Firstest Worldest of Problems

Growing up, I always loved air-conditioning. Friends and family alike would remind me of the environmental and monetary costs, but what could I say? I enjoyed full-room refrigeration.

These days, eh, not so much. Maybe it's the guilt that comes with no longer having 'well at least I don't drive' as an excuse. Maybe it's time spent in Europe, and more time still spent with Europeans. Maybe it's that it just hasn't been all that hot this summer. But I'd sort of forgotten about a/c, and sort of stopped using it.

Which is a problem, it turns out. I've recently learned that the "leak" in my apartment is condensation caused by... drumroll please... not having the air conditioner on. And a fine a/c unit it must be. I've been officially instructed to keep it on at all times, windows closed, of course. (The leak hasn't stopped, but it's a puddle rather than a swimming pool.) As for the obvious, we don't pay extra for electricity. But even so.

Defended!

It's done! Forms are in and everything! And my car wasn't even towed! The defense itself is a bit of a blur, but I remember taking notes. I remember it going well, and that the criticisms were useful, not scary or gotcha or whatever it is one is meant to expect from that type of situation. I remember that despite an overwhelming fear that I'd fail (inspired in part by learning, a week or so beforehand, that someone once failed a math defense when a famous professor deemed the project "trivial") preventing me from planning any kind of immediate post-thingy celebration, some friends saw to it that I didn't spend the entire post-defense in the inevitable late-afternoon nap.

Now I have nothing left to do but throw myself into an idiosyncratic, likely academic and non-academic permanent-job search that may yet end with a postdoc at air-conditioner-repair school. (If you happen to know/hear of/wish to create a position in French-Jewish Studies...) And all the various writing projects I'd lost track of, what with it, can now be resumed, and the existing ones continued. Likely including WWPD, unless air-conditioner-repair school has some clause against it.

The stay-at-home-mom's confession: she works.

When Flavia recently posted a letter from one of her readers, about running into a bunch of 40ish stay-at-home moms at an Ivy League college reunion, I expressed some skepticism about whether these women really didn't work for pay, or whether perhaps they did (from home?), but the letter-writer was rounding down whatever it was these women did to "housewife." Flavia assured me that the letter-writer wasn't making assumptions, so in this particular case, case closed.

That said, I do think I was justified in bringing up the possibility, because there's a huge amount of blurriness between what constitutes "stay-at-home" and what's just being the member of the couple with the less high-powered career. Which brings us to Ashley Nelson's article in The Nation, "Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Mom." The key to the piece lies in a small but important detail: Nelson wasn't a stay-at-home mom, but a freelance writer:

[...] I left my job, figuring I could freelance while the baby napped.

Rookie mistake.

I hired a sitter, but for a time my work took a back seat to life. We moved and, two years later, moved again so my husband could take a job overseas. A second daughter arrived. Then, shortly after, I found myself in a situation I never predicted: sitting across from a divorce lawyer who didn’t even bother writing down my annual freelance income. I had published well and often, but my compensation was less robust. It would barely have covered a month of her costs.

So. Was Nelson working? Was her primary identity "mom"? She goes back and forth on this within the course of this short paragraph. If she "published well and often," and I mean actually did do this, it sure sounds like she had (has! she's in The Nation!) a job. I mean, according to the NYU career office, "freelance writer" is a job. Also according to some but not all freelance writers. It's complicated. But let's say she were not a woman, but a man. Or not a man, but single. (I've heard tell that some freelance writers are unmarried women.) Was her income not enough to live on, or was it simply laughable in comparison to the overall budget of the family she happened to be a part of?

Nelson explains that this isn't just her story, but that of other women as well:

[E]very mother I know who scaled back or quit work to care for children feels a similar anxiety about what the decision has cost her. Like myself, most never felt they were relinquishing their “work selves” completely, just momentarily turning down the tap. Many do some work, but it feels supplemental and underpaid. The climb back into full-time employment seems monumental.

In other words, neither Nelson nor the women she's discussing were ever really housewives/SAHMs/what-have-you. They did work, but weren't properly compensated.

And thus the problem: couples have this bizarre tendency to want to live together, especially when there are kids. This means that even if staying put at a job and not moving anywhere for any man serves as insurance against possible future divorce, it also can, to a degree, kind of preempt the marriage-and-family to begin with. A nuclear family can function as a unit, or (especially if there are no kids) as two autonomous individuals for whom a divorce would be upsetting in the way it is when one has a falling-out with an old friend, or breaks up with a college sweetheart. The perfect household, where divorce would have no financial impact on either partner, yet where the couple managed to live as if a family, and one not so front-and-center aware at all times of the precariousness of all marriages, is hard to picture. The lucky few who have this seem especially keen on writing about it, which confuses matters, I suspect.

Ideally, none of the household-and-childcare who-does-what would be gendered, beyond the pregnancy-and-shortly-thereafter aspects of it. The reality, though, seems to be a lot of women who do work, but who have opted for a lower-paid version of their chosen profession, but one that allows for more geographic and/or childcare flexibility. Had this couple lasted, there might have been time enough for a "see-saw marriage." It might not have always been such a gendered worst-case-scenario.

This gets at something I couldn't quite pin down in my response (responses) to the (ever-more-compelling) conversation at Flavia's, and elsewhere as well, one that led me to various posts from a couple of years ago as well. The women having this conversation (posts, comments) are, it seems, women who studied the humanities. Many are now tenured professors. The conversation is about Important Careers, but tilts to being specifically about careers in academia, specifically non-STEM academia.

