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My Response to Bored in Vernal’s Questions.

Posted by John on May 18th, 2007 at 5:04 pm · 10 Comments

Bored in Vernal asked several pointed questions in her response to my Personal Inventory and Waxing Emo posts. I’ve decided to respond to them in this post, rather than in the comments.

Why have you decided to jettison the dream of being a professor instead of the IT/programming thing? Is it a question of finances? What has made the dream become “gangrenous”? What makes you think that becoming a journalist/author/lawyer is a better option?

The answer to the first question is complex. First of all, it’s highly pragmatic. My IT job is a secure one, and as distracted as I’ve been by my academic pursuits, it’s fed, clothed and housed my family. It has made it possible for Jana to pursue her PhD. I like my boss and the university environment, and my interlibrary loan privileges are such that I can, for example, borrow antique books of Edo-period maps from Yale at no cost. It also helps to satiate my geek-thirst (I have Windows, OS X and Ubuntu Linux running on three separate machines in my office, all supplied by the good taxpayers of the State of California).

My conviction that academia was where I was meant to be meant that I treated my IT career like a duty, a burden, a sacrifice, something to endure until Jana graduated and I could begin pursuing my PhD full-time. Ditching the academic aspirations gives me the freedom to appraise the place of IT in my life and my twelve years of investment in that career.

I’m finding more and more that I’ve poured so much of myself into IT that I can’t discount this investment. Plus, I really like technology. I’m not quite a bleeding-edge geek, but I probably fit the profile of someone who runs in the back of the pack of early adopters. What fascinates me the most about technology, however, is how it transforms society–religion, politics, relationships, how we perceive the world and our place in it. More on that in a future post.

So what “made the dream become ‘gangrenous’”? The waiting. It’s poisoned my dream with cynicism, especially as I look at the insane competition, the crushing doubt, and unemployment that many of my friends in the humanities and social sciences have to deal with. Tenured positions are wonderful, but there’s a huge price to pay to achieve them. Also, I can’t keep putting off my dreams, but I can’t support my family and Jana’s schooling as a PhD student. I refuse to live a postponed life. My response to this conflict is to take a close look at and to adapt my aspirations.

So the first thing to do was to deconstruct my dream, to look at its component parts. I found that “I want to become a professor of religion” is not atomic; it can be divided into smaller parts (which I did in Personal Inventory). I’m doing this on Mind on Fire for the first time, but this analysis is the result of years of introspection and late-night conversations with Jana.

At this point, I can’t tell you whether or not “becoming a journalist/author/lawyer is a better option.” But what I like right now is having options. And that’s a more than I’ve had for a while now.

Tags: Personal

10 responses so far ↓

  • 1 mel // May 18, 2007 at 6:35 pm

    Really, it sounds to me like you’ve made the right decision. I can attest to the personal hell that is doing what you don’t enjoy doing and doing it with no clear options … no hope of getting on with living.

    Life is truly too short and living too precious to blow in exchange for dreams of questionable worth.

    I’ll tell you one other thing, John. Whatever you do, if it deserves half the passion that you’ve expressed in the pages of MoF, it’ll be beautiful.

  • 2 Nicole // May 19, 2007 at 6:58 am

    Coming out of lurking John to tell you as someone with a tenured professorial job that academia is prone to making us think we can’t do anything else. The costs of the work are such that sanity seems to require that we glorify it, making any other occupation out to be less rewarding, less important, less, well, just less.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love my job. But I could do something else and love it. The weight of the attitudes of my peers is such that I had to come to this realization twice over, once as a newly minted PhD on the job market and once when approaching a touch and go tenure decision. Hopefully I won’t forget this time. ;)

    Putting off your life is never a good thing. Good luck with deciding what to do next.

  • 3 Bored in Vernal // May 19, 2007 at 9:34 pm

    I refuse to live a postponed life. My response to this conflict is to take a close look at and to adapt my aspirations.

    Very wise.

    Sounds like the new look at the IT job is timely and productive. As always, it’s fun to join you in your head and see your growth!

  • 4 John // May 19, 2007 at 10:01 pm

    Mel, thank you. That means a lot coming from you.

    Nicole, thanks for emerging from lurkdom! There’s a lyric from the progressive rock band Rush that seems to be appropriate here:

    We each pay a fabulous price
    For our visions of paradise

  • 5 Elise // May 19, 2007 at 11:46 pm

    John, are you truly letting go of your PhD dream, or is it just going on a back burner? Like a really, really, really far back burner? Do you think it is still possible that you might do it later, but you are just going to let it go for now?

    I ask because some of my dreams are on a far back burner and I’m saving them for later. They aren’t a priority now, or maybe I just recognize that I don’t have time now, but they are there. Maybe I’ll accomplish them or maybe not, but I like keeping them there for later. I like to entertain the idea of them, whether 10 or 20 or 50 years down the road.

  • 6 John // May 20, 2007 at 6:28 am

    Elise, I think I’m going to truly let go of it. I’ve thought a lot about what a PhD gets you:
    - It’s the gateway into the academic profession;
    - Broad knowledge of a field as well as deep specialization;
    - Research and writing skills (for the most part);
    - A social network with others who have the same specialization;
    - Social legitimization and respect as a field expert.

