like.  But it will be possible for me to be employed.

And you see, academia never offered that.  When you think about it, for ten years I’ve been on the edge.  Many of my professors said “don’t worry!  You’ll get a job”, meaning a tenure-track position.  I was never certain of that; always, in the back of my mind, was the idea that I might not.  Now, there are many, many things I could have done differently that would have increased the likelihood of my getting a TT position.  I could have networked more, published more, tried for big grants, done more fieldwork, compromised my convictions and done whatever it took to get good student evaluations.  And tons of other things.  The problem is that even had I done all those things, and even had I been successful at all those things, I might still be in the same place: no professorship in sight.  People with far more teaching experience and a better publishing record than I have aren’t getting jobs.  People who are considered superstars in their subfields aren’t getting jobs.  A good goal has to be realistically achievable.  There are several reasons “getting a tenure-track faculty position” is not a good goal, including:

1.  It is impossible to determine where the openings are going to be when you are looking for a job.  Which translates to: it is impossible to define the goal specifically enough.  If you have already completed your PhD in Non-Sexy subfield, this is a problem, because most of the job openings will be for Sexy Topic A and Sexy Topic B.  If you are deciding on your topic, this is a problem because you need to be able to see into the future to determine what Sexy Topic A and Sexy Topic B will be at the time you will be on the market.  This is difficult.

2.  It is impossible to adequately train for such a goal.  The minimal qualifications for assistant professorships are so high now that many new PhDs can’t meet them.  Even if you have a book out and several journal articles, you might still be out of luck if, for instance, your research concerns a relatively peaceful area of the world and then there is an international incident and schools want someone who can teach about Not-so-peaceful and Potentially Dangerous area of the world. There is no path of study and effort that will reliably result in a tenure-track position.

3. It is therefore impossible to measure progress.

4. Because of that, it is impossible to know when you have done enough.  (hint: never).  Do not underestimate the emotional distress this can cause.

One of the things about the academic job market that can be so emotionally damaging is that as a job seeker, you have  no control over the outcome.  You can be the perfect candidate and be passed over because of internal departmental politics.  You can apply to three jobs and get one; you can apply to 300 and not get one.  And here I’m talking only about getting a job offer or not; I’m not even taking into consideration the fact that there might be areas where you don’t want to live or can’t live, or legitimate reasons you need to be near a big city or prefer to live in a small town, or the fact that you might prefer to live in an area in which you can freely express your sexuality, your political views, and your religious views or lack of them.

If you are looking for your first non-academic job after grad school, and if, like me, you are scared and anxious, it is worth remembering that getting a non-faculty job is a realistic, achievable goal.  You can do this.  You have the power to choose your geographic area and the industry in which you want to work.  At times you may feel powerless and there will still be a lot of rejection.  But if  you decide what you want to do, you can work out a way to get there.  If you decide that the way to get there is too much trouble or too expensive or takes too long or doesn’t match your skill set after all, you can change your mind.  In fact, you have a lot of choices.  Isn’t that a refreshing place to be?

Race Preparation

The Person I Live With is running a race tomorrow.  This afternoon we went to pick up his number and T-shirt and then did some other errands, including stopping at the grocery store.  This was critically important because PILW wanted lots of carbs and I had run out of chocolate.  As we came out of the store we saw enormous billows of grey and black smoke.  They were coming out of an apartment building a few blocks away.  As we stood there with other shoppers we heard the first sirens.

I haven’t checked the news yet to see what happened.  From where we stood it looked serious.  I pray no-one was hurt.  A thing like that–the gusts of dirty black smoke obscuring the clouds, and the scent of smoke on the air as we unloaded groceries from the car back at home–that is certainly enough to remind me to be grateful.  I’m scared and uncertain and I don’t know what’s next but my home is safe and I have enough to eat.

(pause for consultation.  PILW wants my opinion on what color shorts he should wear tomorrow).

(this turns out to be somewhat involved.  I’ll be back tomorrow).

Fortunate Friday progress update

More positive stuff!

1a.  Another tailored application submitted today, along with one resume to a company database (probably useless, but it’s easy, so why not).

