Every one of us who’s advised undergraduates has faced a student new to campus who is utterly certain of her major, his eventual career, her study-abroad plans, or other future plans. If one hangs around long enough, one sees that these students’ aspirations are very rarely fulfilled, though more often than not they find even more satisfying and suitable outcomes than they had originally planned.
My colleagues and I generally have been skeptical of such students’ initial certainty about their futures. Faculty members know that students are often full of big plans, and, more importantly, have made those plans based on limited or erroneous information. New, traditional-aged undergraduate students rarely have the experience or savvy to make wise decisions about their futures, and as they discover more about their talents and interests, it’s not surprising for their plans to change.
I recently returned from co-leading a wonderful, rich intercultural trip to Turkey with three members of our state legislature — a police chief from one of Iowa’s growing metropolitan areas, and several members of the faculty and staff of one of our public universities. On the long flight from Istanbul to Chicago, I thought about how surprising my participation in this trip would have been to my younger graduate-school self.
As those of you who have read my entries here over the past several years know, I am intensely interested in the shape of academic careers, and how the implicit and explicit expectations formed by graduate programs prepare future faculty for either satisfaction or despair as they move into and through their professional lives. I am neither talking about nor dismissing the pain caused by the catastrophic mismatch between the number of available academic jobs and the new potential faculty available to fill them, but rather of people who have the great good fortune of finding any academic job, but who then discover that this job is not at all what they expected.
Like a lot of you, I went to graduate school with only a fuzzy idea of what it actually meant to be a college professor, despite the fact that my mother was one and had a very good career. While I was in graduate school, I quickly absorbed the notion that a “real” academic career was like that of my professors–a lot of research, a small amount of teaching, and an indeterminate amount of other things that are largely hidden from those who are not doing them.
Instead, I wound up doing a lot of teaching, not much research, and a huge and increasing amount of those hidden other things. I’ve worked at four institutions, and in each place have gained knowledge, skills, and experience that help, I hope, to make me effective in each of the institutional roles I have been called on to play. I have developed interests that I didn’t anticipate in graduate school (I traveled to Turkey for the first of eight times at the end of my second year in my first faculty job), and have built rewarding professional relationships and friendships of types I couldn’t have imagined.
A former colleague used to fret about how students had a highly “overdetermined” response to planning for their futures. If that is true about undergraduates, it surely is much more true of graduate students who are planning to pursue an academic career. But even inside the charmed circle of those fortunate enough to obtain such a career, there remains an enormous amount of contingency. But just because a path is unexpected doesn’t mean that it’s a bad path, and in many cases it can turn out to be better than the one you planned to take. This was a very hard lesson for me, but one I am glad I have finally and completely learned.
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