Theme Song: Silence
Projects: So many that I’m not listing them here right now…
So, this is a question I woke up with on my mind this morning as I thought about academia’s grim prospects. I have an MA degree in philosophy, which pretty much qualifies me to hang out in a box behind Walmart. (As a side note, you should realize that’s a bit of self-deprecating humor I’m using there.) It used to be that an MA allowed you to teach junior college while a Ph.D. allowed you to teach at four-year schools. In our saturated market, many individuals with Ph.D.s are now teaching at junior college while many MA degree holders, such as myself, are, well trying to figure out what they should do. Not that I want to teach, necessarily, but just that it’s an interesting observation.
I spent my time studying everything I could put my hands on. In my own junior college experience (where I spent four or five years), I couldn’t decide what I wanted to major in. I knew I loved learning. Foreign languages were great. Political science was great. Philosophy was a mental challenge. Creative writing was a lot of fun. Psychology was fun, but came easily to me. When I transferred to CSU Chico, I still wasn’t quite sure whether I’d major in philosophy, English, or something else. I wound up majoring in philosophy, with the thought that I would minor in creative writing and classics. I wound up not taking on a minor. Instead, I came one class short of a minor in French – but even then…
Once I graduated, with honors, in philosophy, I went on to grad school for…philosophy…I wound up taking enough classes to have practically minored in German as well. (Languages, right?) While in grad school, I kept asking myself the question: So why am I here? Why am I in academia?
The entire time, I thought it was so that I could become a tenure track professor at a research institution. That was the answer I kept giving myself, anyway. I wanted to be the kind of philosopher that Martha Nussbaum is – prolific, involved, inspiring. But, I also was being realistic.
When I left my Ph.D. program, for a multitude of reasons (most of which still are sound enough to keep me from finishing), I began to write. I’ve always enjoyed it, but more importantly, I learned very quickly that I was overqualified for most jobs outside of academia. My response was to create my own business and to make my own job.
So I did. And here I am, four years later, running my own show. I’m not complaining at all, I’ve had some wonderful clients and experiences, and I’ve learned many, many things I’d not have otherwise learned about. However, I also wonder, if this was what I was going to wind up doing, wouldn’t an MBA degree and an English degree have served me better?
I could give a thousand reasons why they probably wouldn’t have. One is the most important: You learn so many things on the job, out in the workforce, that you would never otherwise learn. There are things that cannot be taught in a classroom. I spent fourteen years in academia learning about all sorts of things – whether the world ends if we all close our eyes at the same time, what makes a butterfly tick, how to play politics with others. I read a lot of books. I learned how to socialize with a certain category of people. I developed my taste.
Mostly what 14 years of academia did for me was to teach me that I can set goals and meet them if I break those goals down into small chunks that are time-bound. It taught me how to manage projects – even if I didn’t know that what I was doing at the time was project management. When I think about it, there were a lot of transferable skills that I take into the world from my academic experience.