The issue with this, as it relates to the topic at hand (women's feminist duty to be ambitious), is that once one has opted for the humanities, without simultaneously opting for something more marketable (the double-major in air-conditioner repair), one has already quite severely risked opting out. One finds a small and probably ever-shrinking subset of humanities-types in high-powered positions that use those skills. Tenured professors, big-deal editors, and so forth. It exists, but a girl (as in, pre-college) whose main priority is financial independence is taking a big risk if she goes down that path. And that's new, really, because there was always law school. Now there isn't always law school.

So. While a woman who reaches the point of having a tenure-track position and then opts out has opted out, can the same be said of a woman who leaves after X years of adjuncting, or upon learning the odds? Because if by "elite women" we mean (among others) women with humanities PhDs or near-PhDs, well, a lot of the time, this leads straight to a career that's never more than a dream, for a man or a woman (although everyone's always wondering about the perma-adjuncting vs. TT gender breakdown), and while employment-outside-the-home is still likely, it won't necessarily be elite employment, a career.

And! Then there's the question of whether the mere fact of women's growing majority in a given field will in and of itself end up making that field more precarious, whether it will end up encouraging society to think the work in question is nonsense (while nevertheless still demanding the work in question). College students are still being taught, but why by adjuncts? Is it maybe because women are viewed as pushovers, secondary-job-havers, and that $500 per semester could purchase an awfully nice pin? Are freelance rates at all impacted by a sense that (for certain publications, at least) this is work done by housewives?

I could go on, but I have other humanitiesish tasks to contend with.

"That was way harsh, Tai": a response to a no-holds-barred manifesto I somewhat agree with

Flavia has a guest post from one of her readers, a claim that there is indeed an "opt-out revolution," as it's been put elsewhere. The guest-post is, in "Clueless" parlance, "way harsh, Tai," towards women with Ivy League degrees of not-such-distant vintage (spotted at the writer's husband's 25th reunion) who do not work for pay. It's also super compelling and getting a great discussion going. The letter-writer, who implicitly acknowledges the anecdotal nature of her evidence, finds that women with fancy degrees (Ivy college, graduate degrees) are staying home to raise large families. If it's their 25th college reunion, that makes them 47, give or take. So it's unlikely, though not impossible in that milieu, that they're staying home with very young children, let alone physically recovering from pregnancy. They're staying home with older children, it seems.

Which is interesting, sure. Do their husbands encourage this (as Flavia says in the comments, the status-symbol phenomenon, or for less sinister if still upsetting from a feminist perspective reasons) or merely tolerate it? How much of this is choice and how much is, as the author hints at one point, something more bleak - a kind of internalized misogyny holding back women with great potential? The danger of choice feminism is that we risk not considering that very real phenomenon as a possibility. Is there any positive to an arrangement where one parent stays home, if we make it more of a gender-neutral option? Could be, but as long as it's not gender-neutral, we must go on having this conversation.

And a useful conversation it is. But it's a message that would have come across more strongly had the author not held herself up as a shining example of adherence to feminist ideals, of general together-ness. She writes, as an example of why two-working-parent families are better, "When our child was small, we could afford excellent in-home care and also save for hir education. We don't have to debate whether or not we can afford camp, music lessons, or orthodontia. We can!"

Eh, not everybody can. Another family - even Ivy-educated - may have calculated that if the lower-paid partner (often the woman) worked outside the home, this wouldn't pay for childcare for multiple children. Now, maybe that's short-sighted - maybe the woman should keep working as an investment in her future career-and-salary - but it's still a different situation.

Also this: "Maybe it's my background as a scholarship kid who always assumed she'd work her whole life, but I've never seen the world of work as a faceless enemy," and "[...] I've managed to work my way into a decent position, and I have hopes that new opportunities might open up for me in the future."

Is that a frank assessment of good life choices, good character, or a kind of boasting that fails to take into account the role that luck plays in all of our lives? Maybe a bit of both, and I say this as someone who's probably also done my share of good-life-choices humblebrag without intending to. I mean, it's good to think your own choices are consistent with your own values. And there's also some genuine humility in there, so perhaps I'm being unfair. But it just seems like, if you're talking individual cases, maybe there were not-so-cheery reasons these women stopped working, and it wasn't all about being bad feminists. Like the anonymous commenter at Flavia's says, certain things can go wrong in the reproductive process that disproportionately impact the one with the uterus.

Anyway, it seems clear enough that children of the middle-class-broadly-defined who weren't Chua-parented aren't done any favors if told that they won't always have to work no matter what. Because they will. Children of the super-ridiculously-rich, no, and by all means let them pursue careers as unpaid fashion assistants. But if you're of the set risking impoverishment if a husband leaves, someone's done a number on you if they gave you the impression you don't really need to work.

-Like Withywindle, who linked to some data about this there, I do think a j'accuse on the topic of elite women opting out kind of does call for numbers, if it's making sweeping claims, and not just questioning the choice on an individual level. Unless the reunion published a book with what everyone's up to (which can happen) and is basing this on something larger, it could be that the author simply ran into an unrepresentative group. I wonder if the women the author met really don't work for pay at all, or if the author's rounding down their less-ambitious or from-home jobs to 'housewife'. Or even if - if these were just women met briefly at a social function - some of these women do have powerful careers, but in a social/reunion setting for whatever reason choose to identify first and foremost as "moms." Which would also be interesting, but which would be quite different.

