Tag: career pathways

On the Pleasures of Slow Reading

BlogUncategorized

Like many prospective historians, I was drawn to history because of my love of reading. As a child I spent countless hours reading at home and at the school library. I remember being enchanted by the Scholastic book fair and thrilled at the notion that I would be given – GIVEN – a book just for attending. As I grew older reading remained a sanctuary. In high school and in college, I always had a long reading list and stack of books beside my bed, which I would often read instead of spending time studying assigned coursework. Longer or more difficult books would hang around. I’d pick them up and get sidetracked only to return to them weeks or months later.

Becoming a historian seemed like the perfect career path to take my love of reading from hobby to profession. This was (obviously) before I knew what being a historian actually entailed. I learned a little bit about archival research in one of my undergraduate courses, but saw it as supplemental to secondary source reading. I also didn’t understand how difficult the path would be – both through graduate school and finding a career as a historian after graduation.

Still, what shook me most in graduate school was its approach to reading. The sheer pace of the exercise was exhausting; books were mutilated (“just read the intro and a review” was the common refrain) into content that needed to be crammed for classes and comprehensives. Graduate school reading was nothing like any reading I had done before. It was a marathon that felt like a sprint.

So, also like many graduate students in the humanities, my love of reading waned. I didn’t read for pleasure very often and when I did it was either for circumstantial (places with no internet) or social (book clubs) reasons. I lost touch with why books had mattered to me.

Choosing not to pursue an academic career was traumatic, but a silver lining has been that my passion for reading has been reignited. No longer taking part in the information-gathering arms race that is graduate school has allowed me to not only read slower, but also pause and reflect on what I’ve read.

It’s wonderful to really live with a book, to let it sit with you and accompany you. This has held true for fiction and non-fiction. I’ve been reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for about three months, slowly chipping away at it in chunks often to twenty pages. Since it’s in many ways a novel about how time passes,this approach has made me appreciate how Mann structured the novel in a way that flows in the uneven ebbs and flows that subjective time does. It has been similarly rewarding as I’ve read Jill Lepore’s These Truths. Like Mann, Lepore is a pleasure to read and her prose and organization rewards close reading. It’s also refreshing to read a longue durée history from beginning to end and not feel the pressure to skip around or mine for argument.

Obviously, this approach is made possible by the privilege of working routine hours and having a low-stress, low-responsibility home life.At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if I would have learned better –maybe not more, but more deeply – without the pressures to consume as much information as possible. I also wonder if this type of churn disadvantages certain types of students who would benefit from more time to read and reflection each item.

As anyone who has written a dissertation (or any long document) knows well, it takes time to write. So too, to read. Even though there are many days that I yearn for the intellectual engagement and debate of my graduate school years, the solace of slow reading tempers my nostalgia for those days and reminds me of the promises life after graduate school hold for intellectual growth. 

This time of year can be full of holiday- and project-related bustle. Looming end of year deadlines can further heighten an already acute anxiety about not working fast enough. But if you can, resist the urge to rush, take some time to sit down, and read slow. 

The Bridge from Academe

AdviceBlog

My career as a history graduate student seems like a lifetime ago already. It was January 2018 and I had just defended my dissertation, removing the one constant that had unified my intellectual life for the past five years. I didn’t really have any job prospects. My furtive attempts to secure a tenure-track academic job the previous year had been met with such a deafening silence from university employers that I realized I needed an alternate path. I had applied to a bunch of university administration jobs in the kind of slipshod, arbitrary manner that showed that I had no idea what I was doing. Even though I had held many part-time jobs on campus, I wasn’t sure how any of them translated to an actual career. I was simply looking to do something because I wasn’t going to be able to make a living doing what I was trained to do.

Now almost two months into my job as the Publications and Communications Manager at the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), it’s stunning to reflect on how far away that all seems. The restless nights after receiving another rejection. The weird combination of elation and anxiety that surged through my body after opening an email requesting an interview. All the wonderful and kind people I met in the hodgepodge of part-time jobs I worked as I tried to figure out what to do next. It all seems distant.

And in some ways it is distant. I’ve moved to a new city. Reconnected with old friends and met new people. The 9 to 5 office schedule provides a structure that I never had before in graduate school, though it can feel stifling on a beautiful day (which, fortunately, between the scalding heat and pouring rain there are few of in Washington). I used to wake up at 8, now I wake up at 6. Everything seems different.

I’m not sure there’s a lesson here. The usual platitudes – all variants of ‘don’t worry it will get better!’ – are too simple. The emotions are much more complex. There is certainly relief that the economic insecurity of graduate school and the post-graduate transition is over. I am incredibly lucky to have found a job that I enjoy at a supportive organization staffed by smart, compassionate people.

But there is also a nostalgic patina that is already starting to wear away the sharpness of those desperate feelings of my last days in graduate school. I had the opportunity to do the research that I loved. I got to work with students, faculty, and administrators from different backgrounds and with different life experiences who broadened by worldview. I lived in a beautiful place and was surrounded by people who cared about me (and hopefully still do).

Even though graduate school seems far away, real questions and doubts persist in my mind. As Erin Bartram and others have more eloquently noted there is an identity crisis that accompanies the transition out of academia and into another field. For many of us, and I know for me, “intellectual-in-training” or “scholar” was a core component of who we were and wanted to be. I often wonder if being a scholar or historian will be an important part of my identity going forward or, if through some transformative magic, it’s already gone. I would still like to be part of the history community, participate in scholarly debates in my field, and publish on my research interests. Since my research never seemed to generate much interest as a graduate student, however, I’m not sure I have enough momentum or a large enough public profile to continue on as part of that community.

I’ve been thinking often about how to bridge my former and current employment identities. I agree with the career pathways approach that rejects the bifurcation between academic and “alt-ac” employment trajectories to think more holistically about post-graduate employment. That sounds good as an ideal, but what does that look like as a lived experience? Is it really possible to pursue multiple career paths simultaneously without (either implicitly or explicitly) ranking them? Are we fighting in vain against the inevitable disappointment that will occur when graduate students enroll in programs expecting to become professors only to realize that career path is an incredibly difficult one? There are no easy answers to these questions.

Changing a core component of one’s identity is trying, but if we can work together as current graduate students, faculty, administrators, and alumni I think we can better show graduate students the many opportunities available to them. There will never be a perfect solution, but I think there is room to make the post-graduate identity change feel less like a crisis and more like a new phase of personal and intellectual discovery. 

Follow me on Twitter

Goodreads