alternative academics

5 Fallacies About Leaving Academia

Posted by Natalie Berkman

It’s now been almost two years to the day that I defended my dissertation, packed my bags, and moved to France to begin a totally new life. While I certainly had some reservations at the time about leaving the academy for good, I can honestly say that I don’t regret this decision in the slightest. Over the next few weeks, I am going to try to blog more regularly about my various #altac experiences, but I figured I would start by debunking a number of misconceptions that I had before leaving and that I expect others have too.

Changing careers — especially after 5-10 years as a sort of apprentice — will always be daunting, but it certainly does not need to be as jarring as it currently is. I will introduce each of these fallacies as a question I most definitely asked myself on more than one occasion towards the end of my graduate studies, and then explain an experience I have had that directly contradicts that fear. While obviously, this blog post only reflects my personal experiences and might not be true for everyone reading, I hope current graduate students or those considering such a career change can find solace in these reflections.

1. Will non-academic work be intellectually fulfilling?

I chose to pursue a Ph.D. because I was passionate about learning. Being paid to read, write, and learn languages sounded like a dream. Since I got to choose my own research topic, I was able to pursue knowledge that I was passionate about, finding intersections between disparate fields and presenting, publishing and teaching everything I learned. One of my biggest fears about leaving was that I would no longer be doing what I loved, or worse — that I would no longer be a lifelong learner.

Perhaps my experience is unique, but I believe I have learned more in the past two years than I learned throughout the entirety of my formal education. Working in a school that has programs dedicated to creative and technical fields such as audio production, filmmaking, and video game creation has allowed me to turn things that used to be hobbies — listening to music, watching movies, and playing video games — into professional development. Now, I get to approach these cultural objects from a new perspective, learn how they are made, and help train the creative media professionals of tomorrow. I have not only learned a great amount about these topics, but I have learned about managing a team, managing budgets, and managing relationships with our university and professional partners. Every day is new and different and I no longer experience that peculiar intellectual burnout that comes with prolonged attention to a single topic.

2. Without conferences and summer breaks, will I be able to travel?

This one is likely specific to working in an international company, but my first week on the job, I was sent to our regional headquarters in Barcelona for training. In my first year alone, I got to attend the Cannes Film Festival (where I actually saw Catherine Deneuve and Sylvester Stallone in person!) as well as a special graduation ceremony for our students at Middlesex University in London. Additionally, now that I live in Europe, I can literally take a weekend in another country, as I did last April when I went to Florence to visit some friends. I even attended a conference last summer in the Netherlands, where I got to discuss my research in a new and exciting location.

3. Without an academic affiliation, will I ever be able to publish my research that I worked so hard on?

Since completing my dissertation, I have been able to get an article accepted for publication in Modern Language Notes (should be out very shortly!), an essay in a collected volume (the editors are currently looking for an outlet), and a third article in a special edition of Études littéraires (also forthcoming, but likely delayed due to the current pandemic). On top of that, I was invited to a journée d’études at the École Normale Supérieure to present my research on the Oulipo as well as to the annual History of Science Society conference to present my research on Bourbaki where I was even contacted by an editor who wanted to learn if I had any book projects on the horizon! While I was pretty satisfied with all of that, I was even selected as a winner of the Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in French Studies, an honor that came with a book contract. I am now diligently working on revising my dissertation into the book manuscript I always dreamed it would be (another blog post to follow on this!). Surely not everyone who leaves academia wants to continue publishing, but for me, it felt important to find an audience for all of that work I did that was a bit wider than my dissertation committee. So if anyone else feels the same way, I can promise you that publishing is still very much possible without an academic affiliation.

4. With my extremely specific training, will I even be able to do a non-academic job?

This was one of my biggest concerns. In France, every job has a 3-4 month trial period, during which both you and the company are able to call it quits with no repercussions. At the beginning, I was pretty nervous that I was going to fail that trial period, especially considering the fact that upon arrival, I was informed that my job was in fact a management position. Not only that, but that I was essentially the #2 at the school. It was almost summer vacation, much of the staff had already left for weeks of vacation. I had to spend the majority of my trial period figuring things out by myself, understanding the challenges the school was facing, and putting in place processes and procedures. After a few weeks of getting the lay of the land, I realized that my graduate training was indeed enough to manage this situation. I was good at looking at complex situations, analyzing data, and isolating problems; I had extensive experience managing large projects longterm from my Digital Humanities work and my dissertation; and most importantly, I was good at communicating to people at different levels and helping everyone understand what was at stake in our work. So it turns out those fears were unfounded — a Ph.D. is training for a specific profession, yes, but it is also legitimate work experience. Once you can prove that to an employer and get a contract, there is no doubt that you can excel in whatever job you land!