-We really do need to be sure these are women who might have had illustrious careers, but then decided against. "Elite" isn't a monolith. Nor does 'graduate-educated' mean 'employable in the professions.' See Emily Matchar. See my Second-After-Sartre theory. While women who become high-powered executives tend to come from a certain part of society, it's not accurate to look at everyone with an MA in Medieval Tapestry as a potential Sandberg or Slaughter who opted out. This doesn't mean women don't self-sabotage along the way, closing off various opportunities open to those at their universities, of their social class. It only means that said self-sabotage has often happened long before any husband-and-babies entered the picture.

-In response to: "Is it just me, or is the unemployed spouse and large (3-5 children) family back with a vengeance among the economic elite?": These women are/were home with a million kids, presumably over the span of many years, unless quadruplets. They weren't idle. They weren't "unemployed" really. They didn't opt out of doing things with the day.

-Re: "Why aren't women who drop out of the paid workforce being treated for depression, or at least urged to get counseling before they go?": Unemployment has been known to relate to depression, as, they say, has stay-at-home parenting. I suppose I don't love the way "depression" here is used almost interchangeably with making the wrong life choices. (OK, so there's this: "If you are educated for and capable of a decent job, the disinclination to work should be seen as a symptom of an underlying problem, not a lifestyle 'choice.'" But in context, it reads as if the letter-writer doesn't think these women are depressed, just foolish.) If these women really are depressed - and perhaps so - then this is upsetting, not a reason to chastise them for their failure to adhere to feminist principles. We may then want to look at what it is in the culture - the "beauty myth"? something in the water? - that's led them to that state. We'd want to investigate correlation and causation. We'd sooner view these women as victims of social norms than as bad feminists or spoiled housewives.

-If you're going to have a post that asks what message it sends to daughters if mom doesn't work, you also need to address the argument that kids are better off if one parent stays home. Once the think-of-the-children angle enters into it, once you're arguing that other people are bad parents, you do open yourself up to the same accusation. And as much as I personally think working-for-pay is important, I'd have to say, there are far worse things a parent can do to a kid than stay home and look after him/her.

-Having an egalitarian, 50-50 marriage, but basing this entirely on work-for-pay, seems like a dangerous road to go down, even if both partners work. Two spouses rarely have the exact same salary or work-hours at all times. It matters, in terms of power balance, if one spouse isn't and could virtually never be economically self-sufficient, i.e. if that person could never, if need be, leave. But do we really think the hedge-fund-manager plus nursery-school-teacher marriages a) are typically 50-50 household-chore-wise, or b) need to be in order to be egalitarian in the internal-power-balance sense? 

-Refreshing anecdotal evidence time! I know of quite a few women who divorced at a certain age and promptly went back to (a more practical version of) school and, in at least one case, went on to out-earn the ex-husband. This is going to be easier for women who already have a college degree, and who are relatively young (40-ish, say) when all this happens, but it's been done. I mean, there's always air-conditioner-repair school, even for the happily-married. It never hurts.

Your don't-go of the evening

Because what's a day without at least three bleak articles about academia, grad-student-Facebook-land has now brought me to this piece about the difficulties of getting a PhD and job in the humanities without outside support. UChicago doctoral candidate David Mihalyfy writes:

Spousal income, a parent-owned condo, a trust fund – no matter which, these necessities increasingly make a humanities Ph.D. less of a career path and more of a leisure pursuit for those with financial stability from elsewhere, even for students at top institutions.

It's one of the rare trustafarian exposés that remembers that sometimes - strange as it may seem - 30-year-olds (40-year-olds) are married. That the invisible extra source of income of someone ancient might be a spouse, and not mom and dad. Far too often, articles about the broke and humanitiesish suggest that it's this upper-middle-class thing to support one's kids financially until said kids themselves reach retirement age. And, eh, I don't think it's quite gotten to that point.

Further, similarly scattered thoughts below:

-Is marriage to someone who earns more than a grad student does privilege in the same way as having rich parents? I mean, it's pretty equally unearned advantage, or at least irrelevant advantage, but it doesn't necessarily indicate that "Despite rare exceptions, our humanities professors will come from wealthier backgrounds." I mean, a grad student whose spouse is a plumber or schoolteacher is at an advantage. It hardly needs to be Wall Street.

Now, it certainly doesn't say anything good about a career path if you need a decade of outside support to get started. It doesn't seem like the way to get the best candidates for anything. It's still wildly unfair. But if the concern is social mobility into academia, and the socioeconomic class of resulting humanities profs, spousal support would be less of an issue.

-In order to succeed on the academic job market, what you need on your CV are fellowships. Grants. Scholarships. Awards. These things tend to come with money. Needing money - being someone for whom $500, say, isn't just a night on the town - is an awfully big motivator to shoot for these, or at least I found it to be. If something is your job, you may well be more likely to treat it as one. Those who approach grad school as dabblers (no matter the source of outside income) and don't apply for extra (or any) funding may well have more time to publish, but they may have gaps in other key areas.

-Being married/partnered as a grad student isn't necessarily a career advantage. It does seem to up the odds that one will have kids. And as great a thing as marriage to a high-powered hot-shot (or anyone with a job, really) can be in terms of allowing some - like a woman mentioned in the piece - to avoid grueling perma-adjuncting, often enough, a spouse with a decent salary isn't going to want to move to Outer Mongolia (selected due to its current non-existence; no offense intended to Mongolians generally, nor to the Mongolian family who used to be my neighbors in particular) with you when that's the place that has the only tenure-track job in Medieval Tapestry Studies.

