How have you had to re-imagine your dreams, either due to the pandemic or in the past? I'm talking about those goals you are most passionate about. How have you had to modify or adapt your dreams to circumstances that didn’t allow for them exactly as you’d imagined?
For me, this has been a brutal process. I dreamed of getting my PhD in English so I could be the professor who changed your life in undergrad. That classy, tenured woman with glasses and a pencil skirt who made boring or impenetrable books interesting? That was going to be me. I wrote three of my four dissertation chapters in a year and a half; writing was a delicious counterpart to coursework. The academic trifecta of teaching, writing, and research suits perfectly.
I went on the academic job market in the fall of 2019. By early February 2020, I’d applied for 46 jobs. The response? Crickets. By March the pandemic was in full swing; I was able to distract myself with the sudden imperative to teach my in-person class online or by figuring out how to do home workouts in the kitchen (accidentally swiping the ceiling fan hurts). But by April the doom was unavoidable. Universities were declaring hiring freezes or rescinding job offers. By early May 2020, I’d applied to 56 jobs and gotten one interview (I still haven’t heard back about whether or not I got that job).
My dream of landing a tenure-track position as a professor of English seems far off at best, and unlikely at worst. Consider the shrinking tenure market (thanks to universities contracting adjuncts at minimum wage), or the fact that tenured professors of 13 years are being laid off at state colleges (this person had published a book. I will be competing with them on the market this year. Me: ABD/All But Dissertated, no book, and only forthcoming, not published, articles). Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome…..a global pandemic that has led to a major economic recession! In short: the market for professor jobs has gone from bad to worse.
Out of necessity, I must re-imagine my dream of being an English professor in the next year or two. Will I work a job that is an alternative to academia? Will I use my research and writing skills in a nonprofit, in an editing company, as a contracted writer? Will I teach English at a private school? Tutoring, perhaps. None of these are my passion, but they will bring in money. They may eventually lead to a job as a professor, although that seems unlikely.
It’s also possible that I might be able to work a primary job that satisfies one of my loves (reading, writing, or teaching) and through volunteer work and hobbies, I can hit the other two. Anything can happen.
But this is me after a few months of grieving the loss of a very specific career vision that is connected to my identity. At the beginning of this realization, it was grim. I had to be willing to let go of a version of a dream that had been ten years in the making (MA, PhD, jobs to pay for the MA in between). What shape will my dream take in our changed world? I will have to be patient, open, trusting. Re-envisioning something requires light. I’ll let you know what's around the corner when I get there.
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