The dissolution continues…

Life is not a novel.  Because of my voracious reading habits, I tend to want to see my life as a plot with an identifiable trajectory.  Each year that goes by I try to fit in what’s going on with how I remember my personal history.  Maybe everyone does this to some extent: the stories we tell ourselves are an important part of our identity.  And they can be powerful.  Generally though I am skeptical of reading too much meaning into a concatenation of circumstances.

Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to avoid viewing this period of my life as a time of dissolving the old and ushering in the new (I hope there will be something new).  If I wanted to be dramatic about it, I could say it’s a metaphorical death and rebirth, but phoenixes are somewhat overused.  Thinking over the past 6-9 months, here are some of the things that have happened:

–My academic job search totally failed (expected, but still confirmation of an ending)

–My first Kindle, with thousands of books on it, died and could not be resuscitated

–My classic iPod, companion of my days and nights, with many hundreds of audiobooks and backups of important pictures, died and could not be resuscitated

–My computer, with seven years of work and personal writing, died and could not be resuscitated

–I withdrew from two academic conferences

–I started to re-define myself as a non-academic job candidate

–I realized that ageism is real and that to most people I am middle-aged (wait, what? Yeah, it’s true).

–My mother had spine surgery (again)

–My father was hospitalized for a few weeks (home now and apparently ok; we’ll see when I visit next weekend)

–My first and most precious teacher died (this week; hence the silence of the past couple of days)

I don’t want to be melodramatic.  All the same, I have to admit there are days when this looks to me as if the universe is trying to wake me up and let me know that it’s time to start moving in a different direction.  Or that I’m going to be pushed in a different direction whether I like it or not.  The two most important teachers of my life are now deceased.  My parents are not in imminent danger but they are pretty clearly at the point when it’s going to be more about me and my brother taking care of them than them taking care of us.  It’s never impossible to have a mentor but I’m at a stage when other people expect me to be a mentor instead of an apprentice.  I have an instinctive resistance to this because I’ve always been most comfortable as a student, formal or informal.  Pretending to be authoritative on some subject has never been my strong point–which may indeed have something to do with my failure as a would-be professor.

Yesterday I had an awful, terrible headache.  PILW claimed it was a migraine; maybe it was, although I have never been a person who is subject to migraines or indeed to many illnesses at all.  Disgustingly healthy, that’s me, most of the time.  Since moving here though I’ve started to get headaches with changes in the weather.  Yesterday I think it might have been brought on by a lot of crying the day before as well as a shift in temperature and pressure.  Or maybe, as PILW suggested, simply an accumulation of stress.  Overall I think I’ve been dealing with stress pretty well, but then again, when you start to make a list of current stressful things, my list is rather extensive.  I spent most of the day lying down.  The pain in my head made me feel nauseous.  You are correct if you guessed that I did not accomplish anything yesterday.  Only this morning after a second dose of excedrin did the headache break. Things might be on the right track again.  And it is sunny.  So, in the spirit of looking forward, not back, and emphasizing the positive, here are things that are good right now:

Job Search things

1.  Had a follow-up interview yesterday for a position which would be a great fit for me.  I think it went ok.  Best case, they want to hire me.  Worst case, a very competitive elite institution views me as a close finalist for an exciting job.  I can live with that.

2.  My erstwhile advisor spoke to the hiring person for the above position when he called for references.  Advisor said that he (hiring person) seemed very positive about my candidacy and advisor did everything he could to further the positive impression.  Thank you advisor!

3.  I got an invitation to visit a different campus for an alt-ac interview.  Stressful, but yes, it is good to have choices.

4.  I have another first interview by Skype next week.

5.  I got some interesting information about data science and what it might take to get a master’s in data science. (On a whim I entered my e-mail address and phone number on the site for an online MIDS program, and got a call from an admissions counselor within hours.  Impressive).  I’m not sure that’s something I want to do–the payoff would have to be pretty darn big to get me to consider going back to school.  But the person I spoke to confirmed that learning Python is important, and that helps me narrow down my “what to learn next” list.  He also confirmed that my background and experience might make me a competitive candidate, which is good to know.

Non-job things

1.  It’s sunny!  And beautiful!  And warm!

2.  There are flowers!

3.  There are four avocados in the kitchen which have reached just the right point to make a big bowl of guacamole for tonight’s dinner.