2a.  Interviewer returned my e-mail and is still interested in talking; phone interview some time Monday afternoon.

3a.  Relative’s connection invited me to get in touch with her directly, so I did!  E-mail sent.

4a.  Discovered a couple more job sites that are focused on data and analysis work.

Now the weekend.  Seems to me as if snow flurries are a good excuse to make hot chocolate.

Fortunate Friday

Focus on the positive!  I have to remind myself to think positively.  Frequently.  I’ve been told that I should sit comfortably and center myself and concentrate on sending positive vibrations out into the universe while visualizing the kind of job I want, and perfect employment will come to me.  While this approach might not hurt, I can’t convince myself that it should replace writing cover letters and sending out applications.  Nevertheless, concentrating on the things that are going well does have a positive effect and can sometimes banish the overall gloom for a little while.

Job Search:

1.  I continue to write cover letters and send out applications.  Depending on what career advice you read, 50 – 98.26% of jobs are achieved through networking.  Some even say that sending out applications and resumes is a waste of time.  I don’t have a ton of control over when I can do networking but I do have control over creating and sending application materials, so I continue.  This makes me feel as if I am taking action, which is a good thing, because otherwise I might get stuck in the slough of despond and never get out.

2.  A mis-directed voicemail was delivered to me by e-mail yesterday.  I have no idea why this person called an old number–my cell phone number is on all my application materials.  He wants to set up an interview.  I returned the call and left a voicemail.  I hope we don’t have to spend too much time playing phone tag; this is why I vastly prefer e-mail.  Why on earth would you call a number different than the one on my resume?  Oh well.  Positive part: another request for a first interview!  Worst case scenario, that is positive feedback even if we never get in touch.

3.  My researches this week led to a very interesting company which is someplace I think I’d like to work.  It’s in a different city and I have no network there except relatives.  Then again, some of those relatives have lived there a long time and know lots of people.  On a whim, I sent an e-mail to them saying hey, I found this interesting company, don’t go out of your way but if you ever run into anyone who works there, could you let me know? The very next day I got an e-mail back from Awesome Relative forwarding a message from someone she knows who might know someone who knows someone at said company, and what kind of work do I do anyway?  I guess this is networking!  I had to grit my teeth to send the initial e-mail.  They are all laid back people and love me and want to help but I still felt bad about asking for anything.  I sense that there might be posts about networking in the future.

4.  More jobs are being posted all the time.  I could convince myself that statistically speaking, I will get a job sooner or later.

5.  I have greatly decreased the lag time between seeing a job ad and sending an application.  See Monday’s post on mistakes.

General:

6.  The snow is not accumulating.  (The fact that it is snowing, on the 27th of March, which tries the patience of woman and beast and brings out a tendency to hurl curses into the sky and be impolite to fellow drivers and pedestrians, I politely decline to address).

7.  The yarn I made last week is turning into an interesting scarf.

8.  I don’t have to go to the office.

9.  I am not unemployed yet.

10.  I am writing more.

I feel ok.  Not bouncy with joy, but not immobilized by despair either.  There is a lot of waiting: waiting for spring, waiting to hear back, waiting to see what will happen… The pool of uncertainty is an uncomfortable place to be. I try to enjoy stillness whenever I can, bearing in mind that soon there may come a time of frantic activity. Two days ago I had a flash of insight:  I could sell everything and run away to Chile!  Then the waiting would be over.  But I’m not sure what I’d do when I got there.  Feeling ok is fine for now.

Where the cool kids work

Yesterday I filed a resumé with Google.  It was for a job I can actually do–I wasn’t pretending to be a coding genius or anything.  Google is so big now that they have all kinds of positions.  Especially, it seems, sales positions (NO! That was not the kind of position for which I applied.  Not a good match for my skills.  Ever).  The Google application site says something like “your work speaks for itself!  No need to write a cover letter.”  Unless you want to, and here’s a text box for your effort.  I didn’t write one, which, according to most job searching advice I’ve read, pretty much guarantees my materials will be binned immediately.  Except that they said a cover letter wasn’t necessary.  Oh well.

