Deflation.

The interview I had this afternoon was a video conference with a committee.  It was a second interview, which is good, because yay!  it means that I’m starting to get past the phone screenings into finalist territory.  The job search coordinator sent me three prompts to address during the interview.  Ok, I thought.  Better make sure I can answer these really, really well.

I prepared.  For almost a week.  I revised a presentation of my research to emphasize a Big Question and to last exactly 10 minutes.  (In the interview I believe it clocked in at 10:03).  I went over my job history and created a unifying narrative explaining why I thought I was a good fit for the position.  (With charts!)  I came up with lists of ideas on what I would do if I were offered the job.  All of that went ok, I think.  At least, I didn’t feel as if I truly messed anything up, although there were many instances where I could have phrased things better or where I forgot one of the details I’d noted.  There was a zinger, though, which left me feeling bad about my performance in this interview.  Near the end they asked me if I had any questions and I’d been so focussed on what I could do for them that I panicked a bit.  Don’t judge me too harshly–I’d asked most of my questions in the first phone interview.  The position is a limited term and I asked them what success would look like at the end of the allotted time.  This turns out to be a pretty good interview question; I have used it several times now and gotten informative answers.  Interviewers can certainly bluff it or dissimulate, but it seems to help bring out aspects of expected performance that might otherwise not be addressed.  Anyway, the coordinator said that success in this position would include advancing my own career goals and having a clear direction at the end of the stated time.

This threw me.  I spent so much time and effort preparing how to talk about everything I could do for them–how my skills are a good match, how my experience is relevant, how aspects of the job excite me.  I didn’t even think about how the job might be good for me, beyond the fact that it would allow me to exercise skills I enjoy using.  This is all a little vague, and could be made clearer, but I’d like to leave it indefinite at least until I hear their decision.  The job is designed as a limited-term stepping stone and they want to know how I would use it to further my career. The way it was presented was different than the usual “where do you see yourself in five years” chestnut.  The position is what might be called semi-academic, and I gathered that they wanted to hear about how I’d use the position to further my research.  Argh.  It really set me off balance, because for the past several months I’ve been systematically avoiding thoughts of my academic research because I’ve failed in my current position and it’s clear I’m not going to get a professorship.  I’ve moved away from concern about the next field trip or how to elaborate on my projects.  I suppose I assumed they’d languish and eventually die.  But also, at an informational session about this position some months ago, the job was explicitly promoted as a way to change careers.  I was thinking of it as a means to explore different avenues and then move into a different career path.  It is presented this way in the promotional materials.  So really my answer is that I hope to use this position to determine my next career direction.  And they seemed to want me to have a fixed direction already.

When more time has passed I’ll try to remember what I actually said.  Several friends have suggested that I use the thank-you note to present the answer I couldn’t come up with at the time.  After it was all over though, I felt deflated.  As if I’d failed (again).  Disappointed.  And angry.  Angry that the interviewing team wanted evidence of something that, according to all previous information, was in no way required for the position.  Mostly angry at myself.  I spend so much time thinking about what I can do for other people that I rarely stop to imagine what I want to get out of a given situation.  There are dozens of possible answers to how I could use this position to reinvent myself.  Being unwilling to give into enthusiasm, which leads to hope, I didn’t mentally rehearse the trajectory of any one of them.  To do so would be tempting fate, or so my devious mind believes.  If I’d allowed myself to dream about how good the position could be for me and what I could accomplish personally while there, I might have had a ready answer.  If I didn’t have so much social conditioning forcing me to think of others first and to fit myself into the boxes provided by other people, I might have made a reasonable reply.

This is frustrating not only because it may have cost me a great job, but because it’s a trait which carries over into many other aspects of my life.  Ultimately I end up living with continual low-grade unhappiness, which isn’t terrible, but isn’t great either.

A two-interview day

Interviews are tiring. I had one this morning, a local in-person interview, and one this evening, a long-distance Skype interview with a committee.  Both were fun.  I’m trying to avoid thinking too much about how they went, because analyzing and itemizing everything I did wrong or everything I could have said better is not a help.  I did not feel as if either one was a failure; both, in fact, felt pretty good.  But there’s no way to know if the interviewers felt the same way or what the competition is.

Tomorrow I have another interview and I’m preparing intensely for this one.  Which is another reason I’m not engaging in interview post-mortem right now.  Getting sleep is more important.