4.  Age of Ultron is out and PILW and I might go see it this weekend.

5.  My headache has retreated.

6.  I have a bike.  I love to ride my bike.

7.  I am healthy.

8.  I have plenty of supplies and things around to make creative stuff.

9.  My brother is awesome.

10.  Yesterday the team doing renovations across the street dropped off promotional materials on our front porch.  It’s one of the best promotions I’ve ever seen: there was a flyer in a plastic bag and also in the bag was a rubber duckie!  A rubber duckie with a white hardhat and an orange construction vest, holding a roll of blueprints under one wing.  Really quite clever, and appropriate since the company apparently specializes in kitchen and bath remodeling.  I’m not a fan of junk mail and the kinds of flyers that get rubber banded to the front door handle but this was so cute and original, I can’t help liking it.

Have a great weekend everybody!

Drizzly day of good news

No, not a job offer.  But I did get another first interview request today, and now I have a Skype session scheduled for next week.  The position is similar to others I’ve been interviewing for but might have a greater emphasis on creativity.  That would be fine by me!   And I got an invitation to a campus visit at one of the places I Skyped with last week.  Woo hoo!  No guarantees, but it means I’m still under consideration, and at the worst, I get to visit a part of the country I’ve never been to and talk with some friendly people about interesting stuff.

Both of these things make me feel good.  They give me hope that my current situation of uncertainty will not last forever.  If I were a Buddhist I might have something meaningful to say about my current spiritual and emotional malaise.  In order to preserve some kind of sanity I am trying not to get too excited, nor to wallow in despair.  It’s like standing on a raft and trying to bend your knees to compensate for waves so that you can maintain a steady line of sight.  I am attempting to remain detached and not become emotionally bound to any particular outcome; at the same time I am trying to be a fully active participant in this job search business and take initiative to help myself move forward.  (Obviously.  I mean, no-one else is going to do my job search for me, right? I have to take action).  Being active without being attached is a challenge. Ten or twenty years ago I’d have been a blubbering mess.  Now, I’m uncomfortable, but I’m still able to function. It’s odd how when you are young, significant changes bear the weight of forever but as you get older you realize that change is simply change; few changes are for the rest of your life unless you want them to be.

Tra la!

There are days in spring when the outdoors beckons.  When the air is so soft, the temperature so balmy, the sunlight so playful that staying indoors is torturous.  Today was one of those days.  The cherry tree outside my front window is in full bloom.  The lilac bushes are starting to leaf out.  Some trees have a slight film of green.  There are dandelions amongst the shaggy grass.  I rode my bike without a jacket for the first time this year and it was heavenly.

When the sun is shining it is difficult for me to feel as anxious as I usually do.  I know that sunshine doesn’t solve anything. It is not beaming down magical employment. It will not pack moving boxes or solve the problems of aging parent care or write cover letters or bring an e-mail that says “you’re hired!”  My situation hasn’t changed, but sunlight makes it more bearable.  It allows me to push back worry for a few hours and enjoy the breeze on my face and the dancing flowers.

Fortunate Friday!  Job Search things

1.  A potential employer asked for permission to get in touch with my references.

2.  I survived three interviews this week!

3.  My computer is slowly getting back up to speed.

4.  I’ve been offered another chance to talk to the people at the place where I felt so bad about the interview.  This probably (?) means I’m still under consideration.

5.  More jobs are being posted every day.  I know this is not personal to me, but hey, we all need encouragement and it helps to know that employees are being sought.

Other things

1.  I have some days by myself while PILW is out of town with family

2.  My brother is coming to visit my Dad, and it looks like we’ll be able to be there together

3.  My brother is supportive and cooperative in this whole parent hospitalization business, and we are talking openly about the legal things we need to have in place.  This is hard, and scary, but I’d so much rather do it this way with a brother to help than address issues when things are really desperate.

4.  Flowers!

5.  Sunlight!

6.  Breeze!

7.  Apple pie!  all for me.

In which I am overcome by the kindness of others

I have a group of online friends who are absolutely and without qualification awesome.  They are the best friends anyone could have.  They are smart and talented and quirky and brave.  One of them will know the answer to just about anything, and if no-one knows, someone will know whom to ask.  To say they are supportive is like calling the buttresses of Notre Dame Cathedral utilitarian props.  You know who you are, friends.

To tell you the truth today wasn’t going very well.  I’ve tried to create a habit of focussing on positive things on Fridays (so very appropriate today, which is Good Friday).  This morning I was having trouble.  Honestly, none of it seemed that good.  I did my taxes.  It was a grim exercise.  Considering my annual finances left me composing a mental list of Things to Do Differently once I have a real salary.  Which naturally led to worries about what will happen if I don’t get a real salary.  I have a house to live in now, but what will happen if I can’t pay rent?  And what if the landlord does decide to put the house on the market, as he mentioned a couple of days ago?  The sky is grey and glowering and hard as I tried I couldn’t convince myself I am fortunate.  I just wasn’t feeling it.