5. What if I regret leaving?

This was perhaps my biggest fear, especially considering the fact that it seems unlikely to secure a tenure-track position from outside of the academy. While it’s true that I’m still teaching and publishing, I do indeed suspect that hiring committees would prefer a candidate with a more traditional academic trajectory than mine. This may just be yet another misconception, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Indeed, I’ve barely glanced at the academic job ads (which were already limited in my field) and even if there were a dream job, I’m not even sure that I would be interested in applying. Now that I’m managing not just an academic department, but all the academics at a school, why on earth would I want to take a serious title cut and become an Assistant Professor? Why would I want to give up the freedom of living where I want to live in order to be on a track, where my future will be far more limited than it is now? Long story short, I don’t regret this decision at all.

While it is impossible to know if I would be happy elsewhere, I feel confident that this decision was right for me. In fact, in the middle of this global crisis, all I can think of is what would have happened if I had taken one of the two postdoctoral fellowships that I was offered back in 2018. If so, then I would be at the end of one of those two-year positions, counting down the days until both my income and health care expired and most likely without another academic appointment in hand. Instead, I am living in Paris with my wonderful husband, working a job I love with fantastic colleagues, and still getting the chance to engage in the teaching and research that first brought me to higher education.

As it turns out, even my biggest fear about leaving academia was totally unfounded. Since we are once again at the end of what was bound to be a grueling cycle of academic hiring, I hope this post can help those who might be facing a difficult decision in the midst of uncertain times. Best of luck to all!

Twitter take 2: Navigating the MLA Convention

Posted by Natalie Berkman

As someone on the academic job market who is also passionate about graduate student opportunities for professional development and making themselves marketable both within and outside the academy, I did not know what to expect from the MLA Convention. Of course I knew I had to attend and expected to have interviews, but I was nervous about juggling interview prep with academic panels and networking with scholars in my academic field. Furthermore, as an MLA Connected Academics Proseminar Fellow, I was excited to attend a number of seminars sponsored by the Connected Academics program on a range of topics from careers outside of the academy to advising and mentorship in the academy. Basically, I had a full schedule! As this was my first time attending the MLA, I was unsure of what to expect. Below are some of my main takeaways.

Academic Interviews

My first surprise was that I had no MLA interviews. It turns out that my academic interviews had been on Skype well in advance of the conference. I even had a Skype interview during the conference! Most of my colleagues at Princeton and at other universities had similar experiences — they were invited for Skype interviews in December and learned the results of those interviews before the Convention.

When I was invited for my first Skype interview, I was initially disappointed. I thought that an in-person interview would be better-suited to getting a job as a professor and I was worried that I would not be able to perform as well on a screen. However, when I saw the room at the MLA that had been designated for interviews — a gigantic hotel ballroom filled with tables and chairs for simultaneous interview — I realized that perhaps there were some advantages to a Skype interview. Being able to choose the space in which I interviewed alleviated some of the stress of the exercise. Furthermore, interviewing in early December allowed me to learn that I had a campus visit before the MLA, which made me feel less concerned about my job prospects during the holiday season. And of course, the Skype interview cost me nothing, whereas traveling to a conference can be an unwelcome financial burden on graduate students and contingent faculty who, let’s face it, are not necessarily well supported by their institutions.

Professional Development

One of the aspects of the MLA that pleasantly surprised me was the focus on professional development. I appreciated that there were jobs posted (and not just tenure-track academic jobs, but jobs at the CIA for instance), that interview coaching was provided, that students and faculty alike could get free professional head shots, that there was ample information about careers both inside and outside of the academy, and most importantly, that a variety of social events allowed people to meet one another. At the Connected Academics events in particular, I was able to meet a wide range of people who gave me advice on everything from the academic job market to engaging in humanitarian work. I met with a former professor of the institution where I had a campus visit; I met an assistant professor who had previously worked in a digital humanities/libraries context, and was happy to give me her perspectives on both academic and non-academic career options; I spoke with a Princeton PhD now working for the Huffington Post and a career services professional who specializes in working with graduate students.

While the people I met were certainly fascinating, the range of events that brought them together were even more exciting. Given that everything I had previously been told about the MLA painted the Convention as a means to an end — namely, getting an academic job — it was refreshing to see a number of panels devoted to alternative academic careers. Furthermore, those panels (contrary to traditional academic panels) had a clear purpose, optimistic feel, and concrete and useful advice. I left feeling energized at the various career prospects that I will have as a recipient of a PhD, whether or not I choose to pursue a traditional academic route.

