Ten Years Out of Academia

Grad school theoretically expands your marketability and job prospects. What happens when it narrows them?

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One of many precious views I left behind in Walla Walla (Aaron Rigsby / Getty)

Dana Stevens — longtime film critic for Slate, author of a truly great Buster Keaton book, co-host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest — was one of the first famous people to talk to me on Twitter. You might not think of a film critic as famous, but back in 2010, as I spent long summer days in the basement of the library at the University of Texas squinting at microfilm of old fan magazines, I definitely did. She thought the scholarly work I was doing was interesting; I’d post a ridiculous headline about, oh, Bette Davis and like three people would “star” it. She was often one of them.

Her acknowledgment was gratifying beyond measure. It’s clear to me now but was unclear to me then that what I always wanted was to write deeply about the pop culture I loved for a popular audience. I fell in love with this sort of writing by devouring it in Entertainment Weekly in the early ‘90s, then fell deeper when I found the writing of Pauline Kael and Anthony Lane. But I was a connection-less kid from Idaho; I never dreamed of being like them. The dream that was accessible to me was academia.

Dana and I remained Twitter-friendly for years, and in 2015 — after I’d moved to New York to join BuzzFeed News — she asked me to come to an episode of Slate’s Spoiler Special. We went for coffee at some charming shadowy place in the West Village and talked about the research for her then-in-process book. I remember mentioning something frustrating about the academic process a few times, but she never took the bait. 

She had a Ph.D. in comp lit from Berkeley, a department that was home to some of the legends of film studies. But she had left that path behind in the early 2000s. A little more than a decade later, that work was obviously foundational — she was writing a book about Buster Keaton! — but she never wielded her past as a discursive weapon. There was no “Ph.D” in her Twitter bio or email signature. I was amazed and bewildered by how little she seemed to be haunted by it. Which, of course, said a lot more about me, and where I was, than her.

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Earlier this month, I realized — on a dog walk, with little fanfare — that it’d been ten years since I’d left academia. Or, more precisely: since academia closed its doors to me.

From 2012 to 2014, I had been a visiting professor at the liberal arts college I’d previously attended, hired by my former professor. The idea he had pitched me was straightforward but sneaky in a classic academic way. He wanted to expand and legitimize the department which, at the time, was just him and a bunch of classes cross-listed from other departments. There was no “line” for an additional professor, but he could justify a contingent hire (“visiting” professor, e.g., someone who’s there for a year, maybe two, often as a sabbatical replacement) until he got funding for the additional tenure-track position, at which point there’d be a national search — but I’d be the “inside candidate.” There were many reasons for me to believe this would indeed happen, not least of them being the fact that I had watched it happen — in a slightly different way — for the very professor who was now head of the department and had recruited me.

But that was back in 2001. This was 2014, and I was not hired. Someone else very worthy and capable was. People ask me all the time if I don’t look back with a certain sort of perverse gratitude, because that decision allowed my career to take the turns that led me to where I am today. But the truth is no. I’m happy now, but I also would’ve been deeply happy to be a professor at that school that I loved, in that small town that I also loved. I had been building so relentlessly towards that future, pouring every ounce of myself into its possibility. When that road was closed, I crumbled.

Of course I had applied to other jobs as a safety net, including one that still wanted me to come out for a campus visit. But I didn’t have any other options. I had no marketable skills; I had a long CV but no resume. I had around $5000 in savings and $110,000 in student debt and would need eight more years of public service to apply for loan forgiveness. I cried the way you cry when you feel like your life is over. I wondered what it would feel like to move back in with my mom at age 33. I refused to speak to the head of the department — save when absolutely necessary — for the rest of the semester. When my beloved students mounted a protest campaign, I reveled in it, even as I understood its hopelessness.

With distance, I’m embarrassed I buried myself so deeply in that one-way channel. I’m talking about the possibility of that specific job, of course, but also about a career as a media studies academic. Grad school and the skills you acquire there theoretically expand your marketability and job prospects, but in the humanities, it actually narrows them.

I graduated debt-free from undergrad in 2003. When I arrived in Seattle with flush pockets from massive tips from my summer at a dude ranch in Wyoming, I couldn’t find a job as a server — or anything else. But I only really spent two weeks applying for jobs before I settled into childcare. I was so used to things coming easily to me that when a job didn’t I decided to take the easiest route and bide my time until I could go back to doing the thing I knew I was good at: school.

My advisor — the man who later hired me — had identified that impulse in me early on. When I arrived at college, I had no interest in media studies. I had always been a math person with a little English interest on the side. But my first semester, I was struggling mightily in Calculus 3 — it was taught in a different style from how I’d learned Calc 1 and 2 at my local college, and again, I was not used to struggling — but excelling in the “Intro to Fiction” class taught my advisor. He said to me: why don’t you take this Westerns class I’m offering in the Spring. It was nearly impossible to get into, but he was reserving a few spots for freshmen. The only Western I’d seen was Dances With Wolves but the vulnerable part of me, adrift in that first academic year away from home, said yes, absolutely, yes.

