By Samuel Kampa
By the end of April 2019, my academic career was over. My on-campus interview did not yield a TT job. For personal reasons, I made the wrenching decision to turn down a one-year postdoc offer. Every other opportunity ended in polite rejection, impolite rejection, or ghosting. With mixed feelings, I applied for non-academic jobs and eventually accepted a position at an education technology start-up called Yellowdig.
My story is not exactly a page turner. So why am I telling it? I'm encouraging you—no, urging you—to consider a similar "alternative" path, especially in light of the inevitable recession to come. A year ago, "TT or bust" was a common but ill-advised attitude toward the job market. That attitude should be unthinkable today. COVID-19 is an accelerant to a fire in academia that has been raging for at least a decade. When that fire is finally extinguished, the landscape of higher education will be unrecognizable at best and decimated at worst. Philosophy departments will stop hiring. Universities will receive less funding from states and lower yields from endowments. Enrollments will shrink at an even faster rate. Driven by the necessity to teach at scale, colleges will increasingly shift classes online. One by one, non-elite liberal arts colleges will shut their doors. And all but the most elite graduate students will feel the pain of the contraction. You might have thought staying in academia during a pandemic was the safest course of action. You'd be wrong.
If my story matters, it's only because it highlights lessons I learned too late. Like many of my grad student colleagues, I knew less about what it took to get non-academic jobs than I thought I did. My current position is a product of dumb luck, charitable interviewers, and just enough personal preparation. Be smarter than me; learn these lessons now. My intention is not to scare you, but to inspire concrete action. And if I'm "catastrophizing", it's because graduate education really is a catastrophe—albeit a very white-collar, first-world catastrophe. How you respond to this catastrophe will determine the amount of needless pain you'll experience in the near future.
These lessons are told as vignettes, some of which are designed to spark new lines of inquiry, others of which are designed to make commonsense truths more salient. I have no idea whether I'll succeed. If one lesson helps one person, that's another success I can attribute to luck.
- Landing a tenure-track job was always a pipe dream. You might think this is obvious. I hope you do. But ask yourself: do you really believe, deep down, that you're not going to win the academic lottery? After all, there's a difference between believing that your evidence supports something and believing what your evidence supports. When you believe what you know your evidence doesn't support, you're epistemically akratic. (Puzzles notwithstanding, epistemic akrasia is a bad thing.) For a real-world example of epistemic akrasia, look no further than yours truly. I knew that landing a fulfilling, long-term academic job in the near future was statistically unlikely. But c'mon, I'm special. I'll beat the odds! Like many grad students, I vacillated between public clothes-rending over the state of the job market and secret faith in my eventual success. Graduate students' desperate striving for one more publication, one more APA colloquium slot, one more stellar teaching review—all driven by the conviction that they're one accomplishment away from making it into the "big leagues"—is surefire evidence that epistemic akrasia is pervasive even among (or especially among?) the ranks of the over-educated.
- The academic job market is abysmal. In 2020, this should go without saying. But if you're an early-stage grad student wondering what all the fuss is about, let me paint a picture. You spend six years training for a job you probably won't get. You work hard on your teaching, present at lots of conferences, and publish in the best journals you can manage. Upon entering the academic job market, you invest an inordinate amount of time in your application materials, poring over sentences that hiring committees will scarcely skim. For your first year on the market, you apply for 15 positions and get no interviews. For your second year, you apply for 50 positions and get 3 Skype interviews, 1 on-campus TT interview, 1 postdoc shortlist, and 1 postdoc offer that, for personal reasons, you regretfully decline. Now, here's the kicker: Relative to most of your peers, you had a great year. You were lucky enough to receive an offer, and for some reason you declined it. People stay on the market for 5 years without so much as getting a Skype interview. What were you thinking?? Here's where the gulf between academics' and non-academics' career expectations is readily apparent. If, as a non-academic, you spend two years applying for jobs for which you're highly qualified, and all you get is one temporary position, you've had a rotten stretch of luck. But if you're a graduate student embarking on an academic career, you can hardly ask for more, and you'd be a fool to turn anything down. I know more than a few graduate student who think this way, and I'd nearly succumbed to this logic during my desperate search for an academic job. Unless you're out of academia, you don't fully realize just how off-kilter this reasoning is.
