Jobs

Ever apply for a job you know you would be perfect for and you don't get it? I have. It sucks.

So now I'm back to the drawing board for funding next year. It's not just about funding (i.e. having barely enough money to live on while in grad school and having at least a half time appointment so I get a tuition waiver and medical benefits). It's about my career. Some time ago, I realized a couple of things about academia. Most notably, I realized I don't want to be an instructor in a system like the one we currently have. I don't want to deal with a grueling job search where I will compete with hundreds of other highly qualified candidates for the honor of being an exploited lecturer. I don't want to have to pad my CV with publications (which means putting more energy into getting published than doing anything else, including good research) just to have a chance to get a job where I will most likely have no time or resources to actually DO research. And I don't want to work for and with people who not only lack any managerial skills but who seem to find the entire concept of management and planning distasteful and base.
I thought I could salvage the time I've spent pursuing a PhD without abandoning that goal by shifting my focus to academic administration. There is a woman at my university who has a job I think I would be great at and which I am pretty sure I would like if not love. She's in charge of the program which orients, trains, and provides professional and ESL support for the international teaching assistants. It's part instruction and part administrative and it is right up my alley.

So I started moving out into administrative roles. I joined the graduate student government, a university committee overseeing sexual harassment policy, and made formal my role as graduate student liaison for my department. And I applied for this most recent job working as a graduate assistant in an academic support department (not saying which....shhhhh). Suffice it to say it is a program which I have strong competency in and which is looking to expand focus into an area I have theoretical knowledge, experience, and inclination.

But I found out today I didn't get it. Which leaves me with funding options of about shit, shit, and fuckall. I am so very disappointed.

I was pretty upset for a short time. After crabbing about it and making the usual "screw them" type proclamations to A___, I emailed my advisor to let her know I didn't get this extra-departmental job. Both my advisor and I had been hoping for it. I was hoping for it because it involved humane hours, it seemed like a good move in terms of my career goals, and because it would get me at least a little out from under the oppressive thumb of my division head who has been evaluating me as moving "too slow" since my third semester in the program. My advisor had been hoping for it because the grants most of the RA money came off of have dried up, the teaching loads are too high for the funding level they come with (a "ten hour" position is easily anywhere from 20 to 40 hours a week) which means not much dissertation work gets done, and they overadmitted grads for next year with little funding and a shrinking graduate faculty.

She wrote back promptly and not reassuringly, although honestly I hadn't dared to hope for reassurance. She said she'd prefer to talk about this stuff face to face (why? She doesn't pick up on social cues...) so we set up a meeting for tomorrow. I am fully expecting that she will tell me she thinks I should leave the program. I am expecting this because about 80% of me thinks I should leave the program. Without the other employment/funding option, I'm left trying for funding in my department which is exploitative, demeaning (to grads and undergrads), and exhausting and offered under a false guise of one size fits all academic training and career development.

I spent the rest of my morning redoing my resume and applying for clerical jobs at the local hospital. It's a paycheck, it's local, and it's at least people who would consider my work a job and not an honor or favor they were doing me. I sort of think I need that right now.

Wish me luck, in all this.