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.