A Reminder

More than for this class or my colleagues, this post is for me. Today I gave a rant about how I've changed my perception about professorship in the last six months and what it means to be happy. Despite having pondered this a lot it was the first time that I gave form to all these thoughts and it was healthy and good. I am going to, more or less, rewrite what I said in class two hours ago (accompanied with some sources to consider because, hey, I'm a scholar). This is to give me something to come back to on those days when I'm thinking "What the hell am I doing with my life?"
So, Here goes:

Kyle, you want to be a professor because you love teaching, research, and collaborative environments and you think the university is an institution that makes the world a better place. For one to have that goal does not mean that he or she is locked into that path in their career or life forever, that altering one's course becomes a type of failure, or that your life will never be as good as it was if you had pursued that path and acquired that tenured position.

There are some potential downsides to pursuing this path too far:

• The academic landscape is changing: the job market is flooded and desirable positions are shrinking. Even if you were to get the job you want the way academia changes over the next ten years might turn the job you want into the job that you are okay with having.
• Getting that tenure position may very well mean leaving Saskatchewan, even Canada, behind for the majority of your adult life. You have to consider whether or not this conflicts with the perceptions you have had about having kids and raising a family in similar conditions to the ones you grew up in.
• The scariest version of this path that you can imagine is one where you chase after tenure track positions for over a decade while picking up sessional work to make ends meet. In this version of the future you never achieve job stability or a decent pay, you are forced to move frequently (along with your wife and kids), and you are so overworked that you never seem to have time for you friends, family, or other passions.

Here's the thing, your training and skill set make you a marketable employee: you are trained in effective communication (oral and written), research methods, and critical analysis. Your volunteer experiences have taught you how to collaborate with others and you are able to lead people in a way that uses their strengths to the benefit of the group. You also have basic programming skills, a foundational understanding of database creation and management, and will have accumulated various other tech-relevant skills by the end of this year. That last set of skills are particulars that you can use at the moment but, perhaps more important, the time that you have spent learning has made you into a quick learner able to grasp concepts rather quickly and you could efficiently (with some effort) acquire the programming skills required for a particular task because of that.

In short, you're an adaptable individual suited to many different careers and the most important thing you need to consider when pursuing any career is 'does it fulfill me and make me happy?'

If it does this while allowing you to provide for yourself and your family, then great!

If it doesn't, maybe you need to reevaluate the path you're on.

travel.path

if path == "bad":

    for i in job_opportunities:

        explore(i)

        if i == "good"

             path = i

travel.path

(a little python humour for you all).

Here are some articles to consider (some of which were readings) as well as some alt-ac and just plain alt careers to consider (I will continue to add over the course of the semester):

#alt-academy
A real possibility (article)
Humanities Unbound
Versatile PhD
Intelligence agencies are always looking for good researchers