A Year in Transition
What? No post for the whole of 2010?!
The usual reason… life gets in the way. 2010 turned out to be a major turning point for me. I’ve changed jobs and begun a new career in a different town, leaving my academic life far behind. The early part of 2010 was basically a lesson on why one should never go against one’s heart. To understand why here is the background story:
In 2009 when the bottom fell out the job market and my current contract entered its final year, I was offered a job that seemed to be a very ill fit for me. But my boss recommended me for it, and these academic posts are said to be like gold dust. Such opennings appear extremely rarely and the competition amongst applicants is tough. Not having my heart really in it, I flunked out at the interview. It didn’t help that the boss gave me bad advice — when I signed up for a staff development course on how to prepare for academic job interviews, he said I didn’t need it and that my time was better spent attending his weekly 2 hour group meetings. Trusting his better judgement I cancelled. After all he’s the professor and I was merely a post-doc.
After a predictably bad job interview, the boss showed off how much clout he had by forcing the decision in my favour. Such is the power when an academic can bring in a lot of research funds and prestige to a college. I should have been happy, but the first few months of 2010 confirmed what I had instinctively been fearing all during the first year as a probationary lecturer — it was basically just like a post-doc post in everything but name and salary. In fact the work load, expectations and stress were even higher. Ending up in the wrong faculty for my particular skill set only added insult to injury.
I gave my next career move some thought over the Easter vacation in the Caribbean. Thanks to a hyperactive Icelandic volcano, this thinking time was more than sufficient. I decided to start looking for a new job in the middle of one of the worst recessions to hit the UK. As luck would have it, within two months I had managed to land a job in an industry more to my liking that would fit my skill set much better. And the salary ain’t that bad either. Looks like I would be leaving academia.
Now as I look forward to what 2011 has in store, I don’t have any regrets about this major transition. My old job looked pretty much like a dead-end to me, and there are many in a similar situation who are finding this out for themselves. Academia itself is going through a painful transition. Given such pressures, it is easy to see why my former boss, and academics in similar positions would stoop to using highly manipulative tactics to get post-docs to do their bidding. But this should not be mistaken as an excuse for such disrespectful behaviour.
Let’s just say that I’m glad that I managed to free myself from the pressure cooker before the poisoning became irreversible.
