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!

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!

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.

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.

I have blogged about the difficulties in mixing teaching with research before, but even during my fourth year in my post I am still having trouble getting this right! Partly this is because I have been writing and delivering a new 10 week MA unit this term. Even though this is on a topic I am very familiar with, I obviously have to be very well prepared each week and this has been taking a considerable amount of time. Add to that dissertation supervisions and lecture and seminar preparation for undergraduate courses and marking on top of that, and there’s plenty to be getting on with each week!

Many colleagues say that it is over-ambitious to attempt any writing or research during term time and that they struggle to make any progress in these areas outside holiday time. I am certainly finding that this term. It is a good lesson for me in having flexible deadlines though. There’s no point in beating myself up because I have fallen behind my strict writing schedule. I am simply going to have to adjust my targets.

Having said that, this week with no teaching commitments I should be able to push forward and get most of one chapter of my book written and then the next one might be on hold until the Easter holidays! Although it’s a matter of pride with me not to miss deadlines and to deliver when I say that I will, quality is more important than  promptness. So, give yourself a break this week… and set yourself realistic work deadlines!

Cassuto argues that the experience of most PhD students studying at university bears little resemblance to the teaching jobs that they will end up doing (if they’re lucky!) in the first few years after finishing the doctorate. He claims that supervisors need to be realistic with their postgrad students so that their expectations match the opportunities available in the job market. Having a PhD from a research-focused university does not mean that you will get a job with a low teaching load and good research support.

Essentially Cassuto’s message to PhDs is that most academic jobs are not like the job your supervisor does. Your expectations need to change to meet the job market. Of course, this difference between hopes and reality is not the fault of the student but of the individuals, departments and institutions who are training them for an academic career.

Most universities offer PhD students very little academic career development training. It is assumed that your skills and expectations will be honed by imitating your supervisors and colleagues. What is actually required is a professional development strand to the PhD.

One commenter on Cassuto’s article suggested inviting back former postgrad students to talk to current ones about the jobs they do now, including non-academic roles, which sounds like a great idea, but could it ever happen? This would also help to solve the problem that many graduate students feel abandoned by their alma mater once they have finished their PhD by showing that their opinions and experience are valued for years afterwards.

I am very lucky because, at my university, there isn’t a culture of having to be present in the office for the sake of it. Of course we have to be there to do our teaching, to attend meetings, to offer one to one guidance to students but, other than that, we are ‘allowed’ to do our research, lesson planning, marking etc. at home if we want to.

But could we do even more from home? What about having meetings via conference calls and webcams? And, more controversially, should we cancel office hours and just converse via email? Do we even need to be present to teach? We could run wholly online modules, with lectures delivered as podcasts and seminars run as discussion forums online!

Most people think this is going too far. Although working from home (and indeed any sort of flexible working arrangement) is beneficial to a point, it is also important to have face to face contact with colleagues and managers, nevermind actually being present for students.

However, while not becoming the rule, it is useful to have these sorts of arrangements in place in case of a weather-related emergency such as the snow fall we have had recently that has prevented us from getting to work. Instead of the work place grinding to a halt, these alternatives can be put in place ensuring that students and colleagues are not left with no contact at all.

Hopefully in the New Year we’ll have some milder weather and travel to work will not be a problem! In the meantime, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers. I’ll be back in 2011!

For those of you running new courses this year or semester, reading week will probably offer you the first chance you have had since September to assess how the unit is going. Despite all your careful planning over the summer, I know from experience that chances are the unit isn’t going quite according to plan! Perhaps you might also be able to catch up on some lecture writing and get a few weeks ahead of yourself!

For those lucky lecturers like me who are on light teaching duties this year, now is the time to really get stuck in to some writing or research. OK, so you only have a week, but it’s still possible to produce a chapter of your monograph during that time if you’re really disciplined.

However, despite best intentions, you’ll almost certainly be doing an increasing amount of admin this week, and that of course eats into research and writing time. Perhaps you’ll be updating registers and chasing up students who haven’t been attending class. Or writing exam papers for next summer. Or maintaining the website for your course. Or even more disruptive than that, attending meetings in your department.

Perhaps if you have had a really hectic first few months of the academic year, it might be sensible to recharge your batteries ready for the long slog to Christmas. So, in most cases, academics will find themselves busier than ever this reading week, but sensible ones will fit in some ‘me time’ as well!

There are several points here: firstly the author Gabriella Montell was arguing that lecturers have to do more of their own administrative tasks now. This is true. Second, and this is more controversial, she was arguing that those in a permanent job are undervalued and are perceived to be lazy because their contact classroom hours are often less than more junior scholars.

I can see both sides of the fence on this one. I worked in temporary jobs for 3 years after my PhD and it was incredibly hard, time consuming work. The largest burdens are learning new material from scratch in fields you are not familiar with and teaching at an institution that doesn’t consider you a fully fledge member of the department so that you are flying blind for much of the time (and feeling ostracised). Tenured lecturers and professors do not usually face those burdens. However, the amounts of paperwork and managerial tasks they do are often very heavy.

One of the respondents to Montell’s original argument argued that the only way they survived having a permanent position was by learning to prioritise: this is good advice. But they suggested that it was important to learn:  “(1) to say no, (2) to be satisfied with doing a mediocre job for most things, (3) that it’s okay to miss unimportant deadlines, and (4) to do the important and ignore the urgent.”

I would agree with points 1 and 4, but I am not sure about 2 and 3. Is it ever OK to be satisfied with doing a mediocre job, let alone “for most things”? I know that you cannot be a perfectionist and you have to accept that sometimes you have to let a project go and move on to the next thing, but giving mediocre lessons or producing mediocre research or even giving a mediocre performance in a staff meeting is not good practice.

Also I would challenge point 3, that it’s OK to miss some deadlines. I think we all know how frustrating it is when we’ve asked colleagues to get back to us by a certain date and we have to chase them a second, third or fourth time. If you make a habit of doing this, more and more people in your field are going to know that you’re unreliable and that’s dangerous for your career. It only takes 30 seconds to whiz off an email of apology at being unable to complete the task and giving a commitment of when it will be finished. So, my advice: don’t fall into the habit of missing deadlines because everyone else does it. Stand out from the crowd!