Is it possible to get your career going after you take off several years to raise kids? Some say yes, others no. There are so many variable to consider — the amount of time off, your profession, your prior experience — that it may be impossible to give a definitive yes or no to that question.
Is it possible to ramp up an academic career? Good question. That’s been a background theme on this blog for quite a while, and since I’m on a part-time, temporary track for next year, I don’t have a complete answer for you. My buddy, Margie on Long Island, is also an academic putting her last child in Kindergarten this fall and getting ready to breath life back into her academic career. This afternoon, we traded ideas and information that we’ve gathered along the way.
Anecdotally, I know of a lot of others in our boat. And not just women. There’s Matt in Cleveland, who’s the only stay at home dad on his block with a PhD in history. Since academic pay is so dismal and the jobs so rare, it’s often the career that has to go on ice when the kids arrive.
Here’s what Margie and I cooked up this afternoon:
1. Publish anything. Blow the dust off your dissertation and revise the best chapter. Or start new research, which is what I did. This can be very difficult if you aren’t affiliated with a university at the time, because you need access to libraries. It’s also a pain in the ass to go to conferences if you don’t have a university under your name, which is why you should…
2. Adjunct. (God, I can’t believe I just wrote that.) Yes, you should accept crappy pay and the damage to your self esteem, because you can access JSTOR and the other academic databases. You’ll get more work done at the university than on your kitchen table. It’s something for the resume and could be a source for recommendations. It’s a temporary move, so suck it up for a short while.
3. Start the publishing and the adjuncting when the kids hit pre-school. Again, not easy. Childcare sucks and the kids get sick and all that nonsense, but just plug away at it slowly. My buddy taught an adult-education class this spring, which only met once a week while her kid was at school.
4. Get to know the local schools. Don’t wait for an advertisement for an opening. Call the chairs at these local schools and send them your CV. If you are out in the suburbs, your PhD is surprisingly an asset, because there aren’t a lot of other PhDs in the area. You are local talent that doesn’t have to flown in for an interview. If they give you a job, there is no chance that you’ll bolt after a year for something better.
5. Chat with other academics. (I refuse to write the word, "network," because it sounds so calculating.) Revive old friendships with your classmates and your advisers.They might know of positions, and it gets you back in the habit of talking about your work again.
Is this a model for getting a job at Harvard and Yale? No. Gaps on the resume are death to those schools. But there are a whole pile of other schools that have nice students and will give you an office and let you do what you like to do. Some of these schools are actually really understanding about the kiddies.
We’re still working on this, so I can’t give much more advice at this moment. Maybe in another year, I’ll be totally cynical and promoting administrative positions and valium. We’ll see.
Apt. 11d 
It hadn’t even occurred to me (as an ABD with a new baby) that it would even be possible to take some time off and resume any kind of career. This gives me some hope.
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Not an academic, so I can’t specifically address that, but in my observation, whether you can ramp back up or not depends on your career and the local job market. I know a woman who went back for a degree quite late in life and got a nice human-resources administration job. OTOH, in a tight job market or in a “glamour” field where there is a lot of competition and emphasis on being youthful and with-it, ramping off is the kiss of death. With academia, the issue is probably the competition for jobs and the tightness of the market. If there are hundreds of applicants for every position, employers can afford to be super-duper picky.
Laura’s advice for academics endeavoring to keep a foot in the market can be translated to just about any career, most likely.
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I know this isn’t helpful to you, but the only long-term solution is for fathers to be as likely to take time off for children as mothers (with the corresponding gaps in the CV).
Another longterm solution is for employers generally to wake up to the fact of the longer human working life span. In the olden days we would all have been pensioners at 60, but that’s no longer the case. I hope with the much-touted “ageing of the population” the employers can no longer be so super-picky.
However, there’s little we can do as employees to impose either of these, I realise. They are simply historical developments I’m hoping for.
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In re #2 above, I wonder how many people can get access to libraries as an alum of whatever institution.
