I Was a Middle-Aged Adjunct
Or: how to succeed in getting a job outside of academia by really, really trying
Note: although I persist in the belief that everything I write will be of interest to everyone, I have written the following for the special edification of graduate students re: getting a job outside higher education. Please forward it to any such persons you know. I really think I have some good advice.
That being said, I think you will enjoy it, too, as a picaresque about the indignities of my final years in higher education and learning how to apply for a job properly at the age of 36.
Hi!
I hear you’re in graduate school and already wondering about how to get a job outside of academia.
This is wise. The sad truth is that the day you get into graduate school is also the day you should start planning several ways out.
I wish I had. For although I have a nice job as an editor now, I had an enormous amount of trouble getting it. Off and on, it took me years.
The only good thing about walking such a long hard road was that I learned a lot along the way. Although I hope you do get that tenure-track job—free inquiry and forming young minds being two of the worthiest pastimes I can imagine—I think you should start making other plans too.
It might spare you a great deal of pain.
I. Adjunct (noun): a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than essential part
Why should you be actively pursuing alternative careers while still in graduate school? Because otherwise you will probably become an adjunct.
Non-tenure-track positions are now the norm. In 2018 the American Association of University Professors found that 73% of college instructors are off the tenure track. The Chronicle of Higher Education, counting a little differently, came up with 66.1%.
Adjuncting is not for you. Not unless you are independently wealthy, or have an independently wealthy spouse, or at least a spouse who rakes in so much money that he or she does not mind you making just enough money to cover daycare costs.
Let me offer myself as a cautionary tale. For two years before finishing my dissertation, and for two years after, I was an adjunct. That means I was a highly educated gig worker. I was on single-semester contracts at several universities, for a few thousand dollars a course, with no realistic path to stable, full-time employment. At the end of every semester I had to write peppy but obviously plaintive emails to my chairs asking if maybe, just maybe, there might be more classes for me next semester. It reminded me of the Woody Allen joke about the two old ladies complaining at a restaurant: “The food here is terrible,” “I know, and such small portions!”
To make matters worse, I was a relatively successful adjunct. Here’s what success looked like: I taught at three different schools, one of which was 40 miles outside of Los Angeles (at least I had time to listen to audiobooks), and in my best year I had 230 students and made $32,000. That’s with no job security and practically no benefits.
I say practically no benefits because one school was letting me accrue some sick leave, but nobody ever bothered to tell me, so when my daughter was born I took 10 days unpaid vacation, and then went right on teaching through a level of sleep deprivation that probably constituted torture under the Geneva Convention. Assistant professors can get as many as three months paid parental leave.
Which brings me to another point. Even if you were independently wealthy, unless you are going to endow your own chair, you will be a second-class citizen. Everyone on the faculty will be polite. In front of the undergrads they will call you Dr. Gleason—or whatever your name is. But the truth is that you are not their peer. This was brought home to me when I asked my chair at a certain scandal-ridden university in southern California about courses for the next semester, and she referred me to the office manager, “who handles staffing.”
There was the truth. I was a temporary solution to a staffing shortage. They strung me along until April, far after other schools had already met their own staffing needs, before they told me my services wouldn’t be necessary next fall.
Don’t think it can’t happen to you. The economic and social factors driving the adjunct trend are powerful and still gathering steam. A lot of it has to do with higher ed’s funding model. Starting with the tax revolts of the late 1970s, and accelerating ever after, the United States has moved the cost of higher education from society as a whole to students and their families. For example, instead of giving money directly to schools, the federal government gives it to students as loans and then allows them to shop around, on the theory that the students, like savvy consumers, will force colleges and universities to compete for their tuition dollars. We all know what happens when we add a market mechanism, of course. Costs fall, and quality rises!
Instead, costs soared.[1] It turned out that what the student consumer wanted was not low, low prices but the college experience. That meant gleaming gymnasiums, lazy rivers and rock walls, the latest technology in the classrooms, luxury dormitories, top-flight athletics programs, and student services of every conceivable kind, with the staff to run it all.
Consider the dining halls. I went to college at Yale, one of the fanciest schools in the world, and 20 years later I taught at California Lutheran University, a regional commuter school. The food at Cal Lutheran was better. Considerably. That is how fast the amenities arms race has escalated. I can’t even imagine the food at Yale now. (Handsome Dan XIX probably eats better than I do.)
Not coincidentally, 60% of Cal Lutheran faculty is part time. All of those amenities cost an incredible amount of money. The one place—as far as I could tell the only place—where colleges and universities have found they can cut costs is faculty pay. Adjuncts cost about a quarter of a tenured professor, if that. But despite the low pay, every year a bumper crop of newly-credentialed PhDs proves that it is willing to work for less than an average of $3,500 per course.