Recovery from the computer failure is proving to be slow.  Due to great good fortune, I have found most of the files that were lost on various backup systems.  Things are not back to normal, but the new laptop is getting broken in, my most frequently used applications are up and running, I have implemented the first part of a regular backup plan, and I am enjoying the improved graphics on the new screen.

After tomorrow afternoon’s interview I will have more to write, out of relief if nothing else.

Disaster: 1 Motivation: 0

A week ago, the night before I was to leave for a conference and be out of town for four days, the night I was planning to put the finishing touches on my conference presentation, my computer experienced a kernel failure.  In non-technical terms, it died and could not be resuscitated.

Hence I have been offline for most of a week.  Yesterday I got a new laptop and am slowly rebuilding my library of applications, renewing all my passwords, re-discovering bookmarks, and so on.  In one sense, the disaster was a blessing: it took the decision of what to do at the conference out of my hands. I sent the panel organizer a message apologizing as deeply as I could from the depths of my panic and explaining that I had nothing to present.  Nothing.  I do have some stuff saved in the cloud, but with no computer available on which to work with it, no hope of getting a presentation done in time.  This will long remain a low point in my career.  I am well aware that “my computer died” is a lame undergrad excuse, and there’s no reason it should ever happen to a professional who takes proper precautions.  My computer failure brought me face to face with the extreme cost of practicing frugality: in the past I’ve had multiple backups because work provided me with a second computer (a benefit which ended last summer), I purchased online backup subscriptions (the most recent one stopped working for complicated reasons and so has not been updating frequently), and I set up regular backups to external hard drives (something I kept meaning to do as soon as I had an extra $100 or so to spend on a few more terabytes of storage… which of course I never did).  My efforts to make my 7-year old laptop limp along until I got a new job proved devastating.  Purchasing a new laptop last year or the year before would have been well worth the expense if it saved me this last-minute tragedy.  I’m all in favor of frugality but it must be balanced with an accurate evaluation of risks.  My evaluation failed in this case.

I did not want to travel to the conference but reluctantly agreed with PILW that since not going would be as expensive as going, we might as well get on the plane.  Imagine our surprise when, descending into the city, the pilot said “Local weather is 75º and sunny”.  Really?  Really.  It was the most perfect spring weather all weekend.  We ran 8-10 miles a day and walked a lot, all over the city, up and down hills.  It was a lovely respite.

Now that I’m back, however, panic and depression have set in once more.  My old laptop is in a 3-5 day queue for data recovery services, which are likely to become expensive.  Out of pure need I purchased a new laptop, an expense I can ill afford at the moment; but it had to happen sooner or later.  I pray that my cash flow won’t be interrupted to the extent that the purchase proves to be a huge problem.  A laptop is approximately a month of living expenses, and my cushion wasn’t big to begin with, so…  not too happy about the desperation purchase.   I hope it will last a long time–though obviously I’ve learned my lesson and will replace it well before the 7 year mark.  And I also got two external hard drives at the same time, so regular backups as well as cloud syncing are in the works.

The computer disaster has entirely sapped my motivation.  Some of the things that were not recently backed up include the different versions of my resumé, my job searching links, and the Scrivener project with all my cover letters, application notes, status labels of each application, and so on.  I am avoiding the very thought of recreating it all.  I’m simply…  ugh.  It gives me a sick feeling in my belly.  Eventually I will drag myself together and start the process again, but right now everything feels nearly impossible.

Add to that the fact that my Dad is in the hospital again, and my ability to get things done seems to have taken a nosedive into negative digits.  Sort of like the way the temperature here is dipping below freezing tonight and there have been, I kid you not, solid white particulates drifting down from the sky today.  Ridiculous.

A Masterpiece of Procrastination

That about sums up today.

I’m supposed to give a conference presentation on Friday.  How much do I not want to give this conference presentation?  Let me count the ways.  I so much do not want to give this conference presentation that I did not start seriously thinking about it until today.  And then I found so many other things to do: helped a colleague with hir taxes, painted my toenails (because conference == travel, and who knows what might happen; my bare toes might show), read my favorite social site, talked to my Dad, looked up career blogs, which led me to blogs on frugality, which led me to advice on how to start a business and leave the hamster wheel, read social site again, had lunch, made tea, finished a mystery novel, washed a set of bedsheets, checked e-mail repeatedly for no reason, sent an interview follow-up note, cogitated upon my bad life choices, worried about tonight’s dinner which starts in an hour.