I went to a sorta prestigious place for my MA, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised about how much of their online resources I can access with the alumni ID. I’m in Germany, so physical access to the library is out of the question, and I’m not doing heavy-duty research, so maybe it wouldn’t be sufficient. But for someone out of circulation entirely, it might be a partial solution. And if you’re juggling time (or can’t get back to sleep after someone wanted a drink at 3:30am), getting that journal article online might just be a godsend.
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I finished the diss in 1996 and had a one-year position at a liberal arts college from 2000-2001, and I got my current full-time job in 2003. I had kids in 1999 and 2002. My current job is teaching-intensive, which is how I like it, but I do have time to write over the summer if I like.
During those years I did two things: I ran a couple of tutoring programs, and I adjuncted. Of course, my field is English, and teaching as an adjunct gave me a lot of experience in the comp courses, experience that hiring departments in non-research universities love.
In fact, I lucked out tremendously. My chair prefers to hire people who have already been adjuncting at the university. I managed to slip in because the higher-ups were demanding more PhDs among the faculty, and because I had tons of tutoring experience. My chair took a huge chance and it paid off both for her and me, because I do love my job and my workplace.
Adjuncting can be soul-destroying if you let it. But it can also be one of the only ways to get a job. If anyone is looking for advice, I’d love to give it. 🙂 Maybe it’s time for me to re-start my own blog.
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This post made me happy to see, because this is what I’ve been doing for the past few years– adjuncting at a local CC, presenting once at a regional conference in my field, submitting book reviews and small pieces wherever possible, and am working now on my second piece-for-publication, both in edited scholarly anthologies. It really has made the job search easier as my kids near kindergarten.
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I’m not in academia, but I do have a position in the business world where I regularly participate in the hiring process.
I think there are two things you’re fighting against. One is just the issue of state-of-the-market skill sets. If you haven’t kept up in your field, it’s a problem. Although my experience has been that our current knowledge economy highly prizes the sort of deep knowledge and context you only get from working in a field for years. If a returnee remains flexible and open to new approaches, this becomes a minor issue, fairly easily overcome with a bit of retraining or a big project.
The bigger issue, I think, is the perception of lack of commitment. If someone can walk away from the world of work for 5 years, they have made a statement that work plays a different role in their life than someone who has worked through. I make a huge point of always including returnees and parents in hiring pools I’m looking at, and I sometimes get nervous comments from my colleagues. They say, “This position is critical path. We really need someone who will be available if this system goes down.” Or, more ominously, “This is a great opportunity and should go to someone who has proven their commitment to the field.”
It doesn’t help that sometimes these nervous colleagues have been proven correct in their worries. I’ve had some of these non-traditional hires who aren’t focused, spend all their time on the phone with the sitter, are chronically late. People are individuals, after all. Not everyone making the on-ramp decision will handle the transition professionally. But unfortunately, right now, this is a demographic group that tends to be viewed as … well, as a group, vs. a collection of individuals.
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Laura’s advice is good. I, in fact, got a faculty position last year, but turned it down–long commute and other issues. I am considering applying for other positions in the fall, but won’t wait for job postings. I’ve adjuncted at many local schools so have some contacts there. In fact, I got those adjunct positions in the first place by simply sending a letter and letting them know what I wanted and what I had to offer.
Re: jen’s comment above. I know that it sometimes happens that people don’t juggle well. But I think it’s really unfair that onrampers are judged in this way. I find myself on hiring committees responding to the fearful comments about gaps by saying, “Well, do you like everything else? If so, then let’s ask about the gap during the interview.” My experience has been that there are people who have full resumes who are just as behind. They’ve been in a job where they have been working with a single set of technologies and know nothing about others. That, too, can be a problem.
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One thing that I find particularly awful about academia is that there’s no “ramping down” for someone who’s already on the tenure-track. You’ve got to maintain productivity and keep pushing full steam ahead during pregnancy and babyhood or you will not make it.
A few years back there was a long exchange on a big-time blog in my field on the topic of “what do search committees look for?”. I remember a bunch of guys all chiming in, one after the other, writing things like: “More than one year in an adjunt/visiting job is a red flag”; “More than two years betweeen publications is a death knell”; etc. etc. Pretty depressing. I hope that you and others are able to prove them wrong.