You don’t want to be one of them. As the college-age population shrinks, the fight for tuition dollars will only get uglier. Schools will need ever-more attractive amenities, they will need to discount tuition, and it will all put even more downward pressure on faculty wages.
The person who cared about me most at these schools was my chair at Cal Lutheran. In the spring of 2019 we went out for Mexican food at the end of the semester. I told him I needed to spend the summer looking for work outside of academia, and he, two beers in, said that he was glad I had taught at Cal Lutheran, was very glad to have known me, but he hoped I wouldn’t be back.
Reader, I was back in the fall.
II. The obstacles to finding employment outside of academic, enumerated
Why was I unable to find a job that summer? Why did it take me another full year, until August 2020, to get out? Because propaganda from your department and university to the contrary, getting an alt-ac job is incredibly hard.
There are three main obstacles: linear experience, credentials, and the “are you sure you want this job?” problem.
Let me explain them each.
A. Linear experience
This is the big one. Nearly every job posting you see will ask for several years of experience in the field, if not in this exact kind of position. You, as a graduate student, will have spent the better part of a decade preparing for a different job. We can talk about soft or transferrable skills all we like, but the fact of the matter is that if you are talking about transferable skills, and other candidates are talking about direct linear experience, you are at a tremendous disadvantage.
B. Credentials
There was probably a time when the PhD was a trump credential, the highest honor academia had to offer. But now, due to higher education’s voracious appetite for tuition dollars, there are terminal master degrees in just about every field you can name: not only in library science and law, but also in technical writing, non-profit and arts administration, government administration, archival work, communications, and a hundred others.
Please do not think that people in other professions will be awed by your PhD. Other professions have their own bodies of knowledge, their own skill sets, their own norms and standards and training regimens, so just as a history department will hire a history PhD before someone with a degree in archival work, an archive will hire a trained archivist before an historian. In short, other fields have their own professional pride.
C. Are you sure you want this job?
But wait! It gets worse!
People outside of academia will not always believe that you want to leave. If they don’t know much about higher education, they probably remember it from their own student days as an idyllic place, all rolling lawns and funny classmates and fascinating professors, happy years spent floating down the lazy river. Why would anyone want to leave? They may be confused, even a little suspicious. They have no idea how bad it is for those at the bottom of the totem pole.
If they do know, your situation is considerably worse. You spent around 8 years preparing for one career, but now you’re suddenly pursuing another? They may suspect that you secretly still want to be a professor and will leave their position at the first opportunity. They don’t need that kind of heartache. In employment as in love, nobody wants to be your second choice.
In sum, when you look for a job outside of academia, you will be competing with candidates who are more experienced, better credentialed, and more trustworthy than you, and probably younger to boot.
III. What is to be done?
‘Tis a fearful odds. But there’s a lot you can do to even them.
First, you should focus. When I started applying for jobs I sent out applications for anything that looked good: positions at newspapers, archives, good government nonprofits, and so on. This might work, but the chances of success are greater when you pick a field, or two at most, and focus on it, because then you can learn their particularities and give yourself a better shot at the jobs you apply for.
The field should be fairly specific, something like publishing, which is what I settled on, in part because I had already worked in publishing a few years before entering grad school. But once you’ve thought narrowly enough, you should also think broadly about what would count as working in that field, especially at first. The New York Times or a big five publishing house were never going to hire me. So instead I looked for work as a copyeditor, proofreader, technical writer, communications officer, anything where I would write and edit for a living.
Once you have a field or two and thought broadly about what would count as working in them, then it’s time to clamber over those obstacles.
A. Linear Experience
First and most importantly, you should build linear experience while you’re still in graduate school. This doesn’t need to take too much time. In fact, it could be fun.
In your first year or two of coursework, don’t knock yourself out. Reserve just one hour a week for pursuing alternatives. You could take a long walk on Friday afternoon and muse about other careers you might like, slowly zeroing in on a particular field. You could poke around job boards, or invite someone out for coffee and hear more about what they do (see informational interviews, below).
As you finish up your course work and start studying for comprehensive exams, you should also start doing things that will later appear on your resume. You could teach part-time at a local private school, you could do an internship over the summer, or if you’re interested in nonprofit arts administration you could volunteer to take tickets for the community theater’s performance of Henry V on Friday night. Just do something, anything that will later demonstrate a history of interest in your particular field.
Once you are writing your dissertation you should also be spending a few hours a day pursuing non-academic alternatives. This is feasible. Your advisor is going to hunt me down and kill me, but the truth is that you can’t work on your dissertation for more than like 5 hours a day, so even if you’re also teaching, you will still have several hours to intern or volunteer or work part time. Maybe you won’t have time for the latest Netflix costume drama. So be it.