- There is no "non-academic job market". There are, on the other hand, non-academic job markets. There are jobs at start-ups, at large corporations, at NGOs, and in government offices, and each type of job requires a distinct strategy for applying and interviewing. "Doing your research" requires a lot more than learning how to network. It requires a well-informed, domain-specific approach to your specific market. While well-intentioned and helpful to an extent, university-sponsored seminars on "how to get a non-academic job" scratch the surface at best. They're akin to seminars on "how to get a job in academia" that gloss over the differences between teaching jobs, research jobs, and administrative positions.
- My "critical thinking skills" weren't enough. No one is dazzled by my PhD. They care about what I've done lately. To get a non-academic job, I needed hard evidence that I was capable of performing specific tasks with tangible business value despite being a 28-year-old philosopher with no prior experience. If that sounds difficult, that's because it is. Here's how I barely pulled it off. In the final year of my program, I started learning how to code in Python and write queries in SQL. I put in for a flurry of "easy apply" jobs on LinkedIn and received almost no responses, which wouldn't have surprised me had I done my homework. With a bit of prodding from my wife and solid advice from a popular book, I started attending local networking events, meeting with strangers for informational interviews, and applying for start-up jobs at a niche website. I eventually interviewed with Yellowdig and was hired as a Customer Success Specialist, a position that wasn't even advertised at the time. While the job had no official technical requirements, I was later told that I wouldn't have gotten the job without my coding experience. The takeaways: plan ahead; don't be shy; and if what you're doing isn't working, be a good Bayesian, update your priors, and try something different.
- My philosophical training wasn't useless. Pursuing a PhD in philosophy vastly improved my analytical acumen and writing skills. Teaching undergraduates helped me break down technical material for non-specialists—something I do routinely with clients. I even use my background in first-order predicate logic. Seriously. Yellowdig's database is modeled on it. Conveying the value of your philosophical training to employers is tricky, and overselling your academic chops will make you look out of touch. But you have to learn how to strike that balance if you want to transition more-or-less smoothly out of academia.
- Start-ups are a great launching point for newly minted PhDs. Start-ups take risks on ambitious people with unconventional backgrounds, and they're more likely to consider candidates who are poorly versed in the art of applying and interviewing for non-academic jobs. Start-ups give employees the time and freedom to develop new skills, direct new initiatives, and influence the development of the company. This should appeal to PhD students who are accustomed to directing big projects from beginning to end, learning things on their own, and combining analytical with interpersonal labor. While start-ups are notoriously fragile (especially now), it's far better to have had a high-growth job and lost it than never to have had a high-growth job at all.
- Leaving academia would change my identity … for the better. As my wife would tell you, leaving academia made me a much easier person to live with. Little by little, I stopped obsessively comparing myself to other people. I cared less about prestige. I stopped begrudging the success of those I felt were unworthy of opportunities I wanted. I no longer checked blogs like this every day, multiple times a day. And I started paying more attention to the spouse I loved and less attention to the career I thought I loved. That's not to say I'm suddenly a model of virtue. But I truly believe that quitting academic philosophy made me less selfish and better equipped for family life.
- Leaving academia doesn't entail abandoning the life of the mind. If anything, my day-to-day work involves more research, analysis, and problem-solving than I would have mustered in a teaching position with a 4-4 load. There's nothing wrong with teaching-heavy positions, of course, but if you're a research-minded person from a teaching-focused graduate program (as I was), you're better off shifting your attention away from academia and toward data science, policy research, or some other analytical role.
Allow me to end on a more inspirational note. You are highly capable of becoming an invaluable member of the non-academic workforce, whether you realize it or not. And if you thought it prudent to pursue a PhD in philosophy, you probably care about more than just making money. So you have the talent and the motivation to do something meaningful with your professional life—great! Now, ask yourself where your labor will have the greatest marginal value: in a contingent faculty position where scores of equally talented teachers are waiting in the wings; or as a researcher at a non-profit, an analyst at a socially conscious company, or an ethicist for a health care or tech group? Who needs you more: an academic insiders' club that tells you, over and over again, that you're not wanted; or the diverse and vulnerable world outside the ivory tower? I can't answer that question for you. But one brief year after leaving professional philosophy, I'm amazed it was ever an open question for me.
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