Nor will the grad-student spouse necessarily think Outer Mongolia and a far lower family income (and what about when Outer Mongolia deems you unworthy of tenure?) beats not-Outer-Mongolia and high school teaching/non-profit work/library work/from-scratch housespousery/retraining-in-air-conditioner-repair/there's-always-law-school. Don't let anyone stand between you and your dreams! But god forbid you should have found a partner before age 35, and that that person should also have dreams, and that that person's dreams pay more and in a better location. The best you - a purely theoretical you - can hope for is that in the course of grad school, you realize your dream may not have been Professor of Medieval Tapestry Studies after all.

(There isn't a two-body problem, generally, when parents or a trust fund are the source of whichever cushion. Although I don't think the first of the helicoptered generation is old enough yet for grad school.)

-Did you think I was going to let this go without a gender angle? No such luck. It seems possible that being partnered helps men but not women. While - given, if nothing else, the fact that men tend to earn more than women - women with husbands (because most couples are opposite-sex) may have a better shot at avoiding garret starvation, women may also have more trouble than men when it comes to getting a spouse to move wherever a job happens to be. A single man, meanwhile, will lack whichever Stable Adult With Family aura that apparently benefits married men - and not married women - on the job market, academic or otherwise.

Paid to read books

"I get paid to read books!" This sentence - always with the exclamation mark - is the easiest way to identify a new humanities grad student. I used to say it myself. When you're used to college (and maybe a masters program) where you paid to read books, the thought that someone would pay you anything at all for the same work seems too good to be true.

What follows isn't a don't-go. (Started this post before seeing Rebecca Schuman's great-if-bleak article. Guess something's in the air?) I don't regret going, and even if I do end up doing a joint degree in computer-science and air-conditioner repair once I finish my dissertation, I'd say it's overall been a positive experience. If you have humanities-ish strengths, and want/need to pay your own way/have your own health insurance, there's a lot worse you can do than end up in a funded grad program, researching a topic that fascinates you. And the problem with the don't-go genre is that it never answers the question of what else someone who ends up in humanities grad school might have done.

But, assuming the question isn't answered for you (i.e. assuming you do or likely could get into a good, funded program) these are some things to... consider:

-Whatever you're getting paid will seem like a ton the first year, and like a joke or an insult the last. When I started grad school, my rent was under $700 a month, and my stipend more than covered it. I taken a year off and worked prior to grad school, and worked during college, so I knew a bit more the-value-of-a-dollar than some, but mentally, I was still at the life stage when my working meant mochas, H&M, and lessening the burden I was on my parents. Self-sufficiency - with its electric bills, broker's fees, Metrocards - was something else.

-At most jobs, if you're doing well, you get something called a raise. If you do well in grad school, what happens is, they don't stop paying you. You will see things on Facebook from college acquaintances about how huge the seats are in business class, or one of your high school classmates will be one of the Facebook billionaires, and none of this will even matter, because you're too busy being jealous of other former classmates who are pulling in, what, $40-50k (in NYC - maybe less somewhere else) at an office job whose title means nothing to you but doesn't that sound wonderful.

-Even if no one in the history of your grad program has taken under seven years, by the time you've been in school for longer than four years, i.e. the expected length of an undergraduate degree, you will be asked all the time if you're going to finish up any time soon. You will hear about how you've been in school for so long, and not in a way that suggests a comprehension of this just being how long the program you're in takes. It will seem, to those around you, like a personal failing. What exactly have you been doing all those years? You will internalize this, and start to think there's something wrong with you that your dissertation didn't take five minutes. You will imagine that others are judging you even when they're just being friendly and asking what it is you do. It will get old. You will get old.

-Even if you go into your program already jaded, already aware that you probably won't end up a professor, this does leave the question of what you will end up doing. As this is WWPD and not career-counseling, I will refrain from going into the particularities of my own situation - a long and boring story about the pros and cons of interdisciplinarity. (Anyone hiring in French-Jewish Literature-and-History?) But the fact that I am and always have been open to alternatives to being a professor is either my saving grace (so many who aren't spend years adjuncting before changing course) or evidence that I lack whichever Sheryl Sandbergian ruthlessness is needed to for goodness sake teach novels in this job market.

Meanwhile, while I don't feel any particular shame in going and doing something else - bills must be paid somehow, right? - and am indeed actively interested in various routes other than "professor," I'm not sure what to make of a general job market in which "entry-level" means an internship one might apply for if one has previous related internship experience. Is any of what I've done thus far transferrable? I mean, in principle, yes, and I can-and-will make that case, and my sense is that professors understand this (or do if it's explained to them) and can serve as references for things other than tenure-track jobs, but will employers agree? Is this my fate, or does the fact that I don't have the full year's food-service experience TGI Friday demands mean... what, exactly?

And with that, back to the dissertation.

Of lost time

I know you are under the impression that a PhD that focuses on the themes of inter(text)uality in medieval basket-weaving would be a surefire route to a high-paid career with 1950s-breadwinner-style job security. I know, it's a common misconception. And the only way you'd possibly learn the truth is that every so often, a wise adult issues a Don't-Go, warning the likes of you that grad school is a terrible mistake.

The mark of a Don't-Go is that it will be phrased as a question: should you go to grad school? But the moment this has been asked, the answer has been given, and apologies for the passive voice. The most fun Don't-Goes try to reach the widest audience possible by refusing to differentiate between MA and PhD; humanities, social sciences and sciences; funded and not; elite U or not. This is to confuse you, such that when you're admitted to a joint PhD program in all quantitative disciplines, with a joint appointment at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, you can turn it down, because it's only sensible to do so.

