conferences

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.

Twitter as a Tool for Academic Networking? #NoThanks

Posted by Natalie Berkman

This year, I have been honored to be a fellow in the second cohort of the MLA Connected Academics Proseminar, a fascinating group of current and recent Ph.D. candidates who meet once a month in New York City to discuss alternatives to the “traditional” academic career. As part of this process, we have been discussing how to maintain a professional presence online, which has been one of the major reasons that I have been working so hard updating my website recently. Recently in the Proseminar, the topic of Twitter came up as a potential solution to the impersonal feel of large, professional conferences and would help younger students network and spread their research despite the professional hierarchy that exists in professional settings. So, this month I decided to try it out. I had plans to attend the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts national meeting in Atlanta, and thought that Twitter might help me navigate the three interrelated conferences going on at once.

I went online, found the SLSA hashtag (#slsa2016), and immediately tweeted:

To be honest, it felt disingenuous. I was thrilled to be there, but to write something vague to an unknown number of scholars did not seem the best way to communicate it. Maybe if I tweeted about something more specific, I thought. I attended my first panel and really enjoyed the final talk on the Two-Culture debate and waited until the end of the Q&A to tweet:

After the Q&A, I approached the presenters, asking questions and exchanging email addresses. I then checked Twitter and noticed that someone had liked my first tweet, and two people had liked the second! I immediately followed both, assuming that this would help fill my newsfeed with more appropriate, SLSA-related posts.

At another panel, someone gave a talk about Pokémon. Since that reminded me of my childhood, I snapped a picture of his PowerPoint and tweeted to the SLSA-specific twitterverse:

This also garnered two likes, though the same as before. Once again, I interacted with the speaker after the panel, exchanging email addresses and engaging in thought-provoking conversations about glitches and research. Noticing that one of the speakers had posted earlier with the SLSA hashtag about this particular panel, I responded to his tweet, thanking him for the panel. He immediately followed me, indicating to me that I was doing something right.

As the day went on, I texted my external examiner, an Associate Professor who is a big name at this conference and who had encouraged me to attend. We met down in the lobby and she introduced me to dozens of scholars. For the rest of the conference, she took me by the hand, recommending certain talks and panels, presenting me to other scholars, and helping me engage in more direct, in-person conversations. While I continued to check my Twitter feed, I began to notice that there were only a few scholars on it, and they did not seem to be engaging in conversation with each other.

The following day, Katherine Hayles gave what would go on to be known as the most influential talk of the conference, and I made sure to tweet some highlights. However, I then noticed that one attendee had tweeted the same quote with TWO hashtags: #slsa2016 and #slsa16. Uh oh, I thought. I’ve been doing it all wrong! There were more than just a few people tweeting with the other hashtag — there must have been about 30! I had been communicating my (admittedly superficial) tweets to such a restricted audience! In another panel, I began using both, still receiving a similar number of likes.

On the final day of the conference, I attended a morning panel and sat near Katherine Hayles. In the Q&A, as always, I continued to ask questions and noticed that Hayles was vigorously nodding along with my comments. She ran out at the end of the panel to get to another talk, but at the lunch later that day, made a point of telling me that she appreciated my questions and politely asked about my work. In the meantime, my Twitter feed was surprisingly quiet.

Overall, I’m not sure how I feel about using Twitter at conferences. While several people in panels (especially the digital humanities panel) seemed to be using it constantly and consistently (even during talks), those participants did not seem to be interacting as much in person. I must admit, of all the people I tweeted, retweeted, followed, and liked, I did not meet a single one in person. We just never crossed paths. I also found that watching people with their phones out during presentations appeared unprofessional.

On the other hand, being actively engaged in the Q&As really did help me to network, and I left the conference with business cards and email addresses, along with a bunch of new ideas and insights! Seeing retweeted blurbs about panels I did not attend was uninformative, and seemed a missed opportunity in a conference where several panels happened at once. That said, nothing helped more than having a tenured professor take me under her wing. Indeed, this removed the inevitable awkwardness of approaching senior scholars as a graduate student.

Rather than tweeting and retweeting a mere thirty scholars on Twitter at a conference with over 600 participants, we should strive to make connections through actual interactions. Perhaps this should be made more explicit in our training as graduate students: that we should attend conferences with our advisors and mentors; that we should do research on the professors who will be attending and know enough about their research to pose useful questions following their talks; that we should not risk appearing unprofessional in any way by having our phones out during talks. While Twitter may be a nice way to make a big conference seem smaller, we cannot let this technology distract us from the real use of conferences — human interactions through critical, academic dialogue.