Rate this:

I started this blog as a way to help non-traditional students find their way into academia. If you are one of these students I hope my story has given you hope and infused you with new ideas.

I did what I set out to do; I got my Ph.D. and landed a job that will allow me to spend the rest of my working days teaching science at the college level. I think I would summarize my journey thus: It was a hell of a ride, but determination and hard work got me through it.

The future looks exciting. I can’t wait to see what awaits me in the months, years, and decades ahead. But that is not a journey I will blog about here: I’ve done what I set out to do with this site.

Rate this:

I have spent a rather alarming amount of time worrying that I would never get a tenure-track job.

For readers who haven’t been around since the beginning, this worry was in part because of my unusual background: I started my Ph.D. program at age 37 after 15 years of homeschooling my children. Although I wanted to teach chemistry at the college level, the research I wanted to do was found in a geochemistry program, and so I got an interdisciplinary doctorate degree. Then, for several reasons (in large part because I missed teaching), I didn’t do a post-doc as many scientists do. Instead, I took a contract position teaching chemistry at a large urban liberal arts college on the East Coast.

As I posted earlier, my job hunt last year was not successful. This made me very depressed: would anyone ever see past my “differences” and hire me despite my interdisciplinary degree and non-traditional background?

Despite my pessimism, I kept plugging. This academic year I put in 16 applications; of the 16 schools I applied to, three chose to fly me out this fall for in-person interviews. One chemistry department made me an offer…and I turned it down. You see, another school had also made me an offer: a school that valued interdisciplinary education and had specifically offered me a position because of my unusual background, not despite it. (The school also happens to be close to family and some pretty awesome field sites.)

And so, half a year from now, I will move back to the Left Coast, to a school that is pretty darn amazing. I have found my permanent home.

Rate this:

Last summer (2015), just as I was giving up on the academic job search, I got a Hail Mary*  job offer thrown my way. A contract job, for one year, in a city I’d always sworn I’d never live in.

No sooner had I arrived than I had to start looking for jobs for the 2016-2017 school year. Over the course of the last 12 months or so I submitted 35 applications for tenure-track jobs. (It could have been more, but by November I knew my current contract would be available for another year, so I stopped applying to places I wouldn’t want to live long term.) I got 9 phone/Skype interviews (much better percentage than last year) and had 2 on-site interviews. Neither led to a job.

So I’m sticking around for another school year, and I’m honestly not too disappointed:

• For starters, it took most of the school year to get my research lab here up and running and I really want to get more preliminary results before I have to start the process all over again.
• Also, I love my colleagues. I honestly could not ask for better co-workers: they love teaching and are excited about new pedagogical approaches, but they’re also mostly research active as well.
• The location is also growing on me in a way that I never would have imagined. I love the diversity. (I interviewed at a couple of places in the Midwest and was shocked at how WHITE everyone was. In my current summer class, 2 out of 15 students are white. Yes, no typo, 21%. That’s pretty typical in my classes to date.)
• Finally, next year looks like it will be another amazing year. I get to be a course coordinator (looks good on the CV), teach a graduate instrumental analysis class (ditto), and !!!mentor a master’s student!!!
• Oh, and did I mention that our department just acquired some new instrumentation that will make my research soooo much easier?

No, I don’t mind sticking around here at all. In fact, I’d happily stay until my youngest is out of high school (i.e. through the 2018-2019 school year)…if not longer, assuming they ever decide to offer me a tenure-track position.

*Literally–I work for a Catholic school!

Rate this:

“Oh, UnlikelyGrad, you are so amazing. I could never do what you do. I’m not strong enough.”

If I had a dollar for every time someone had said something of this nature to me, I could buy myself a vacation home in the Berkshires. I personally find it a ridiculous statement.

By “ridiculous” I don’t mean that the people in question are strong enough; I mean that strength is not a binary thing. I’ve had four babies and held dozens more newborns in my time–I love babies–and I can assure you that no newborn is particularly strong from a physical point of view. But some grow up to be strong people and some grow up to be weaklings (and everything in between).

