LIFE LESSONS & ACADEMIC JOB MARKET RANT

Although I’m currently in my office at university with the intention to have a productive reading day, I feel compelled to stop everything I’m doing to write this. I thought I’d share some life lessons I have learnt over the past year, in the hope that I can inspire a bit more positivity and perspective in what sometimes seems like a gloomy world.

2017 was far from the best year of my life, which feels like a weird thing to say considering that some of the best life events that could ever happen to me, happened – one of which was getting engaged! But in life the good comes with the bad, and sometimes you just have to accept that. If anything, all the bad things that have happened this year have really enabled me to adapt and progress as a person & to be honest I feel like a much better, open-minded and stronger person because of “all the shit”. I do think that occasionally bad things need to happen to really wake you up a bit and gain fresh perspective, but that being said, you should always live a life of gratitude and be thankful for everything you have – you shouldn’t have to wait for something bad to happen to make you realise how lucky you are, and that’s a mindset I will *always* ensure I have. Anyways, onto some lessons I’ve learnt about academia…

I’ve truly learnt that you will always be told how hard it is to pursue a career in the academy. Time and time again (yawn), people have told me that I need to always have a plan B, just in case getting an academic job in the future “doesn’t work out”. On the same kind of lines, I’ve even been told that if I want to have a family of my own in the future, pursuing an academic career may be difficult. In a nutshell, apparently the two are potentially incompatible (hmm). And people say that there’s gender equality?! No, no, no, we (career-orientated women) have a very long way to go in achieving equality in the workplace. Funnily enough, I’m wearing my Feminism jumper today which is really quite fitting isn’t it? I began to realise that any conversation relating to the academic job market was going to be a negative one and, frankly, I started to become very irritable about it. Doing a PhD is hard enough without getting it rammed down your throat that your dreams of continuing research and teaching after the PhD may always just be a dream, and that the success rate of people getting a postdoc position is few and far between. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the frankness about the reality of the bleak job market, but not when it’s all I ever hear – whether at conferences, funding events or just in general conversation with academics/peers/people.

I had to include a snapshot of my feminism jumper, since I touched upon gender equality!

Sometimes it can be a very difficult pill to swallow. I definitely have my panic-stricken moments when I think about my future and what will happen to me once my PhD is nearing the end and my funding runs out. Instead of thinking positively about the potential opportunities that could be available at that time, I immediately think about how I will cope if I go into unemployment because the possibility of getting a postdoc position it near impossible. How will I pay my bills? How will I tell people that I simply can’t get a job, even though I’ve spent so long qualifying? How long can I put my life on hold until I land an academic job? What are my other options, when I KNOW I want an academic career? Sometimes the bleakness of the job market can stop me in my tracks and make me feel SO incredibly lost and uninspired. I begin to question why I’m doing this damned PhD in the first place if there’s hardly any prospects at the end, which is silly because I’ve dreamt of doing a PhD and pursuing my research passions for so so long and I know I’m living my dream (& hopefully helping people along the way by doing so), even though at times it feels so hard because of all the toxic energy.

This leads me onto another major life lesson I’ve learnt particularly over the past year. Life really is too short and precious to be drowning in all the external negativity. Too often I allowed the negative conversations about academia knock me down, sometimes so much so I struggled to get back up. Every time I was told about the bleakness of the job market, I felt like my dreams dwindled more and more and became even more untouchable and distant. But the reality is, it is a tough world out there, not just in academia but in so many other professions too – it’s full of inequality, lack of opportunities, malicious competitiveness and the list goes on. Which means you have to be even tougher. But not tougher in the sense of caving into the system of shooting others down to get to the top. It’s so important to stay grounded and to always be kind. Work hard and just keep focused on yourself, helping others along the way, and take it one step at a time. I want 2018 to be a year where I embrace #PhDlife and not obsess over the instability of the job market and, therefore, my future. Life is for making the most of the current moment, which I have started to realise now and I’m so much happier for it. It can be hard to escape feelings of hopelessness and negativity about future things when you’re constantly reminded about it, and when we live in a society that forces you to constantly think about your future career plans; but by focusing too much on the future it can also be difficult to make the most of the opportunities that you have NOW. At the end of the day, I am in such an amazing position if I do say so myself– the whole of my postgraduate studies is funded by an amazing research council, which in this day and age is so rare to even get. So why wouldn’t I just be happy and grateful for the opportunity I have been given to live out my dream for the next 3 years of my life? In that time I will have the opportunity to meet so many inspiring people and organisations as part of my research and I literally cannot wait. However, it came to a point where I was getting so miserable about the job prospect thing, that I was finding the PhD process miserable too – the thought of not being able to pursue my passion after the PhD was ruining my experience of doing the actual PhD…unbelievable!

So, I’ve snapped out of the trap I fell into about thinking too deeply about my future – I will cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I’m going to bloody make the most of my PhD experience & block out the negativity as much as humanely possible, and I hope you all do too. And back to reading I go...

Em x

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