When I was working on my degree most of the faculty would have been appalled to hear where I was working.  For-profit was synonymous with evil.  There was no grey zone to most of them.  But since that was the only place that was able to pay a reasonable salary, I stayed and just didn’t get into it with the faculty.

In my current role things are a little tenuous; due to some internal politics, it’s not clear who I will be reporting to or what I will be doing 3-6 months in the future, although it’s fairly certain to change.  That could be good (opportunity) or it could be bad (doing things I’m just not that interested in).  But I’ve been playing it cool because, frankly, I have been comfortable.

Now something interesting has come up.  A position at my alma mater doing analysis for the budget and planning office.  It would pay slightly less (within 5%) of what I make now, come with an office instead of a cube, have a director title instead of a manger title (although still no direct reports), and make me eligible for pretty cushy set of benefits by private industry standards.  (People who have it complain, but really until they’ve work outside of a state university they have NO idea how little some companies offer.)

All that having been said, in some ways the job itself is a step backwards.  (The step up in title is just to make sure they could afford someone like me.)  I would be doing less of the cutting edge stuff I’m doing now, be less involved in the industry groups and publishing my research, and doing more mundane query-jockey stuff.  Oh, and have to pay an insane amount per year for parking, which I know sounds petty, but is vaguely irritating.

Nonetheless, I’m still strongly considering it.  This week is 2nd round interviews.  I will take half a day off and go talk to them.

So I’ve been asking myself WHY I am willing to take the bad things about this in order to change jobs and have come up with a couple of things:  I like the idea of the stability and knowing what I’ll be doing a few months from now, I like the benefits even if the salary is a bit less, and I like the idea of working for a not-for-profit again.

That last one is irritating.  I thought I had gotten over my snobbishness about that kind of thing, but apparently it’s still there, just suppressed.  I still look down on the for-profits as a place to build a career.  I see them fill a role, just not one I want to be involved with.  I’m not sure I like that about myself right now…

The thing is that there is very little difference in terms of the two types of organizations.  Non-profit educational institutions are every bit as concerned about money as for-profit colleges and universities.  This particular school is one of a wave of research institutions who, in the past few years, have made it clear that if a department or scholar isn’t bringing in enough money to pay their salary and support staff, they aren’t going to be kept around.  The non-profit keeps changing entrance requirements in such a way as to preclude the poorest, worst prepared and most needy students from attending.  In contrast, the for-profit is focused on programs to HELP those students succeed.  You can argue (and I’m sure Harkin would) that the for-profit is doing it only to increase their bottom line, but the fact remains that they are graduating students who otherwise never would have made it.  Neither is as evil or as pure as comics like the one above would have you think.

So why do I still have that snobbish attitude?  My next week will be spent focusing on making this decision based on facts, not that attitude.  I need to look at what both jobs offer, where they could go, and which will provide a secure future for myself and my husband.

Anyone who has spent time in the regular job market and looked for a job has heard the old saw that more than half of the jobs are filled through the “unofficial” job market; someone knows someone else, who puts them in touch with the right person who is hiring for a job, etc, etc, etc. I knew this to be true, but frankly suck at networking so had never had it work for me.

Then came LinkedIn, a site designed to make us all just a bit better at networking. I have what can only be called a schizophrenic presence there, with links to friends in the IT industry, co-workers from my day job, a few academic colleagues and some other random acquaintances that seemed to make sense. I never thought much about it. However over christmas break, it thought about me.

I received an email from a 2nd level contact looking for someone who knew statistics, maybe some finance, and might be interested in a position in financial planning and analysis. I’ve been struggling with the overwhelming mismatch between my day job and my academic interests/goals for some time but have been too high up in my day job to walk away for a graduate assistants salary, especially now that husband has joined the ranks of the underemployed. But I called the guy back to find out more about the position due to a deep dissatisfaction with my day job. I mean, heck; I have an MBA, I know some finance, I know statistics (I teach it)….why not talk to him. I found out he was recruiting for a fairly high level financial modeling position with a higher ed organization, who were fascinated by the combination of my education, technical skills (IT and statistics), and business skills.

Over the past month, all my spare time was spent either interviewing or studying for the interviews. (NOTE: I don’t care HOW senior you are in a field, you always study for your interviews; if nothing else you learn about that organization and refresh your knowledge on the items they are specifically interested in.) And I got it. Negligible salary change, but I will be working in the industry I know and love, doing something marginally different from what my career has been for the last 15 years, and focused on issues I’m passionate about.