Ron Rosenbaum, the latest author of a Don't-Go, limits himself to literature grad school, which, if you were considering/are currently in literature grad school, will cause you to read the thing, and the comments, and let's be honest, it's not like you're needed desperately at the office. What gives Rosenbaum his authority is that he himself went. To Yale. For one year. In 1969.

That Rosenbaum then had a successful career in journalism either a) gives us hope or b) tells us that in 1969, that was a viable career path, or c) makes us wonder if maybe having been a literature grad student at Yale (where he also did his undergrad) gave him an edge. Which is often the missing piece, as with the Harvard college drop-out legends. A place can lend you caché even if it doesn't grant you a degree. A commenter though, put it best:

I love you, Rosenbaum, but here's what I'm hearing: if I can manage to get myself into undergraduate school at Yale University in the middle of last century, I will have a good shot at getting a good job in the field of journalism, which (since it's midcentury) still has many years of plenty ahead of it? Well then, my mind is made up!

The classic problem with the Don't-Go is that we learn not to go to grad school, but are presented with no viable answer to what someone who ends up in or considering literature grad school might do instead. Rosenbaum's alternative sounds all kinds of appealing, but ignores the state of journalism today, as well as the logistics, namely the ten trillion unpaid internships one is now expected to have completed prior to the low-paid work with which Rosenbaum was able to enter the field. He seems to have caught onto the fact that academia is no longer a sure thing, but that's about it. He's mostly interested in the undisputed tendency of literature grad school to turn lovers of books into Perez-Hilton-addled burn-outs, if only from time to time. But I promise, enjoyment of literature comes back eventually. Just don't expect much of it in the lead-up to or week after your qualifying exam.

Anyway, I have nothing against the Don't-Go concept, but I want to see one that tells college seniors and recent grads to rewind the clock and pay more attention in high school math classes, to bond with teachers of something other than creative writing, to do whatever it is one does that leads to being a consultant, banker, air-conditioner-repairperson. Give us something we can work with.

Strictly professional: Further reflections on the grown-up Facebook

-I'm kinda liking it. What I like most about Facebook, what keeps me on it, is the rolodex aspect. I'm not saying that's all I use it for, but I on some level think that's all it's good for, and Linkedin pares it down to just that.

-Not sure about the suggested... contacts. (The impulse is to say "friends," yet the purpose is to avoid needing to do so.) I mean, I've exchanged nods with the famous mathematician who lives across the street, but never emails, and I'm quite certain our professional overlap is nil. And of course, as with Facebook, there are the usual let's-move-along-shall-we suggestions (former students, people one went on one date with 100 years ago). I see patterns, but can't figure out where the data come from. Or could but won't be bothered.

-Also massively confused about the etiquette. Because these are contacts and not friends, you don't have to/aren't supposed to add (back) people you know socially, but who aren't in the same field as you? Or is there some kind of character-reference angle, where it helps to show that X-hundred people can vouch for your reasonable-person-ness? I mean, I'm only adding people where there's some kind of professional overlap, and even then feeling altogether pushy, but you know.

-The photo aspect is odd - like a French CV. (So I went with a picture taken in a Brussels Pain Quotidien. Close enough.) As is the prompt to say what year you graduated from college. Is this courting age-based discrimination? (Along similar lines, a posting for a very interesting writing job - job, not internship - notes that medical benefits aren't part of the deal. Is this because up to 26, that's now often taken care of? Is it, in other words, a way of saying the elderly, i.e. late-20-somethings, need not apply? Or is this just, as PG once helpfully noted in the comments, verbal skills aren't all that marketable?)

CEO position, transportation stipend available

Just got a list email about what sounds like a pretty cool, if not super-glamorous, job, "with a preference to graduate students and recent graduates." 20 hours a week for up to six months. Need to know English and French, and have relevant work experience. The catch? You guessed it: the pay is nothing whatsoever. Not a job in fashion or journalism. At a respected institution.

Surely, one might imagine, a position with so many prerequisites, something beyond entry-level, where the candidates sought are already out of college and may have advanced degrees, wouldn't have too many takers? "Due to the large volume of applications we receive, we are only able to contact those candidates selected for an interview."

Is there - and this is a serious question - any incentive for any employer to offer pay in exchange for work? Or is that being phased out?

Exciting job opportunity

A Thai restaurant in the Village is looking for a "management intern." Unpaid. "The intern will have the opportunity to learn basic management skills within the fast-paced New York City food industry. The intern will handle basic office responsibilities (book keeping, faxing, responding to phone calls, emails, and file organizing)." 

I think - fear - that this is what's referred to when people talk about "Plan B" option for humanities graduate students.

Odd jobs

Like any sensible humanities grad student, I keep track of Plans B through Z. In doing so, I came across what could well be the worst job imaginable, or best, depending your sexual orientation and outside sources of income: unpaid intern at a women's modeling agency.

Meanwhile, "Paid Summer Internship in Wine PR" was obviously intentionally listed to lure away despairing Baudelaire-dissertation-writers. Replace "Wine" with "Cheese," and I'd be more tempted. Although wine and cheese both seem like things that would hardly need PR.

A post that would be called "grass is greener" if today's date didn't give the wrong impression

Among my peers who started out in Teach for America or similar, law school is this immensely appealing road to higher pay and not so many rowdy 8th-graders. Those who dabbled in this and that as recent college grads will, one after the next, end up in those post-bac pre-med classes, much to the chagrin of those of us whose parents inevitably hear that so-and-so's kid is doing one of those post-bacs, and, you know, never too late... Lawyers and law students fight over jobs for which a JD isn't necessary, wallow in debt, dream of academia. Grad students and academics fantasize (we do! I swear!) about pairing walking sneakers and pantyhose and commuting into an office job. Office workers are all, of course, delighted with their lot in life. I know people fleeing to as well as from MFA programs. A friend of a friend evidently didn't make as much of a go of it as anticipated with pastry grad school.

