job advice from someone who's only held one full-time job
Here's my job advice: doing what you like doing (and are good at doing) will get you more of what you like doing.
Penelope Trunk is always blogging about what a bad idea grad school is. She's right- if your goal in going to grad school is to boost your earning capacity into the stratosphere. The investment-banker-type stratosphere.
If you don't care about making a six-figure salary, AND you like going to grad school, AND you would like being a professor, AND you can outperform enough other people to land a job, then grad school is not such a bad idea. My dad's always done quite well on a professor's salary, and it certainly seems like gobs of money to me right now, as I successfully manage to not go into debt on $13,500 a year. Moreover, I like going to class, teaching, and being a part of a school-type community. Grad school's not just a means to an end. It's a life experience, and I have to say that whenever I'm not getting bitter at my department, I really enjoy it.
The other career advice I would like to refute is from a well-meaning young prof here who always advises students to do exactly what he did: don't participate in your department's social events because it doesn't get you anything, specialize down to a very tiny topic for your dissertation, socialize with professors once you get a job, grow a goatee...
That may be great advice for becoming him, but I would rather poke myself with a sharp stick than get his job at a major pressure-cooker univer$ity that's run on a business model rather than actually caring about learning. (No, really- the U of I considers it a bad thing that 70-80% of their budget is actually spent on people's salaries! And they're losing state funding, so they're basically becoming a private school without a private school's endowment or rich donors or limits on the size of the student body. Anyway, I digress.)
I don't want to be a superspecialist that contributes semi-annually to the pile of mediocre research in the world from a cubicle office in a huge school. I'd rather be a generalist at a college that cares more about, well, education, and spend more of my time teaching. So, how do I get there? Oh, wait- by being a generalist now- by doing what I want to do. Simple.
posted by karenlikescereal @ 2:11 p. m.
5 Comments:
I agree. Maybe we are heavily influenced by our parents' workplace choice (small, liberal arts university), but my hope for Brad when he ends up in higher education is something a lot like what you described. And that seems to be what he wants to. For me, I always thought I wanted to be in higher education - but then I was lured into the lucrative private consulting world and the money is a bit dizzying. Not that I plan to work here forever, but for now it is good. It helps support that grad student husband of mine who has made $12,000/year for the past three years and plans to keep doing it for another four or five!
I've held a lot of full time jobs but the one I have now is the only one I like. Unfortunately 30 people were laid off yesterday. I'm still here, but if you have any advice on how to be happy for people who lost jobs where they were doing what they wanted to do? Because if I have to go back to doing background checks on investment fund managers I might just kill myself.
Believe me, if there was a lucrative private Linguistics field, I'd be thinking about that too! I just don't know anyone who doesn't work as a professor (unless they're a computational linguist, and I don't have those skills.) So basically I'm defending my choice of going into a professorship-only job field, which is kind of stupid with the way tenure-track positions are declining, but hey- I only need one job.
Shannon... I think in order to be happy if you get laid off, you should take unemployment and live in a youth hostel in Ireland. Sorry, that's all I've got.
I'm not sure about any of that job stuff, but I highly endorse the goatee option.
That's not a bad idea at all, considering I'd make about as much on unemployment as I do working full time. We both knew plenty of people who have done it.
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