The precarious years

I tweeted a while ago about looking back at work I’d written but not managed to get published between finishing the PhD and getting my current job.  I wanted to try and be encouraging for those who are still trying.  But there was also an entirely fair comment about when encouragement isn’t enough.  I was also reminded of this post that I half-finished a while ago by various tweets yesterday about the REF and early career researchers.

So, to show a bit more of the complexity of these decisions, I’m going to be as honest as I can here about how that process played out.  I’m keeping this as neutral as possible – one person’s plus is often another person’s minus.

I started my PhD in 2003 when, it’s safe to say, the advice on what was necessary to have achieved to be competitive in the job market was radically different to when I finished in 2008, in the middle of a recession and at the end of an REF (then RAE) cycle.  Having something published by the end of the PhD was a good idea when I started; having a monograph published was necessary to get a job by the time I did so.

In the seven years post-PhD I had two fractional fixed-term salaried posts, a LOT of fixed-term teaching at a number of different universities, first year to third year, early nineteenth century to contemporary fiction.  I learnt a lot, and the range of reading I did has been invaluable.  It was utterly exhausting.

I’m financially more fortunate than most people.  I’ve had lodgers; I’ve let my house.  When I’ve done so I’ve never been much more than breaking even on this (paying bills when living with lodgers, paying my own rent somewhere else when letting, along with maintenance costs, house insurance, etc).

That “fortune” is only because I’ve cared for and/or buried direct relatives in the final year of my undergrad and PhD (my mum, and my granddad on the same side, respectively; I had an interruption to deal with the latter situation).  In terms of mental health and emotional wellbeing I don’t recommend this as a good way to achieve financial security in one’s late twenties.

When I got my permanent job I was actively phasing myself out of academia.  I’d stopped hourly-paid teaching because further experience wasn’t adding anything to my CV.  I was a registrar in south Nottinghamshire, marrying people at the Register Office and in fancy venues around the county.

When I applied for the permanent job I got, I didn’t have any university affiliation.  I did have an unpaid research fellowship by the time of the interview, which a friend very kindly facilitated for me.  My book was fairly recently out, which was the only reason I was keeping applying for academic posts.

I’ve given good interviews, bad interviews, not got permanent jobs that I was essentially doing, and in the end got a job that I thought I had no hope of getting.

I’d made my peace with not having an academic job and enjoying doing a job that I could leave behind.  I got paid roughly the same for a wedding as a seminar, and didn’t have to do any further e-mailing or administration.  I interviewed for other academic support roles in study skills and research development, and was applying widely for any job that was vaguely appropriate.

There are people who are better scholars than me among my peers who graduated from PhD programs at the same time who haven’t got faculty positions; there are people who graduated after I finished my PhD who have permanent jobs and have been promoted above my level.

I’m not sure if there’s any real moral or advice to be taken from this series of ups and downs.  I suppose, ultimately it boils down to the following: keep believing in yourself while you’re in and trying to be in academia.  If you’ve got a PhD you’re potentially good enough (and if someone tries to tell you that you aren’t, seek your mentorship somewhere else).

Doing other things isn’t a failure, and there are definitely positives to be taken from not having a job that is as consuming as academia is.  And keep in touch with friends you made in academia if they are struggling with precarity, or leave the sector by choice or necessity.

In a terrible job market there’s necessarily an element of luck to one’s appointment.  I know I’m lucky, but there have been a lot of bumps along the road.  All I can do having been lucky is keep hoping for other people to achieve that too and using my position as best as I can for the benefit of others.  It doesn’t feel like much, but it lets me sleep at night.

Good luck, wherever it takes you.

Stress management: some thoughts

Last Friday night when I was settled in on the East Coast mainline on the way back from a conference in London I rashly asked for topics that people would like me to say something about on my blog (which I’m playing with, updating, and trying to write more on).  One of our final-year undergrads, Hannah, asked for thoughts on stress management / keeping up motivation in the face of self-doubt.