The new organization wants me to work initially on a predictive revenue model. But in essence a revenue model for a college is an enrollment model; grant funding is handled separately. Questions that play into this model include:

• Why do students stop taking classes?  What factors are most significant in the decision?
• Are there things in a students record that would allow us to predict which ones will persist and which ones won’t?  Are there interventions that can be made to change the predicted outcome?
• Are there external factors (the economy, for instance) that drive enrollment behaviors, and in what way?
• How do these things vary by major?  By number of credits completed so far?  By level of degree (Associates vs Bachelors vs Masters vs Doctoral)

So now, rather than working on my lit review as I had intended, I am reviewing financial modeling, teaching myself SAS (they use SAS instead of SPSS), and scanning the existing literature on higher education enrollment to make sure I don’t miss any key factors that have been found by researchers so far.

To me, this is time well spent.  It ties loosely into my dissertation (and given my lack of data may result in a sensible change of dissertation direction to something related to persistence), but more importantly puts me in the position that seems so necessary to finishing; being steeped in the environment that you are studying.  Unlike a standard corporation, these folks are excited by my slightly academic take on the problem and my knowledge of current events in the industry.

I expect the next couple of months to see a revision of my organizational strategies, as well as a the promised review of Demystifying Dissertation Writing and my ongoing attempts to improve my teaching skills .  My guess is that the productivity revisions will come first, as the bipolar life I’ve been leading comes to an end and my jobs and academic interests begin to intertwine.  I can’t even begin to express how much I am looking forward to that!

There are a ton of reasons people start a PhD program:

• They want to be called Dr.
• They are fascinated by a really specific topic
• They want to cure cancer/find extraterrestrial life/fix society/etc.
• They don’t know what else to do after their undergrad program
• They don’t want to get a real job yet
• They want to be a Professor

For me it was this last one, although in hindsight I can admit that I didn’t have a clear idea of what that meant.  What the average undergrad sees of professors is conferences, teaching classes, meeting with students, etc.  That was the part that I wanted.  What the average undergrad DOESN’T see is the research process, the funding issues and the politics.  Here are some things I didn’t realize when I started that I kind of wish I had known beforehand:

• A PhD is a RESEARCH degree.  You are being trained to do and publish research.  Your “major” is really the area which you intend to apply your research skills.  Teaching is secondary.
• There are fewer and fewer full time tenure track positions available.  The humanities are just a disaster in this respect (to the point where respected faculty are advising undergraduates NOT to go to grad school), the social sciences are sinking fast, and even the hard sciences have fewer openings.  Competition for those positions is fierce, and the bar to even be considered is far higher than it has ever been in the past.
• Money is scarce.  Most schools now are placing a lot of emphasis on bringing in grant funding.  So in addition to doing research you must learn how to get the money to do it, and that means choosing your subject not for its intrinsic value or because it fascinates you, but based on what the government, industry or non-profits are willing to fund.
• You don’t get to relax after you graduate.  In fact, it gets worse.  The first six years of your academic career are focused on nothing but getting tenure, and while everyone SAYS they look at teaching reviews in the process what they REALLY care about is research productivity and stature.
• Internal academic politics are as bad or worse than the politics you encounter in any other workplace.
• Much of research time is spent proving things that practitioners will tell you they already knew.  I read about a paper recently titled Interacting with women can impair men’s cognitive functioning.  Duh.  My papers to date have also landed with comparable thuds on the practitioner world, where they tend to look at you like you are an idiot for not having already know whatever it was you just showed in your paper.
  
• The typical professor at a a university is expected to spend most of their time on research and little on anything else.  (See below) I’ve heard 70% research, 20% teaching and 10% service at an R1.  Even those working at a liberal arts college teaching 4 classes per semester are expected to get some research done.

A few things have become clear to me of late:

1. I love teaching and that is what I want the focus of my work to be.
2. I am particularly passionate about students at the community college, most of whom work full time and are often single parents or struggling to get by.
3. I picked a bad field for those goals, because frankly there is little call for instructors in education policy anywhere other than at the graduate level of research schools.
4. This is a LOT of work when it won’t get me where I want to go.

As I may have mentioned, this semester I am teaching not just my standard statistics class, but also psychology 101.  There is a LOT of need for people to teach psychology at the community college level, and I actually have quite a few credits in relevant areas (methods and educational psychology).  Therefore I am taking a short detour (6 classes assuming all the transfer stuff works out correctly) to pick up a Masters in Psychology.

