How I lost sight of me in this career
And how I'm finding her again.
My goal of becoming a college teacher was the driving force behind my decision at the age of 32 to earn a doctorate degree. After finishing college, I began teaching ESL overseas and held a number of other teaching positions until I started my doctorate nearly a decade later. I loved teaching, and I wanted to do it at a deeper level in the college classroom. It wasn’t that I didn’t like research and writing; it was just not the leading factor.
But after looking into the realities of getting a PhD and working for a university, I realized that I would have to play the research game if I wanted to do what I loved.
When I got to my PhD program, I dove headfirst into learning academic research and writing techniques. Doing so required me to adopt the values of the academy and pretend that, for the time being, research took precedence over teaching. Although I developed as a teacher and learned a lot from my classes in graduate school, a lot of my efforts were focused on streamlining my teaching rather than improving it.
When I first started playing the academic game in graduate school, I saw it as merely a means to an end. For the most part, I built my career on the premise that I had to become a perfect academic before I could get a job. I built my CV through conferences, publications, awards, honors, and other metrics valued by the academy in order to land a faculty position where I could teach. My goal was to work at a teaching-focused institution and not a research-intensive one.
Lessons from Butler
Judith Butler teaches us that we learn our identities through repetitive actions that become so ingrained that they feel natural, and we believe they are natural. She, of course, is talking primarily about gender, but I think it also applies to my experience of becoming an academic. I sculpted myself into what I thought was the ideal academic through repetitive actions.
I became more interested in research and became proficient at it. I published, and I didn’t perish. Growing my CV became one of my favorite pastimes, and each time I added a publication line, I got a dopamine rush.
It is still a mystery to me whether I simply assimilated to survive or if the exposure taught me to really enjoy research. I’m not suggesting that my current interest in research is disingenuous, but I wonder if it developed because I was in the academic pressure cooker.
Like gender performativity, enjoying research is not about putting on an act; rather, my academic identity is an effect of repeated actions. To get an academic job, I focused so much on research metrics that I didn’t always know where the academy's values stopped and mine started.
Where do the academy’s values stop and mine start?
I doubt that I’m alone in my experience. The structure of academic programs and the institutions we are part of often push us to prioritize the values of the system over our own. Especially in research-intensive environments, the emphasis leans heavily towards research over teaching, and academic publications overshadow public scholarship.
This competitive academic setting, while promoting merit, doesn't function as a true meritocracy. As a result, some of us lose sight of our original reasons for pursuing this career path, feeling torn between personal values and institutional expectations in order to be competitive on the job market or achieve a promotion.
I discovered something new about myself when I started my current job as a full-time faculty member. I really loved mentoring graduate students, and I especially enjoyed teaching about the research and writing process and making it more transparent. Although I had learned how to be a better writer in graduate school, it took a lot of angst and effort. I wanted it to be easier for other people.
However, I noticed strange feelings that would arise during any week when I had a lot of student meetings. Even though I enjoyed and thought of those meetings as part of my job, I didn’t consider them to be “real” work because I felt like it was interfering with my research.
Why would I dismiss something I enjoy doing, which is technically a feature of my job for which I am paid, as not my actual “work?” The academy’s values and my fear of not playing the game had become so ingrained within me that I thought they were me.
I worked so hard as a graduate student, a visiting lecturer, and now as an assistant professor to become the scholar I thought I needed to be to succeed that I lost sight of some of the rest of myself.
Right now, I am in the process of figuring out where my values and the academy’s align and don’t. I am more motivated than ever to carve out the life and career I want.
I believe that people frequently experience some of the feelings I describe post-tenure when they believe they can finally relax and have the career they want, which is often at least a decade after they began their academic training. After six years of graduate school, two years as a lecturer, and now nearly five years as an assistant professor, I want to find my true north again and am not waiting on the academy’s timeline to do so any longer.
I will leave you with this
Instead of merely meeting the academy's perceived standards, it's been vital to identify my core values. By doing so, I can align my time and effort with work that resonates deeply with me. Even if there is always a game to be played, perhaps I don’t have to play it so well.
This introspective process was difficult at first, but it is now giving me a sense of lightness and confidence that I had lost. Do I worry about being kicked off the team? No, not any longer. There are other teams to play for if this one decides to cut me.
In Thursday's post, I will share a set of worksheets designed to help you identify your core values and motivation for your career. I am hoping they can help others who have lost their way. I am still figuring things out, but I am happy to report that I am more excited and less intimidated by the process, which is a good place to be.
Related Post:
How to Marie Kondo Your Academic Career
Academics are often pulled in many different directions at once. As a result, writing and other things we value land in the dust of our busyness. Many of us feel that incorporating more writing time into our schedules would require 60-hour work weeks that none of us have the energy to manage. Is it even possible to be a balance…
Thanks so much for this post, Jen. It’s honestly a relief for someone else to say this out loud — I’ve thought it to myself, but even questioned it within my own mind... I DO enjoy a lot of what research allows/offers (choosing my own projects, thinking deeply about big ideas, etc.) but have been struggling with the “business” side of it — getting pubs out quickly, being strategic about journal outlets and citations, etc. It’s exhausting.
And on the other hand, I feel such a deep sense of purpose around my teaching, and I can really feel the tangible impact I am having. No wonder I’d rather think about/work on my classes! It feels both easier and more rewarding. I am already good at it, and the path to becoming a better teacher is clear. I actually pivoted during my PhD to doing research on education in my field, and that’s been a really wonderful way to bring two worlds together. But the actual hammering together of papers over timeframes that I have to really push myself on, and even finding the path to becoming ‘better’ at this… it’s honestly hard to stay motivated on that side of this work for me.
I am ‘new’ at this — I’m in my first year on the TT and it is also my first year post-PhD — so I still remain hopeful that I can figure out how to make research work for me. I’ve been working with Kate Henry one-on-one to try to set a sustainable pace and figure out how I work best. And I have proclaimed loudly that if I can’t achieve tenure without sacrificing my health and wellbeing on its alter, I don’t want it anyway. But it is soooo hard to resist the siren song of working to burnout to achieve the clear external bench mark. I wish I had a snappy conclusion to come to, some wisdom to offer here! But more than anything, I’m just very grateful that you opened this conversation. You put words to something I didn’t put realize I needed to talk about.
This resonates with me so much too, Jenn. Thank you for putting the experience into words. I think I need to forward this to my therapist 😅