Hired Education: Career Advice from Someone who Doesn't Know What She's Doing

I have only been a Masters graduate for about a month now, but I began that soul-sucking, hair-tearing, and other-cliché-causing process of job searching since March. It made the emotional roller coaster of grad school seem like nothing--in any given week, I went from excited, to nervous, to despairing, to hopeful, to hopeless, to eating a tub of ice cream. I was so sure I wouldn't find a job remotely related to my field, I applied and interviewed for a vet assistant job at an animal hospital I'm pretty sure was a "forced positivity" cult.

Others told me, "you will find a job. Trust me, you will." I did not trust them. Instead, I looked up things such as "how to be homeless," and "should I sell my soul to the sciences?" But today, I'm going to show up in your Internet-space uninvited to tell you why you should trust those people who are saying those things, as well as give you some unsolicited advice about landing said job.

Because nothing says "obnoxious blogger" quite like a list, am I right?

1) Start early.
This is essentially my mantra for everything in life, but it's especially important in regards to the job search. I didn't start looking at job postings until I was actively applying. When I looked at the CSU administrative jobs page, I realized that while the job descriptions fit my career goals nicely, I was missing a lot of the preferred (and sometimes required) skill sets. Had I looked at the jobs page a semester or year earlier, I could have started building those skills. Granted, you never know what jobs will be available at the time of your search, but I've noticed that many of the administrative jobs I applied to required similar skills and experiences.

I will say, however, that I started making connections early, and that is a hugely important step, even if it doesn't land you a job right away. For instance, having gained a preliminary interest in instructional design, I met with an instructional designer early on to discuss career options. She appreciated being able to help a fellow Rhet/Comper, and, almost poetically, that job opened up a month before graduation.

2) Don't despair: ditch the "worst case scenario" mindset.
I have a habit of conjuring up the worst possible outcomes in my mind (not the aforementioned "how to be homeless" Google search). But you will drive yourself mad if you maintain this idea that your degree and life amounted to nothing, and you might as well live in a cave.

I once received advice from a professor who said that "when you're feeling worthless, look at your life as a data set. Take your life experiences and résumé as evidence that counters the hypothesis that you're not good enough." Then he went on to tell me I wasn't good enough, but that's beside the point.

You have a degree. You have unique qualities and experiences that you can bring to a job. And if your dream job committee doesn't hire you, someone else will. It just takes time. Which brings me to my next point.

3) Be patient (and do not, for the love of everything good in this world, compare with your colleagues).
It's easy to deem the academic calendar as the norm. Things happen far in advance in academia--I knew that I would be heading to grad school in August by the start of April. But even if you're applying to academic jobs, the timeline is much tighter (and can also change).

I applied for a teaching job at CSU in February, and got rejected in May. Then, just yesterday, something changed, and I was offered some sections. I remember, after applying to 30+ jobs, despairing that I wasn't even getting interviews, only to get interviews two months later. Recognize that hiring committees have hundreds of applications to wade through, and just because you aren't hearing anything within two weeks, doesn't mean you're automatically rejected.

It also means that just because your colleague was offered a full-time job before you, that doesn't mean you will never get a full-time job for as long as you live.

4) In order to have a realistic timeline, keep a spreadsheet.

As much as I'm obsessed with organization, it's not in my nature to keep a spreadsheet. But once my partner was all, "hey, you should probably keep a spreadsheet," it changed my life completely. I had a visual representation of when I applied, when I should follow up, and what my follow up status was. I was able to create a system in which I would follow up after two weeks so I wouldn't have to play any guessing games.

5) Be prepared--but not too prepared.

This is a tricky one. I don't need to tell people who go on for advanced degrees to be prepared--for many of us, research is more akin to an obsession than an obligation. When I started interviewing, I had a tendency to be over-prepared, for fear of freezing up during a question (especially during phone interviews, which are quite possibly the most dreadful experience ever). What I realized, though, is that by getting to the interview stage, I had already established that I was qualified and knowledgable. What the committee wants to know is if you are a person that could see themselves working with. I initially had an air of desperation and "yes ma'am, no ma'am." It's not cute in dating, and it's no more successful in job interviews.