As you’re finishing up your PhD, you should be hitting the non-academic job market hard. A good goal is sending out one application a day.
B. Credentials
If you can stand it, you might get another degree. There are library and teaching programs you can complete in a year, maybe even as you’re writing your dissertation. I’ve heard tell of UX boot camps that last two weeks and cost $10,000, but afterwards their graduates can fetch $100,000 or more on the market. I met a technical writer who did a year-long program and, once again, commanded six figures from a medical supply company. She was 24. Now she works for Google, probably making much more.
But what are credentials, really? Credentials are in part a sign that you fit in. They aren’t the only way to signal that.
One way to figure out how to look like you belong is to talk to people in the field. This is why you should conduct informational interviews. These are informal conversations, with people in that chosen field of yours, in which you are not asking for a job but for information. What are jobs in this field like? What does it take to get into this field? And so on.
When I was job hunting full time, I made it my mission to do one of these a day. Start with people you know, or just message people on LinkedIn (yes, you should have a LinkedIn account), and ask to meet them for 30 minutes over Zoom. In these interviews, you will learn about the profession and build a network of people who can offer you tips and advice.
Are you ready for the best advice I got? You few, you happy few, you who have stuck with me until now get to hear it. I was talking to an editorial assistant at a fancy academic press and asked her for advice on breaking into the field. Her advice was simple: email the hiring manager.
Let me say that one more time, with feeling: email the hiring manager.
The hiring manager’s name isn’t going to be on the job posting, but it’s usually whoever your boss would be. So, first apply for the job, and send your future boss an email explaining why you’re really excited about the job. It’s that easy. I know it sounds simple, but a friend of mine at a bank in New York says he’s been the hiring manager and he couldn’t believe how few applicants took this step.
Doing it gives you a huge edge. For one moment, you are not just one more resume in a stack of them. You are right in front of somebody, briefly making your case. For a slightly unconventional candidate, which you probably are, that’s an opportunity you can’t pass up.
Before I emailed hiring managers, I was getting nowhere. Over a two-year period, I applied for dozens of jobs and didn’t get so much as an initial interview. The first time I emailed the hiring manager, I got one. And then I got more. Not for every position I applied for, of course, but even when I didn’t get an interview, I often saw that people in those organizations were looking at my personal website or LinkedIn page. Email the hiring manager. It gets their attention. That’s what you need.
Also, for the love of God, have a real resume. Don’t send your CV. Not even a shortened CV. Who knows how much time I wasted, how many opportunities I squandered, by sending people a CV. Having a real resume is yet another sign that you understand professional life outside the ivory tower. It will make you look like you fit in. Do not argue with me. Go to the career center. Get help.
C. Are you sure you want this job?
This will come up in the interviews. Be prepared. In fact, once you get an interview, prep like crazy. You’re a grad student, so research overkill is second nature to you, and this is your chance to outwork everyone else. When I started getting interviews, I collected lists of common interview questions and wrote out answers to all of them. Sure enough, some of those questions came up, and I had ready answers.
Still, in my first interview, I bombed. It was a staff writer position at a global public health institute at a major university. There had been 245 applicants, but first I made it to the final 40 (where I had to write a news brief based on an academic study), and from there I progressed to the final 9. Now I had a Zoom interview with the director. I prepared for hours. I studied my interview answers, read her academic articles, and listened to her speeches. When the day came I put on my best suit and tie and, even though it was a tele-interview, my blue suede Allen Edmunds shoes.
The interview was supposed to last 20 minutes. I didn’t last 12. It was obvious, right from the start, that when she looked at my resume, she saw an academic rather than an editor or staff writer. Then I made the fatal mistake of saying something along the lines of “I’m really excited about contributing to the institute’s research.”
Her eyes snapped up from my resume to the camera. “What do you mean by contributing research?”
Shit. I stammered something about contributing to the institute’s mission by translating academic research into broadly accessible language and blah blah blah. It didn’t matter. Her institute was part of a university, so she knew perfectly well that I had trained to be a professor but, since that obviously wasn’t working out, I was casting around for other options. Regardless of what I meant, what she had heard was that I still might have research ambitions of my own. After a few more perfunctory questions, she thanked me for my time. I had blown my best chance in years.
Next time, I was ready. For the next position, I went through a total of four interviews, and every time I made a point of saying that I was only looking for jobs outside of higher education. One interviewer actually asked me, “You’re a professor. Isn’t this a step down for you?”
“I don’t see it that way at all,” I replied. “I don’t see this as a step down, I see it as a great step back into publishing.”