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I think the solution to Jen’s concern (that folks who take time off are seen as unreliable) is that they have prove their reliability in a short-term situation before they can have a shot at the long term. Effectively, Laura is giving advice for proving that on your buck (rather than someone elses). That is, you show that you can reliabily teach and publish without having anyone pay you to do the jog (yes, I guess adjuncts get some salary, but Laura is suggesting using that to get acess, not salary). If your an experimentalist, you will need that access, and so have to find a temporary position (like a post-doc) and use that to prove you are reliable and can do the job before getting hired.
What traps people is that it’s really hard to do, to prove your worth on your own buck and most people decide it’s simpy not worth it.
bj
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Another problem is if you have a family and a mortgage, it is very difficult to be mobile. You can’t up and move for the one opening in your field out in Utah. Also, the spouse might not be able to find work out there. Academic salaries at most schools can’t support a family any more, so your spouse’s employment opportunities are really important.
So, you have to lie in wait for an opportunity at one of your local schools. A department with a bunch of 40 year old faculty members means no openings ever. It’s kinda sick, but you have to approach job hunting like finding an apartment in NYC. Keep an eye on the obits.
re: the gaps on the resume. It’s going to be a red flag for some assholic schools. MS, those guys are incredible schmucks. As bj said, you have to prove yourself on your own dime. Which is what I’ve been doing. We would have to go on gov’t support and sell the house and go without health insurance, if we had to live on my salary for next year. My salary helps out, but at present, it doesn’t cover the mortgage. I’m not sure how the gaps will pan out in the long run. I think that I’ve made up for them by publishing and teaching a lot in the past year. I’ll let you know what happens, when it comes time for a tenure track job. While a lot of the work that I’ve done in the past year has been on my own dime, I’m looking at it as an investment towards a better salary in the future. But some people don’t have the ability to make this investment. Conference attendance alone can be a major burden.
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In my experience, the difference between success and failure for the on-ramper often has to do with a single individual within the institution who is willing to advocate for them. As Laura notes, sometimes all it takes is one person who pushes to interview someone with a non-traditional background.
In the business world, women who are disgusted with this sort of attitude become entrepreneurs and create their own corporate culture. Is there any alternative like that in academia? (If there is, I’m having trouble picturing it.)
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It occurs to me that I was falling into the “opt” out ditch:
“What traps people is that it’s really hard to do, to prove your worth on your own buck and most people decide it’s simply not worth it.”
Perhaps “most people decide it’s simply not worth it, or that the simply can’t do it.”
Some suggest getting rid of tenure to get rid of the current academic career pattern (which heavily burdens the early years which coincide with childbearing). I don’t like this idea.
I think there should be formal on ramps into academia other than the standard path. I’d like to see a system of on-ramp fellowships (more obvious in science, where most folks do get paid to do fellowhsips). People who had taken a break, would be able to selectively apply for these fellowships, and take them with them to an institution. Then, they’d have 3 years to prove themselves and go on the job market.
bj
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There are two sort of connected problems. One is taking off the time. The other is being geographically limited. I suspect the geographic limitation is probably the more important. I think if you can work your way back in — write stuff, present stuff, get yourself known again — you can get a job somewhere. Not Harvard, not even UVA, but somewhere. And the course you follow may need to be crooked: adjunct somewhere and then pick up a visiting slot somewhere else, then move again for another visiting position and then maybe move all the way across the country for a t-t. And none of these somewheres necessarily within commuting distance of Manhattan.
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I’m going to vote for another problem – well, jen mentioned it as ‘state-of-the-market skill sets’ Recency of degree matters to people who are hiring. A lot. I did very nicely with a fresh master’s degree, at 31. My brother-in-law similarly at 45, got a good job, then after three years on that job spent four years helping my sister-in-law and has had a dreadful time getting a job after reentering the market.
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Maybe if you are in a technical or scientific field where change happens quickly, taking a few years off would mean major catch up. An employer might rightly think that those few years were a negative.