What I'm saying is, for every peer I know who's been on a direct and exhilarating trajectory since college, there are maybe five hopping around from productive pursuit to productive pursuit, not lost in the sense of rising at 4pm in the proverbial parental basement, but stuck with something of a wandering eye when it comes to careers. It can't help that whichever path you're on, your friends and family will be emailing you dozens of articles about why your choice was a foolish one.

On that note, there's another article telling grad students that they've made a terrible life choice. Early on in the piece that, if you're a grad student or prospective, someone has probably already sent your way, Katy Waldman assures us, or her bosses at Slate, that even though this is her frame for the story, she's not really considering grad school. "In real life, of course, I have a job that I like and a professional future I’m pursuing avidly." Waldman's essay, inspired by an online forum about grad-school admissions I'd never heard of but that's evidently a big deal, is a quasi-personal essay, and not merely a general think piece with a Slate-y personal hook. It's about self-reassurance. Waldman, a journalist, is telling herself that her Plan B, namely grad school, isn't so great, after all.

I know this impulse well, perhaps because it seems she and I have mirror-image Plans A and B, and I do this periodically regarding career paths similar to hers. What if, I sometimes wonder, what if I hadn't had that stubborn aversion to unpaid internships, and used a few of those as a launching pad for seriously pursuing a career in journalism? What about air-conditioner repair? Cue the scene where George Constanza is sitting on the floor of Jerry's living room, having quit and been fired from the very same real-estate job, wondering whether he might have a career as a talk-show host, jockey, or projectionist. "Probably a union thing." Cue Elaine sniffing her pen, at her office job, asking herself, "Is it too late to go to law school?" Immortalized on "Seinfeld," and as old as time.

As is almost requisite in don't-go-to-grad-school articles, there's not much specificity in terms of what's meant by "grad school." MA, PhD, something else entirely? Which discipline? Funded or unfunded? Entered into with career plans in mind, or as a way for socialites to bide their time? But the imprecision kind of works, because Waldman admits that when she thinks about grad school, it's not about a particular field or program, but grad school as a way of life. Waldman is then shocked to learn that grad school is not an intellectual summer camp, but rather a step in the lives of many ambitious young adults, with all the cutthroat competitiveness that entails. Wharton, alas, is not a drum circle, nor is a slot at NYU Law offered to anyone who kind of identified with "Felicity." Or something?

I'm not entirely sure I follow Waldman's premise, which is that there was, in genuine historical fact, a Golden Age, during which grad school really was an escape from it all, when Harvard and Stanford or whatever had open admissions, and could be a permanent life choice in its own right, a lifelong alternative to regular employment. "Going to graduate school," Waldman informs us, "is no longer a way of opting out of the endless search for a better job, the best job, any job. It’s become an element of—a strategy to be deployed in—that search." This Golden Age, as best I can tell, was not 1990 or 1970, or indeed any period of time, but rather a conception of grad school, a fantasy of grad school, Waldman herself occasionally finds persuasive.

Waldman, it seems, confuses her own personal disillusionment with the idea of grad school with a real-life shift in the function of post-college education.

As the obsessive chronicle of yeses and noes reveals, the process of finding a masters or doctorate program carries with it a sense of desperation—one actually reminiscent of the job search. In this rat race, the ivory tower morphs from a reassuring backup plan into a source of social and existential terror via its mysterious admissions policies.

Why "actually"? Why are we surprised that prestigious grad programs would be difficult to get into, or that this would be a source of stress for applicants? How is this specific to These Tough Economic Times?

As I prepare to enter my seventh-and-final year of Dreyfus Affair Studies, contemplating what is even for graduates of top programs a bleak job market, I'm a ready audience for what-were-you-thinking pieces as you'll get. But this one doesn't have me convinced.

Marketable skills

Recently, at a beyond-academia event aimed at preemptively-despairing grad students who very much still want to be profs, I learned that one alternative possibility for a humanities PhD is: unpaid intern. Fair enough, I suppose, that if you're changing careers - which is what it means to go any route other than the academic job market - you'd need to start at the bottom. But the bottom used to be paid. Nothing wrong with administrative work at a for-profit business, if it's compensated. Our program is compensated. I didn't get the sense that there was much enthusiasm among the advanced-degree-holders present for taking an unpaid internship at 30-give-or-take, which, to her credit, the woman making this suggestion preemptively acknowledged.

Anyway, while I've had a fairly set Plan A (and B, C...) for some time now, I agreed with the general principle that it never hurts to see what's out there. So I figured out, after however many years, how to access my college's alumni career services network. Once properly logged in, I put in "French" as a search term,  what with that being one of my theoretically marketable skills. Among the first entries to appear: "Fry Cook."

Quote of the day

I’m inferring that you and your wife would prefer, and understand better, an arugula-eating son toiling on a doctorate in comparative literature. However, it could be that at the end of that son’s labors, you’d wish he’d spent less time analyzing Love's Labour’s Lost and more time getting some skills that resulted in a paycheck.

-Prudie.

