Breaking the Rules {My New Job}

Moving to California was the wrong decision, they said.

You should never relocate while still on the job market, they said.

You must be willing to move ANYWHERE, they said.

I started my PhD program six years ago knowing the job market would be rough when I finally earned my degree. People would ask me all the time, “What do you want to do when you get done?” “I want to be a professor,” I always replied, in spite of the fact that professor opportunities are very limited. The job market in higher ed has been rather dismal for the past decade or more. Tenure track jobs are becoming outdated. Online schools are growing. Universities are hiring part-time workers instead of full-time professors because of budget cuts and the increasing costs of employee benefits. As a country, we have produced too many scholars with advanced degrees in a struggling economy that doesn’t have jobs for its most educated workers.

These were the truths I faced as I ran the marathon of graduate school… so much hard work with no guarantee of a job once I crossed the finished line. However, I felt like I was supposed to get my PhD and I trusted God to take care of me once I finished. He gave me the desire to teach college long ago, and I believed He could bring that dream to fruition.

These are the rules of grad school if you want to stand a chance of getting a job when you’re done:

• Join many committees. Spend many hours on campus doing service, even if it infringes on your ability to get your own work done.
• Be the director of something. Gain experience doing administrative work, tutoring in the writing center, or specialize in teaching second language writers. You stand no chance of getting a job without these experiences.
• Get published. If you don’t have at least one journal article by the time you graduate, you might as well not apply for jobs. If you learned one thing in school, it should have been the phrase “publish or perish.”
• If you are a woman, NEVER have children. They will drag you down. You will never get tenure. You will make less money. You will get behind in research. You will suffer the wrath and prejudice of the patriarchy…. FOREVER. Babies will ruin you.
• And, finally, never, ever think you can picky about where you get a job. If you have an opportunity in Wyoming, you go. Nebraska? Hope you like corn. Northern Minnesota… buy boots and a parka and pack your bags. One professor told us you can say “no” to five states. You can pick five states where you refuse to apply for jobs, but you have to be willing to go to ANY of the other 45 states. Period.

Here is how I broke the rules:

• For my first three years of grad school, I served on one committee per year. I think service is important, but I didn’t want grad school to take over my life. I was newly married and wanted to invest in my husband. I was committed to our local church and wanted to serve there as well. I was blogging and growing a thriving online community. There was no way I was going to overfill my plate with volunteer work at school and suffer in other areas of my life. During my third year of grad school, I co-hosted an awesome interdisciplinary conference right after I found out I was pregnant with Zianne. The conference was phenomenal, and I learned so much about planning academic events that I will apply in my future career. But then I resigned from service for the rest of grad school and mostly stayed home writing my dissertation and raising my babies.
• I was the director of… nothing. I never worked in the writing center. I never took an administrative role during grad school. Would I have excelled at these things? Probably. I am gifted in administration, organization, and communication… but I just didn’t have time. I watched my peers take on these roles, usually classmates that were unmarried and had no kids. I applaud their work, but I knew these positions were not for me. As job advertisements came out this year, probably 80% of them asked for administrative experience of which I had none. I applied anyway and trusted the Lord.
• I still don’t have a peer-reviewed article. I have published a couple things… a book review and chapter in a trade book, but I don’t have the holy grail of all academic work… a single authored article in a top-ranked scholarly journal. Some might consider this an utter failure on my part.
• I am the crazy woman who had not one, but TWO, babies while in grad school. Women having children in PhD programs is uncommon, but I knew a couple women my age at ASU who had one child. But intentionally having a second child before I was done with my program? I am sure people thought I was insane for ruining my chances of a career when they saw my huge pregnant body waddling around campus.
• And then we moved. In October, at the start of my last year of graduate school, Micah had a job opportunity in Southern California and we went. It was totally wrong. Since my chances of getting a job were so slim, we should have waited until I graduated and then moved ANYWHERE in the U.S. if a school offered me a position. Micah should have put his own career aspirations on hold to accommodate my need for a job. Under no circumstances should we commit ourselves to a new geographic location where Micah would likely need to stay for at least the next 2-3 years That would limit my job search to a 50 mile radius which was basically academic career suicide. But we packed our U-haul for Orange County right as all the jobs were opening up for next school year. As we settled into our new California home, I would get job alerts daily… Washington, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee. They all sounded like fun places to live, but now they no longer made sense for our family.  

But when God is control, you don’t always have to follow the “rules” to which society pledges its allegiance: 

• I didn’t get to serve a whole lot at ASU, but I look forward to taking on more service projects in my new job, especially as my kids get older and I have more flexibility in my schedule. I especially love that at Vanguard, I get to invest in the hearts of my students and hope that my ministry experience at church and in YoungLife over the past two decades will help me point students toward Christ.
• I didn’t gain a lot of administrative experience at ASU, but now I get to direct the writing center and use my leadership, communication, and organization skills in a new way. I am so excited to grow this campus resource.
• The day after I found out I got the job at Vanguard, I also found out I am getting a book chapter published. This is my first true academic publication and will be a huge step toward earning tenure at my new school. Vanguard has a small research requirement, which is perfect for me, as I want to focus on teaching without completing disregarding the scholarship I’ve been working on for the past three years.
• All of the professors I’ve met at Vanguard seem to have amazing work/life balance. Most of them are home with their families on Fridays and in the late afternoons. One of the other English professors is also a mom and she leaves campus in time to catch her sons’ hockey games on weekdays. There is a precedent on campus that families are important, and I look forward to spending ample time with my girls while thriving in my career.
• Vanguard is TEN MINUTES away from Micah’s work. We will move soon and there is a good possibility that neither of us will have to get on the freeway to go to work. You know all the horrible Southern California traffic you hear about? Well, we might not even see it because God knows how to break the rules.