Do you know what Google has on its career application pages?  If you’ve applied there, of course you do.  But if you haven’t: there are boxes for links to online portfolios, code repositories, and personal websites.  I’m supposed to have a showcase at some site called Github?  I guess I should figure out what that is.  It’s not surprising that Google would want people to show them what they can do and use links and such to do it.  As one who hasn’t been looking in the public sector until recently, this is daunting.

The thing is, I have no pretense to being a hot shot coder.  I like programming.  I’ve done some of it, mostly in languages which are now the tech equivalent of 80’s big hair and shoulder pads.  I love the process of figuring out logical chains of calculation and designing efficient loops and so on.  But I’m under no illusions: my knowledge has been picked up as needed, in whatever language was being used where I was working at the time.  I don’t have a CS degree and though I’ve flirted with the idea at times, I don’t really have any desire to get one.  I love solving problems but I don’t like continual stress and I think I’d go bonkers in an atmosphere that was always aiming for speedy deployment.  Part of the reason I’m leaving academia is long hours; I don’t want to walk into another situation which has frequent crunch periods with 10 or 12 hour days.  Slow and steady is my style.

But it is true that the current cool in employment is tech.  Smart people work at places like Google and Apple.  It is fun to work with smart people.  I like working around smart people.  I’m smart too, I’m just not a coding wizard.  I’d love to work around smart people doing interesting things, and I believe this is possible, even outside of the Ivory Tower.  I know it is possible, because there are millions of other people with PhDs out there working somewhere and you don’t suddenly become a boring person when you are no longer employed by a university.  And the world is full of intriguing problems.

I looked at the page for the Google office closest to me.  It has a picture at the top of some young men having a great time eating pizza.  They look as if they could be some of my students, actually.  Yesterday I also did some LinkedIn browsing to see if I could learn more about the company with the Interesting Job I applied to yesterday.  I did find some people who work there, but no-one I know.  Many of them had profile pictures, and they looked like slightly older students.  Graduate students, maybe.  Perhaps men a few years out of grad school, assuming they went straight on to a PhD program after undergrad.

Harnessing the talent of youth is great.  That’s what successful companies should be doing, right?  Profit from innovation, and young people have bleeding edge ideas and all that.  Young people need chances and they need good jobs and they deserve productive, healthy workplaces and interesting careers.

Middle-aged people do too.  Everyone does.  It was only late last night as I was mulling over my day that I realized all the photos I’d seen of employees yesterday were young white men.  This could absolutely be coincidence or the fact that I didn’t click through enough pages or some kind of bizarre sorting anomaly that will change as soon as the company hires a black woman with a last name beginning with “A”.  Still.  I realize that I don’t look like I work in a cool company doing interesting things.  I look like a middle-aged woman who might have been a professor.  Actually, I look like a middle-aged woman who is too old to be an assistant professor.  I believe this is one of the many reasons I haven’t been successful on the TT market.  Admittedly a small factor, but subconsciously, we all have an idea of how a rising star assistant prof should look.  What’s the first image that comes to mind?  I’m betting for most people it’s closer to Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing than it is to middle-aged woman in tweeds.

Google’s company culture is famous and in truth, if what I hear about it is true, it is not a good fit for me.  I knew that a long time ago.  What does worry me though is that the standard of youthful brilliance is becoming so pervasive in certain fields that I could be rejected because of the length of my work experience and my college graduation date.  Even if it’s an unconscious bias, it can still be very harmful.  I’m not claiming that any company is trying to discriminate.  I am saying that “fit” can be used as an excuse for many decisions.   “Exciting tech work” probably doesn’t automatically bring to mind “middle aged woman”.  Or even, for that matter, “recent female college graduate”.

Summary: I’m starting to wonder about ageism.  I know it’s not supposed to exist and every company has an EEO statement which claims they don’t discriminate on the basis of anything they can imagine would be grounds for a lawsuit.  I hope very much it’s true.  Mid-career people can be cool too.  Even when they are starting over.

Navigating the black hole of no feedback

Today:

5 am: Awakening is happening. I feel sick in the pit of my stomach at the thought of dealing with life.