Des Français

Sometimes, from the ol' mailing list, I wonder if being an American getting a degree in French is a bit like if I, a "cis" woman, were to get a degree in the experience of maleness. I can learn about it, I can admire it aesthetically, but I'm not going to be it. The job postings - not academic jobs, of course, but part-time, extra-money work - is almost inevitably for someone French. People whose four-year-olds need to learn être from an authentic French person who can, working overtime, also tell Mom how not to get fat. Or something. I have no idea. Here's the latest.

La boutique [fancy Parisian macaron shop that recently opened on Madison near all those Ralph Lifshitz stores] souhaite recruter des Français (exclusivement, pour la "French touch") qui chercheraient un emploi dans la vente ou dans la restauration (ouverture prochaine d'une deuxième boutique à Manhattan, avec une partie restauration).

Emphasis in the original.

Is this even legal? (Is it like Hooters insisting on busty and young? You're more of a performer than a cashier?) Do I even care? Practically speaking, no - I'm not about to spend $33 round-trip on the train to sell macarons to socialites for what I can only imagine is minimum wage. But it interests me (and, fine, irritates me, but doesn't surprise me) that Frenchness is such a thing that it's evidently more marketable than having, for example, an MA-plus in French literature and history. Although being an American with an ambivalent inferiority complex about not being French is plenty marketable. To be continued...

Speaking of...

How timely! Fresh in my inbox, an email forwarded to my department proposing what could only be described as the job Elaine does for Mr. Pitt. The list emails are a great source of valuable info. and, alas, inadvertent entertainment, as with the recent request, by an agent, for a tutor, presumably for an unnamed celebrity, where if you wanted the job, you needed to send your resume with a photo attached. There are also sometimes demoralizing requests for babysitters (good to know these ABD skills add up to a job one can perfectly well take in middle school), but those are at least paid positions.

Which brings us to this latest. It comes from a Writer, one I'd never heard of, but who will have you know that he's a big deal. After three paragraphs of bio, he gets to the point:

I won't burden you with a list of the various other literary projects I'm involved in, but I hope it's obvious that I have plenty of potential duties for an assistant. It is essential that an intern be a native speaker of French who is capable of helping me when I write directly in that language. This would be an internship of several hours a week, rather than a paid position, offering interesting experience dealing with people and activities in the literary world of two cultures. Hopefully, it could count toward academic credit.

"Hopefully," heh. And I don't for a moment doubt that this "position" will receive multiple applications, if not from my own department, then from wherever else it's being advertised.

Writing projects

For The Chef at Heart with No Time  

We set up your kitchen like the set of your favorite cooking show.  Shop for the ingredients of your favorite recipes.  Prep the ingredients (chop, dice, flour, bread, tenderize, measure, get proper pans out etc).  Set your table, empty the trash &; have the dishwasher ready for use.  When you come home, you turn on the flames and off you go.

This, Talbots, Lululemon, and shoppes of all kinds (if-you-have-to-ask cheese; fine silver; eco-friendly gifts; a high-end dress shop I don't dare enter, that storefront-wise seems to be ripping off the Barneys Co-op aesthetic) is what it's about in these parts. I must find a way to spin this into a sweeping 19th-century-style novel about These Times, or stop fussing about it.

In the mean time, my new semester's resolution (although I'm not entirely sure, this being a fellowship year, and on account of living among those following not one but two different semester schedules that may or may not be in sync, when one ends and the next begins) is to churn out the rest of the document. It's very much at churn-out stage - the fun part where I thought through the ideas, the materials, is most done. Now it needs to emerge in full, in discrete 40-50-page components. Manageable yet daunting. That classic advice - "it doesn't need to be perfect," trust me, I know.

I was struck by Philip "Social Q's" Galanes's claim that one is forever hearing about people's dissertations at parties. I find that hard to believe. When asked, in social situations, what I do, I have this hierarchy of answers such that I provide the least possible information, both so as not to busman's-holiday and, more to the point, so as not to bore others with it. "French." If pressed, "French literature and history." If pressed, "19th century." If pressed, "Jews." If an author is requested, "Zola," not the obscure 19th-century French-Jewish-press journalists whose writings my dissertation is far more centrally about. Rarely do we reach the point of "Jews and Intermarriage in Nineteenth-Century France." You, my fellow grad students, surely know how we're all supposed to have a one-sentence, elevator-ride description of our projects? That's well and good, but in purely social settings, or with the colleagues of one's significant other, even that is, as they say, TMI.

And this is for the best. Dissertating grad students do not go to parties in order to talk about their dissertations. We go in order to get our minds off our dissertations. If someone's genuinely interested in the topic, as in, if someone works on a related field (or, in the case of my diss., personally identifies with it), and it's abundantly clear this isn't a matter of someone being polite, of someone approaching social situations by asking questions of others about themselves, then sure, I'm not ashamed of my topic, I am interested in it, after all. And I'm certainly not offended if someone, out of social graces or genuine interest, asks about my work. Nothing wrong with social graces! The more, the merrier.

But the combination of Social Asker and Burnt-Out Dissertater (redundant synonym of Dissertater) is a tough one indeed. Yes, as a general rule, the humans like to talk about themselves. But unless you happen to meet a grad student still working on the dissertation proposal and in that this is so exciting! stage, consider asking them about something else, or better yet, talking about yourself and what you've been up to. If what you do happens to be in the field of air-conditioner repair, maybe pass along info. regarding possible job openings for otherwise unemployable humanities graduates.

