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.

But here I want to talk about the canines – the teeth with deep roots, which grasp and tear, the teeth which hurt and leave marks. For me, currently, the biggest of these are feelings of rejection, and they come in many different forms from many different sources, some intentional and some not.

Perhaps the least intentional is the feeling of rejection which occurs when you leave a department and a community you have been a part of for a long time. It’s an almost inevitable part of finishing a PhD, and an important way of moving on and growing as an academic. My advisor always encouraged me to adventure elsewhere after my PhD; it would develop my personal skills and knowledge, and take my own work outside the enclosed world of my department. I’d come to terms with the idea of leaving sometime late last year, and the idea of venturing further afield was an appealing one. But now that I have begun that process, I’ve realised how much that community meant – and still means – to me. Even though it was inevitable that my PhD would end, I never quite imagined how that would feel; and actually, it’s a very specific kind of rejection and loneliness.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not lonely through want of company, having a great partner and wonderful family and friends. It isn’t as though I have been ostracised; I still see many of my friends from my old department on a social basis. But I am no longer a part of that specific community, that very particular set of people going through similar experiences and working on projects in an environment that is, it seems, quite hermetically sealed. And that separation produces its very own, quite dully painful and chronic sense of solitude.

But there’s a form of rejection which is more acute and specific – that which occurs when job applications are turned down. Since submitting in December, I have had one job interview (unsuccessful), and multiple rejections without interview. Opening every rejection email, no matter how nicely it is phrased, brings with it all the nerves, all the disappointment and then all the numbness that I remember from when, aged ten, I opened the letter that informed me that I had failed my grammar school exam. I’m not that different now from that child, and every rejection still makes a toothmark on my sense of self-esteem. I wonder if I am valuable outside my previous academic context, if I do have anything to offer to that wider world about which my supervisor used to speak, whether that wider world is at all interested in anything I have to say and how I say it.

But this is something it is necessary to get used to. With so many applicants for every academic and postdoctoral position and a worryingly low number of successful applicants gaining permanent posts in the end, it doesn’t look like life as a post PhD, pre-academic-career individual is going to get easier any time soon. But in the end, you just have to keep trying, and using your available time whilst job hunting to keep your academic hand in and make yourself as attractive as possible. It’s something I’ve yet to learn to do successfully and fully.

Rejection bites for many different reasons, not all of which the person rejected can understand or know. As someone who takes dismissal quite personally, I can’t legitimately tell you to not take it to heart. But I can tell you to constantly evaluate how much this kind of career is worth to you – and that if it is the thing you most want in the world to do, then no matter what, you simply have to persevere: and know that it can take months, even years, to get there. However, you should also know that, in the meantime, there are things that you can do.

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.

Laura Malisheski’s article highlights the problem that if you are desperate for a job, you will take anything that’s offered even though it might not be ideal for you. Who’s going to turn something secure down after years of living near the poverty line as a student and part-time teacher? You could very possibly end up taking a job where the teaching load is too heavy to do any research, or where you have to move hundreds of miles from friends and family. But despair will set in especially if you are looking for work for this coming academic year and, as the saying goes, ‘beggars can’t be choosers’. Malisheski claims that you will spot many of the key warning signs at interview, so make sure you keep alert for signs of internal tension within the department for example.

Realistically though, people rarely turn down job offers. Last week a friend of mine whose first book has just been published went for a job in a city where he didn’t want to live. He really didn’t want to relocate there, but would have done so in order to get a secure position and was rather disappointed to find that he hadn’t got the job. However, this coming week he has an interview in a much more desirable location, with other more encouraging opportunities in the pipeline. More concerning is when there seem to be no jobs at all coming up in your field, or you are applying for hundreds of positions and not getting any interviews at all.

Malisheski argues that it could take several years to find your feet at an institution that you love. Not everyone wants to stay in their first permanent job anyway, having all sorts of reasons for moving. So if you can bear another few years of instability it’s worth taking a job that may not be perfect in order to simply get on that career ladder. And to all those people looking for work for September…good luck!

We had a long discussion about academic CVs and the perils of getting CV advice from generic websites targeted at those who are entering the commercial sector. Many of these advice sites say that a CV should be no more than 2 pages. Well, even for academics at the start of their careers it is impossible to fit everything in to 2 pages. We decided that a good length for an academic CV was between 4-6 pages. But the question was raised about how to make different sections of your CV stand out and be more attractive to the reader. The use of colour was proposed, which I think is a great idea. BUT what if the person printing out your CV at the other end hasn’t got a colour printer? Or if the CV is distributed for the interview panel using only a black and white photocopier? All that hard work choosing colours will have been for nothing. Messing about with italics, underlining and different fonts is also not recommended as it makes the CV harder to read. The solutions we came up with were using different point sizes and spacing the words well on the page.

Another question was about the issue of salary negotiations. Rarely, an interview panel will ask you what level of salary you would expect if you got the post. What a challenging question! You don’t want to price yourself out of the market but equally you don’t want to under-sell yourself. Obviously any answer given in an interview is not binding: if you are offered the job you will be able to negotiate formally later. But it’s still a difficult one; I’d be interested to hear anyone’s suggestions on how to handle that.

Overall I had a great time in Southampton, a lovely setting and a very friendly, enthusiastic bunch of students. I could quite get used to this roving careers adviser lark! So if you have a group you’d like me to come and talk to…please get in touch!