But it is almost two months now since I became properly free of it, and as the excuses to remain unemployed diminish, so too does my bank balance. In inverse proportion, a horrible suspicion is beginning to arise in my mind: what if I don’t WANT to get a part time or temporary job whilst I look for something ‘proper’?* What if I actually believe that working somewhere which doesn’t require or make use of my PhD is somehow below me?

In other words, what if I am a terrible, terrible, job snob?

Compared to many other women of my age, I have a very good chance of acquiring a well paid and rewarding position: I hoped and still hope it will be in the academy. In a sense, it is perhaps this knowledge that underlies my reticence about finding ‘other’ work – no matter how much I need it. Perhaps the problem is that I so firmly believed, or just took it for granted, that finding such a position would happen almost immediately. The fact that it hasn’t has come as something of a shock. And thought I don’t like to think it of myself, perhaps I have come to imagine that my perfect academic job, my security and self-sufficiency and my intellectual pleasure are rights, rather than the privileges they actually are.

I think that there is also an element of fear in this. I’m 28 years old, and I haven’t really been outside education since the first time I stepped through the school gates in September 1989. That’s almost 24 years. Honestly, I don’t think I know any other way or place of being, and I’m wary and frightened at the prospect that I might have to get work outside of the Ivory Tower, no matter how temporary that may be. The fears are those of a cosseted schoolchild: what if they don’t like me? What if they think I’m weird? What if they think I’m a snob? What if I don’t like them? What if they know things I don’t know, and talk about things I don’t understand? What if they make me feel small and unworldly? All these questions are laden with prejudice, and are perhaps silly if not downright pejorative. I’m aware of this, and it is a painful thing to realise about yourself.

Worse, however, is this question – what if that temporary job becomes permanent? What if, for whatever reason, I stay in a job that (apparently at least) wastes the effort that others have put into getting me the title of Dr.?

There are a number of ways of approaching this issue. One is to suggest that, in fact, that supposed temporary, non-academic job might become the best thing that ever happened to you – or, at least, not a bad thing and that you will be happy, able to support yourself and any family you have, able to do the things that you want to, because you have a job that doesn’t eat all your time and brain power and create such high levels of stress.** If that becomes the case, there will be no need to feel unhappy – or even ashamed, particularly because there is nothing to be ashamed of. Another tactic is to be quite explicit from the start that this is going to be a temporary position and that, unless something changes drastically, you will continue to look for other work and not allow yourself to fall into the safe complacency which having a job can provide. One friend of mine has held almost every job under the sun –  but she doesn’t let her jobs, past or present, define or limit her. They’re not who she is – and I need to learn this too.

If I know all this, then what, aside from fear, is keeping me from taking on less academic, but steady, work, and forcing me to chase two and three week projects doing note taking, administration and proof-reading? Perhaps it is laziness – I was told to take a holiday and, truth be told, I’m rather enjoying the pottering. But I know, too, that this enjoyment won’t last – it’s probably already gone on too long – yet I fear I do not want to lose the luxury it provides. Is it snobbery: am I reluctant to take work because I do not think it is worthy of me? If this is so, I have learned nothing about being human. Is it shame: am I afraid that I will disappoint the people I love? If this is so, then I think the angst lies more within me.

It is most likely all of these things. But I have to get over them, because this is not a problem that is going to go away. I currently have a three week task to complete for the University, which I am lucky to have. But once it is over, it is over, and I will have to start looking again. And I can’t rely on Unitemps forever – once I have graduated, early in the summer, I really will be on my own.

Thinking about it, though, perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps all the protection I have had from the real world during my time in the Ivory Tower has somewhat limited my education. Perhaps I need to step outside its bounds for a while – to learn about the wonders and terrors outside, and to recognise my academic opportunities as honours, not entitlements.

*By ‘proper’, I mean academic. And permanent.

**In 2012, the Universities and Colleges Union issued a report which suggested that academics are far more stressed and overworked than average.

Academic conferences are as much about learning a new culture as they are about presenting your research ideas and networking for prospective career openings.

As a PhD candidate going to academic conferences in the United States for the first time, I was wary of where I present my paper and the kind of people who are likely to be there. A big conference is likely to put me in a situation where I will be a small fish in a very big pond while a smaller conference, yes, you guess it, will make me a small fish in a very small pond. On the one hand, stories abound of PhD students and senior academics casting covert looks at name tags only to discover that they have been wasting their time talking to a “nobody.” And on the other hand, I’ve heard stories of ‘newbies’ getting job interviews at big conferences and I know that a lot of PhDs will be coming to these big conferences ready to ‘fight’ each other for a job. I badly need a job but I wasn’t really willing to fight a thousand PhDs for one postdoc opening, which I might not even get!