Over the next three years, I took film class after film class. I became one of the first four “Rhetoric-Film Studies” majors to graduate. I wrote a ridiculous and self-important senior thesis. I became a better writer and a moderately more interesting thinker. I watched so many movies and came to love so many stars. When my professor said things like “you should think about submitting this to an academic journal” or “you should start thinking about grad school,” I didn’t know what that meant, exactly, except, you’re good at this.

Did I want to become a professor or did I want to do the thing I was praised for? I do think I felt passionate about a certain, very basic style of film studies, the sort where you watch Goodfellas for the first time and feel like shouting THE MAGIC OF CINEMA!!!! But what was actually appealing to me was the straight, followable line from grad school to job. I would apply to grad schools the same way I had applied to undergrad schools. I would get into all of them, the same way that I had been accepted everywhere I applied for undergrad. I would get a PhD, and then I would get a job with that PhD. And even if there were bumps in the way — like what had happened to my own professor, who had been hired in as a Visiting Professor and then had a tenure-track position created for him — they would be surmountable if I put in the time and work and my students loved me enough.

Imagine my surprise when, that first year out of college, I applied to six graduate programs — and was roundly rejected by all of them! I was rejected by the programs I had no business applying to and I was rejected from the Master’s Programs without funding. No one told me as much at the time, but I was rejected because my application evidenced a person with a broad love for movies and very little understanding of what she wanted to do about that love. My thesis was middling. I sort of wanted to do something related to the West? I also had an English minor, and a lot of these programs were housed in English Departments? I had no scholarly perspective or philosophy. I thought they would just understand me as worthy. What monumental hubris.

Rejection should have dissuaded me but it simply re-motivated me. I took a night class at the University of Washington from someone with a PhD from one of the schools I was applying to so I could get a letter of recommendation from him. I retook the GREs. I applied again, and was accepted by several programs — none of them with funding, but I thought paying for your MA was just part of what you did. I said yes to the University of Oregon and yes to the $30,000 in out-of-state tuition I’d pay for that first year. I didn’t understand that accepting people like me was necessary for the program to fund its PhD program and, after that first year, staff its undergraduate writing courses. I just thought I had worked hard and solved my problem.

I don’t want to rehash every year of my academic experience but the same phenomenon happened again and again: I mistook the necessary machinations of the system for praise and affirmation that I was succeeding and would continue to do so. I thought getting peer-reviewed papers accepted early and often meant my work was good when it actually meant there were more journals, some of dubious prestige, demanding more content. I thought getting into a “top” PhD program would be an assured job but they were just filling a quota. But you have to believe otherwise, otherwise you’re working so hard, over so many years, with so much debt — to what end?

This is where the cultish components of academia come to the fore. The institution thrives on our fear of failure, on the mortification of “sunk cost,” and by sucking up our available time and resources in ways that make it impossible to cultivate other skills or quadrants of life. We stay, despite so many signs we should leave, because we have allowed the work to paper over the doors. If others left, we shamed or pitied them; if others wanted in, we cheered them. That thinking has shifted significantly since then, but at the time, particularly for someone in the very thick of the job market, it felt like there were two options: sure, it was suffocating in the room, and everyone was starving and cranky. But if you left it, it really did feel like you would cease to exist.

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When I didn’t get the job, back in 2014, it was like I was in that door-less room and the ceiling began to fall down. My weekends and summers were spent working. I didn’t have any hobbies to speak of. The vast majority of my friends were academics. I couldn’t afford to move to be with my non-academic friends in Seattle. I was dating another academic whose prospects were similarly dead-ended. My specialty was such that I couldn’t even get a job teaching freshman comp at a community college. I had willingly and eagerly limited my options again, and again, and again.

Save one area: writing online. I was often told by other academics that even though it seemed like having a more public profile would help an application, it was generally a mark against you. That logic may have changed somewhat over the last decade, but at the time, it was the one piece of academic advice I defied, probably because I was too addicted to people responding to my work. I had a Wordpress blog where I wrote about my research; I tweeted; I eventually wrote for The Hairpin, where many of you reading this now first found me, which then led to writing for other sites.

I could justify this writing because it was still “work” — but it also gave me one (equally precarious) option that was not academic. And as I have written about many times, I happened to be doing it at a time in internet history when there was an opening for (unpaid) writers to make a name for themselves….that was in the process of becoming a moment in internet history when VC money attempted to give those writers (and what we now call “creators”) jobs and make money off of them.