    I’m sure I’m missing benefits as well. Here are some of the costs:
    - Getting a PhD in the humanities and most social sciences is high risk, especially if your expectations are set on a tenure-track position at a research university.
    - The path is pretty narrow–your choice of advisors and grad schools is pretty limited and it’s difficult to change anything once you gain momentum (ironically, this is one of the things that attracted me to academia–I know exactly what I need to do to succeed).
    - It takes a long time. I’m 36 now, and even if I put this off for 4-5 years, we’re looking at me being nearly 50 when I begin professoring (professing? I love verbalizing nouns).
    - Academics are pretty limited in their geographic mobility.
    - Coordinating the careers of married academics is very difficult.

    I’ve discovered a few things about myself that put me at odds with getting a PhD.
    - I have a strong anti-authoritarian and anti-tradition streak (which many academics share), but you have to jump through a lot of hoops before you finally get tenure.
    - You can become respected as a subject expert without reaching the depth that most academics go. While society needs those who are highly specialized, I like swimming in the middle depths. Everything I study is interdisciplinary: ritual, religion, gender. My strength is my ability to transcend boundaries and synthesize my medium-depth knowledge in a number of fields, and I like this. Also (this will make me sound so much like the stereotypical American male), I’m scared of a life-long commitment to one subject.
    - I want to experiment with using a mix of new and old techniques to get the benefits of being an academic while avoiding the costs. I can use the web and article/book-writing, for example, to develop and then sell myself as a subject-matter expert, and to become the go-to person for some knowledge niche. I want to play not only with the information, but I want to challenge old hierarchies of accessing, distributing, and producing that information. This last bit requires elaboration, which I plan to do in a later post (this comment has grown post-like in its proportions!)

  • 7 C. L. Hanson // May 20, 2007 at 7:06 am

    I completely relate to this dilemma, and in particular with liking to “swim in the middle depths” intellectually.

    Since I left the LDS church as a teenager, I had the advantage of more leeway to choose to finish my Ph.D. first before even thinking of having kids. But as I was finishing up my last couple of semesters (writing my dissertation), I decided I didn’t want to be a professor, even though it had been my dream. The main reasons were that I felt like the amount of mental effort and concentration that would be required while doing research in my field of specialization would hinder me from exploring a wider range of topics (outside of Mathematics). Plus, getting to the point of getting tenure requires so much work and sacrifice (especially lack of geographical mobility and difficulty in coordinating married academic careers), and I didn’t feel like I was passionate enough about Number Theory to commit to that path.

    Like you, I took up a career in IT (software engineering) that I’ve enjoyed for the most part.

    More recently though, the positive results I’ve gotten from the writing I’ve posted on my blog (essays, book reviews, my novel, etc.) led me to the idea that I could become a serious writer, supporting myself as a columnist or book critic while writing fiction on the side. Then my realistic side kept making me ask myself “Which is going to pay the mortgage? Being a writer? Or my real job?”

    Then — as in your case — the whole “dream deferred” thing started poisoning my IT career, making me feel like I was doing it out of obligation.

    The good news is that I’m on an upswing now. I’ve just finished the post-editorial corrections on the second edition of my Java book, and I’m really pleased with how it has turned out. It’s making me feel like I have a talent for what I’m doing and I’m not wasting my time by writing software and not literature. ;)

    Plus I can keep up my writing on the side, no problem. And my IT job isn’t keeping me from writing another novel — I don’t have a story in mind yet anyway, and I’ll be ready when inspiration strikes… ;)

  • 8 Elaine Frei // May 20, 2007 at 7:07 am

    Just a thought I had reading your comment about the costs and benefits of pursuing a Ph.D….

    I don’t know if you’ve found this to be true in the process of working on your Master’s, John, but one of the main reasons that I decided against pursing a further degree right after I finished my BA was that I’d heard too many stories from others who had been there about how necessary it had been for them to toe the ideological and theoretical line in the program they were enrolled in, in order to be successful in the program. In other words, if they expressed disagreement with the theoretical perspective of their department, they could have some problems that might even include not being granted their degree. That sounded way too much more like indoctrination rather than education to me. I was also afraid, by the way, that my tendency (like you said yours is) toward interdisciplinary approaches wouldn’t go down well.

    I don’t know. Perhaps this is only true in anthropology, but I heard the same thing from people in education and in history as well, and I’d run into it a little bit even in undergrad work when I was a history major at Fresno State before I fled the school and changed over to anthropology.

  • 9 shana // May 20, 2007 at 6:19 pm

    Two questions:

    Have you thought about Public School Teaching?
    Have you thought about Community College Teaching?

  • 10 John // May 21, 2007 at 11:07 am

    Chanson, thanks for comparing notes. It’s good to see that someone else shares my fear of commitment to one subject and the feeling of being torn between two possible career paths.

    And I’m glad that you’re on an upswing!

    Elaine, I think there is tremendous variety from department to department, but I’ve seen similar situations. Some professors make incredible mentors and will support you even if you don’t agree, while others seem to set up personal fiefdoms where the price of fealty is ideological assent.

    Shana, the CC teaching is more immediately accessible, since I’m less than a year away from getting my Master’s. I may do some teaching on the side for now.

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