5:30 – 7:00: Exercise. Nothing thrilling, but hey, at least I made it to the gym and did some cardio.  The world always looks better after exercise. Maybe today will be ok.

7:00 – 10:00: Miscellaneous stuff irrelevant to this story.

10:00 – 10:30:  Check e-mail.  Nothing from any possible employer.  Feel depressed.  Click on job alert to find a posting that looks promising.  Except for those three areas in which I have no experience.  Is it worth applying anyway?

10:30 – 10:45: Look at non-academic job postings on Indeed.  Find that one that looked interesting yesterday.  Do a quick browsing of the company’s website.  Awesome! I want to work here.

10:45 – 12:45: Write cover letter for Interesting Job in City Where I Want to Be.  I have qualifications!  I have experience!  I am a creative thinker!  I am flexible!  I am a fast learner!  I want to work for you!  Yes, I can do this!

1:00:  Apply to job.

1:01: I bet there was a typo on my resumé.

1:02: Did I really say that in my cover letter?

1:03: They’ll be able to tell I’m qualified, won’t they? Surely they will.  I mean all the terms are right there.  I even used the language of the job ad in the cover letter. They’ve got to like me!

1:05: Check e-mail.  Read automated verification that assures me I’ll be contacted if HR thinks there might be a match.  Drat HR.  I bet they won’t appreciate my cover letter.  It seemed like a small enough company that the cover letter might be seen by relevant people before being weeded out.  Sigh.

1:06: Slough of despond.

1:10: Check e-mail.  No message from any possible employer.

3:30: Sun!  Wow, sunshine really does make a difference.

4:00: Check e-mail.  Still nothing from any possible employer.

4:05: Slough of despond, somewhat mitigated by sunshine.

What is really getting to me today is the total lack of feedback.  I tailor resumés and cover letters and send them out into a gaping void where they become part of a mass of anonymous job materials.  Nothing.  It is now late March, which means that I have three more months of employment.  Three more paychecks.  Nothing like putting a small number on things to turn up the panic dial.   I wish I knew if I’d already been rejected, and from what.  For the applications I sent two or three weeks ago, maybe I should assume that I have.  For the applications I sent last week, maybe there’s still a chance?  Perhaps I shouldn’t presume they’ve rejected me quite yet.  Some of the posting are still open.  For the applications sent yesterday and today, I can’t hope to know anything for… a while.  How long is a while?  I wish I knew.

I wish I knew if my applications were being ditched at first glance.  Then I could find some help and alter them.

I wish I knew if my applications were considered by a hiring committee for, say, five minutes.  I’d like to know why I was passed over in that case–maybe I should have highlighted different skills?

I wish I knew if I were aiming too high, too low, or about right.

I wish I could tell from a job ad whether my extra experience in X will make up for having no direct experience in Y.

I wish I knew if my application made it to the eyes of the person actually choosing, and if so, why they rejected me.  What should I have done differently?

I know absolutely nothing.  In most cases I never will know anything about my application.  I really have no idea if I’m on the right track and simply need to keep doing what I’m doing, if I’m way off, if I just need a slight adjustment, if I should give up on my targeted career area altogether and try something else…  Maybe the end of March is a kind of slump period.  There is still at least one fellowship out there that probably hasn’t started seriously evaluating applications yet, according to the program’s own administrators.  I’d like to hold out hope for that one, although in this market, it’s unwise to hope for anything.  Maybe silence two to three weeks after submitting a job application is no cause for worry.  Maybe I’ll start getting a lot of calls next week.  Or the week after.  Maybe companies move slowly.  Maybe they have to keep jobs open for a certain amount of time and I applied at the beginning of that period.  Maybe the hiring person is on holiday.  Maybe I shouldn’t expect anything during Holy Week (I have applied to a few institutions with religious affiliation).  In most cases, there is simply no way of knowing what ever happened to my carefully crafted expression of interest in contributing my skills to the success of the hiring institution, a place I had never previously heard of and probably will never hear of again. Few things are as frustrating as a total lack of information.

It’s damned irritating.

