reposting from Invisible Adjunct - 8/27/04 part 2

Originally posted to Invisible Adjunct 8/27/04

What should you look for in trying to find stimulating work outside academia?

One of the things I should have mentioned in my discussion of the information interviews that marked the start of my career change (lesson #4 as it were): not all organizations are equal, and not all jobs are equally appealing.

An obvious point, maybe, but I ended up going in directions I didn't anticipate because I found out that public organizations I thought would be great to work for wouldn't, and that jobs that would be fun weren't at all.

Two of the public jurisdictions closest to where I live have reputations of being "progressive" and I was keen to see if I could latch on with one of them. I discovered that one was stricken with a morale crisis nearly from top to bottom because of poor management, and the other had very good spots and very bad ones. I had interviews in departments I'd still be very happy to work in, and I had interviews where I knew within five minutes I didn't want to work there.
And the kind of work (obviously) matters. I thought at one point that being a Planner would be a great job; now I know a fair number of planners, and the majority of them do a monotonous, literally by-the-book kind of work that I would find intolerable. Some planners do get to do interesting, "visionary" things, but even still, I don't find myself envying them all that much.

So: it pays to explore very carefully. What do people think of the organization? Is it always showing up in the newspaper laying people off? Not a good sign, even if it's a common one (and it could happen for a variety of reasons - maybe state or federal cuts cause the layoff?). Is it run by a professional administrator people generally admire and respect, or a fractious and part-time elected body riven by petty rivalries and short on intellectual horsepower?

What are the people who work there now like? This is a KEY indicator - if the office is full of bright, sparky people with personalities, odds are it's a pretty good working situation. If it's full of grey, rumpled drones, it's probably because good people routinely flee the first chance they get.

I know I keep promising to comment on "What do I like about my work now?" but that's got to wait, again. I need to .... get back to work.

reposting from Invisible Adjunct - 8/27/04

Originally posted to Invisible Adjunct 8/27/04

re: regret?

I wouldn't say I regret spending seven years in grad school and getting my degree. I don't stew over the time and effort, and I had soem wonderful times and met some wonderful people during those years. I do regret the student loans, but I'm not sure exactly what alternatives I had, given my family situation at the time.

The last two comments make an interesting pair on one point: I don't generally take a lot of pride in my degree. As I said before, I tend rather to be a little embarrassed by it, and I think that has a lot to do with my class background. Reg'lar folks don't put much stock in book learnin' and members of my family tend to look at me funny because I spent so much time in school. But the roots of that difference from the people I grew up around go deep - I was always carrying a book around as a kid, and people knew I wasn't like them.

If I can muster up a feeling of pride around the degree, it's mostly about the persistence to see it through.

Do I feel like coming from a blue collar background was a disadvantage? Not a crippling one, but it's definitely a cross-cultural challenge that we don't usually acknowledge. I literally entered a whole new world when I started college at 17, and had to start from scratch to figure out how it all works, without a lot of help at first.

Alfred Lubrano's book Limbo is an interesting take on some of these dynamics, and even though I'd quibble with a lot in his book it's very much worth reading.

reposting from Invisible Adjunct - 8/25/04

originally posted to Invisible Adjunct on 8/25/04

I got lucky.

After deciding to seriously explore Plan B, I started doing info interviews with people in a variety of different organizations at all levels of government. And I just happened to luck into a terrific opportunity in a suburban County government that hadn't even occurred to me to consider at first. It was a terrific opportunity because I was working in the County Administrator's office and got to experience a really first-rate organization from the bridge, so to speak. And more importantly, I got to work on a variety of very different projects and interact with people all around the region on different projects.

Two years ago, that position ended (it was an unusual limited-term position) and I again got very lucky, talking my way into managing two federal entitlement grant programs for a suburban city of about 90,000.

I should be clear: the "luck" (in both cases) was that a position that was a good fit came open just when I was looking, and that I had a personal contact in each case that got me a serious look from people doing the hiring.

In both cases, I didn't have experience that was clearly directly relevant, and had to basically talk my way in, based on skills that were transferable. But it wasn't that hard to sell smart people on the idea that a smart person can quickly learn the nuts-and-bolts, and I think the extra dimension of being an intellectually curious, "ideas" person was attractive to my prospective bosses in both cases. My current boss has told me that was really one of the clinching factors when they were weighing hiring me against someone who had more relevant experience.