When I interviewed for the job I eventually accepted, I was so exhausted, I thought, "I'll just go for it and be myself." I still prepared, but left room for me to just...talk. I made jokes, talked about this blog, and called my former supervisor a superhero. I was, like, a person in the world with a personality. And apparently that worked in my favor. 

And, always remember that this too shall pass. 

Breaking Up With Yoga

So I'm not exactly breaking up with yoga per se--more like casually seeing. I still try to do yoga at least 3 times a week (often with my favorite yogi YouTubers Adriene and Kassandra), but I'm taking a little break from capital-y "YOGA." I've been doing this for a while now, but only now have I gotten comfortable in distancing myself from an identity that was integral to this blog (it was, after all, the second necessity).

I have no qualms with the actual physical practice of yoga. As someone who suffers tremendously from anxiety disorder, I attribute yoga to my increased sense of calm, as well as my ability to make rational decisions and maintain a positive attitude. I have also struggled with disordered forms of eating and self-loathing for roughly 9 years, and yoga has taught me intuitive eating and self-care. It is a practice I hope to carry with me for the rest of my life.

But, for peace of mind and acceptance, I have to finally shed this "yogini" identity.

From the start of this blog, I struggled with feeling like I didn't quite fit in the yoga world. I reconciled this point by coming up with "Lipstick Yogi" trend, and deeming myself oh-so-clever. I had discussed feeling like an imposter, an outsider far more than interested anyone other than myself. I thought maybe there was something wrong with me, and that if I just drank a green smoothie or did sun salutations at 5am every day, I would be more "spiritual."

Only now can I propose that maybe there is something wrong with yoga.

In fall of 2015, I applied for a yoga teacher training based on the studio owner's suggestion that I do so. From day one of my yoga teacher training, I felt like something was off. I never clicked with the owner, and I felt expected to pour heaps of money into the studio because I was an active member there for so long. I got the sinking feeling that each lecture with the owner was an episode of "stars: they're just like us!". I was also expected to miss a week of college classes (something that was never mentioned when I registered for the training) to go to India and pay for the owner's meditation retreat because she just felt that "it was right." When I brought up my concerns with the owner, she gathered the teacher trainers together for a meditation practice and said "see, I did this for you."

While I was upset and confused about seeing a place that I loved and trusted as a manipulative business practice, enough time has passed for my bitterness to fade. However, this extreme wake-up call solidified some of my suspicions about yoga as a whole.

I understand that yoga studios are businesses, and have to make money to survive. But what I can't stand is that most studios are cleverly disguised as therapeutic safe-havens that have no interest in your money--that they are glorified parents, just interested in your well-being. I highly doubt I would have had to register for my studio owner's retreat, had that been the case. Being a holistic center that focuses on self-care is no excuse to not lay out a clear business plan that informs its customers just how much they will be paying, and why. Adding on costs and payments isn't a change in the winds, or an intuition about the well-being of a yogi. It's a scam.

One of the biggest lessons that yoga taught me is, paradoxically, what got me out of yoga. I should have trusted my intuition before walking into that teacher training, and I should have stood up to the owner when she engaged in practices I didn't trust. But I'm also thankful that I stayed as long as I did because it showed me that the studio lifestyle might not necessarily be for me, and I can do without the spiritual accessories of yoga.

So, in light of this change, I have decided to take this blog in a different direction. As yoga is no longer a primary necessity in my life, the original title feels outdated. So, for now, we'll call this "coffee, kitties, and corruption," as I'm a sucker for alliteration, adore coffee and cats, and cover issues of corruption in higher ed. It's not a perfect title, but it no longer feels like I'm trying to squeeze into an identity that no longer fits.

Hey 6 years into a blog, change is bound to happen.

Academics Aren't on YouTube, and We Should Be

From day one as a graduate student, I shouted my love of YouTube from the rooftops. Given that YouTube as been a significant part of my life since 2011, I was ecstatic to apply an unhealthy obsession an interesting hobby to my scholarly endeavors. I recall, during our Rhet/Comp meet and greet, my professor had barely finished asking "so what do you want to study?" and I said, "YouTube. There's like, no scholarship on it, so there's definitely a gap in the literature!"