And depressing.

Maybe good is good enough?

It is said in my family that I have a tendency towards perfectionism.  Ahem.  This is one of those cases in which Mom may be right.  Certainly it is true that I don’t like doing things shoddily, I am never satisfied with my finished products, and I am always interested in improving my work.  It is also true that I’ve suffered from perfection paralysis–the feeling that whatever I do isn’t going to be good enough, so why start.  The urge to find and fix that one very rare bug in the code before deploying the entire application.  The reluctance to start writing before an entire book manuscript is fully formed in my mind.  Aiming for the impossible pretty much guarantees failure unless your name is Milo and you have just taken delivery of a mysterious large box with a tollbooth inside.

There are positive aspects to perfectionism.  I wouldn’t be as good a dressmaker or knitter if I didn’t have the ever-present urge to learn more and increase my skill.  There is also value in knowing when to set perfectionism aside.  As a teenager I visited France, ostensibly to improve my spoken French, and I was so scared of making mistakes that I almost never said anything.  I was a very quiet teenager anyway, but the additional burden of requiring perfect utterances of myself as a beginner didn’t help my efforts to learn the language.  Fifteen years later I went to South America for three months.  I knew I was going to need to speak Spanish, and I’d never had any instruction in the language.  Learning a new language at age 30 is, they say, much more difficult than learning it in high school.  I took some Berlitz classes which helped with urgent tourist-type needs. They gave me a bit of a head start but I was still basically a total beginner.  As I planned my trip, one of the things I  gave myself was permission to appear stupid.  I decided that I wasn’t going to learn Spanish by being afraid to speak, and that only by speaking was I going to learn what I needed to know.  I did appear stupid, and got laughed at, and in one notable case was ridiculed to tears by a speaker from Spain who was aghast at my ignorance of verb tenses.  But I learned a lot.  I learned much more than I would have had I been afraid to open my mouth or only kept company with people who spoke English.

If you have spent much time in academia you are most likely familiar with the urge to always, always improve.  You may have the feeling that nothing you produce is ever good enough, even when you earn a good grade for it or a positive comment or even when you are invited to give the keynote address at the national conference in your discipline.  Certainly I never thought that anything I did was interesting or sufficient to get me to the next stage.  I’m still puzzled by my dissertation, trying to understand why it was good enough that I was granted a PhD.

A few weeks ago I had a phone conversation (yay!  experience!) which turned out to be an interview for a possible job opening.  As a part of the process of further exploration, my interviewer sent me material for a “performance test”–some data to analyze.

I panicked.  I worked on that data for a week.  I gave myself a crash course in R, which I hadn’t used in years.  I scoured the web for information on data visualization, what to do with x kind of data, data analysis, programming in R, anything that would help.  I worried over it and agonized about it.  In the end I sent back a “report”–I put that term in quotes because had I turned in something like my final write-up in one of my statistics classes many years ago, I’d barely have passed.  Or so I convinced myself.  I was certain that I’d missed something critical: some hidden pattern in the data, some obvious test that I didn’t know, some opportunity for discovering a correlation that I had overlooked completely.  I sent it in the day before the deadline and tried to shove it out of my mind.  I expected that I’d hear back in a few days: “Thank you very much, we regret to tell you that we have decided not to pursue your candidacy further at this time.”  I prepared myself for rejection. My work was not perfect. And I did not have sufficient theoretical grounding; I couldn’t write you the equations for the distribution of the data or show a theoretical statistician why I used one test and not another.

I did hear back in a few days.  Nothing directly about my report, but interviewer wanted to schedule another conversation with some different, higher-up people.  I guess I passed.  I am not trying to imply that I got the job or anything like that, but apparently my non-stellar, theoretically lacking results were sufficient to pass that hurdle.

