Within a month of starting my degree (2008), I was on strike. Standing there on the picket line as a TA and talking to contract professors, I had a vision of my future as a freelance professor and that did not scare me. I had been working freelance in film and television for about a decade, so I was not too worried about returning to that precarious employment situation. It was not until after I had my degree (June 2014) that I discovered that the freelance teaching landscape barely exists for the new scholar, based on what the professionalization of her degree demands of her.

I returned to academia to do my PhD as a mature person: I had already worked in many fields, including administration, film and television, including a few years teaching English as a second language in the Middle East.  I had also published a few books, one of poetry and one of fiction. And I had a child. I entered my PhD with a practical vision that was all about academia and, probably because I had a son and had to manage my time effectively, completed my PhD in 5 years. By most standards, I had many academic successes, including getting three years of OGS funding and the Provost Dissertation Grant in my final and fifth year, not to mention top grades. As my academic interests developed, my academic writing improved and so did my creative work. By the time I graduated with a PhD, I had published my second book of poetry and, a year after getting my degree, a portion of my thesis came out as a monograph. My third book of poetry will be published later this year. For all my successes, I have been struggling to be even partially employed. Apparently, as told to me by someone on a hiring committee, my publications are irrelevant to what hiring committees are looking for in sessional teachers. What departments are interested in is someone with teaching experience. So, my degree, my scholarship, and all of my academic successes, are irrelevant in the current academic job market. No one told me that.

I am one of those barely employed PhDs, in an environment where I am competing with my friends which makes them my adversaries on the employment line. I am one of the many PhDs forced to claw my way through unemployment anxiety, competing with existing or potential academic colleagues and, when I fail in the competition, run off to heal my ripped weak nails. My failure to land a sessional job, forget a limited term appointment, could be due to the fact that I’m competing in the wrong era: I’m up against 25 year olds, and obviously, they have stronger nails. I am struggling in this market not just as one of a thousand other PhDs with as little teaching experience as I, but as an academic whose reason for being, the research I started, is irrelevant. The fact is, there is nothing in the department that alerts the graduate scholar to the fact that teaching skills are the only thing you will want after convocation pushes you out the door of the institution where you have grown your research for the last five years, as per the requirements for the degree. Could I have been better prepared for this? I think so and that isn’t news anymore.

This climate of academic unemployment around us is equal to the era of the great Depression, where your chances at employment are luck or nepotism or maybe just youth. I don’t know, because I only have bits of luck. Had someone during my PhD told me that my joy and love and scholarship would be killed on the vine as soon as my funding ran out, I probably would have started looking into translating my research into areas that were more directly applicable to the non-academic job market while still a student. I could go back to school to revise the whole plan that got me to return to academia in the first place. Sure. Or it’s too late. For anyone reading this and thinking about next steps, my recommendation is diversify your skill sets on academic and non-academic fronts now, while you have the luxury of funding and time.

Within a month of starting my degree (2008), I was on strike. Standing there on the picket line as a TA and talking to contract professors, I had a vision of my future as a freelance professor and that did not scare me. I had been working freelance in film and television for about a decade, so I was not too worried about returning to that precarious employment situation. It was not until after I had my degree (June 2014) that I discovered that the freelance teaching landscape barely exists for the new scholar, based on what the professionalization of her degree demands of her.

I returned to academia to do my PhD as a mature person: I had already worked in many fields, including administration, film and television, including a few years teaching English as a second language in the Middle East.  I had also published a few books, one of poetry and one of fiction. And I had a child. I entered my PhD with a practical vision that was all about academia and, probably because I had a son and had to manage my time effectively, completed my PhD in 5 years. By most standards, I had many academic successes, including getting three years of OGS funding and the Provost Dissertation Grant in my final and fifth year, not to mention top grades. As my academic interests developed, my academic writing improved and so did my creative work. By the time I graduated with a PhD, I had published my second book of poetry and, a year after getting my degree, a portion of my thesis came out as a monograph. My third book of poetry will be published later this year. For all my successes, I have been struggling to be even partially employed. Apparently, as told to me by someone on a hiring committee, my publications are irrelevant to what hiring committees are looking for in sessional teachers. What departments are interested in is someone with teaching experience. So, my degree, my scholarship, and all of my academic successes, are irrelevant in the current academic job market. No one told me that.

I am one of those barely employed PhDs, in an environment where I am competing with my friends which makes them my adversaries on the employment line. I am one of the many PhDs forced to claw my way through unemployment anxiety, competing with existing or potential academic colleagues and, when I fail in the competition, run off to heal my ripped weak nails. My failure to land a sessional job, forget a limited term appointment, could be due to the fact that I’m competing in the wrong era: I’m up against 25 year olds, and obviously, they have stronger nails. I am struggling in this market not just as one of a thousand other PhDs with as little teaching experience as I, but as an academic whose reason for being, the research I started, is irrelevant. The fact is, there is nothing in the department that alerts the graduate scholar to the fact that teaching skills are the only thing you will want after convocation pushes you out the door of the institution where you have grown your research for the last five years, as per the requirements for the degree. Could I have been better prepared for this? I think so and that isn’t news anymore.

This climate of academic unemployment around us is equal to the era of the great Depression, where your chances at employment are luck or nepotism or maybe just youth. I don’t know, because I only have bits of luck. Had someone during my PhD told me that my joy and love and scholarship would be killed on the vine as soon as my funding ran out, I probably would have started looking into translating my research into areas that were more directly applicable to the non-academic job market while still a student. I could go back to school to revise the whole plan that got me to return to academia in the first place. Sure. Or it’s too late. For anyone reading this and thinking about next steps, my recommendation is diversify your skill sets on academic and non-academic fronts now, while you have the luxury of funding and time.