It’s definitely getting to that time of year – we’re approaching the end of teaching (we start early in Scotland, and early within that at Napier).  Dissertations are due soon.  Students on other courses or at other universities might be starting to think about exams.

As I said in my set of tweets, I don’t claim to have The Answer to this, but I can tell you some things that have worked for me, or that I believe are valuable.  Some of these pieces of advice will be familiar to students I’ve taught over the years.  While I’m writing this in response to that undergrad query, I think all of these things are potentially useful general writing practices.

The first piece of advice on stress management is going to seem a bit counter-intuitive: give yourself a break.  You can’t work constantly.  I know you’ve got competing commitments, and it’s a struggle to fit everything in, but make time for activities that aren’t stressful.  Take a pause and make a brew.  Find an hour to do some exercise.  Take a night to go to the pub.  We all need to recharge our batteries from time to time in order to work better, rather than just more.

If you can’t do that, try to make doing academic work more fun.  Arrange a writing date with some friends.  I am a firm believer in the value of a bit of silently supportive peer pressure to do something, and if you’re working on similar things it’s good to have other people around to ask questions of, take tea breaks with, have three minute raves in your breaks, or whatever it is that keeps you going and enthused.

The subtext of both of the above is: don’t get too isolated.  Some people work best on their own, or don’t find social commitments relaxing; in that case take some time to be kind to yourself in whatever way works for you.

Stress can also often come from an accumulation of deadlines.  But these shouldn’t be a surprise to you.  Assessments normally come roughly at the middle and end of term wherever you are; at Napier there is actually an assessment matrix in the Programme Handbook that will enable you to plan ahead (these are always subject to a bit of change, but we don’t make a habit of changing submission weeks year on year).  Think about how you can strategise that work.  If you have three essays due in two weeks that might mean, for example, taking a calculated decision to write one of your essays on the text you were most interested in from the first or second week to give you space later.  (I say this as someone who was stupid enough to do an 80/40 credit split in his second year of a three-year English degree.  I got some of my highest marks in that term when I did two-thirds of the year.)

Stress can also come from deferral of work.  Everyone works differently, but I’m a big fan of the accumulative method.  Keep getting stuff down; writing is a process, and breaking the tyranny of the blank screen is soothing.  Brilliant quotation that you’re definitely going to say something about?  Type it into a word document and type a few sentences of preliminary analysis about it.  Critical quotation that says exactly what you want your overall point to be?  Stick it in a draft of your introductory paragraph.  Random quotations that you feel might be useful?  Type them in a document (with reference), keep them for later.  I still have bits and pieces that have travelled with me for well over a decade now, and once in a while they come in.  Cloud and tiny USB storage means this is easy.

For me, doing is soothing.  If you’re the same, keep doing things.  While I enjoy my own time, I also enjoy being around people.  If you’re the same, make sure you have social things planned.  Try to think about what makes you feel less stressed about writing and keep doing those things; try to create a virtuous circle of behaviour.  And if you find writing generally stressful – maybe try changing your writing practice and see if that helps.

As I said at the beginning – these things aren’t the answer.  I don’t even think I’m particularly brilliant at managing stress.  But they are a few things that you might try that work for me when I remember to do them!

I’ve ended up just writing about stress management here; I’ll come back to self-belief soon (although there’s a lot of overlap between the two, for me).

Academics Are People Too

Academics are people too. I’ve been turning over this phrase in my head for a while, in response to the increasing workload I see colleagues shouldering, and the almost exclusive focus which is demanded to achieve an academic career.

Ironically, feeling that I should be doing work instead has got in the way of me starting this blog more times than I can easily count. So, tonight I’m just going to press ‘post’ before I see something shiny and wander off.  Or look too long at the stack of books imploring me to read them.

Intellectual work of any form is subject to Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available. How many days do you have to mark that pile of exam scripts? That’s how long it will take. When is that conference proposal due? It’ll be sent off late on that day. When is that article due? You know that if you’re around the deadline you will be far from the last to submit. I never fail to be struck by the irony of the elasticity of the majority of academic deadlines in comparison with the hard and fast deadlines the students we teach have to adhere to. Yes, of course, we’ve earned the privilege, and everyone else is in the same over-extended boat. But still.