Early New Year's Resolutions*

-Write The Small Dog Workout Book. Inspired by this NYT reader comment; socialite, reality TV star, and incredibly tall woman Kelly Bensimon's choice of tiny maltese as workout partner; and my own half-hour jogs with Bisou, the ones that tire her out for a couple minutes and me for the whole day. The jogs are really for her, and for me only insofar as it means maybe she'll require less chasing around the apartment afterwards. But I'm sure that as with any exercise, poodle-jogging makes a person fit and Gwyneth-like. This book would sell in the States, I think, but could even become a hit in Frahnce, where it would be marketed as a way of combatting cellulite. Either way, Bisou goes on the cover.

-Or, co-write the satirical cookbook my friend and fellow woods "housewife" and I have been discussing, based on our non-existent café serving the woodsy academics. Think Bravo meets Alice Waters. Think "Big Bang Theory" from the perspective of Penny crossed with Daria. But those are all the clues you're getting for now.

-Stop reading the NYT, NYMag, or anything else with NY in the title, except for hard news and op-eds. No Styles, no Well, no lifestyle commentary, no restaurant reviews. No reports on shoe sample sales where the shoes look like ones I might potentially be able to walk in. Nothing about how one simply must go to the Greenmarket fishmonger for the latest catch. Yes, it was nice being able to get good fish, as opposed to whatever's shrink-wrapped at Wegman's, or displayed in a fishmongery way but often foul-smelling at Whole Foods. Yes, there's a boutique fish store on Nassau St., but it's at the far end of Nassau St., and days when it's cold enough to take fish that far by bike are days it's too cold to bike there. And my guess would be that if it's anything like the boutique everything stores on and near Nassau St. (like the cheese shop without prices on most of the items! like my recent $14-plus-tax-and-tip hamburger!), if you have to ask... No! I must tear myself away, away from fish stew recipes and the even more delicious comment about how wrong the recipe author is to suggest using canned tomatoes, when in this day and age, with all we know about BPA...

-Pitch some kind of earth-shattering "how we live now" article to the Atlantic. Something about the food movement or rescue culture. Something about how "we" only feed our dogs local and sustainable kibble.

-With husband, purchase car. Learn to drive car. Wean self from shuttle.

-Maybe I could have my own talk show? I like horses.

*Academic goals not included, because they're what they are for every other humanities PhD student, namely finish it, publish part of it, and graduate already.

"Outside the classroom"

This can't possibly be the first, or last, celebration of the college dropout. Like, did you know that the guy from Facebook, and Bill Gates, they never got their diplomas? Michael Ellsberg, Brown '99, has written the latest installment of 'Let's take this bit of trivia about a few who got lucky and at any rate had spent some time at elite colleges and project that onto a national population for whom dropping out would realistically mean video games and not entrepreneurship but you never know, right?' And the nugget of truth is that there are people who go to college because they're middle- or upper-class and that's what's done, but who'd be better-suited to some other endeavor. The catch is that this alternative might be lucrative and (to use the catchphrase) "job-creating," but it also might be low-level and food-service. It might be folding shirts at the Gap, or driving a cab. In other words, the controversial-ish platitude about how college isn't for everyone doesn't amount to, 'but fear not, a glamorous life awaits the drop-out.' The alternatives to college are (as conservative critics of academia sometimes sniff) often enough 'noble' pursuits (the plumber is always a favorite), but there will be a tradeoff in status and (often if not always) income. Unless what you do instead of finish college is found Facebook. But someone already did that.

So that's one problem. Another is that "college" isn't just about the coursework, something I'd think is obvious, but that Ellsberg completely ignores: "[V]ery few start-ups get off the ground without a wide, vibrant network of advisers and mentors, potential customers and clients, quality vendors and valuable talent to employ. You don’t learn how to network crouched over a desk studying for multiple-choice exams. You learn it outside the classroom, talking to fellow human beings face-to-face." Fine. But who are you meeting "outside the classroom" at Harvard, as versus "outside the classroom" at a community college in your hometown? Who are you meeting "outside the classroom" if you're not attending any school whatsoever, but are working at your local Target?

The point of college - college as social-mobility-promotor, as future-employment-boost - has never been just about grades and scores. Grades and scores are what get you into college. But elite universities in the U.S. aren't like European ones where you just show up for class (or just show up for exams) and otherwise are not connected to any college "community." After getting through how most jobs are filled via connections and so forth, Ellsberg explains,

In this informal job market, the academic requirements listed in job ads tend to be highly negotiable, and far less important than real-world results and the enthusiasm of the personal referral. Classroom skills may put you at an advantage in the formal market, but in the informal market, street-smart skills and real-world networking are infinitely more important.

Fine. But college is where this networking first happens. And that's really, really important if you're trying to break into a career for which you have no family connections. If you do that networking in the first semester and drop out, and find that you're the next Zuckerberg, if you're the exception and you know it, great. But if you don't go to college in the first place? I saw the Facebook movie, and I have my doubts that there'd be Facebook if Zuckerberg had stopped his education at high school.

Excuses excuses UPDATED

A good deal of my studying at the moment appears to be about reaching the level of a French high school student. I may know more than most about the obscure nonsense I study, and some tangentially related obscure nonsense as well, but Victor Hugo, for instance, I've only met just recently, and am apparently somewhat far behind. When a sentence begins (in French), "Every not-too-ignorant high school student knows [...]", and ends in something about Hugo's poetry that was news to me, it all does start to look rather futile.

Of course, if the Hugo editions I needed weren't reserve books located in an ostensibly silent part of the library that has for whatever reason been appropriated by those who'd rather chat at full volume than read or check Facebook or whatever, things might go more smoothly.

UPDATE

Also not helpful: according to the Introduction, the collection of poetry whose significance I'm attempting to understand for an exam is best understood as "profondément ambigu."