A Crack in the System — Some Reflections on the Job Market and Post-PhD Life
Dr Giulia Cavaliere, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London
I got a permanent job. In academia. At 29.
Please, hang on. This is not the usual look-at-me-I’m-amazing social media post. Before calling me smug and entitled, please allow me to explain what lies behind me sharing this.
First things first. Old habits die hard: it’s possible that that soon after signing the contract and delivering the good news to my current colleagues and employers at King’s, I might tweet about this wonderful new opportunity. I’m fairly sure that I’ll receive lots of personal and virtual congratulations. Many will be oh so proud. Indeed, everyone who has known this for a while has been very congratulatory. I’ll smile, brush off some of the exaggerated compliments and sincerely thank all the people who helped me to achieve this.
This is what I will probably tweet about. But, despite my scepticism about moral duties, I feel that I’ve a couple of them towards friends and colleagues (and especially towards the Venn diagram’s intersection of the two). I did get a permanent job. And I did get one that I’m really looking forward to starting. I’m beyond grateful to those who have supported me personally and professionally. I’m more than a little indebted to those who have been there for me and have listened to me complaining, whining and obsessing over first finding a job and then accepting it (finding it turned out to be only half of the effort). So, believe me, I’m thankful and I know how extremely lucky I am.
Now, back to moral duties. Or, wait, not quite yet. Back first to tweeting about this permanent job and to receiving lots of congratulations. To those who’ll read my tweet and to those who have been extremely congratulatory in the past weeks: I owe you one. I owe something that I don’t post about and that can’t be read in a shiny CV. Yes, I did get a permanent job and yes, I went almost straight from PhD studentship to lectureship. I know that this is amazing and shamelessly lucky. I also know how rare these jobs are and how wildly more gifted, interesting, talented and deserving people are struggling in the job market. But let me get things straight: I did apply for other jobs and I didn’t get them, I just wasn’t going to post about them. I badly (probably too badly, as it turns out) wanted one of them for personal and professional reasons. I also got a job that sounds great, but that’s bloody far. I wasn’t going to post about this either. My life as I know it, my walk-commute via South Bank to King’s, post-work drinks in the sun, climbing with friends (not on the same days as the drinks — mind) and being home for dinner is about to radically change. Not that I would have shared all this.
And since I’m at it: let’s talk for a second about my other social media posts about academia and how these last months have been. Let’s start with revising my PhD on Zanzibar and submitting it from Kathmandu after possibly the most amazing hike one could ever dream of. Let’s then move to waiting for the viva while having loads of time to read, travel, swim, hike some more and discover enchanting lands. I’ve posted the occasional photo of all this. I’ve also probably boasted about having the privilege to re-teach the course I’ve designed last year, meeting amazing students and sharing the office with top quality human beings. I recently let twitter know that I was commissioned to write a background paper for the WHO, published some new stuff and talked at a couple of events here and there.
What I haven’t posted about, and I think I should have, is how revising a PhD on Zanzibar is only amazing if one discounts the power cuts that kept interrupting me, the gripping loneliness, the self-doubt about the quality of the whole thing, the anxiety about facing an examination and especially about the future. I also haven’t posted about coming back from the physical and metaphysical high that the Himalayas gave me and how everything seems to have lost meaning (and hasn’t regained it yet). I haven’t posted about how I’ve been ill on and off for over four months. I haven’t posted about being so fatigued and in so much pain that I sometimes need to sit down on the street and lay my head against random walls. I haven’t posted about articles that have been rejected, that I had nerve wracking discussions over or that have been judged uninteresting and not at all original (I’m neither exaggerating nor paraphrasing). I haven’t posted about struggling with low mood and having such a precarious equilibrium — if any at all — that the most insignificant crack in the system knocks me out for a few days.
I don’t normally share how academia takes a huge toll on my private life, how my inability to switch off has deleterious effects on the people around me, how I find it incredibly hard to cope with the pressure and tame the demons. I preach about the unworthiness of the unexamined life (or the ‘unchallenged’ life, as a friend accidentally but aptly paraphrased the Socratic mantra). Yet I say nothing about the collateral damage of obsessing about living up to its standards. As an academic and friend of mine once said: ‘we’re academics, we like to complain’. I’m no better: I also complain and I’m also insufferable about all this. But I do so privately, with a select few (sorry lads, I owe you too many pints). I keep all the brightness and sparkles for the rest of the world.
This is not a cry for help. Again, I’m lucky enough to have loads of it. I probably deserve to be called entitled. I am very entitled (and reasonably healthy, and white, and comparatively wealthy, and able). But I also think that it’s important to share the good, the bad and the ugly, and this is an attempt to balance all the good with some bad and ugly. There are lots of very insightful articles about mental health in academia: the ever-present pressure, the horrors of the job market and so on. I possibly suffer from such a severe case of imposter syndrome that I don’t think this post can add any meaningful contribution to those reflections. It might be due to cowardice or to eschew potential criticism, but I don’t want it to be ascribed to that tradition. I just want to release a warning for when I’ll eventually share the news of that new permanent job of mine and to those who have been kind enough to celebrate my achievements.
I need to change the narrative and to mine own self be true. This is my narrative, the real one this time.
