I did everything a graduate student was supposed to do. I conducted research, published in prestigious journals in my field, wrote grant proposals, big and little, and received financial support for my work. I served as a T.A., co-taught an undergraduate seminar, and served on departmental and external committees.
But I did not go to graduate school expecting that one day I would be a professor. In fact, I did not intend to earn a Ph.D. I wanted to go back to school to see what the biology of small populations could teach me, if anything, about how to protect endangered species from extinction. I planned to finish my master's and then move on, travel to Africa, re-enter the working world, and apply my newly gained knowledge.
But I fell in love with Vermont, I liked my program and I enjoyed my colleagues. I had a wonderful working relationship with my adviser, and I was inspired to seek deeper answers to the research questions I was asking. I decided to stay and pursue a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology.
I happily curled up in the cozy cocoon of academe, comfortably encased by departmental requirements and narrow expectations. But one day the cocoon burst, and I emerged. I had just finished my dissertation defense and was sitting alone in an empty room awaiting the final formality. The door opened, my adviser walked in, smiled, and extended a handshake. "Congratulations, Dr. Pray."
Now what?
I applied to a handful of tenure-track positions and received several interview offers. But I knew, even before I packed my bags and ventured across the country for my first job seminar, that I had gone too far. I knew it when my host, a faculty member, greeted me at the airport and drove me to my hotel and handed me a large packet of information on the college, from the departmental bulletin to the employee-benefits folder to lore about the quality of life.
I knew when I woke up the next morning and met another professor for breakfast in the hotel lobby and it was all I could do to look attentive as the words poured out of his mouth. I knew when I made the rounds, escorted from lab to lab and to the dean's office and back to another lab, that a little voice stifled by six years of graduate work was trying to say something to me.
I walked into the office that would be mine if I were to accept the position and tried to imagine myself living a professor's life. Later, I met with students and went to dinner and talked about my research goals, the courses I would teach, my plans to support and encourage young women with science ambitions. Everyone was friendly and welcoming, the seminar I taught was a hit, I saw a niche I could occupy. But still something was wrong. Eventually, as the hours passed, as people smiled and spoke and led me down the academic aisles, the little voice started to scream.
I went on three more interviews, thinking that maybe each would be different. In each case, something turned me off, whether it was the building, the size of the department, the particular mix of research interests, or the paucity of women faculty members. It became evident that my reaction to my first interview was not simply an exception. I was not cut out, or at least not ready, to be a tenure-track research professor. There was something else that I needed to do with my life. I did not tell my colleagues that I declined two other interview offers that year.
My job-searching experience has been more about personal growth than anything else. I suppose that's what career changes are all about. I'm often racked with guilt and what-if thoughts, and I have found it extremely difficult to talk with academic go-getters about my doubts.
In every job interview, all of the discussions, without exception, were about research and the intricacies of evolutionary theory, with a necessary dose of teaching expectations and assorted academic topics. I have absolutely no idea if any of the people I talked with were happy, self-actualized human beings. I could guess. I observed. Worn eyes, tired gaits, impersonal gestures. If it felt safe, I asked questions like, "Do you like it here?" One new hire shrugged his shoulders and said, "It's a job." He was a bright scientist, part of an active research department.
I asked one old-timer, a full professor, who was near retirement if, given what he knows now about academe, he'd do it again. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. "They up the ante every year," he said. "The pressure on young faculty to produce and rope in grant funding is far greater than it ever was when I started." He paused and turned his gaze back toward me. "You give the most productive years of your working life for tenure," he said. You give them up.
As I left his office, unescorted to my next appointment, I kept my head high and thoughts focused. Though all I really wanted to do was tell them, whoever they were, that I was terribly sorry but tenure wasn't on my list of things to do.
I do not remember knowing what tenure was when I started graduate school. But I quickly learned that tenure is what it is all about. Publish early and publish often. But whose agenda is it? And why is it pushed on all the young minds who in their naiveté want to learn, think, and explore? Why does not wanting a tenure-track position equate to less ambition, dilettantism, wastefulness?
At one point, I had tried, before entering the job market, to initiate a discussion among graduate students about how to prepare ourselves if we did not want an academic job. I hoped for some sort of involvement, recognition, anything, from the faculty or the administration. "We're not here to counsel you on your career," one administrator told me. My efforts were shot down.
The narrow thinking about the Ph.D. must change. Not only because there are more graduates competing for tenure-track jobs, but because the Ph.D. doesn't occupy the same place that it did 100 years ago, 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, when the degree was the gateway to a life of research in the Ivory Tower. Folks still enter graduate school seeking the rigor and excitement of their own self-made project, and often they contribute as much as any tenured professor to their field. So why should they feel guilty about wanting to use their experience and knowledge in different ways?
There is a huge, thriving world outside the confines of academe, ripe for the attention of Ph.D.'s who have the skills and perseverance to tackle its challenges, communicate ideas, and take action in thoughtful ways. Academe needs to reassess its role in society. Consider the possibility that it can be a powerful source of intellectual resources and innovative achievements that touch more than the lives of manuscript reviewers and sleepy-eyed undergraduates.
Consider also that in this age of cross-fertilized cultures and ideas that it might behoove graduate programs to market themselves as more than the overcrowded sites of scholarly apprenticeship that they have become. Embrace the notion of alternative careers. Have the courage to see what the returns might be -- who the programs could attract and what the alumni might bring back.
Make room for all the talented students who want something other than tenure-track faculty positions. Encourage and invite students to be creative, not just in their analyses and syntheses and interpretations, but in building for themselves their own thoughtful individualized place in the professional scheme of things.
Still, I read the academic job ads every week, as though one day the perfect job will suddenly pop out of the page. I haven't found it. I don't know if I ever will. But I look more out of habit than desire. I've been listening a lot to that little voice, the one that took me out of the academic rat race and set me on my current course. I've been thinking a lot about Africa, and I've started writing. And so far, so good.