One of the main problems is that I’ve checked out on my research.  I hate to admit this.  The reality though is that my research and my Big Ideas have become extremely low priority since I started looking for a non-academic job.  I haven’t read an article or an academic book in months; I haven’t gone to a relevant talk or kept up with news in the field.  I don’t read the updates sent by my professional association because booooring.  I look at the subject line of some of the discipline-specific e-mails that come into my inbox, but given the choice between whether to read about someone else’s success in a field which is excluding me more and more every day or whether to check new listings on HigherEdJobs, guess what?

Yesterday I downloaded the conference program and found that there are a dozen or so people in my panel.  The talks are fifteen minutes.  Probably many people would say I should be a lot more worried: conference talk!  Argh!  You must have new material!  You must be scintillating!  You must quote all the right theorists!  Had I know two months ago that there would be a dozen or more people on this panel, I would have withdrawn.  I agreed to present in order to do a favor that at the time seemed politically wise.  Now that I’m not on the TT road, the favor is pretty much irrelevant, and the cost to me is immense.  I’m kicking myself.  I knew back in August that this might turn out to be a bad idea, and so it proves.

(When I say the cost is immense, I speak both figuratively and literally: the trip will run over $1,200 which is money I can ill afford right now.  Some may be reimbursed but not all.  At this point this trip is almost the difference between an extra month of frugal living expenses.  When unemployment looms such things are not to be scoffed at).

So I’m recycling old talks and doing my best not to feel bad about it.  I am telling myself that I have been pragmatic, rather than the opposite.  I could have actively worried over this talk for weeks.  Instead, adopting the premise that work expands to fill the time given, I waited until very late so that I wouldn’t niggle at it endlessly.  It’s always possible that if I did a really good job, and it were really, really interesting, someone in the audience might notice and might even want to exchange e-mail addresses.  The chances of that are, however, rather small.  It is hard for me to imagine any situation in which this conference would help me get a non-academic job when I need one, like right now.  Therefore, the stakes on this presentation are very low.  I’m on my way out; there’s little to lose at this point.  I don’t want to appear a fool or a nitwit, but neither do I have the emotional energy to come up with something scintillating on an old topic.

And in my experience, fifteen minutes is just about long enough to say here’s my subject, here are three pieces of evidence, here are two main conclusions, thank you.

Also, generally panel organizers are happy if someone runs under time rather than over.  Which is another reason why I wouldn’t have felt bad about pulling out had I know how many people are in the panel.  One absence means a good cushion for those presenters who ignore the clock.  There is always at least one.  In a group of a dozen, I wouldn’t be surprised at three or four.

I am writing this in part to divert my mind from dwelling on the imminent challenge, which is my last post-doc function.  I hope I do not cry when someone asks me what I will be doing next year.  I really, really hope I can hold it together.  I am not looking forward to this at all.

I got another rejection today, but late last night I got a request for another first interview.  I also heard from a place I interviewed with a while ago; they are still working on the pre-employment process.  Meaning, no job offer yet, but they are still supposedly interested in hiring me.  That’s good.  I have a feeling that the salary they’ll be able to offer for that area of the country may not make it worthwhile to move to take that job, but at least someone is still interested.

Must stop procrastinating and go to dinner.

Distracted

I had another phone interview today which was going fairly well until the subject of salary came up.  I think I blew it.  I’ve been told you should avoid naming a figure unless absolutely necessary.  Unfortunately my life-long training in The Nice makes it difficult for me to repeatedly refuse to answer a direct question.  The range I mentioned was “above the range for this position” and I will be surprised if they call me back.  My gut feeling was that I have all the qualifications they are looking for and they’ll probably be scared to hire me because they’ll assume I won’t stay long because I want more money.  Mistake.  I wonder if the thank you note can be used to do damage control on this?  Something alone the lines of “I also want to reiterate that my salary requirements are flexible and depend on the total package including benefits, work schedule, and so on.”

This week my posting may be sketchy.  One of my goals in starting this blog was to record the day-to-day struggle of job searching with a PhD. To show the roller coaster and its gritty underside.  Right now, several things are going on:

–My father just had surgery

–I am preparing for a conference this weekend which I don’t want to go to (there will likely be a post about that)

–The last event of my postdoc is tomorrow (meaning, lots of exhausting feelings; The End of my academic career)

–Someone in my parents’ generation who is not technically related to me but who had an immense positive impact on my life is in hospice.  To put it bluntly, I found out this morning that one of the people I love most in the world is dying.