Becoming physically strong is not a matter of genetics; it’s a matter of carrying on, pushing through pain and fatigue and lifting gradually more and more and more weight until you can carry a lot. Every time I get back to the weights after months away (which is, sadly, more frequent than I’d like) I start to burn out about 5 minutes in. I push on and make it through the whole routine, and at the end I am out of breath and sweaty. I usually end by panting something along the lines of “Holy…Cow… I…Need…To…Do…This…More…Often!” And then I am sore all over. The next session is better, and the one after that is better yet, and if I keep up my routine over the course of a few weeks I start being able to add new things (or heavier weights) to the ritual.

The same can be said about becoming mentally strong. You do not become good at math by picking up a calculator; you become good at math by doing simple arithmetic in your head, over and over and over, then doing algebra in your head over and over and over, then doing proofs over and over and over. You do not come out of the womb good at writing: if you are a good writer, it’s because you write a lot, revising and revising and revising.

Likewise, no one immediately has the emotional fortitude to go through a harrowing time. There will be times when you want to quit: when you are too sore to want to lift any more emotional weight. These are the times when you stop taking the long view. Thinking about the years ahead that you still need to endure is crushing. Well-meaning people tell you to take things one day at a time, but frequently even that is overwhelming. Sometimes I had to take things five minutes at a time, or even five seconds at a time.

Sometimes you have to force yourself to get through a workout one rep at a time. Sometimes you can only get through a homework set one problem at a time. And sometimes you get through a tough time by taking life two seconds at a time. The important thing is to keep moving, keep working your way through. Someday you will look back and see that you have walked a hundred or a thousand miles…and you realize that people look up to you for being able to walk a 5k without breaking a sweat.

Strength comes from endurance. From doing a little, one bit at a time, over and over and over. No, you may not be as strong as you need to be yet…but keep going, and I promise you that you will be.

Rate this:

I said in my previous post that I’d been lucky to get the contract job I did. Maybe, maybe not.

After another grueling day of doing job applications this weekend, I went back and looked at my stats for last year:

• I applied for 39 academic jobs.
• From those 39 applications, I got 6 phone/Skype interviews.
• From those 6 interviews, I got requests for follow-up/in-person interviews from 3 schools.
• I only got one job from those three, but I was told that I was the runner-up for another one.

In other words: I worked pretty damn hard to get the job I had.

Aside from the superficial stats, I did a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make sure that my CV looked good:

• Guest-lecturing for everyone who would let me
• Teaching online classes for Gifted Homeschooler’s Forum so that I could add online teaching experience to the CV
• Doing workshops etc. on teaching strategies

Again, hard work. I started positioning myself for a teaching job YEARS before I went on the market.

So far this year I’ve put in 23 job applications. That puts me about 10 apps ahead of where I was at this time last year. I *will* get a tenure-track job if it’s the last thing I do.

Rate this:

It was easy to use my real name when I was only doing research. But I don’t really feel comfortable blogging under my real name when I’m teaching on the off chance that my students google me. So my first thought when I went through and redacted my name earlier this year was, “This is just until I graduate.”

But then I graduated and got a job teaching for the summer.

And now…drumroll…I’ll be teaching for next school year as well. I’ll be an Assistant Professor (of the visiting type; sadly, not tenure track) of Analytical Chemistry at a Large Urban University (with a very diverse population and LOTS of non-traditional students) somewhere in the eastern U.S.

I am thrilled by the job as I always envisioned myself teaching and hoped that I’d get a chance to work with students like me. I only have two regrets: (1) It’s not a permanent job, and (2) It’s not in a city I would have chosen as a home. But it’s a good job, and I think that, overall, I’ve been lucky job-wise.

Rate this:

I have spent the last couple of weeks jumping through the bureaucratic hurdles to get my status at MyU switched from student to faculty. This must not be a common process because I’ve gotten a lot of misinformation from various flunkies.

