Traveling Ph.D.

Blogger’s Note: Today is the first day of school, here in southern Indiana. I wanted to celebrate by sharing this blog entry that I wrote last summer. I still stand by my advice. You may work as a professor, but don’t let it become your whole identity. You — yes, you! — are entitled to have a life while you are on the tenure-track. Trust me and learn from my mistakes — MT

I’m feeling fairly reflective these days. You know, thinking deep thoughts and all that jazz. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve achieved many of the goals I set out for myself (bought a house, got tenure, got promoted). Maybe it’s the approaching school year. Maybe it’s the fact that The Coach is back to football, which gives me a ton of time to think. Or it could be that pesky birthday that ends in zero that’s coming up at the end of the year. Who knows?

What I do know is that over the past six years, I’ve learned a great many things – things that I am just beginning to appreciate now that I have tenure. Thus, I’m offering you The Traveling Ph.D.’s List of Things that I Learned on the Tenure Track:

Lesson 1: Fear is a great motivator.

Although I was raised in a middle-class family (yes, you can have money and still have a crazy family), I was the first person in my father’s family to graduate from college in a long, long time. My grandfather, who died before I was born, had a college degree, but my father dropped out of school when he blew out his knee playing football. Both of my aunts married young and went to work in factories. I only had one cousin who went to college and he dropped out to join the army. So, I spent a great deal of my 20s feeling like the “great hope” of our family – working my way through college, through a very unnecessary master’s degree, through my Ph.D. After all that hard work, I certainly didn’t want to fail at achieving tenure.

It wasn’t the idea of losing my job that was scary – I could have gone back to work in the not-for-profit sector – it was the fear of failure that kept me going. Well that and the fact that my sixth grade teacher called me retarded (and sadly, I am *still* not over that). I would wake up in the middle of the night, fresh from a dream about work, and drag myself to the computer to work on my dissertation (not done when I took my job), and later, to work on my research. Almost every article I have published over the last six years was written in the deep, dead hours of the night.

Lesson 2: I should have spent more time living my life.

During my first three years at my current job, I spent every weekend in my office. Every weekend, both Saturdays and Sundays. I wrote course proposals for a program that I wasn’t the director of. I graded more papers than I probably should have assigned. I over-prepped every class session because I was so afraid that my students would see through my shiny new Ph.D. and realize that I was a gigantic fraud. I was tired, crabby, and annoyed – so annoyed that I applied for lots of jobs in other places, places that I couldn’t afford to live, places that my husband wouldn’t move to, places that looked like the grass would be greener. I did get offers, but nothing compelling enough to make me start the tenure clock all over again.

I don’t have kids, but I did have family obligations. My father was pretty sick the first year I was at USC, but I didn’t have enough time to spend with him. Granted, he was in a nursing home seven hours away, but I still felt guilty about the fact that I felt like I could only get away when he was on his death bed (which happened two or three times that year). When my father did die, I took one day off of work to arrange his affairs. That’s it. One day. But, you know, I should have placed myself, my husband, and my family first more often.

Lesson 3: I should have learned to say no more often.

Repeat after me: “Service is not your friend.” I know that’s not the politically correct thing to say, but it’s true. If your colleagues are telling you that service counts as much as research and teaching, they are lying to you. Now, I am not saying that you should avoid all service – after all, everyone should pitch in when it comes to advising students, advising organizations, and hiring their new colleagues. What I am saying is that junior faculty members should not have to shoulder all of the service obligations for their department. It’s not fair to hand all of that work to individuals who are prepping new courses and trying to get their research out the door. You should do enough service to be collegial, but not so much that it takes over your life. Learn how to say “no” without really saying no.

Lesson 4: I should have worked with my door closed.

I’m a talker, I admit it. If you wander into my office, I will have a nice, long chat with you. Students, colleagues – it doesn’t matter. The problem is, if you’re trying to get your research done, you can’t be talking all the time. This brings me to three corollaries:

• Corollary A: You should be accessible to your students, but that doesn’t mean you have to be accessible 24 hours a day. Set aside a certain amount of time each day where you don’t answer the door, the phone, or your email. You need that time for yourself.
• Corollary B: Email is great, but it should not overwhelm your life. Don’t answer student emails at midnight. Turn Outlook off at a reasonable hour each night and don’t turn it back on again until the sun comes up.
• Corollary C: If you can’t resist the temptation to answer the door/phone, get out of your office. Work in the library, a coffee shop, at home. Just go somewhere where you can have some peace.

Lesson 5: Take a vacation.

Listen to me carefully: Just because you are on the tenure track, you should not spend all of your time working. It’s counterproductive. If you’re like me, you’ll get annoyed. You’ll spend all your energy being resentful and that just gums up the works. Trust me. Your brain needs time to rejuvenate itself. And when I say, take a vacation, I don’t mean take a vacation and do research. No! What I mean is that you need to leave your work behind and get the heck out of Dodge. Think about it – if you are thousands of miles from home, you can’t do anything about work problems anyways, so you can sit back and enjoy yourself.

Finis

Originally Published: August 20, 2009