Hence, I may not be able to muster the energy to report on the job search much this week.  I’m having some difficulty being anything but weepy at the moment.

Interview exhaustion

This afternoon I had a phone interview for a job that could be fun and exciting.  It could also be a great career-starter.  Naturally, since it is an awesome job and the people I interviewed with sounded friendly and collegial, I am convinced I must have made a major mistake.  Or perhaps I didn’t make a huge mistake, but because the job would be so good for me and me for it, I assume that the likelihood I’ll get asked for a second interview is extremely small.  It would be nice not to have to play this mental game of getting enthusiastic about something in order to convey interest and energy during an interview, and immediately try to forget about the possibility because job lottery statistics indicate it probably won’t go any further.  I can’t afford to get emotionally invested in any opportunities before I have a job offer.  Forcing myself not to hope is extremely tiring.

Job searching is as bad as dating.  Sometimes worse.  The jobs you want don’t want you, and the jobs that want you aren’t the ones you want.  So frustrating.

To rein in the generalities though, I’ve recently been examining an apparent gap between the jobs for which I think I’m a natural candidate and the jobs for which I actually get expressions of interest.  I have only submitted a couple dozen applications so far, but the (admittedly sparse) feedback is interesting.  I thought I’d be a very strong candidate for institutional research positions at academic institutions.  Institutional research analysts collect and compile data about many different aspects of a college or university, perform analyses on those data, and usually produce reports for university administration and/or state and federal regulating agencies.  I’ve worked in academia for over a decade now, I have database skills, know SQL and R, and most of my academic and dissertation work involves analyzing datasets.  From the job ads I’ve looked at, IR positions seem to vary between data mungers who don’t do much analysis to directors who not only analyze but make recommendations about institutional policy and direction to administration.  Obviously I don’t have the expertise for the latter; I could have, in a few years, but I don’t right now, so those positions aren’t a good match for me.  There are some ads for positions at the other end which indicate that I could be far overqualified.  I was hoping to find postings for a sweet spot in the middle.  So far, callbacks from IR postings: 1 request for a phone interview next week.  To be frank I’m a bit surprised at this.  Perhaps many of these positions are filled by internal candidates; perhaps my skills aren’t at all what they are looking for.  Hmm.

Contrarywise, I started applying to more IT-like positions in an effort to expand my options and get some results.  I’ve applied to things with titles such as Data Analyst (often similar to what’s described above but outside of academia), Systems Analyst, Business Analyst (I’ve held both of these titles in the past when working in finance), and Report Writer.  I would not say that I’ve gotten a lot of interest from these submissions.  But I have gotten more than from my efforts to find a position using my technical skills within the academy.  This is a head scratcher.

Case in point: one of the fellowships I applied for takes a single application and sends it to many different institutions.  Each institution can choose any applicant from the pool.  On the application one can indicate a preference for different categories.  The categories have to do with academic research (mostly humanities), data curation, and visual arts.  I checked “academic research” when I submitted, because I thought it was the category for which I was best qualified.  Luckily this does not rule out my being considered for other categories; so far I’ve had one interview request from data curation–the description of the position emphasizes data science, data management, digital infrastructure, and so forth.  There has also been that odd experience in which I was sent forms from a place I couldn’t remember applying; the place turns out to be another institution with a position in data curation.  I’ve no idea if that indicates an actual expression of interest.  I’ve heard nothing more from them, so I’m not counting on it, but it’s thought provoking nonetheless. I was hesitant to portray myself as an expert in these more technical areas but when it comes down to it, I guess 10-15 years of experience with SQL and databases and such is valuable.

There was not a whole lot of progress on the job search this week except for the fastest rejection ever.  I only submitted one application besides that one.  I did successfully complete a phone interview today, and got a request for another interview next week.  That’s all good.  Eventually some interview will, I hope, lead to a second interview, and some second interview will lead to more… I need to find a way to increase the speed though.  I’m becoming very nervous about impending unemployment.

Selling out

If you are a recovering academic trying to find a job outside of the Ivory Tower, I’m guessing at some point along the way you’ve heard something like this:

“Wow.  Insurance?  Isn’t that… I mean…  kind of corrupt?”