In other words, I got spectacularly lucky. I cannot give others advice on how to follow my path because the conditions that created that path no longer exist. I didn’t roll up the ladder behind me but it would be deeply dishonest to pretend that it still exists. The funding for it has vanished. And when I find myself wishing that other academics had told me as much about the situation for new graduates in academia, I have to remember how gradually the ladder disappeared and how eager I was to ignore their warnings.

The combination of my class, my race, and my previous success had convinced me that hard work would bring me wherever I wanted. It’s not a tragedy that that didn’t happen for me. The tragedy is we reproduce this thinking in a way that allows individuals to feel that their fate — good or ill — is the result of their work alone, instead of the result of complicated, apathetic, and often utterly random systems. That doesn’t mean that people who “made it” aren’t good at what they do. It just doesn’t mean that those who didn’t make it are bad at it.

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Sometimes I jokingly reference “my previous life as a professor,” but it’s increasingly apt. After a year or two of clinging to academic practices, norms, and self-honorifics — practices I now understand as manifestations of grief — I sometimes forget I have a Ph.D. altogether. I imagine I feel today some version of what Dana felt back in 2015. Grateful for it, and all the ways it’s influenced and informed my thinking and even the way I can facilitate an audience conversation at a book event — and distant from it.

I look at the last ten years of my life and I see endless adaptability. I gave my last final to my students and got a plane to New York the next day. I had to learn how to be in an office, how to go to lunch with a source, how to be journalist. I developed a different relationship with compensation and a new way of thinking of my labor. I worked all the time but still worked far less than I did as an academic; my understanding of a “normal” amount of work was so broken that it took me years to figure out what balance might even approximate.

My industry kept shifting and my beat kept moving and people kept getting laid off. The manic digital media optimism from my early years at BuzzFeed began to fade, but we were all too engulfed in Trump coverage and Facebook-inflated traffic to really understand. I started writing a newsletter on the side, a home for all the thoughts that still frizzled at the tips of my fingers but didn’t quite fit in a traditional piece. I didn’t realize but should’ve known: I was once again building a life raft away from my ever-narrowing prospects.

What I learned in academia is what others in unstable and dying industries learn: that hard work guarantees nothing, that a union is essential but can only do so much, that you can only justify doing more for and with less for so long before something begins to harden inside. I’ve become vigilant to shifts in the landscape, far more self-preservative than I’d like, and downright hostile to requests to labor for free. I am at once happy for my former colleagues who’ve been able to find positions that work for them and furious about the way the system has injured, impoverished, and demoralized so many others.

But I also feel that anger and grief diluting into something like apathy. I’m more willing to see and name my agency in my journey through the system, yet I’m wary of shifting too much blame from the system itself, which is held together by passion, absolutely, but also by fear and precarity. The solution isn’t making sure everyone who enters academia gets a job; the solution is revamping the funding structure (and structure in general) of higher ed entirely, including tenure requirements and departmental structures, performance norms, treatment of graduate cohorts, all of it.

So I listen to and read the people fighting the good enduring fight while also recognizing that my experience and particular bitterness is out of date. The post-humanities Ph.D. options have broadened significantly, and the grad school advice from most academics I know has shifted dramatically. People are more honest — and there are simply far more testimonies available online — about what an academic career does to your life trajectory.

But I still don’t think we talk frankly enough about what so many are seeking when they apply to grad school — and that includes med school and law school, too. Some of these potential students want the money and class position, full stop. Some are deeply passionate in a way that they simply cannot understand any future other than inside this path. But most are excellent students with very little experience of failure in search of some way, any way, of revisiting a structure they associate with nurturing and safety.

When it comes to these students, the best gift we can give them — whether they are our children, our advisees, our peers, our employees, or just ourselves — is clear communication of worth. It’s spaces to fail with security and create and build community outside of resume-building. It’s ongoing assurance of their value: not because of their grades, or their ability to “work hard,” but simply because they are. It’s respect, which looks a lot different than surveillance. Creating these environments requires a lot of work, most of it invisible. It’s arduous in part because it requires refusing so many legible norms of “good” parenting or mentorship. But its eventual value is beyond measure.

The legacy of an exploitative institution is long. It narrows your world and hardens your heart. But the legacy of mentorship and parenting like that — it might not lead to as much money or as many accolades, but it builds an expansive foundation for a life characterized by surprise, growth, reflection, and gratitude. My parents gave me a lot of that, but my personality was always too stubbornly oriented towards others’ praise. So now, ten years out of academia, I find myself effectively re-mentoring myself. What is my value, as opposed to others’ value of me? Who am I, apart from my ability to do a specific sort of work? Increasingly, astonishingly, the answer seems to be: quite a lot. ●

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