Why?  Well, most simply it aligns better with my goals.  It gives me the necessary credentials to get a full time teaching position at a community college in a field that is always needed and of interest to students at that level.  For now I am not officially stopping the PhD program;  I will probably finish my dissertation eventually, if only because I hate to see things unfinished.  But in the meantime I have realigned how my time is spent versus my goals.

So why am I telling you this?  If you are starting to think about graduate school, and especially about PhD program, you should go into that process with your eyes completely open.  As with any other career there are pluses and minuses to this one, and given the level of time, sacrifice and effort involved you need to be sure is for you from the outset.  Talk to faculty at your intended school candidly about job prospects, hiring rates for departmental graduates, and how they spend their time.  Make sure you know what you are getting in to.

• Too much powerpoint is bad – you don’t have to show every step of every problem on the slides – use the board
• You don’t have to cover every word of the book; make them read it, cover the high points and answer questions on the rest
• More interactive exercises, less of hearing myself talk

So those are the things I’m working on.  I am down to about 16-18 slides per chapter, which is about half of what I used last time.  And I have found some interesting exercises, although not as many as I need quite yet.

The good news, however, is that the class doesn’t start until next week, so I have another week to get a few more chapters worth of materials put together, find more good articles and images, and come up with an exercise to help drive home the concept of standard deviation.

This month has been difficult; at my “day job” (non-academic) I have survived 2 rounds of layoffs and watched many dear friends and colleagues lose their jobs the week before christmas.  The MBA in me knows why the company is doing it (if you can live on your cash flow right now you will emerge out the other side in much better shape) but I am convinced they are choosing where to make the cuts in a painfully short-sighted manner.  They cut 2 major departments, the six-sigma quality analysts (who could save them millions if people would listen) and are shutting down sites that, frankly, they will never get reopened because of their remote locations.  I am having a bout of survivors guilt mingled with relief; we aren’t financially ready for me to be unemployed.

I’ve also faced the fact this month that we aren’t going to be financially ready for me to take a 50% cut in pay (what I would take for an academic job) for a long time, and maybe never.  I make a comfortable living now, and frankly we are used to it; we like the stuff that money can buy, the lifestyle we have.  So can I or should I bother to write a dissertation to get a job we may not be able to (or willing to) afford for me to have?

On positive notes, I am teaching a section of statistics at the community college next semester.  I enjoy it.  My husband keeps reminding me that it would take only a little work (a few classes) to become qualified to teach Psychology as well and community colleges can keep me busy with those two pretty much forever.  I am considering it; my thought process goes like this:  If all goes as planned by the end of spring I should be done with my Comps, although getting that and my proposal done while working 50 hours a week and teaching a class are kind of iffy.  I could, however, take 2 classes per semester in psychology for summer, fall and spring while taking a 1 credit “continuous enrollment” in my program and have solid teaching credentials for a community college.  It would delay my dissertation by a year, which is no big deal since I can’t afford to graduate and change jobs yet anyway.  If I wait until fall to start those classes I can probably do my proposal over the summer and technically be ABD for that year as well.

We’ll see – no decisions yet.  Just ideas floating around in my head.

For today, it’s Christmas Eve.  I need to CLEAN!  We’re having 8 (out of 10) of our closest friends over tomorrow for Christmas Dinner and the state of disarray that we live with really won’t work for entertaining.  (I’m making Prime Rib; the thing is huge and it was EXPENSIVE!  But it will be amazing!!!)  I also have some errands to run (which I may do first – the cleaning is feeling kind of overwhelming right now.

Then tonight I’m making Duck with a Pomegranate Wine sauce and Mashed Potatoes for dinner; we have tons of cookies for desert.  Then PRESENTS!  (I still get excited like a kid about gifts, but we like to sleep in.  Since we have no kids, opening on Christmas Eve works for us.)

Enjoy your holidays!

And I took the 3 working days of next week off.

I don’t have to do anything or be anywhere until December 1st.

If I want to sit around in my jammies and watch daytime TV all next week, I can
If I want to stay up late and sleep in every day, I can
If I want to take my dogs with me everywhere, I can

I can do whatever I want; if that means cooking or home improvement projects or cleaning or all the other things I have been putting off because of having too much work, that’s what I will do.

I need this so very very badly….

And it is making me very very happy right now!

Of course, that is assuming I would graduate by August 09, which seems unlikely.  And I’m sure I’m not the only person who was invited.  And they want a quantitative person (which I can do, but isn’t my passion).

Still, WOW….