Twitter as a Connection-Making Tool

I’ll admit it: I’ve been somewhat skeptical about Twitter in terms of its usefulness for professional development, academic or otherwise. To me, sending 140 characters out into the black hole of the internet, to be seen by a few people and then disappear, seemed the opposite of “professional.” Clearly, I understood the perks: there is something rhetorical about the short nature of the tweet; a tweet allows one to reach his or her constituents immediately, without the need for an intermediary; the chemical reaction in the brain provoked by seeing a simple number of likes or retweets is addictive, making you yearn for more; finally, twitter allows one to see the larger trends of our time, what is making the rounds in our intellectual circles, and to participate (however frivolously) in that dialogue. Concerning academics, however, the nature of Twitter always seemed in contradiction with our aims and goals. While brevity is the soul of wit, a 140-character tweet seems insufficient to broach real issues. And even though the peer-review process for academic publishing is long and flawed, one would think that academics would not hold tweets in very high esteem.

However, I had never considered immediate practical uses of Twitter. At the MLA Convention, it was a useful tool for me to bridge the academic and alternative academic, the personal and professional, the esoteric and the communal. The most basic use I found was as a note-taking tool. Having my computer out, I could simultaneously record the most interesting comments from the panels and get instantaneous confirmation of what was interesting by others who were following the same hashtags. Furthermore, when I could not be in two panels at once, the panel hashtag allowed me to see what had happened where I could not attend. That said, this depends upon the conference attendees. If few are on Twitter, this strategy would not work. Even at this particularly large convention, the panels that seemed to garner the most tweets were those dealing with professional development or digital humanities. Lucky for me, those are two of my main interests!

Most importantly, Twitter allowed this unfathomably large conference where it would have been impossible to forge meaningful connections for a lonely graduate student to feel much smaller. While I was lucky to have a group of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances there to help me get my bearings, many graduate students attend large conferences, present their papers, and then leave without having interacted with other scholars or networked. Twitter allowed me to find events that I might have otherwise missed, see which type of panels had a lively discussion, and get to know names and faces of those who were participating in the Twitter subset of MLA attendees. At the last panel I attended, I noticed that the woman next to me had been interacting with me on Twitter for days, and we were delighted to be able to meet in person.

In the end, while I am still skeptical of Twitter and feel it is far too hyped, I will continue to use it at conferences. While some might be better suited for this particular tool than others, using it costs me nothing and has the potential to lead me to people and resources I might not have otherwise known. And most importantly, it has the potential to be a crucial entryway into the inner circles of conferences, allowing graduate students to network more efficiently than ever before.

University Administrative Fellowship with Career Services

Posted by Natalie Berkman

Last semester, I was named a University Administrative Fellow (UAF) for the Center for Career Development, a new program at Princeton meant to introduce graduate students to university administration. Along with a fellow graduate student from the Chemistry department, I was in charge of alumni outreach in the organization and planning of the first graduate student-oriented career “meet-up.” The whole process was a great learning experience and allowed me to see a small slice of university administration and take an active role in alternative academic planning for graduate students. Here are just a few things I took away from the experience:

  1. Your university career center is NOT ONLY for the non-academic job search. I don’t know where I picked up this idea, but I had always thought that Career Services was either for undergraduate students or graduate students who want to leave the academy. This is far from the truth! Career Services can help grad students across disciplines plan out their academic studies, job searches, and better understand their professional lives and expectations.
  2. A career meet-up can be just as important for students at the end of their graduate study as at the beginning. While we termed our event a “meet-up” rather than a “career fair” to highlight its more casual nature, the basic tenet was the same. Preparation was key, especially for graduate students nearing the end of their studies. When they did their research and came with specific companies in mind, some were even offered interviews. In fact, one student received a job offer at the event! Since preparation was essential, we insisted on offering “warm-up” events, one of which was offered by a recruiter. Even students early in their graduate careers benefited. Specifically in the humanities, knowing what sorts of options were available was an encouraging way to broach the topic of alternative academic careers.
  3. Companies DO want to hire humanities PhD students. The issue, however, is that those companies may not have the time or the resources to attend such an event to meet with potential candidates. Through alumni recruitment and brainstorming of companies to invite to the event, I was initially overwhelmed by the lack of response from humanities alumni and from the difficulty of tracking where humanities PhD students ended up. I began to understand that companies do not hire humanities PhD students on a large scale as some industries would hire science PhDs. The solution was to invite local businesses who have hired Princeton humanities PhDs, whether they were currently hiring or not such as Educational Testing Services (ETS) or Princeton University Press, introducing students to industries they might not have considered.
  4. Size is key. The greatest asset of this event was the small size, which created an intimate environment for students to talk both formally and informally with recruiters. Recruiters and students alike appreciated the attention they received. Hopefully it will continue to become an annual tradition — I know I will certainly attend as a highly-prepared graduate student in my final years!