My Experience Part IV/Other Career Paths

Now, I write from my second year in a PhD program. It has continued to be, to a great extent, what I signed up for; plus, I now have the good fortune to be paid consistently for reading, teaching and study.

I write at the end of a semester during which I’ve had some of my most satisfying professional experiences as a teacher. I taught a discussion section, as a TA, with some of the most engaged, motivated students I’ve ever taught. It was an optional section held at 11:00 AM on Fridays over Zoom during a pandemic, so I think selection effects had everything to do with the stellar class dynamics.

For that same course, I delivered a guest lecture and conducted a class in which I delivered a passionate, personal lecture on a subject close to my heart, and to which I believe many students really responded. I still love what I do.

And yet, I’m thinking about other options. Thinking seriously about them. This semester, I’ve been enrolled in a grad course on employment and professional development, with an eye to non-tenure track and non-academic careers. I also plan to apply to law schools over the course of this winter break.

Part of this is, of course, accounted for by the job market issues which I outlined in multiple previous posts. In particular after the pandemic: I love what I do, but, with no self-deprecation in this statement, I don’t feel like I’d be competitive enough at it to assume that I’ll be able to secure a good job that pays well enough to support a family through an academic job.

Part of me is really saddened by this, given how integral a part of my identity this has been for so long. It’s a little silly, and certainly not the worst problem in the world to have, but I get just a bit blue about the transition that having less time for reading literature in a different career will represent.

Parts of me, though, feel like it’s time, and not just for practical reasons. On a basic level, I think that my decision is not even principally being made for practical reasons. I have for a long time been growing less confident about the social impact that academic work like the kind that I would be doing as a professor would have. I have other aspirations, other commitments that I’d like to pursue.

For help articulating the uncertainties by which I have been beset, increasingly, in academia, I’ll turn now, as I have so often in life, to books.