I was, as it often turns out, exceptionally wrong, as there is tons of scholarship on YouTube (see Lehua Ledbetter's work on rhetorics of identity in the beauty community and Samara Anarbaeva's article about identity on YouTube as a whole, for instance), so I was by no means forging a completely new path in academia (oh, what a foolish first-year I was!). I got an education on cyberfeminism, the slippery nature of identifying authenticity online, and digital manifestations of intersectional feminism. There was a consistent emphasis on the practical nature of academia--several scholars noted that in order to "do" cyberfeminism, we should venture outside of our scholarly bubbles, and engage with those in the digital world, translating our ideas into something accessible and digestable.

At first, this idea scared me. Many of my professors and colleagues assumed that, because I liked to study YouTube, I also created YouTube videos. While I did go through a "Jenna Marbles wannabe" phase my freshman year of college, for the most part, my insecurity about my face, voice, and intelligence kept me from creating content on the very platform I spent so much time analyzing.

Perhaps part of this fear stemmed from the observation that, despite encouraging digital engagement, very few scholars vlogged on YouTube. There are "highly academic" videos that viewers would have to actively seek out, but for the most part, daily vloggers and beauty gurus are separate from the scholarly community.

There are exceptions of course, as Lehua Ledbetter refers to her own insecurity about being "found out" as a beauty guru, and I have stumbled upon a student who recently got his PhD at Oxford and vlogged the experience:

Simon Clark in particular has gained quite a following, and has discussed moving into using YouTube to be a full-time science educator. This is the kind of digital engagement scholars call for, but both YouTubers here seem to exhibit a sense of shame in making these career/life choices. They'll say things like "I know this is weird, but..." or "as my channel grew, I felt an increasing sense of terror and anxiety that I would be "found out”—as an academic, as a feminist, someone who should know better than to participate in activities that seem fundamentally at odds with the professional identity that I had so carefully cultivated over the years. I was participating in discourses of consumerism, female gender performance, and appearance that did not align with my beliefs about who I should be as a woman of color, and liberal academic" (Ledbetter). There's almost this sense that YouTubers who also exist in the academy should pick one or the other, or that scholars can still be deemed serious "despite" their work on YouTube.

One of my primary goals as a grad student was to truly bridge that gap between scholarly and popular audiences. I felt tremendous guilt for not creating a YouTube video for my final project, so, a few weeks before graduation, I made this, and showed it to the entire Rhet/Comp cohort during final presentations:

I, like Lehua, felt a tad insecure for showcasing a quirky sense of humor I usually leave outside of school. I cringed at my makeup puns and watched with horror as the most scholarly of scholars wrinkled their eyebrows and looked exceptionally confused. But, I ultimately recognized that I had to get outside of my academic comfort zone to reach teen girls and send along the message that watching a beauty video isn't going to turn them into an anorexic Kardashian right then and there. And, as an added bonus, it encouraged me to reject stereotypes about what it means to study English, and to integrate wit and voice into my academic writing, thus further pushing the boundaries of what scholarship can and should look like.

It seems quite obvious that YouTube scholars should perhaps create content on YouTube, but I have rambled on about its benefits anyway. There are academic topics, however, that don't as obviously lend themselves to YouTube, and this is where scholars could break the mold even further.

Like a true academic, I'm going to elaborate on this point with a "call to action": I have been working on the Center for the Study of Academic Labor website, and have compiled resources for adjunct support and activism. In searching for sources, I investigated YouTube, hoping that there was an ex-adjunct (or even a brave current adjunct) who could tell her story in a vlog format. Outside of Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, I couldn't find anything. In fact, the adjuncts who did identify themselves seemed to create soft, cushy content, saying things like "teachers talk about you!" but forgetting to mention the poverty wages, lack of benefits, and zero job security that come with the job.

(Vlogger name: Hannah McNeely)

Making content about adjunct exploitation can be tricky, especially given that speaking out against treatment of adjuncts can result in getting fired, threatened, or harassed. Most adjuncts aren't in a position to tell their stories, which I totally understand and respect. But maybe those who benefit from a tenure track position, or who quit academia, could stand in front of a camera and vlog about these very real issues that affect students and families alike.

I understand that many of us don't have the time or resources to devote a serious amount of energy to YouTube (although, many of the video production resources that are available to students are also available to faculty!). But it may be worth trying out a video or two and further bridging the gap on a platform that could very well erase some of the mystery and misunderstandings surrounding academia.