#Post-Ac Essay in Progress!

Hey y’all, I’m working on another post-ac essay. It’s Part Three of last year’s two-part blog series about reading only women authors.

The part where I figure out why I care increasingly less about my dissertation research every year. (Is that true?! It may be true??!!!??)

Here’s a teaser from the draft:

E-Book Essay Teaser: Post-Academic Unemployment

I’m working on my memoir essay thingy this morning. Thought I’d post a teaser.

Sandberg, Millennial Journalism, and Evolution

What do they have in common?

Pretty much nothing.

But the Sandberg stuff and the journalism stuff have been pricking people’s underbellies recently. I thought I could helpfully share some of the more helpful entries in these latest blogosphere buggaboos.

The evolution thing is just cool.

I Feel Like Madonna

Friends! I am officially a validated, credentialed post-academic blogger.

Y’all may not know this, since as far as I know, most of my regular readers are inexplicably not members of my elite club of overeducated, underemployed people using their PhDs recreationally instead of professionally, but the post-academic blogger is a popular blogger.

You know that 70% of PhDs who cannot find stable, secure, living-wage employment? That 70% of your children’s college instructors who do not have their own office to decorate with Quentin Tarantino posters and flyers for the next ecofeminist lecture series and photos of the dog?

Well, they need some solace about their sorry lot. And they find it online. My own post straightforwardly addressing leaving academia remains one of my most poplar. But I gots nothing on people with URLs that include variants of “leaving” and “academia.”

A few of the awesomest post-ac/alt-ac bloggers (glossary: simply, alt-ac is PhDs with campus or combo staff/research gigs and un-simply it’s complex, while post-ac, c‘est moi, a PhD whose degree helps her professionally inasmuch as it provides her coworkers with light ribbing material) are putting together an e-book tentatively titled Moving On: Personal Stories of Leaving Academia.

On a lark, I crafted an abstract, and, friends, it was accepted.

My personal story of leaving academia will be made chillingly, revealingly, hilariously public.

I haven’t been this happy about external validation since my essay about Infinite Jest was accepted to one of the fancy-pantsiest journals, where it sits patiently in archives for 3 DFW PhD candidates a year to read and disagree with.

And this is better.

So my light blogging may be even lighter as I use my precious few free weekend hours to write this essay over the next few weeks. And in May, I’ll be trumpeting this e-book like it’ll solve the Middle East. All of it. Which, you never know, maybe it will.

Leaving Academia

Gummint historian and Versatile PhD macher Alexandra Lord wrote a lovely first person column for the Chronicle of Higher Education protesting the part of academic culture that encourages young scholars to sacrifice everything they value in their whole lives for one small part of their lives: scholarship.

You know, if you quit academia, it’s because you didn’t love it enough.

Don’t bother clicking on the rest of this post if you don’t care about what it’s like to be and then not be an academic.

Mid Week Roundup

Ezra Klein puts his smarty pants on (does he ever take them off?) and breaks down the Ryan and Romney budgets.

What we (don’t) talk about when we talk about Medicare.