“You want to go into tech?  Well.  It’s too bad you won’t use your skills for a good cause.”

“Don’t tell me you are even considering finance.  Dude, you are totally selling out!  How can you do that?”

“I hate to see you giving up your dreams for something as mundane as technical writing.”

“You are working where?  Oh hades.  How can you stand it?”

“You’re… what?  A bus driver?” (long ominous pause) “Huh.”

To say that I find these kinds of comments infuriating would be vastly understating the case.  Let’s explore some of the subtexts here:

1.  All industries except academia are corrupt.  Especially for-profit industries.  Especially for-profit industries that provide dirty little services citizens need to do silly things like take care of their health, drive a car, or own a house.  Any corporation that is making money is out to get us. You are betraying the life of the mind by supporting their agenda.  No academic institution is worried about making money, ever.

2.  Doing technical things is mundane.  Never mind that tech innovations over the past 20-30 years have changed the way we live, including the way we research and teach.  All those tech startups are only out to cheat people into spending money, and you can’t be concerned with making money and maintain true appreciation for intellectual inquiry.  

3.  Zeus and his family are weeping and wailing in disappointment.  How could you.  How could you even consider sullying your hands by working directly with money?  You are a disappointment to your kind.  You are a failure and an outcast.  Your willingness to take a salary from the hands of financiers directly implicates you in all the evils of capitalism. It is better to starve nobly than to enjoy profit gained by base means.

4.  It’s too bad you don’t have a little more grit and perseverance.  I guess maybe you simply aren’t smart enough to make it as a scholar.  Wouldn’t it be better to maintain your lifestyle of genteel intellectual poverty and adjunct somewhere, instead of applying your skills to the real-world needs of ordinary people?  You are failing yourself and setting a bad example by being willing to make a living wage instead of starving for your art academia.  You are not dedicated enough.

5.  All those who work in a cubicle are one-dimensional cutout fake people who do nothing but add to the mass of featureless humanity.  It is sad to see you sink so low.  If you leave the Ivory Tower you are a dull stupid brainwashed drone and we have no further use for you but we will remember you regularly and shake our heads over the tragic loss of so much potential.

6.  You… do…  work that is visible and has a tangible result in the world.  The effect of what you do can be directly measured by those you help.  You use your physical body to get something done.  This is…  incomprehensible.  Visible work isn’t real work. I don’t even know what to say.

These kinds of comments and their hardly veiled implications incense me.  The hypocrisy makes me crazy.  If you think you are better than several billion people because you happened to win the lottery and get a TT job, you need to ask yourself some pointed questions.  Such as:

Do you want someone stupid handling your retirement funds?

Does the competence of the person who handles data security for your credit card company matter?

Do you use a smart phone?  A computer? Key cards? Digital images? Online journal articles?

If there’s a storm and your power goes out, how important to you is it that there are people who know how to fix it?

Can you build your own house? (to code, no cheating with lean-tos and uninsulated sheds).

Have you ever had need of a user manual?

Is decent health insurance important to you?  If so, and if you are lucky enough to have it, how the hell do you think it works?

There is nothing inherently wrong with earning a living wage.   Working outside of academia is not a moral failing.  It is not shameful.  It is not a fall from grace.  Academics who make a lot of noise about diversity and lack of discrimination: how about you work on appreciating a diversity of employment?

 

Minimalist Wednesday (or how fixing databases consumes time and energy)

Today was spent primarily in a journey to way out of town and back to get some help with the MySQL databases on my laptop.

On the off chance that someone else can learn from my mistake, please note:  if you have MySQL databases running on your Mac, and are behind on a few OS versions, be aware that an upgrade to 10.8 or 10.9 may screw up the databases.  Internet comments indicate that at some point Apple stopped packaging MySQL with the OS (it is rumored that postgreSQL has replaced it, but I have not yet confirmed that).  After I upgraded to OS 10.9.whatever, the MySQL databases which habitually run in the background when my computer is on could not be found.  I am not good at the command line but I googled the necessary Unix commands (again, I have to do it every three years when something necessitates terminal action) and looked for the database files and could not find them.  Panic. These databases hold information from the last ten years of research.  So a) it was stupid of me to upgrade without investigating the effects on such an important chunk of my laptop data and b) it was stupid of me not to check that they were running immediately after upgrading.  It was several weeks before I discovered the problem.