I went to an appointment and came back weepy and confused.  My feelings are a writhing mass of contradictions: I know I’m lucky in many ways, but there are still securities I’d like which I don’t yet have (continued health insurance, a steady income, a growing retirement fund, living in a place without an expiration date).  I’m no better or more special than anyone else, but it makes no sense that it is so hard to find a job with a PhD.  I believe in education for its own sake, but I’m pissed at myself that I lost 12 years of income and retirement contributions pursuing education.  Tears of frustration and hopelessness were shed today.

When I got back home this afternoon there were two things on the porch.  I couldn’t remember ordering anything, but it’s always possible that PILW ordered something and didn’t mention it.  After putting my bike away I opened the front door and retrieved the parcels.  One was a small square box from a place called choco-somethingorother.  The other was a padded envelope, addressed to me.  Where the sender’s address would go, it said “RAK, friend group”.  In another corner of the label was a small message:  “Somebody loves you”.

Honestly, that was enough right there.  Here was I, having a pretty close to awful day, and I come home to an anonymous message from someone in a group I love and trust.  Whoever you are, know that your pen wields the power to transform my attitude from despair to delight.  The interior shape seemed like a book, and that’s great! I love books of all kinds.  And it’s the kind of thing my friends would do: have a good book, you’ll feel better.

But when I opened the envelope, it wasn’t a book. It was a Kindle.  Brand new. I stood there at the kitchen table with the envelope in one hand and the kindle box in the other, blinking fast and furiously.  Speechless.  Some time ago I mentioned that my old Kindle died and could not be resuscitated. I have no idea if someone remembered that and thought it would be nice to get me a new one, or if they simply thought a Kindle is a nice thing to have, or if… whatever.  It doesn’t matter.  The point is, someone noticed that I’d been having some tough times lately and thought “Let’s let her know we are thinking about her and maybe cheer her up a little.”  And it worked.  It so totally worked.  There is no signature on the card, so maybe it was a joint effort?  However it happened, thank you.

Still in a daze from discovering a surprise Kindle on my doorstep, I turned to the petite white box.  The markings of “fragile” and “keep cold” looked promising.  I slit the tape on the top and began to excavate the peanuts.  After shoveling away several handfuls I found one of my favorite dark chocolate bars!  No–wait.  Two.  Four–holy cow.  A small fortune of dark chocolate was packed into that box.  One of my favorite brands.  The card said “Happy Easter.  Love, Mom and Stepdad.”

I lost it.  I put my face in my hands and bawled.  You know how it is when it feels as if the world is kicking you.  You grit your teeth and want to kick back.  Then when someone smiles at you out of the blue the kindness does what no amount of punching could do: it buckles you at the knees and you collapse.  Or at least I do.  It is one of those small miracles of the mundane that these things both arrived today when I was battling all kinds of demons.

Thank you Mom.  I love you.

Thank you friends.  I love you all.

Now I feel as if I could make a list of good things, but really, this story is enough.  To enumerate would be superfluous.

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?

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.

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.

What is outside the Ivory Tower?

The Golden Plains.

That’s what I’ve taken to calling it in my mind, anyway.  Partly because one of the sights that never fails to pull at my heartstrings is a field of cornstalks as it ages into gold in the early autumn.  Midwestern child here.  When I was growing up my across-the-street neighbors were a bunch of cows.  There were cornfields on all sides of our little piece of property (until corn farmers started transitioning to soy, but that’s another story).  Had I grown up in wheat country, I imagine I’d feel the same about wheat fields, and I hope that’s a sight I get to see someday: acres of golden wheat whispering in the breeze.

Plains are level, without the extremes of tower living.  You can see things from the top of a tower you can’t see when standing on the plains… then again, if you at the top of a tower, your feet aren’t connected to the ground.  “Plain” can also refer to plain living.  As I understand it most approaches to plain living include a rejection of the quest for prestige as an end in itself.  It is worth remembering that outside the Ivory Tower, there are plenty of people who don’t consider success in academia to be the absolute solitary measure of a person’s achievements.  (See academia as a cult, etc.).

What’s on the golden plains?  The chance to be grounded.  The chance to grow nurturing food–literally, in my case; without the requirement to travel every summer, I can have a garden again, when I find the right place to live.  The prospect of getting a change in perspective by walking for miles on your own two legs.

Of course, if you prefer, you could focus on the filthy lucre aspects of “golden”, and scorn the kind of living which is focused not on ideals but on earning money.  And you could interpret “plain” as dull, boring, monotonous, ugly, mediocre, and homely.  It’s up to you.