Recently came back from the family vacation. The big one, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. That means, amongst other things, a lot of “how’s the academic life?” questions. Here’s the basic rundown.
1. What do you do(study)? I’ve explained this a million times. No one remembers. That’s fine, it helps we work on my elevator speech: simple, short and interesting. A few folks even want me to send them pdfs of my papers (I did). That’s nice of them.
2. What do you do(all day)? The assumption seems to be that I spend 80-90% of my time teaching. Again, as much as I try to nicely provide accurate information (0%) I still get the "what? really that can't be right?" look.
3. So what kind of job are you going to get? A job, if I’m lucky. I do a quick explanation of different types of professor gigs (SLAC, R1, CC, etc). Explain what I’m looking for (R1) and emphasize the highly probabilistic nature of the market. At this point I often get the look I call the “why didn’t you just go to law/med school” look.
4. Will you return to the region? Again, the market is unpredictable. Particularly given the recent economic goings-ons it is possible that no major (R1) university in the region will be hiring in my field. No, I can’t just fax my resume CV to the dean at FancyPants U. Besides, I’m still a bit split over my home region. Maybe it would be nice to live there again. It’s been over a decade since I last did. The main pluses are familiarity and ease of travel (driving to see relatives as opposed to flying). That’s it.
I hate that! My grandmother never, ever realized that I didn't have to apply for a summer job when I was in grad school because I already had one.
ReplyDeleteI think I got my parents trained OK--they stopped asking when I was going to finish after 4 years, and they were so happy I moved back to their time zone, they didn't care that I was still pretty far away.