For example, one told me that I needed to redo all of my paperwork, including the direct deposit form, and there would be a “trial run” for the first paycheck, which would mean picking up an actual paper check on payday (even though my paychecks have been direct deposited into the same savings account for the last ~5 years). I couldn’t find a deposit slip for my savings account, so I filled the form out with my checking account info instead. Later, the person in charge of bank transfers called me to ask whether I really wanted the money going to my checking account, or whether I’d just like to keep it going to the savings account that was already on file. Obviously I didn’t need to futz around with the direct deposit paperwork in the first place.

I was also told by the computer help desk guy that I absolutely could NOT keep my student email–I’d be assigned a different email for use as a faculty member, since I would need different permissions. And since I can’t have two email addresses assigned to me, my student email would disappear fairly quickly. ACK!! Right now I have almost everything going to that address; I had planned to change things over to a gmail account over the course of the summer, but hadn’t gotten around to that yet. Immediately I ran home and started notifying all sorts of people of the new address; I also frantically tried to figure out how to download the messages using Apple Mail (since I’ve always only used the web mail feature). A couple of days later I went back and was brought upstairs to the system administrator…who told me that I would just keep my old email address. Grrrr!!

All of this paperwork has interfered with my prep time for class. Since this is an accelerated class (one semester’s worth of material in 6 weeks) I’m not going to have much time to do lecture prep once it starts. So I’m not only trying to put together the usual start of term documents–syllabus, lab schedule, etc.–but also trying to get as much lecture prep done as possible before the first week hits.

It all starts Monday. It’s going to be an adventure!

Rate this:

Honestly, I don’t know.

I have a summer job–adjuncting at MyU–but I have no job lined up after that.

I want to teach, of course, but at this point I will do whatever it takes to support my family.

I’ve applied for ~45 jobs so far (academic & industry) and nothing has panned out. Don’t get me wrong; I’ve had phone interviews and even, in one case 3 successive interviews, but I only end up with rejections.

It’s depressing.

Rate this:

As anyone who’s in grad school has learned, the first part of a dissertation defense is open to the public; the part in which the committee questions the candidate is private. I always found this frustrating because, if I didn’t know what was coming, how could I prepare for it?

The closer I got to my defense, the more worried I got. I had an officemate who was in with his committee for close to two and a half hours (after the public part!). Granted, this is a bit extreme, but how did I know that I wouldn’t end up in that situation? (Dr. Green was particularly hard on me when I took my oral exams–he questioned me for over an hour and would have kept on going if the other committee members hadn’t demanded some time for questions, too.)

Needless to say, I was surprised when my committee wrapped up the questioning in a bit under an hour. My thought as they ushered me out for deliberations was, Is that all? Not only was the questioning short, it was relatively easy. The questions were thought-provoking but I was able to answer them without too much effort. I even cracked a few (topic-appropriate) jokes.

That evening, at a party Dr. Hand-Waver gave in my honor, I was talking with Dr. Sharp (not on my committee) and mentioned that I found the defense amazingly easy.

“In what way?” she asked.

“Well,” I replied, “It didn’t feel like an interrogation to me, the way that my other committee meetings did. It felt more like sitting down and having a conversation with friends.”

She smiled at me. “Well, that’s what we look for, isn’t it? Once you pass, you become a colleague. We want to see that you can talk to us as a colleague. It’s amazing how few students get that.”

So there you go. That’s what you’re shooting for as a grad student.

Rate this:

If I have fallen off the writing wagon the last six months, I apologize deeply.

Things have been crazy here: dealing with (a couple of fairly serious) issues with the children, job hunting, and–of course–finishing up the dissertation.

Yesterday I defended my dissertation. (There will be another, longer, post on this later.) After the committee deliberated, my advisor came out to fetch me and congratulate me. As I re-entered the room, various committee members shook my hand and said congratulations, and then, finally, Dr. Green–who’d been sitting in back–said, “Congratulations, Doctor!”

And that’s when it started to hit me. I did it!! Almost 24 hours later, I’m still a bit disbelieving that it’s (mostly) over; the euphoria hasn’t hit yet.