Sometimes–maybe, outside of the Ivory Tower, a lot of the time–adequate is good enough.  Thinking back to my pre-grad school experience in the financial industry, nothing was required of me that necessitated the same amount of effort and error-checking that I had to do as an academic.  Consider all the tens of thousands of people presently doing data analysis for some institution somewhere.  Some of them are at the top of their field and no doubt there are journals for data analysis and Big Data and its use in business and so forth.  Most of them, though, are doing a job adequately.  They succeed without producing theoretical papers on how Big Data works.  They are good at their job, and being good at their job doesn’t mean that they have to be the best in the world in their speciality.  Perhaps some have “only” practical training and couldn’t care less about the theoretical mathematics behind the analytic tools they use.  They do fine anyway.  Maybe some of them use the kind of visualizations they’ve been used to, that the company expects, and don’t feel the need to read Tufte cover to cover every few months or keep up with all the cutting-edge data visualization blogs. (I presume there are such things.  I haven’t checked yet.  I should).

I am finding this a difficult mental adjustment to make.  We are told over and over that you get academic advancement by being the best at something.  You must bring something unique to academic discourse in your field.  You must have a novel perspective and know all the theory and have impeccable methodology and know more about your corner of research than anyone else and be the smartest.

Outside the Ivory Tower, you don’t have to be the best to have a chance at making a living.  You don’t have to have a unique slant on something.  You don’t need to prove years of theoretical grounding.  You don’t need to know more about your industry than anyone else. You can be good at something–just plain, everyday, adequately good at some skill–and be very employable.

Mistakes, and a reminder that done is better than perfect

I had hopes for today; I intended to get some things done, even with a 2-hour meeting in the middle of the day.  Unfortunately, I got derailed by a mistake which was entirely my own fault.  Friday afternoon I was in the process of applying for a job, and I got to the point on the job app website where the applicant is surprised with three or four unanticipated essay questions (“Please give an example of your previous work experience that is relevant to this position.  1200 characters or less” (sic)).  Knowing that such sessions time out, I was typing out responses in Scrivener.  I had gotten around to the last question when there was a knock on the front door and I gave myself a mental kick because I had entirely forgotten that a high school student was coming by to talk about spring lawn cleanup and the possibility of being our mower for the summer.  So I took care of that–and incidentally, kudos to all high school students who are self-starters and get used to marketing their skills and calculating estimates for their labor early in life.  Anyhow, by the time we had talked about lawn cleanup and the nice high school student had very politely not made a face of disgust at the state of our lawn, it was time to make dinner and I put the application materials away.

Then I had a weekend.

This afternoon I finished typing out a response to the last question.  My cover letter and resume and writing sample were all corralled into a labelled folder so I’d be sure to upload the correct versions.  I’m pretty well qualified for this one!  Ready to go!  Except…  oh no…  job posting not found.  The deadline was this morning, or yesterday, or maybe Friday night.  I missed it.  Posting no longer active.  Insert curses here.  My own fault, no possible excuse.

After that my mood declined precipitately, and I got into that mindset in which the more job ads I read, the lower my qualifications sink.  So I spent an hour or so reading job postings and convincing myself that I’ll never be hired by anyone, anywhere, or at least that I’ll have to start so low in the realm of possibilities that I might as well try Starbucks.

This attitude is not helpful.

In the end I decided that more fruitless mulling over impossible opportunities was getting me nowhere and that it was time to go home and have a nice hot cup of tea.  Which I did.

Things I have learned from this:

1.  I need a better way of keeping track of application deadlines

2.  When a good job posting shows up, don’t wait! Jump on it.

3.  A submitted application is better than a perfect unsubmitted application.

Things to do tomorrow:

1.  Gather and send materials requested by an HR department which has made it very clear that they are not yet giving me a job offer.

2. Reformat resume for industry.

3.  Work on second resume for a different type of position than the one I’m currently targeting.

4.  Communicate with a friend.

That last one looks out of place.  But I’ll tell you the positive things that happened today.  I talked to two different colleagues who confessed to finding the atmosphere at our workplace cold metaphorically as well as literally.  For years I’ve thought it was something wrong with me.  It’s surprisingly comforting to hear that someone else hasn’t magically discovered the key to the elite clique.  I also heard some more friend-of-a-friend stories of people who got TT positions and are miserable.  I am not happy that anyone is miserable in their job, but hearing stories like that makes it much easier for me to be at peace with walking away.