Luckily a couple of IT folks in an obscure geographically distant department at my University were willing to take time out of the middle of their day to help me out.  I have no idea why my request got referred to them, or why there aren’t database help folks closer to the main campus.  In the end though they found the database files, which had been moved, and re-directed the startup item to the correct directory.  They did note, quite politely, that this is likely not a solution which will be stable over the long term, and hinted that it might be time to purchase a new machine.  I am 100% in favor of getting a new laptop but I’m worried about making such a big purchase while I still don’t know what my future employment will be.

One of the helpful IT people suggested that I could investigate online database hosting and thus avoid the hassle of maintaining databases on my own machine altogether.  Right now I am most concerned with getting a viable database set up to practice SQL and to complete employment tests.  Maybe online hosting is the way to go.  When I asked for recommendations, IT person pointed me towards the hosting service ze uses, and then did a google… the first result?

Amazon.

Amazon has data hosting services.  I had no idea.  In one sense I am impressed.  In another sense, I am scared.  Is there anything amazon cannot provide?

Summary: nothing to report on the job search today due to preoccupation with other things.

The fastest rejection ever!

I spent all morning working on a cover letter.  Created an account at the company website, uploaded my resume, pasted a cover letter in the text box, uploaded a pdf of the cover letter, answered the standard questions which I am getting quite tired of seeing, hit submit.  As I pressed the submit button I thought “Well, at least I’ve done one thing today.”  I went to check my e-mail for the canned submission message, then went to look at some other stuff, then clicked back into my e-mail box and lo and behold, there was another message from the company, saying “Hi, we’d liked to update you on the status of your application… your qualifications don’t fit our needs at this time.  But we’ll keep your resume on file!”  (Yeah, I’m sure lots of people get hired that way, by HR people going through saved resumes to see what matches up with current job openings.  The other one has bells on).  Here’s the astounding part: according to the time stamps on the e-mails, the time between the confirmation of submission and rejection was 12 minutes.  TWELVE MINUTES.  Honestly, I feel as if that must be some kind of record.  Do I get a medal?  Or a plaque or a certificate or something?  Because come on, that’s not even a quarter of an hour!  That is one HR staff that is so on top of things they might as well be working from the peak of Mt. Everest.

Right, ok, I recognize that in all probability there was no human involved in that decision.  My first thought was that it was the result of one of the infamous resume keyword scans.  Oops, didn’t pick the right buzzwords, too bad.  That would be very frustrating because I was pretty sure that my resume had some valuable keywords on it.  I know that my cover letter included significant phrases from the job ad.  A friend suggested that maybe the position has been filled already and they simply didn’t take the job posting down.  That explanation makes more sense to me; I’d prefer to believe that, because to contemplate the possibility that my qualifications are discarded so quickly, whether by computer or human, is truly discouraging.  I should perhaps note here that the job wasn’t CEO or graphic artist or kindergarten teacher–by which I mean that it wasn’t a position that had nothing to do with my skills and experience.  According to the ad, it was something that I’ve done in the past and could reasonably do again, and I have most of the key qualifications that were listed.  While I do appreciate the explicit expression of rejection–I won’t be going around thinking or hoping that this position might suddenly come through–it is hard to escape the feeling that I wasted an entire morning.

Lesson: one more example to support the maxim “apply immediately”.

Before all of that, I got another polite rejection message in my e-mail from a place I applied to weeks ago.  I wasn’t holding out hope and I’m glad they went to the trouble to notify me.  Even so it’s not exactly something to buoy up my mood.

And then, just as I was breathing deeply and getting past the frustration and disappointment, I got a text from my stepmother: Dad is in the hospital.  The text was maximally alarming and minimally informative.  As you might imagine, this did not lead to an afternoon of calm centeredness and the smooth production of several more cover letters.  No, in fact, I was on edge and worried and upset and didn’t get anything done.  I talked to my brother for a while.  I am a 4-5 hour drive from Dad; he is several thousand miles away.  Brother said that in the best case scenario, we can probably expect many more incidents like this over the coming years.  Both of our parents have health issues and they were born before WWII.  He’s right, much as I hate to consider it.  Later this afternoon I was able to talk to my Dad and he’s ok for now; he’ll be in the hospital for a few days while they figure out what’s wrong.

