It’s been a while since I last posted on here. I have a good reason for this, my hands have pounded this very keyboard for the last few months and I have made some decent progress in finalising my thesis. That is to say, that I have sent my supervisors a draft of the complete thesis less the conclusion. That’s the first five chapters done, a cool 305 pages and (typically) over the maximum word count! So, I have been busy over the summer but focused solely on nailing the thesis. Now, that’s a task I can get out of bed in the morning and get to work on (and I did, made easier by the miserable weather that constitutes the British ‘summer’)! But life after the PhD is too scary to contemplate, and now that I am divested of any frantic chapter drafting duties, it is a reality that I am now having to come to terms with.
In a post a few months ago I alluded to some possible post-PhD opportunities that I was pursuing. Unfortunately, none of those materialised. Although, I did get short-listed for a position as a post-doctoral researcher and got called to interview, but I wasn’t offered the position. From this experience I can draw several conclusions, both positive and negative. Yes, the fact that I didn’t get something means that the market is crowded but there was clearly something of interest on my CV to enable me to get shortlisted. Also, I can conclude that there is a paucity of academic jobs at the moment, but opportunities are still out there. Unfortunately, I don’t get a pound for every time someone says “you’ll just have to be patient”, if I did I wouldn’t need to worry about finding the cash to pay the bills now would I!?!
Part of what makes searching for a job, nay, a career, so difficult is that I not only have to reconcile in my own head quite exactly what it is that I want to do with my life, but I also have to go out into the big bad world and compete with other people, all with more confidence, better people skills, and years of experience with CVs saying how they can make a cappuccino while standing on one leg disarming a nuclear missile at the same time. Of those things, incidentally, the only one I can just about manage is to stand on one leg for about five seconds before falling down in an undignified heap. Maybe I’ll keep that off my ‘skills’ section of my CV for now then?!
Sorting out quite what I want to do is made difficult by the economic climate, but doing a PhD is an intellectual process that makes taking decisions that were once straightforward, a laborious process of posturing and building nuanced arguments. I am also now a master of procrastination and applying for jobs is even more procrastination worthy than redrafting chapters or writing conference papers. What’s more is that after over four years of doing the same thing, meeting the same people at conferences, boring the same friends at the same pubs about the same PhD thesis, and teaching the same classes to similar (but not the same) undergraduate faces, there is actually very little to be said for staying in academia. Yet that voice in the back of my mind still tells me that this is the career path I want to follow. I think it is natural to fall a little out of love with academia in the final stages of your PhD. I bet everyone who thinks that would still jump at the chance to step into their supervisor’s job, in order to pursue those interests that brought them to the university they studied at in the first place. So, internally I am being pulled in different directions, in an ‘ideal’ world I would stay in Newcastle and take up a lecturing job or post-doc in the department, but in the ‘real’ world I never want to set foot in a university (Bristol, Belfast, Baghdad, Boston) ever again! Something’s gonna have to give.
I have had to give this some thought in recent days, and have decided that I am going to pursue a career, nay, careers, (can you have two careers simultaneously?) in the non-academic world as well as in academia. That sounds, pretty much, like fence-sitting to me, the crazed idea of someone who still hasn’t really made up his mind and knows that the moment he decides not to pursue a particular career pathway, it will suddenly become clear what he truly wants and that he chose the wrong option!
While I probably need therapy to help me to resolve these issues, getting careers advice certainly seemed like a good idea. That is why I visited the Careers Service last week. Being the swot that I am, I was delighted when they gave me some homework to do! Basically I need to fill in a quiz about what my skills are and to imagine my dream job(s). I haven’t done this yet, that’s next on the agenda after writing this post, but I think it will help me to resolve those issues I talked about and hopefully I will feel less like I am being pulled in different directions and I will be able to adopt a positive strategy to have career plan A, plan B, plan C etc. and for those plans to make sense in my head and for me to be able to envision where my life might be headed. I still need to get them to check through those multiple versions of my CV, but I think the practical advice combined with the structured ways of getting me to think through the options open to me will be a huge help. Once I have a clearer sense of what paths I want to explore, then they will be able to advise me as to where I should be looking to make things happen.
I’m sure that I’m not the first student on the verge of completing a PhD to turn up at the Careers Service a little bit clueless, nor will I be the last. The academic route makes total sense and the PhD and the experiences I have had during the last four years serve as a stepping-stone into academia. The PhD is the apprenticeship to being a fully-fledged academic, with the material from my PhD serving as the basis for potentially several publications. Exploring the non-academic route seems complicated by comparison. If I’m honest, having a PhD and joining graduate recruitment programmes, the civil service faststream and the like, seems rather unnecessary and a waste of the last few years. Of course it’s not been a waste, I just am having trouble seeing that the PhD skills are transferrable, the research I have undertaken, the administrative tasks I have done, the teaching, the organising, the interviews I have conducted and just the mindset of delivering on a major project, are skills that I have demonstrated and developed over the course of my PhD, skills that any employer is looking for. The challenge is to be able to market myself as both a competent academic, an expert in my chosen field, and as the kind of person who has a wide-range of skills and can adapt to new situations and challenges. I think I can do that, but I’m going to need some trained professionals to help me out on this one, as I am having trouble seeing beyond the fact that my PhD will eventually qualify me to nothing more than Dr Steven Robinson – expert in his own thesis and just about able to stand on one leg for five seconds.