In addition, I’m not sure if I do like academic conferences, except for the ones where I’m presenting a paper. I know that these gatherings can prove invaluable to my current research but lets be honest, a lot of academic presentations are boring, very boring. And you are likely to have meaningless chats with people you may never see again or hear some ‘strange’ guy talk about his dog. Okay, the last bit only happened to me once. But lets face it; conferences can turn out to be like one of those weird house parties you used to go to as an undergraduate student and you may come back from conferences not quite sure of what (substantively) you’ve got out of them.

With this philosophy dominating my thought in early April as I board the Virgin Atlantic flight to New York, and with very little money to spend criss-crossing the massive land space that is America, I decided to forgo a conference on American Popular Culture where 3,000 academics will be congregating, for a rather cosy graduate conference at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

The journey to Albuquerque from Birmingham, UK, took almost fourteen four hours with three different flights and stopovers in three cities. Will I like my hosts? Will I be spending four boring days in a city I have never been before?

Albuquerque turned out to be a great small city, ethnically diverse and with many cheap places to eat good New Mexican foods. I made use of my spare time by learning the city’s history and seeing the way the people live. The conference itself turned out to be the best conference I’ve been to yet. My hosts were great and they took time to show me the city and the university. While some European academics may think Americans are loud, self-involved folks, I found them to be respectful, funny and outgoing. Unlike some academic conferences I’ve been to in Europe, the academics I met were not pretentious.

As I left New Mexico for a holiday in Florida and New York, I felt like I made the right decision to go to a smaller conference. I didn’t leave with a job interview but I made some great friends, with whom I’m likely to be friends and colleagues for years to come.

Maybe next year I’ll go to a big conference, but for now, I’m happy being the little guy in the little league.

Shola Adenekan is a PhD candidate and a teaching-assistant at the University of Birmingham.

Next week you’ll find a new author on this blog, who is at the start of his academic career talking about the issues facing junior scholars today. I am moving on to a new blog for jobs.ac.uk on my specialist subject area of American History: if you’d like to visit my new blog, click here.

I wanted to finish my last post for Just Higher-Ed with a few thoughts on the important issues over the last four years. The vulnerable and sometimes abused position of part-time and temporary staff in the sector has been a recurring theme as was academics having to justify how hard their jobs actually are. The challenges of balancing a full teaching load with demands of research has been another often discussed issue.

The increasingly competitive nature of the job market both here and overseas has also been a source of concern but there have also been bright spots as our department has made several permanent and part time hires in the last few years, so the job market hasn’t stagnated completely.

One lesson I wanted to pass on is that if you have had to do several years of ‘adjunct’ teaching, you will probably find that moving to a permanent job is easier in some ways and more challenging in others. However, if you have friendly colleagues and teach a subject that you love without too much interference from the powers that be, within the first couple of years you’ll establish yourself, fitting your work into the yearly academic cycle with no trouble. Best of luck to all you jobseekers out there: your dream job is just around the corner!

Increasingly academics have to input their own marks into record systems and so this time of year is one of frenetic admin activity as well as actually marking exams. Many colleagues don’t find marking exams horrible, but they don’t like the fast turn-around times and the admin burdens that increase every year.

I enjoy marking: finding out how much (or how little!) of the information and skills I have taught during the year has actually been absorbed by my cohort. I don’t have a choice whether to mark exams or not, but some of you who are on temporary contracts might find you’re offered extra cash to mark exams. It might seem like a lot of work, but I’d take it: marking end of year exams brings a certain sense of closure to the year’s academic activities.

At some universities academic staff also have to take on invigilation duties. This task can veer between the highly stressful and the mind-numbingly boring! Stressful if something goes wrong: the wrong exam paper, noise from a neighbouring room, a student taken ill or caught cheating (all of which I have experienced in only four years of doing this!) Mind numbingly boring because you have to stand in a silent room with no phone or computer to play with, no book or newspaper to read for hours and hours! The advantage is that at least you get a few hours during a very busy time of the term when you can do nothing and clear your mind for a while!

James Lang argues that networking need not only be self-serving but that it is important for teachers to direct their undergraduate and postgraduate students in how to network. Almost anyone’s career chances will be boosted by having this skill.

Networking is about much more than small talk and the bravery to approach someone you don’t know and start talking about yourself. It’s about being perceptive enough to draw connections between your work and theirs, about spending the time researching the background of colleagues in order to speak intelligently with them.

These skills can also benefit the university too. Networking can be employed to help boost student numbers when staff members are asked to work at prospective student events. Long’s article makes us all stop and think: networking isn’t just a cringe-worthy self-serving tool but something that we do naturally every day. And so we need to pass the technique on to our students to ensure it becomes part of their working practice too.

I am looking forward to the Easter break to have a rest because I won’t have to do my long commute into my university so often but I will still put in eight hour days in my office at home. Many academics struggle to convince family and friends that they will not be taking a three week holiday at this time of year!

Of course many of us have piles of marking to do, hardly a restful task for anybody! And apart from that, we’ve been looking forward to the end of teaching so that we can get on with our research or writing projects. Not only is this a very enjoyable part of the job for many, it is also essential for career development.

