I’m going to say something that someone who wants a career in academia should never say: I was relieved when I found a corporate job outside the sacred halls of the ivory tower.
I spent five years earning my PhD in theatre history. During that time, I taught as much as I could and also worked as a freelance copywriter, blogger, theatre critic, instructor for workshops in “non-traditional” learning scenarios, theatrical fight director and project coordinator. I always had between five and eight jobs. I was scrambling to make ends meet while taking out a small fortune in loans to be able live in the city where my university (and, thus, institutional library access) was based.
After I graduated, the burden became even greater. I was trying to navigate the academic job market, pouring my heart and soul into any teaching I could get, and freelancing as hard as I could – but it still wasn’t enough. By Christmas, I was burnt out, disillusioned, and jaded.
Then it happened: I found a position with steady hours and job security. It was with a major financial services company, a field I (admittedly) knew almost nothing about – but my employers liked that. They liked that I was in the same demographic as the target audience and could explain complex “finance-y” things simply and without jargon.
I was relieved. I was working as a writer in an office with a team of incredible, amenable, and smart co-workers. The environment was relaxed. I was paid a living wage. I was able, for the first time in my adult life, to plan a vacation.
So now I live a double life: corporate by day, academic by night. Until I find something stable inside the academy, or a prospect that lends so much to my CV that it’s worth the risk to take, I see no reason to leave a job that offers me the stability necessary to conduct my research and keep my stress levels in check. I keep a hand in by producing academic work for publication, attending conferences, accepting guest lecturing positions and applying for academic jobs.
But I’d felt some trepidation about taking a job outside the academy, and I now feel a sense of guilt. I had a stereotypical idea of what success looked like after a PhD: 80-hour weeks, commuting between institutions, barely being able to pay rent. If I’m not suffering, am I really in the academy?
I am constantly making sure that prospective academic employers don’t find out my dirty secret. I don’t list my corporate job on my CV, I don’t post about it on social media, and I don’t bring it up in conversation with anyone who isn’t a close personal friend. When people ask what I am doing, I steer the conversation to other freelance projects and unpaid research. Somehow, the shame of finding viable employment outside of the academy on a temporary basis – even if inside-academy employment is not viable – has a stigma attached.
We’re stuck with the romantic, unhelpful notion that starving postgrads should just wait for that big break while they run up credit card debt or work in dead-end service jobs. I have colleagues, for instance, who are working as Uber drivers (which pays nowhere near what I’m making and offers no benefits). There should be no shame in paying the bills without sweating blood, day in and day out.
What’s most frustrating is that the skills I am exercising in my corporate job will actually make me a better academic. I am being paid to be a writer, turning out copy every day for various rhetorical purposes. I analyse market research to determine how this copy should be written and how it could be better optimised. I am teaching my teammates about the work I am doing, why it is important, and how I do it; skills that make me a better teacher.
But academics seem to think of the corporate and academic worlds as binaries; you can’t have one if you want the other. The corporate day job is a CV-killer, a signal to potential academic employers that you can’t hack it in academia and had to resort to outside employment.
The state of the academic job market means that there’s just no place for these binaries. PhD students shouldn’t fear corporate jobs as a one-way street to a hopeless life outside of the ivory tower, and academic employers shouldn’t be judgemental about these roles. If a job allows someone to use their skills, develop knowledge and continue to participate in field-related conversations, it’s a step in the right direction.
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