Today I want to talk about a realisation I had very recently about the nature of the career I am pursuing. If you asked me what my ideal job was last year, I would have said Professor at a major University. In fact I did say that in multiple interviews over the years and I think it may have cost me some jobs. But I realised two things. 1) This may not be what I really want to do – which is a loaded personal question and I still haven’t answered it fully so we’ll just gloss over it for now. And 2) That future job is not better than the one I have now.
I have been equally disingenuous when answering a different question. One that my high school friends and family will often ask whenever I return home. “So when will you get a real job?”. The implication being that I am just endlessly adding years to my education and that I haven’t started a proper career yet. I answered politely that I was actually being paid for my services as a teaching assistant in grad school. After that, each of my postdoc positions was also a real job, term limited as it may be. But even as I was reciting these talking points, I did not fully believe them myself. There was a growing sense in me that I was just padding my life with short-term solutions until I could really start my career.
That was a mistake. One that probably cost me greatly. Academia is about continued learning. Each progression in my career has allowed me to learn new skills, gather more knowledge about different topics, and expand into new areas. That is the entire reason why I chose to be a scientist in the first place, and I am ashamed I lost sight of that for too many years. Learning is what I want to do for a living, and I have been doing it for a while now. With each position I contribute to the overall advancement of science, and to the excellence of each of the institutions I attend. That has real value beyond personal growth and I have actually been recognised for it. What I saw as prerequisites for the ultimate real job I was chasing, are actually promotions from a job I started over 10 years ago.
This epiphany of sort has led me to re-evaluate the way I see my own work, how I approach job applications, and ultimately has resulted in a much happier – and more productive – work life for me. The question of an ideal position assumes that there is a point at which your career is fulfilled, and that we are all chasing that ultimate goal. For me, that constant anxiety linked to the doubt about where I will be going next has resulted in a deep crisis in self-worth when numerous attempts to get that position continue failing, and a colossal amount of time utterly wasted on applications. Now that I have accepted that there is no end to the resume building process, I can be a lot more optimistic about my journey and focus on my current job, instead of the better one I still don’t have.
Now don’t get me wrong. Academia is a hyper-competitive job market, and I don’t want to convey that you should ignore the pyramidal structure of it and the likelihood that any of us will get a secure job at a University. That, and whether a tenure-track position truly is the pinnacle of academic achievement, are two questions best left for a different post. But if there is a take away from this stream of consciousness I just wrote, it’s this: science is learning. That is all we do, all day, every day. It is vital that we keep doing it at every level of our careers, and it is necessary if we want to be good communicators and pass along our knowledge to peers, students, policy makers, or the public at large.