So where does that leave actual holiday? Time with family and friends? A breather after the long term? However career focused you are, it is important to allow yourself sometime to rest and recuperate or you will find term starting again in May and you have no energy at all. Dedicating a small number of days to spend time away from your desk is very important and will actually improve your performance overall. So however tempting it might be to throw yourself into research, give yourself a break over this Easter period. Your mental and physical health might depend on it!

Downing argues that exactly at the time when universities in the West are dramatically cutting their state funding, institutions in Asia (especially China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan)  are moving in the opposite direction. The efforts of these countries is paying off as more of their universities move into the world’s top 200 list published by Quacquerelli Symonds.

This means that Asian universities are in a better position to attract the world’ s best academics to teach and research, and the world’s best students to learn there.

Of course, the ranking system itself causes controversy, as does the internal UK ranking of universities here. But I agree with Downing when he argues that some sort of ranking system, however flawed, is necessary in order for us to judge Higher Education systems using ‘real world’ values.

And the findings of this ranking system is that the traditional universities of the West who have dominated the tables for years should be worried and look to Asia as a model of how to improve their own standing. Many academics don’t like the idea of competition on this scale, but it seems to be a fact of university life across the globe, so surely it’s better to be informed about these changes than to bury our heads in the sand?

Unfortunately the cuts to the British public sector are starting to have an impact on arts and humanities researchers and lecturers. For example, the British Academy has cut its small grants programme, as outlined in this excellent blog by Phil Ward: please click here. As Ward says, this will especially impact on early career scholars attempting to get a foot in the funding door.

While promotion and career progression are so closely tied to the acquisition of large funding awards, the removal of smaller awards such as this will have the affect of making competition for the larger awards even more fierce. So, how should we go about trying to undertake research in such challenging circumstances?

Research from home? Online resources mean that for many scholars travelling great distances to archives is not always necessary now.

Research outside term time  only? Without funding it is nearly impossible to spare the time during the teaching parts of the year to get down to some serious research or writing. So, forget the idea of an actual holiday, and make sure you dedicate your breaks to research instead.

Small grants from libraries/archives? The situation globally is not completely hopeless. There are still some institutions offering scholars money to study for short periods of time (a few weeks or a few months). Libraries, especially in the US, offer decent visiting scholarships over the summer months.

The situation is far from ideal, but if you want to continue to be a research active scholar, increasingly lateral thinking will be required.

If you are an academic jobseeker you think of your own development in terms of skills and competencies as well as the subject-based expertise that you acquire and it’s no different for the graduate jobseeker. If you are well versed in the language, theory and practice of career development then you will be in a good position to help your students as well as yourself.

It is important to help them to show that the things they have done at university have given them the skills and experience that place them ahead of the pack. An obvious example is giving an oral presentation with a class mate. Research skills, teamwork, oral communication and powerpoint skills are among the demonstrable outcomes of undertaking that assessment.

Masters or PhD students can be encouraged to think in a similar way about their university experience. Not every postgraduate will want to move on to a career in academia but this doesn’t mean that their postgrad degrees are wasted: far from it! Employers admire the strength of character that completing a postgraduate qualification requires and also the skills that it produces in a candidate.

I am not suggesting that every lecturer should have to be a careers adviser as well. Students have access to their careers services often for several years after they graduate so we should not try to duplicate the good work that they do. But we know our courses intimately and can relate them to the skills our students need in the world of work. This should be in the back of our minds when we design new courses or rejig old ones. This development doesn’t require us to do different things, but rather to think about what we already do in terms of employability and skills.

When academics are tired at the end of a long teaching term, they would probably find the idea of never retiring horrific, but I sometimes think privately that I couldn’t ever give up what I do.  This attitude does cause problems though, and one issue faced by some senior managers is how to finally ask those coming to retirement age, or who might be well past it, to lay down their chalk and retire.

There are two aspects to this. First, research. Of course noone is saying that retired academics have to give up researching. Many continue publishing and speaking at conferences well into their retirement. But the question is how much support should the institution give that person to continue their work? Library privileges help and are relatively cheap; however, providing office space for former staff members might deny current members of staff access to that space and therefore hinder the running of the department.

Second: teaching, and this is the issue that Fant focuses on. Retired academics are often hired to do sessional, contractual teaching where their continued presence is essential to the running of a particular course. There is nothing wrong with this, but as Fant says, it can be difficult to encourage them to give way gracefully if a new member of staff with similar expertise comes on board.

In my experience if these matters are handled sensitively then everyone can benefit. When I started my first permanent academic job I received a great deal of advice from a retired head of department who was doing some part time teaching and his expertise helped me become a better lecturer.

This is a complicated issue and, of course, in some institutions, staff are given no choice but to retire at a certain point. Dealing with this with flexibility and sensitivity is a real challenge for those managing a department.