Remember when I suggested job security was basically demonstrated skills + your network of people who speak well of you? Well, in both my last job and this one I've been paid essentially to dramatically enhance both of those things. And paid well: considerably more than an assistant professor could expect.

In fact, it's almost certain that I couldn't afford to go back to teaching now. One thing that was never clear to me till I left academia is just how poorly paid academics are outside the engineering/science fields. Now I know that a full Professor makes more than I might make even a few years from now (depending on where my career goes), but I'm not too sure the academy is still "making" full Profs in any measurable quantity. And it's far from clear that I would have lasted that long.

But I'm focusing too much on less-important things. The real question is how do I like the world I'm in now, and do I miss academia?

reposting from Invisible Adjunct - 8/24/04 part 2

Originally posted to Invisible Adjunct 8/24/04

Well, like any liberal arts grad, I had grown to believe that if I couldn't be a professor, I couldn't do anything else. Actually, since I've been comfortable with computers since about 1979 and can write a proper English sentence, I knew I wouldn't starve, but I drew a huge blank when I imagined "alternate careers."

Luckily, in the lean years chasing adjunct work up and down the Willamette Valley, one of my day jobs landed me in a clerical position supporting a Public Administration program at a local college, and I began to meet interesting folks who had more-or-less interesting jobs in government. It wasn't something I'd given much thought to (I doubt many kids say "I want to be a bureaucrat when I grow up!"), but when my big job interview on the Front Range led me to think "OK, what is Plan B?" I trotted down to City Hall for information interviews with some of the folks I had met through this job.

I was pretty nervous about this. I'm not the most extroverted person, and I wasn't sure how I'd be received. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but I'm often embarrassed about having a PhD when I talk to non-academic types. But doing information interviews, I discovered a couple of things that were very powerful:

1) people were generally happy to talk to me, share their experiences, and encouraged me to think that I could do the kind of work they did. Many folks actually had wildly varied career paths and had done several very disparate kinds of work before turning to government. More than one had gone at least partway down the same academic road but managed to change directions.

2) this is just an extension of #1, but it deserves emphasis: some really smart, really interesting and yet down-to-earth people work in local government. I found lots of people I would enjoy working with or for, and this made changing careers much more attractive.

3) I DID have transferable skills that I hadn't recognized as such. I took utterly for granted my ability to access information & research complicated obscure things very efficiently, and my ability to analyze and recapitulate in a clearer, more organized way a huge volume of information on a topic. And I can communicate well to a variety of audiences in person and in writing, which seems like nothing to crow about, until you get out in the world and meet people with six-figure salaries who simply struggle with that.

The way I summed all this up for myself finally: if I can help 18 year-olds figure out what Aristotle's Politics means, I can probably be of some use helping people figure out how to apply the Oregon Revised Statutes or Title 24 of the Code of Federal Regulations to their work.
I'm not trying to summarize my resume in the paragraph before last, but pointing out that if you're reading this now, all of the above probably applies to you: if you've survived a few years of grad school, you do have tremendous skills that will make you competitive in the larger job market.

And I think this was the big epiphany for me - as a fish-out-of-water working class kid, I was pretty panicked about failing in my first career choice. My idea of job security was basically: "a job where it's real hard to get fired!" Then I realized, and this may sound hokey, but it's undeniably true, especially nowadays: you carry your own job security around with you in your skills, experience, temperament, and the network of friends who are willing to vouch for you on those 3 scores. I have a lot less career anxiety now, because I've learned that I really do have important skills that are relatively scarce.

Now the question Invisible Adjunct raised about could I have developed those skills at less cost and aggravation without going to grad school? Yeah, I think definitely that's true, but it's no help to me to know it now! It just makes me resent my student loans all the more.

And for many of the same reasons IA & others put forth here, I would emphatically discourage sparky young people from going to graduate school. Reading this board, I kept thinking that aspiring to become a professor these days is almost like trying to be a concert violinist or a ballet dancer, or a professional athlete. Only a tiny handful of people will ever make a living doing it, it's manifestly irrational to choose it as a career path, and you have to be the kind of obsessive, driven personality that scoffs at that cost-benefit analysis to keep at it. So discourage everybody, I'd half-seriously suggest, and only the full-tilt wingnuts that just HAVE to devote their life to studying Milton will push past that discouragement and keep plugging.
That wasn't me, clearly.

Ok, so that was a rather long-winded prelude. What the heck do I do now, and how did I get into that, and what do I wanna be if/when I grow up? Stay tuned.