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Doctor Temp

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By Sara Davis

Last July I defended my dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, and wafted off the campus on a cloud of sweet success, murmuring, "So long, suckers!" In August I was back on campus as a temp.

It wasn't that I couldn't find a full-time job. The problem was that I had big plans for an academic career. I had an offer to teach two classes -- one each semester -- in my old department at Penn, Asian studies. The pay wasn't much, but it was necessary teaching experience. Unfortunately, the first paycheck would not arrive until October, and it would not be enough to live on. I needed a part-time job, preferably something undemanding to balance out the daunting task of teaching two new classes.

I have always been good at finding jobs, and pride myself on my ability to do any kind of work, anywhere. I worked my way through college as both a dishwasher and a temp, and have done any number of bizarre jobs since then (for instance, cataloging farmers' advice-to-the-lovelorn letters for Farm Journal, and editing South African poetry for an obscure publisher). Suddenly, with a new doctorate in hand, I seemed to be unhireable. No one seemed to want an Ivy League Ph.D. answering phones or typing letters.

My savings dwindled, and finally there was nowhere left to turn, so I signed up with Penn's in-house employment agency. The agency took one look at my rapid typing speed, clean suit, and Penn credentials, and offered me a plum position: a part-time job as a word processor at the Wharton School of Business.

The Wharton School is among the most prestigious business schools in the nation, and it is a college within the University of Pennsylvania, though its relationship to my home department is a little bit like that between the first world and the third world. Wharton undergraduates stand out at Penn: They attend lectures in crisp business suits, carrying briefcases. The normal career path at Wharton is to start an innovative little company in your senior year, make a zillion bucks, and get written up in Fortune magazine. The losers (poor things) have to settle for making six-figure salaries at multinational corporations.

Professors in my poorly supported and marginalized department, hereafter to be known as "The Land of the Dripping Ceilings," blame the Wharton School and its commercial values for every ill at Penn from student grade-grubbing to global warming. Nonetheless they sometimes hold their scholarly meetings in Wharton conference rooms, mostly, I suspect, to spin around in the cushy chairs and play with the light dimmers.

The first obstacle I encountered as a temp was with panty hose. I hadn't bought the stuff in six years. I had forgotten the early morning angst you experience looking at your leg as a run climbs up it. Every morning my apartment was filled with hoarse cries as I hopped across the living room for clear nail polish to paste over the runs, eventually winding up with completely shellacked legs. Panty hose, and the skin disorders associated with it, were key factors in my decision to enter graduate school. Six years and $60,000 in student loans later, here I was again ... back in panty hose, polish glinting in the fluorescent lights.

The second and bigger problem was the drop in status. Being a temp is a little like going back to your first year in graduate school. My new bosses -- Wharton's full-time secretaries -- seemed like nice enough people, but they treated me as if I were pond scum. Every detail of office life was explained to me in minute detail, as if I were a visitor from another galaxy, as opposed to someone who had been interrogated and brainwashed via video for three hours by a temp agency.

Don't get me wrong. I understand that to most of the working world, temps are idiots. In my past professional life, before grad school, I hired and fired dozens of temps myself. A lot of temps are people who are too boneheaded to do much else. A few are extremely bright, but some of these suffer from scary personality disorders. So I understood why the other secretaries treated me like a hulking great doofus. The problem was with me: After six years of Ivy League graduate school, I had lost the ability to swallow my pride.

Once I had been at Wharton for a week, I began to use many of my free moments to work on my tasks as an adjunct lecturer, leading to an even greater cognitive dissonance. Wharton secretaries sent me to the library to drop off a coursepack after explaining to me in exhausting detail what a library was, what a coursepack was, and why professors keep them in a library. While at the library, I took the opportunity to do a little extra research, or to make a furtive sidetrip to "the Land of the Dripping Ceilings" and sit in my professorial office, doing breathing exercises. This helped me salvage a little of my self-esteem.

I spent a month temping, and gritting my teeth all the way (I'm sure it showed, and I hereby apologize to all my co-workers at Wharton). Then the giant hand of God reached down and rescued me. In one week, I was offered another adjunct class at Temple University and a professor at Penn asked me to be his grader. With these offers, I was able to quit my temp job.

On the plus side, no one now explains the copier to me as if I am a nincompoop. Also, my students call me "Doctor" and look at me with great big admiring eyes.

On the other hand, those of you preparing to enter the academic job market will be just thrilled to learn that working three adjunct jobs, for a total of 60 hours a week, meant a cut in pay from my wages as a temp. Moreover, while as a temp I would have had free health insurance after three months, as an adjunct I pay for my own health insurance. This offers an instructive comparison of the relative importance of secretaries and professors.

Of course, this importance bears no relationship to actual productivity. Certainly, some secretaries, like those in "the Land of the Dripping Ceilings," work like dogs and get paid terribly. At Wharton, on the other hand, where business efficiency is a byword, a lot of what secretaries do is completely pointless.

My position, typing up endless reports for a summer business course, was an excellent example, and I amused myself in my spare moments by figuring out how to make myself redundant. This was a clear case of computerization creating more work than it saved. If the course's four teaching assistants had written in their grades by hand and spent 10 minutes with a calculator to figure out the median grades on the exams, Wharton could have fired me and saved thousands of dollars a year. Once this column is posted, I am looking forward to my first job offer as an efficiency consultant at Wharton.

As for temping, it has served me well for many years, and has bailed me out of more economic near-crises than I can count. Nonetheless, I do not recommend it to other newly-minted Ph.D.'s. After scrambling out of pond-scum status for years in grad school, I found it too painful to go back again. My advice? Go the Wharton route.