The Difficult Questions - Nonacademic to Academic Career Recovery

Against my better judgment, I emailed my former mentor.  I think he sees me as very needy, and so has been really reluctant to reach out at all since I graduated.  I think he just wants to move on--perhaps because he can't account for my failure.  I'm not sure.  But anyway, I sent him an email, and asked about the "shelf life" of a Ph.D., and about whether he might have any strategies for reintegration into academia.  In the past, he has helped his male students and former students with their careers when they didn't follow the usual straight-into-tenure-track path.  But maybe he's just tired now.  I can understand that.

I am feeling stale and unfulfilled.  Stale, because I have no connection to anything that relates to my degree.  And that's not a good place to be.  I understand why there is a shelf-life for Ph.D.s. While you're in a graduate program, you're caught up in the currents of what everyone is talking about.  There's something vital about that environment, even when you sort of hate the things that people are talking about--still, there's an intellectual energy.  And teaching!  Ideas come from teaching.  And there is also energy in helping someone to see something new, or to be able to figure something out for the first time.  There is an energy that comes with being around people who are young--who are becoming--who are not yet there, and not yet in a holding pattern (because I know working adults are not yet there, but they are where they have to be; like I am).  Teaching is helping someone to move forward.  Training is helping someone to make the most of where they are now--at least, the kind of training I do.  Professional development has more to do with moving forward, but even so--they're moving forward on a much more limited trajectory.  I want to be in the realm of open possibility, not of settling, or of stasis, or of closed doors and glass ceilings.

So I emailed.  And I got a very stock response--keep trying, spin your work experience as positive.  As I said, I think he is tired.  *sigh*  So am I.

So I emailed back, because I know that my first questions were nebulous.  And I asked three big questions:

1) Teaching - can you lose it?
2) Intellectual community - how do you find it?
3) Strategies I've considered - are they worth it?

The first two are crucial.  I am in such a different world.  In training, we don't ask probing questions.  Even in the "soft skills" classes, in which they seem to ask big questions about diversity, for example--they really don't.  The questions are designed to help people accept the answers that the strategists have already set forth.  I'm in technology training, which means the answers are always closed:  "How would you make use of this in your job?"  "Have you ever hit 'Enter' in Microsoft Word, only to have all of your formatting change?  Well, I can help you with that."  There's no creation or discovery; only demonstration and repetition.  So I worry that I am losing the ability to ask the probing questions--to make people think.

I'm also worried that I am losing the knowledge that I used to possess--that it's tucked so far back into my head that it's increasingly inaccessible.  I see my boxes of books that I haven't unpacked, and when I look in them, I see books that I love--that I used to love--with which I have no connection currently.  I could read them again, but why?  Some books are for me, and some books are for jumping into conversation, and inspiring others.  I'm not going to revisit the History of British Literature on my own behalf.  There's simply no point.  Or is there?  No... I really don't think there is.

And then, there's the fact that the current is leaving me behind.  I don't know how people on the inside are talking about things any more because I'm not there.  And reading it in a journal is simply not the same.  It's the teaching.  How are we presenting these authors?  What are we highlighting?  And even if I go against the grain, it's stimulating to be able to borrow from or work against what other people are doing.  Instead, I'm rereading Harry Potter.  And I'm pretty tired of it.  But I have to keep reading, because Voldemort isn't dead yet.  If I worked fairly hard, I could probably make that into a career metaphor.  But I won't just yet, because I'm feeling lazy.

So...  How do you find intellectual community?  Or intellectual validation?  I have a small community, for which I am very grateful.  If you are reading this--thank you.  You keep me going.  Literally.  But I have always hungered for more--for publication.  To have my ideas out there--influencing... someone.  And right now, I just have no idea how to get there.  My most recent abstract, which I thought was very good, was rejected, but part of me isn't surprised--every time I have an idea, the academically trained side of my brain can see what's laughable about it.  I was accepted to a conference that sounded fabulous, but a conference right now is no more than an expensive vacation, and I don't like to travel alone.  I have never found community at a conference--not really.  Once or twice I came close. Generally, I feel very alone--a complete wallflower.  So no community there.  But I need the community for stimulus, for support, and for resources.  What makes a good book?  Who might be interested in the half-baked ideas I do have?  And most of all, why should I write them down if there is no guarantee of an audience, of publication, or of a change in career?

These, my friends, are the questions I need to answer.