All in all, an unproductive day.  I am feeling a bit grouchy and not too positive about the whole job thing right now.  Brother has a high-paying job in an expensive city and wants to be doing something else.  He worked hard to get where he is and he’s good at what he does; many people would envy him.  He’s bored and wants to do something that more closely matches his values.  I was surprised to hear him mention ageism–he thinks there is a lot of prejudice against not-young people who want to start new careers.  I absolutely agree but it is strange to hear this from my younger brother!  He’d be willing to start over at something interesting, but people look at his experience (nearly 20 years excelling in a field that requires a special degree) and assume he’d never stick it.  I can’t know for sure, but I think this might be at play in some of my applications too… it wouldn’t surprise me if I was dropped from the possibles list after last week’s interview because of the PhD.  They want someone who is willing to do a lot of moderately skilled but in some ways boring work (interviewer’s words, not mine).  I would do boring with occasional challenges if it meant no worries about food and rent.  I don’t think I convinced the interviewer of that, though.

Thinking about that, and about brother’s anecdotes about exorbitant rents in his city, and about my age and my ebbing tolerance for busywork and office politics, today is one of those days when I think I should simply pick a nice place to live and then figure out how to make a living there.  I’ve always wanted to live in the country and here I am looking at major urban areas–Chicago, D.C., Fairfax, Boston, L.A.  A great job posting came through today but it’s in NYC; I have to draw the line at New York.  I think I’d go insane, even if I could afford to live in a suburb and could face two hours of commuting a day.  I am wondering if I should focus on some smaller cities in areas where having a farm is not unrealistic.  I’ve heard Indianapolis is nice.  Kansas City was featured in the NY Times a while ago as a pleasant place with relatively low cost of living.  Portland Maine?  Ithaca?  Some small town in Pennsylvania or Vermont?  Maybe there is a nice mid-sized insurance company in Des Moines that needs a data analyst.

I am now shoving the whole problem aside for the evening to get some much-needed relaxation.

Being happy for others

I talked to a friend recently and found out he got a job!  By which I mean, an academic teaching position.  It is not a TT position, but he’s been trying as long as I have and as far as I’m aware he really wants to stay in academia, and this will let him do that.  I’m excited for him.  Genuinely happy.  I congratulated him enthusiastically totally bypassing the mental comparisons that are so insidious (why him and not me?  What does she have that I don’t?  Why is X subject more interesting to search committees than mine?)  A little later, as I was reflecting on his good news, I realized that in fact, my happiness is not mitigated by self-doubt, feelings of inferiority, or envy.  I don’t want another temporary position.  I don’t want to move to the city in which my friend got a job.  I don’t want a position that is only teaching.  The prospect of having heavy teaching load with increasing pressure to get a book published and the near certainty of going on the academic market again in a few years…. I don’t want that.   The fact that I am happy for him without the least bit of jealousy augments my happiness considerably.

On the other hand, it is getting increasingly difficult for me to be around my colleagues.  Well-meant innocuous questions such as “What are  you doing this summer?” or “Any news on the job search?” cause me to cringe inside.  The answers are “I have no idea” and “no”. In the last four weeks or so I’ve started to admit out loud that I have no chance at a TT position and that I’ve given up on the academic market.  To their credit, no-one has yet looked down their nose at me.  Of course, I have communicated that information selectively.  My colleagues are for the most part kind people.  Even so, I can feel myself inevitably being nudged to the outside of the academic nest.  They are talking about the trials of trying to buy a house close to the campus that just hired them with a superstar salary and generous startup funds.  I don’t even know if I’ll be moving or not.  They are discussing conferences and symposia they hope to organize in the next year or so–I listen politely, knowing that in a few months, I will be that pariah, an “independent scholar” without university affiliation, and as such, a highly suspect attendee at such a conference.  They are anxious about how to fit fieldwork and writing into the four long months of summer; I am anxious about how to pay my bills.

It’s no longer exactly hurtful, at least not with the acute piercing disappointment of the first few rejection letters.  It feels as if it is all slowly floating farther and farther away.  As if I am alone on a cloud which has become unmoored and is caught by a maverick breeze.  A few weeks ago I could have jumped back into the discourse about research funding and fieldwork plans–supposing, for instance, I’d experienced a last-minute miracle and gotten a job offer.  Now…  I’m not sure.  I think the gap might have become too broad to leap.