It’s difficult to work back to when I first started thinking about the need to balance the personal and the professional effectively. Maybe it was in 2008, as I was finishing my PhD having just returned from a three-month interruption to deal with some family stuff. Maybe it was in 2009 as I was teaching a full load for the first time. Maybe it was in 2011, when I ended up needing to finish four articles in the same semester as I was doing three quarters of my teaching. It certainly crystallised as I was trying to finish my monograph in 2012 while jobhunting, and was still there after I finished as I was moving house and institution in 2013.

From my position in 2014, still (too) busy but without a major project on my plate for the first time since I started the PhD, I’m absolutely convinced of the need to keep active outside of academia, both mentally and physically. I wasn’t good at it when doing the above. I wish I’d continued to do some exercise, to get out and about, to reassert the importance of my mental health and physical health as, in the end, vital to my professional health. The uneven demands of work in the university aren’t conducive to maintaining regular activities outside of it. But that makes it even more important to do so. In the humanities we need to remember the importance of being human.

This isn’t just about me, though. I mentioned initially that this is a burden I see others shouldering. I hosted an #ecrchat in 2012 that looked at work-life balance, and found similar stories.

A variety of articles that I’ve linked in previous, unpublished versions of this piece are no longer current, but give a sense of how important an issue this is.  Just to give a flavour, here’s one from the THES which perpetuates problematic stereotypes. The striking thing about these entries is the lack of time in the day to do anything apart from academic work. The limited time Ruth Farwell is able to devote to her beekeeping seems symptomatic of a wider problem, as are the rare dates Alice White is able to manage with her partner. Surely it isn’t right that we should be subjecting ourselves to this sort of unsustainable schedule?

There are, of course, wider issues about the shrinking budgets for Higher Education and the spread of casualisation in the academy that underlie this – from that point of view today, UCU’s Anti-Casualisation day of action, is apposite for this post.

Challenging Zero Hours Academia http://t.co/KofzLQOw64 via @UCUAnti_Cas #AntiCas14

— UCU Anti-Casualisation Committee (@UCUAnti_Cas) May 7, 2014

 

I’ve also been impressed by others on twitter thinking and writing about health and wellbeing. Katie Lowe (@fatgirlphd) is great on being healthy, positive and getting things done; the thing that most recently inspired me to come back to this idea was some of Lucia L.’s tweets (@empathywarrior) about mental health and academia.

Some days I dream of pursuing a dream of doing my degree in counselling psychology and working full-time with academics re: stressors.

— Lucia Lorenzi, PhD (she/they) (@luminousmethods) April 19, 2014

This would be a great service.

 

So, the point of this blog is to remind me, and to remind us, even to remind our students, that academics are people too. It’s OK to have external interests – no, it’s GOOD to have external interests. This blog will be about research and pedagogy. There might even be a bit of shameless self-promotion. But it’ll also be home to music and book reviews, recipes, comments about sport. Anything that comes to mind to write about. I want to demonstrate clearly that it’s possible for two sides of life to coexist in academia, and it’s good to write about all aspects of that life. It’s necessary, even, to write about the good things as well as the moments with which we struggle, to remind ourselves that it’s not one long unremitting tide of papers to write, essays to mark, conferences to attend, exams to mark, jobs to apply for and classes to teach.

Maybe it’s time for a new hobby.  Or time to catch up with those friends you keep thinking you don’t have time to catch up with as you spend another night sitting fretting about that article and not achieving much.  Spending time on yourself to relax is good – it can make you work effectively as much as take time you don’t have, and recharge those batteries in order to let you think clearly about work. Because we do need to be able to think clearly – more than anything, as academics, we need to be able to think clearly. And making space to think clearly comes, in part, from taking up a bit more space with leisure.