I got the job.
I’m not going to lie, though. Job hunting is miserable. It is time consuming and tiring and demoralizing. Day after day you send out carefully crafted cover letters and resumes and you almost never hear anything back, and all the while your savings dwindle and your rent and grocery bills keep coming due. Every day that my efforts went unrewarded, my situation felt a little more hopeless, a little more desperate.
In order to handle how I was feeling, I spent my evenings reading books by authors like V.S. Naipaul[2] and watching movies by directors like David Cronenberg and S. Craig Zahler. Maybe screwball comedy will help you, but I needed art that reflected how I felt: bleak, pessimistic, ugly. The old line on upsetting art is that it produces catharsis, it purges bad feelings. That never happened in my case, but those books and movies still offered a reprieve. For a few hours a day, those ugly feelings appeared to be outside of me, on the screen or on the page, rather than bubbling up in my stomach.
During the day, I kept myself going by redefining success. Success did not mean getting a job, or even an interview (though of course that had to happen eventually); success meant going about each application in the right way.
I compared it to going up to bat in baseball. A hitter generally doesn’t get up and try to hit a home run. The goal is to have a good at-bat. A good at-bat means taking an approach that gives you the greatest chance for success. It means looking for the pitches you know you can hit, not swinging at junk outside the strike zone; it means taking a pitch if the count is favorable; it means shortening up your swing and fouling off a few pitches if the count isn’t; it means having a plan and a process, sticking to it, doing all the little things right, not beating yourself. For the job hunt, a good-at bat means at a minimum canvassing job sites like LinkedIn and Indeed every day for a decent opportunity, tailoring the cover letter to the organization, the resume too, and always sending a note to the hiring manager, whoever that might be.
Strikeouts, line-outs, and home runs are all possible outcomes of a good at-bat. At some level, if each of the at-bats was itself good, then the outcome doesn’t even matter. Triumph and disaster are both impostures, and you can meet them just the same.
If you can think like that, then you can keep stepping up to the plate, and one day the ball will just sail.
IV. Will I be happy?
When I’ve talked to graduate students about jobs outside of academia, a surprising number ask some version of the following. Are you happy on the outside?
I would turn this question around. Are you sure you would be happy in academia? Being an adjunct is terrible, and that secret is out, but what I haven’t seen acknowledged publicly is that a surprising number of tenure-track positions aren’t good jobs either.
I know someone who gave up a tenured position because he couldn’t stand teaching four courses a semester anymore; it gave him no time to do the kind of exploratory reading, thinking, and writing that made him want to be a scholar in the first place. Other people end up in horrible departments, with lazy and dictatorial senior colleagues. Others find themselves single, over 35, and stuck in rural Iowa, with little hope of starting the family they always thought they’d have. All of them make less than even a modestly successful lawyer, while putting in an equal or greater number of hours.
Even professors who seem to be living the dream often aren’t. Most tenure-track professors at major research universities spend the bulk of their days preparing to teach, teaching, and grading; plus sitting in meetings, serving on committees, and conducting reviews. An acquaintance of mine who is a director of graduate studies has to answer, by her estimation, 75 emails a day.
The pressure to publish means they don’t have much time for exploratory reading either. They’re doing the blocking and tackling of scholarly publication: double-checking citations and footnotes, summarizing previous literature on their subject, and figuring out how to respond to reviewer number two’s complaint that they didn’t engage deeply enough with the oeuvre of Gilles Deleuze. They’re lucky to have two hours a day to read, think, and write freely. That’s no more than I have now.
Where does that leave us? We could say, with Jimi Hendrix, that there ain’t no life nowhere. There’s some truth to that. The world is not a friendly place for idle curiosity and intellectual play. I doubt it ever was. If American higher ed itself ever was, its slow corporate reorganization over the past 50 years means it isn’t anymore.
We could look on the bright side, though. Outside or inside higher education, you can make time for your intellectual life anywhere. The trick is to stop looking for one particular kind of job and instead think about what kinds of jobs would be conducive to leading an examined life. What kinds of jobs would be fulfilling on their own, or at least leave you with the time and energy to pursue your intellectual interests during off hours? Making that life will take clear-headed planning and hard work, but I’ve given you the best start I can.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,
Paul
[1] I know that the libertarians would say that the very presence of government money means this was not a market at all. That makes no sense. The money was going from the government to the schools directly. Then the government gave the money to the students, who gave it to the schools. The main thing that changed was the addition of a market mechanism. Costs went up. Markets do not always work like they did in Econ 110. End of story.
[2] Here are the opening lines of Naipaul’s A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” I read that line and nodded. Yes, that is true.