Coming Back Older and Wiser

By Harrison Blake

The Careers pages are full of advice and cautionary tales for newly minted Ph.D.'s seeking academic jobs. But little has been said about a job-hunting strategy you can adopt before even entering graduate school: Take some time off.

"But I did take time off," many readers are probably thinking. "I hung around with my friends in my college town and worked on my writing sample. Then I took the GREs. That was so stressful."

No, I mean, really take some time off -- two years, at the bare minimum. Do something substantial. Join the Peace Corps. Or just be a desk jockey in an office somewhere, a twentysomething Lester Burnham. But especially if you are in the humanities and social sciences, take a few years and get away from academe before you pursue a doctorate. I did, and it has served me well in graduate school.

Now comes the skepticism. The Peace Corps is one thing, you're thinking, but isn't office work precisely the life of unconscious despair that Thoreau warned us about in high school? You and I were probably the only ones who read that assignment, and didn't we look around at our peers and think, "I'm never gonna be like them?" Moreover, the dustier one's bachelor's degree gets, the more gumption it takes to ask professors for reference letters. Shouldn't one strike while the iron is hot, while one's mind is afire with innovative ideas about gender trouble or rooted cosmopolitanism?

Nothing you have to say about life at age 22 is so urgent that it can't wait a few years. Indeed, going to grad school right away can just as easily be called a cop-out. I admit that I applied to doctoral programs straight after college, and the packets I sent to admissions departments were composed of roughly 40 percent intellectual inspiration and 60 percent sheer inertia and even timidity. After all, I'd been trying to get A's on essays all my life. What else was I to do?

Luckily the programs all rejected me. Waiting until I was older before I tried again proved to be a test of my motivation. When I started to spend my free hours reading in an academic field, that was a good indication that I was ready to devote my life to it.

But that is merely a negative reason for waiting. There are positive ones, too. Joining the work force can develop qualities that will aid you in your academic career.

Most obviously, there's time management. Many of us have bad habits as undergraduates. We drink a little too much. We pull all-nighters when there's an assignment due and coast the rest of the time. That can describe people who work in an office, as well. Nevertheless, the rigors of a 9-to-5 schedule made me learn to use my time more efficiently than I had before. And that made for a contrast between me and a few of my grad-student peers.

For example, there was my vampire roommate. I was a newbie excited to be back on a lovely green campus full of the intellectually curious; he was ready to go on the job market. He was smart, funny, and respected in the program. I found out quickly that he was an insomniac: When I made dead-of-night trips to the bathroom, I would hear the TV going.

But he didn't let the condition affect his mood, and he always seemed to beat me out of the apartment in the morning.

Then one afternoon I returned to the apartment after a seminar and heard buzz-saw snoring from his bedroom. Well, he obviously took naps. Not a tortured insomniac after all. (I'm always amazed by people who get out of bed at 10 or 11 a.m., then try to get to sleep at midnight and can't, and on that basis decide they have insomnia. You don't have "insomnia." You sleep too late.)

Finally I discovered the truth one day when I had to get up extra early. I was brushing my teeth at about 6:30 a.m. when my roomie appeared and started washing up, too. "Getting an early start today, huh?" he asked.

"Yeah, I have to make a presentation in a seminar."

He nodded with approval. "Well, I'm off to bed. Cheers!"

So what's the big deal here? He was happy with his life as a vegan vampire, wasn't he?

Well, he didn't do that well on the job market, and I think it was due to his poor work habits. When you set your alarm for 6 or 7 a.m., it gives an urgency to your actions -- you have to talk to people and get things done before everyone goes home at 5 p.m.

But if you get up at 10 a.m. (or, in my roommate's case, at 2 or 3 p.m.), you're living in this twilight world where errands can always be put off and paper-writing delayed -- after all, your creative juices don't get flowing until the moon has fully risen. During his 20's, my roommate had let his undergraduate habits calcify, or, to stick with the vampire metaphor, infect his bloodstream, so that he never lived up to his full potential.

Maybe he is an extreme example, but here's another. During my stint as an office worker, I got used to eating lunch quickly and hustling back to my desk. When I went to grad school, I kept the same routine -- if I went to lunch at 1 p.m., I made sure I was studying, writing, or just copying a stack of papers by 2:15.

Now let's say you're a little more casual about it. You stay at lunch an extra hour because you find the conversation stimulating, even if it's not always on an academic topic. You develop a habit of browsing through the bookstore before you start an afternoon's work. You're losing an hour per day, and it adds up. Wasting, say, 20 hours in a month doesn't sound like that much. But over a year, wasting time at that rate amounts to 240 lost hours -- six full weeks of standard 9-to-5 labor time during which you accomplished absolutely nothing. Over four years, that's 960 hours -- a staggering six months of wasted time.

Do you think you could, say, do the research for an article in that time; or do the research and write it; or even do the research, write, revise, and try to get it published? I think so.

Getting a regular job can also help you learn how to deal with authority figures. It's never easy, in academe or anywhere else. But, by and large, my professors are fairly nice people. They understand me. After all, when they were children they had their noses buried in The Lord of the Rings or in science projects, just like I did.

The nonacademic boss I worked under for two years in Los Angeles provided a contrast. I admired her -- she was strong and smart, the force that kept us putting out a product each month. Every so often she would give you that special compliment that made you glow inside.

Yet it's also true that I hated her guts. Her talent for compliments went along with a genius for belittling people, especially during group meetings. Instead of Office Space, my co-workers constantly made references to Swimming With Sharks, in which Kevin Spacey plays a demonic film producer who's kidnapped and tortured by his assistant. When my boss announced that she was leaving the company, the first thing in my in box was a message from a co-worker titled, "Ding-Dong, the Witch Is Dead."

That is why I'm put off by graduate students who characterize our professors as puppet masters who, at best, make our lives miserable and, at worst, actively conspire to keep us from getting the tenure-track jobs we deserve. For those students, a little perspective would go a long way. I always want to say to them, "Sure, some professors can be jerks, but compared to the monsters I've worked for in the corporate world, these guys are the Muppets."

I believe that working outside the university cultivated habits that have made me a much stronger job candidate inside the university. But I'm not arguing that if you bring a little economy and hard-headedness to grad school, you'll inevitably get the position you want. No, the upshot of my strategy of waiting is a little different.

If I fail on the job market, it will be hard indeed, at least in part because I'll be a few years older than the other jobless Ph.D.'s. But I won't have any regrets because I was experienced enough to know what I was getting into.

A few years ago I had a semi-decent apartment and an urban lifestyle. When I decided I wanted to pursue a doctorate, I read the grim figures and listened to the warnings. I knew that the academic path wouldn't be as comfortable and would have its own unique frustrations, but I took it anyway. If I must now change direction after several years, I won't be able to blame my misfortune on youthful naïveté or on cynical professors who pulled the wool over my eyes.

When we're 22, most of us see the university as a privileged space where we can enjoy a greater degree of intellectual autonomy than in the regular work force. For snide critics, that is the distinction between the "ivory tower" and "real life."

However, those of us who enter Ph.D. programs soon realize that the ivory tower is real life, with all of its bickering, deadlines, and bureaucratic irrationality.

My experience in the workaday world enabled me to see academe without illusions and to enjoy what is best about it. By contrast, my 22-year-old self probably would have had his idealism replaced by cynicism and bitterness. Had I gone to graduate school immediately after college, I would now be living precisely the life of quiet desperation that I vowed against as a book-loving adolescent.