The thing about finishing a project that has hitherto consumed you is that it opens up your ability to throw yourself much more completely and vigorously into things that you would previously have been prevented from taking on. For example, I now combine part time, temporary work with hunting for a more permanent academic job. Currently, I have a transcription job which is fascinating, but involves a confidentiality agreement, and when that is done I will be invigilating exams requiring special arrangements – an insight into University administration, but also a way of helping individuals who wish to achieve, but who have to face far more serious challenges to do so than I ever did. Both of these are new experiences, opportunities to extend the world that my PhD confined to my own desk and my own brain.

Wednesday mornings (sometimes all day) I work as the Treasurer of the Museum Ethnographers Group. I gained this position in the final year of my PhD, and though I did my best with the time I had available, there is no doubt that I am now much freer to devote more to this organisation, attending and writing a report regarding its annual conference, and helping with its various events and projects. This voluntary work has been a lifesaver, keeping me in the museological and academic loop. It is not an easy job, but now I have the mental capacity I can take it on much more wholeheartedly and with a lighter mind. It seems that submitting my PhD came hand in hand with an exponential rise in my mathematical abilities.

Any chance you get to look outside university hallways is also worth taking. I’ve spent all my life in education, and the rest of the world is rather fascinating and strange to me. This week, I got to experience a particularly peculiar part of it, when I helped my partner’s father exhibit his business, which designs and manufactures wind tunnels for testing fire detectors, at a Fire and Safety show at the NEC. It was strangely familiar – somewhere in between the conferences I’ve been to, the architecture expos I’ve read about in my research, and the strange, temporary glamour of a Formula 1 pit lane. Large stands were set up to display products, covered in corporate badges, films and in some cases, models both female and male. One was designed to mimic a pub: and it did sell beer. The ripping up of carpets and the tearing down of stands was a most surreal experience: a marker of the whole event’s temporary nature. Universities can be quite insular – recently I’ve learned how interesting and equally strange the world outside them actually is.

I’ve also already found a number of Calls for Papers, both for articles and conference papers, which I intend to answer, and of course I write for this blog. My old department have invited me back to speak at their research week, and I have a book for review half read and floating somewhere on my shelves. In other words, now that I’m free, I’m busier than ever.

Many of these recent experiences are somewhat left field: I never imagined that I’d be showcasing fire safety equipment, and who knows what else will come my way. My present situation of technical ‘unemployment’, which I’ve complained about on here in the recent past, actually offers a distinct advantage: what I do no longer has to be directly related to my research, and no matter how strange the offer or request, I now have the choice whether or not to say yes. Unemployment was not what I expected, and perhaps if you let go of expectation about what you will or should do when you finally submit, the hands of possibility open up.

The Viking and I were – and are – very different. In our second year we were elected as the student representatives, and during that time we ran a conference, reinvigorated the various research seminar series, organised Research Week, sorted out MA Thinktank Sessions and ran a monthly student-staff consultative committee. All this work really highlighted the differences between us: myself – shy, unable to take charge of a committee meeting without a great deal of stress, but very organised; she – perhaps less administratively inclined, but distinctly more able to command attention and respect, to lead people and motivate them. We made a good team; the strengths of one outweighed – and even resolved the issues created by – the weaknesses of the other. I’d like to think we changed our department for the better. But I, at least, learned minimum of three lessons from The Viking in this period.

Firstly, being a leader. Perhaps not something you expect to have to be during a PhD and I was certainly not very good at this. Too timid, keen to please everybody, and with a tendency to cry with frustration if meeting filled with big personalities got out of hand. I have to say that I was grateful when The Viking took the task of chairing the conference committee into her own hands. She had no compunction about shutting people up and moving on (kindly, of course), so that meetings didn’t run on for hours and hours. Neither did she have a need to please everyone – she had conviction enough to decide and do what she thought was right. And she could do something that to me was amazing: she could tell people what to do, whereas my attempts were always prefaced by a mealy-mouthed ‘Could you please…you’d be ever so kind to…would it be ok if…?’ and rarely got any further – I’d feel guilty and do the work anyway. This leads on to the second lesson I learned.

Secondly, dealing with people – an issue with at least two parts. Once you’ve been a leader, organised and encouraged people, you have to let them get on with it. I’m unable to do this without interfering. The Viking trusted people to do their jobs – and do them they did. They don’t have to do everything your way to be successful. The second part of the dealing with people issue is realising that disagreements and debate are rarely personal, and shouldn’t be taken to heart. As far as I could see, things that hurt me rolled off the Viking’s back like waves off a prow: whilst any form of argument at all deeply upset me, at times it seemed she enjoyed dissent, because in some sense it was productive.

Thirdly, organisation. Here, perhaps, the lessons were reciprocal. My high-stress, bureaucratic tendencies forced the Viking into action and she translated them into action. Through this, I learned that it was possible to be – or at least appear – organised and cohesive as a pair or team, something I’d previously only considered to be possible for one person alone. But working on the conference with the Viking taught me that organised and successful action is rooted in trusting the person who is supposed to have your back. And trust her I did.

We haven’t worked together in that capacity for almost three years now. But when we went for tea and cake the other week, I learned one more thing from her. I have a tendency to be nostalgic about the past and a little frightened of the future, and whereas for the longest time I didn’t want to leave our department, or give up my role in it, she was always keen to move on to the next thing. Her relief at no longer being student representative was palpable – and my sadness was probably equally material. But staying in one place and role forever, as she has said to me many times, doesn’t allow you to grow. It might be safe and sensible, but it limits your experience, and it doesn’t let you come into your own. She’s always known that she would move on after this, though I’m not sure to precisely what, yet. I’m fairly sure it will be good, though.

So there are The Four Lessons of The Viking: Doing a PhD requires and teaches more than purely academic skills – the ability to lead, to cope with difference, to organise in a group and to grow up and move on.

Good luck, Viking -Á við sópa með þreskingu árina, eina mark okkar verður vestri ströndinni.

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.

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!