But in most academic fields, change happens really, really slowly. Major books are few and far between. You could easily catch up with the literature with a few google searches. Other skills are like bicycle riding. It took me a couple of weeks to get back into good lecture form, and I taught myself a few new tricks, like powerpoint, along the way. Objectively, taking time off did not make me a worse researcher or teacher. It probably made me better, just through maturity.
OK, I never stopped entirely. I always kept a foot in by doing research or adjuncting, though the resume doesn’t really show that. But my husband, who hasn’t done either of those things in seven years, said he could comfortably give a lecture on his dissertation tomorrow and that no major work has been published in his specialty in that time.
The gaps in the resume should not mean crap in academia. But they do. Which sucks to no end.
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One way to keep a hand that hasn’t been mentioned in is to organize an unpaid affiliation (honorary fellow/visiting fellow)with a local university. I did this while I was home with my kids and it gave me an email address and access to the library. And it was an affiliation so that I didn’t look entirely unemployed during the time I was there. Having friends with full-time academic jobs can help with setting this up.
I think it is possible to move back into an academic career. I think search committees want to hire people who are productive research-wise, can teach, and who will be good colleagues. So Laura’s advice about publishing and adjuncting is spot on.
I know that my university has hired people who have adjuncted with us because we know them: we know they are good teachers (which we value), we know that they are responsible and reliable, and we know that they will be good departmental citizens. That, combined with a reasonable publishing track record, makes them really desirable as colleagues.
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I agree with Helen that one of the big things will be for dads to take time off as well. My husband did, partly by choice and partly not. In the past 14 years I’ve been on tenure-track and tenured, he’s finished his diss, adjuncted, taught on one-year contracts, stayed home with kids, taken classes, and driven a truck (not in that order). He’s now got a continuing contract at a local U (see point 4, above). It’s teaching-intensive but that’s what he’s decided he wants given the realities of the tenure track. I think it would have been harder (and required close attention to points 1-3, which he didn’t do) to stay viable for a t-t job, but a secure teaching job in a large state u is now his.
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Fascinating discussion. I wish I had some practical advice to give, Laura, but most everything I can think of–and more–has already been covered by other commenters, and anyway my experience has been with hanging on by one’s fingernails to tenure-track academia until you finally are able to scramble on board, not with getting a handhold after having been away for a few years. Anyway, good luck with the ramping up! I look forward to seeing you at APSA this year.
(Now that I think about it, I guess I do have one comment, or maybe just a general concern. I really wonder what MCM would make of the support being displayed here for adjuncting as a career route? Insofar as trying to move towards one’s professional goals in the academy are concerned, the logic behind it makes perfect sense…and yet, saying that returning academics need to “suck it up for a short while” sounds a lot like the sort of statement which we all heard at one point or another in our graduate educations, and which helped create the world which gave us “invisible adjuncts” in the first place.)
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Russell’s concern is the general one of what people who are willing (for a variety of reasons) to work for poor compensation (and security, and benefits, etc.) do to the profession. This came up on half changed world (Elizabeth’s blog) with respect to compensation of not-for-profit workers and internships (and women, bankrolled by husbands).
Folks would suggest a union, but, frankly, unions are pretty unhelpful for those trying get on the ramp (they protect those who are already there).
On another note, I think that the issue of geographic limitations is different from the on ramp issue. Folks could have both problems when trying to get back in after a break, but they could also not. From an institutional perspective, they need to be addressed differently, I think.
bj
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On another note, there’s the story of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
“You’ve said you’re an evangelist for history. What do you mean?
That means I think everyone should know about their past. About their family history and about their neighborhood history. And they should save their old wringer washing machine! ”
It’s not a story to model your life on (as with stories about Einstein and Nobel prize winners). I’m sure we’ve lost a a thousand Ulrich’s for the one we have. But it does give me joy that her passion for her work (which at some point she must have done with no thought of being rewarded) was recognized.
bj
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First off, read this:
http://wuphys.wustl.edu/%7Ekatz/scientist.html
Truly great line: “I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.”
Getting back in the game is certainly never going to be EASIER than staying in the game in the first place, and staying in the game is desperately hard and most fail.
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