It’s a no brainer April 21, 2012
Posted by Mike Gulliver in Musings.Tags: Career, funding, research, risk, utopian theory
add a comment
OK, so here’s a bizarre proof of Utopian Theory if I ever saw one…
If you read this regularly, you’ll know that I finished my PhD in 2009 – right at the point when the bottom dropped out of the UK Higher Education job market – and have been eagerly looking for an academic position ever since.
In the meantime, I’ve made myself useful in IT Services at the University of Bristol where I have a secure job that I quite enjoy – and dipped into as much teaching and writing as I can afford.
It’s not academia though, so that’s still the eventual aim… except that getting into academia is almost impossible if you don’t have the required publications or funding – and I don’t, because my job hasn’t allowed me time to write, or apply.
Consequently, although I have the ‘potential’ to be a successful academic – all of the jobs that are advertised are out of my league, even though they are for ‘beginners’.
However, now, things are slowly changing. (more…)
To lecture or not to lecture… that is the question June 21, 2011
Posted by Mike Gulliver in post.Tags: Career, lectureship, research
add a comment
A few years ago, my future was simple. Get a PhD, become a lecturer, do lots of research, publish lots.
Then I got the PhD, the academic job market tightened up, the University of Bristol decided to shut down the undergrad Deaf Studies degree… and I found myself traipsing round the temping agencies with a CV in hand looking for a job, any job…
Now, I have a job… which pays the bills. But it has (almost) nothing to do with my ‘real’ work which I started (before) during my PhD. And I’m hankering to get back to that.
The easiest way in seems to be to apply for a lectureship.
But – and here’s the question – will a lectureship actually give me any more time than I get at the moment for research?
I’ve recently been doing some consultancy work at another (essentially, a teaching) university – where the staff complain that they don’t get time for research. Speaking to colleagues who are also in a ‘junior lecturer’ position, they don’t get much time for research or writing.
I’ve also just finished the endless round of exam preparation, marking, scrutineering, exam board meetings etc. for a single undergrad course that I taught last year. Certainly, if I were teaching more than 2 or three courses, there would be little time there to do much substantive research and/or publication.
I’m dying to get back into academic work if I can. But that, for me, involves at least a portion of research time. Simply becoming a jobbing teacher would not be good enough.
So, is it better to be in the academic field, not there yet but at least working in the right direction? Or is it better to attempt to get there by other means?
At this point in my life, I just don’t know!
The hard facts of life June 1, 2011
Posted by Mike Gulliver in post.Tags: Career, income, mortgage
2 comments
The maths is inescapable… Between Jo and me, we need to earn more money.
No… it’s not about prestige, or recognition… or luxury, or ‘stuff’… it’s about the mortgage, which is due for renewal at the end of the year.
… cue a string of comparison websites, which all suggest that we can get a mortgage on my current income – but only one that will cover half of the house.
So, now we have to decide… Jo can either go back to work, or we can sell the back bedroom and the garden, most of the garage and some of the bathroom…
… or my income needs to go up.
Short of selling a kidney, I’m not really sure what to do about that!
Stonewalled… September 14, 2010
Posted by Mike Gulliver in Career.Tags: Career, frustration, stonewalled
add a comment
I enjoy my job… I do. And I’m grateful to have it. But it’s not really what I trained for… having spent ten years bouncing around in a mixture of environmental charities, voluntary organisations, school administration, teaching, and as an IT systems temp in a bank, I decided to return to university and pursue something that I was really passionate about.
So I did my PhD…
Now, having completed it, I find myself back in admin… and training, and IT systems!
I enjoy my job… (I already said that)… but I desperately want to work in the one area that I chose above all others – academic research… research that is so edgy that it can’t help but disrupt and reconfigure, and reauthor, and challenge…
… the work that I want to do (that I do, very slowly in the background) has the potential to completely re-configure understandings of humanity…
But it seems that – in this climate of uncertainty – the few jobs that come up are tightly nailed-down with no variation or contribution possible… as far as I’m concerned, a self-fulfilling problematic… almost adverts for why someone with outside-of-the-box thinking needs to be involved, but impossible to get if you want to think outside of the box.
For example, here’s a response to an informal enquiry about a position (one of only 2 in the whole of the South West that I felt I could apply for). Not in my area (although in disability studies, and policy… so about as close as you can get without actually being in my area)… a position where I felt I could make a real difference; bring an imaginative methodological approach, extend boundaries in a number of different directions… All I thought it needed was for the PI to take an imaginative look and think “actually, this is a bit different… it might be interesting to at least chat with him…”
Instead of interest… what I got was this:
“The project has already been designed with its methods already approved … Therefore there wouldn’t be scope for you to influence the project methodology. You are eligible to apply but at the same time we would like, if possible, to recruit somebody with qualifications/experience outlined on the list of essential and preferable criteria.”
In other words, we want a researcher who has less imagination than we do… simply to do the work, and write it up.
*sigh*
The pressures of being a ‘tweener’ October 13, 2009
Posted by Mike Gulliver in Musings.Tags: Career
add a comment
At home, we’re currently watching the T.V. series ‘Prison Break’. One of the key characters is David ‘tweener’ Apolskis. Caught somewhere in allegiance between the prisoners and the police he never appears quite sure who he should side with to best ensure his future… does he follow his heart and ally himself with the cons? Or take the more pragmatic step of cooperating with the police?
Having just passed my PhD viva, but without any immediately secure research destination, I know a little bit how he feels. During my Masters and PhD, I did everything I could to ensure that there would be research work waiting for me when I finished. However, despite volunteering, lecturing, tutoring, supervising and publishing my way through the last seven years, I’ve come out virtually empty handed.
In truth, I’m not surprised. There are few academic departments in the UK (world) working with Deaf studies at anything higher than undergrad level… so it’s largely a case of dead-man’s-shoes. However, even when there are dead men, the shoes are taken away by recruitment freezes. Add to this the distinct possibility of a drop in equality and social science funding brought about by a conservative win at the elections next year, and the complete failure of academia in general to perceive the enormous importance of Deaf Studies as a test bed for re-writing theory on what constitutes ‘valid humanity’… future pickings look thin.
However, I can’t stray too far. If I do, I’ll never publish, never win a grant, never get back in. With my heart in academia but no option but to find work elsewhere, I’ve become a ‘tweener’.
My working life has become a strange combination of two different worlds. Four days a week (approx) I work as an administrator and computer help-desker for the ILRT at the University of Bristol. Two days a week I spend working for the Centre for Deaf Studies as a temporary researcher. Work to write academic papers, grant proposals, make contact with potential funding sources and research collaborators etc. vies with phone-enquiries and spreadsheets… I have completely different CVs, two e-mail signatures, two professional personas…
I’m being supported at every turn. The ILRT have been enormously flexible in allowing me to drop my hours to do additional research work. CDS have bent over backwards to find me ways to be involved. However, it’s clear that my ‘tweener’ status makes satisfying both quite difficult. I’ve been told, for example, that in order to get funding and get through the ‘research door’ more permanently, I need to publish more and put in grant applications… but the one thing that I’m not prepared to sacrifice for this is my family… so when do I write them?
I guess it’s good training in being a ruthlessly efficient administrator for when I finally do get a lectureship… but it seems to be a gap in an academic career progression that is not often talked about by those who have successfully navigated their way through it…