Why does this matter?  Because it brings up a very legitimate timing question.  I’ve known from the very beginning that if I wanted an academic career it would involve a substantial pay cut and a move.  It is possible we could get our finances in line between now and Spring 2010, but if the housing market hasn’t recovered, moving will be difficult.  And it doesn’t take my MBA in order to realize that we aren’t at the bottom yet; there’s more economic pain to come.

Additionally, it seems to me that if I graduate and then don’t go on the market for a year or two I am likely to have trouble and a lot of questions.  That isn’t the normal pattern. 

So that leads me to a question?  Do I stay on schedule and try to graduate Spring 2010, or do I coast a bit, take another year (or even two), take advantage of a nice, stable job and allow the economy to recover?  Right now I’m leaning toward the latter….

However I now remember one of the things that first attracted me to an academic life.  While there are projects and papers that you work on with others, in general the academic life is a relatively solitary one.  You succeed or fail based upon the work you put into things.

• Writing as an ultimately solitary activity.  While you can collaborate on a paper, that really means you each work on individual pieces or you conceptualize it together then pass it back and forth until its done. 
• You get credit and blame for what you do.  If your writing partner drops the ball and you write the paper yourself, then you end up with the writing credit.
• There are few things that actually qualify as emergencies (although I realize that students don’t necessarily agree with that statement).

I crave that.  Especially today.

My boss asked me to take on project management tasks for all of the projects in my department.  That means less directly technical work on DOING the projects, more paperwork, politics and involvement with what everyone else is doing.  I accepted.

I was really torn on this one.  I mean, I am nearly a prototypical INTJ.  On the one hand part of what I like about academic work and my prior work is that I worked primarily on my own, succeeding or failing on my own as well.  I like that.  I like being responsible for myself and getting credit for my accomplishments.  When the description said “they are more comfortable working alone than with other people” it was spot on.

On the other hand, however, “they are prepared to take the lead if nobody else is up to the
task, or they see a major weakness in the current leadership”.  This is precisely what happened.  Our director isn’t good at resource management and as a result the team was getting swamped as no-one paid attention to not just how many resources were needed to get the work done but specifically WHAT resources were need.  He’s been giving out estimates for how long things will take that show no real connection with the work any longer.  In this role those jobs will be mine.

There was some discussion of hiring an outside person for this, but the fact is that the level of knowledge of the team, our skills, the organization, the people, our customers and our methods that the person would have had to gain quickly was too high; a lesson we’ve learned lately with some contract PMs brought in who are driving people nuts.  Instead my technical role will be backfilled.

What does this have to do with my life as a scholar?  Three things.

1. The change in role will force me back to a more rigid application of GTD and other productivity tools.  I will be juggling the management of 5-10 projects at different stages, so organization will be key.  And I don’t think that would be a bad thing for my academic work.
2. I have an opportunity to adjunct teach a class starting this fall on Program Evaluation.  Project management and Program Evaluation have huge areas of crossover that I think will let me do a better job teaching that class.
3. My work will be somewhat more stressful and scattered.  This means I will have to work a bit harder to keep my focus when working on my academic work.

In preparation for these changes I am beginning to reimplement GTD for my academic work.  One of my tasks for this weekend is to put my Tasks for the classes this summer into Remember the Milk so that I can track them and see them within Gmail.  (I’m not convinced that any electronic list manager is better than any other, but RTM has features (such as its integration with Gmail and its blackberry interface) that make it more convenient for me to use.  Now if it just had a bulk excel/text file loader….)

I also just heavily trimmed my google reader subscriptions.  I will trim more over the next couple of weeks.  I got rid of stuff I had a tendency to just mark as read because I couldn’t keep up, things I didn’t really care about, and (to focus for dissertation) a bunch of education feeds unrelated to my specific dissertation topic. 

My other recent change was signing on with a trainer 3 days per week to force me to get my butt back to the gym.  I struggle, because there are so many other things that need to be done, but if I DON’T get there my weight will just keep climbing and that will eventually impact my health.  That needs to be a priority.  I also scheduled it for 5:30pm, forcing me to leave work at a reasonable time on those days.  Since I have things like 7pm conference calls with Indonesia once a week, it should net out just fine.

The last change I need to make to get this all working is one I have stuggled with for some time.  Getting up at a consistant time, 7 days per week, earlier.  Now, for me, earlier means 7am.  I have a REALLY hard time doing it.  But I need to make that change to keep everything going forward.  I guess I’m just going to have to be a b*tch for a few weekends until it becomes an ingrained habit.  Meh.