3 Steps To Really Consider a Career in Higher Ed

How do I know which job is right for me? Would I enjoy working at a particular university? Should I even become a professor? These are questions that higher education job seekers might ask themselves.

Like most any decision, you won’t know if it was right until you actually do it. But that career advice doesn’t help, especially with the high barrier of entry to work in higher education and the sunk costs and risks associated with making a career move.

First off, you have to divorce yourself from the idea of who you want to become and focus on what you will actually do. For some people, they like the thought of working on a college campus or being a professor, but they haven’t fully considered the realities and tradeoffs of the decision.

Caitlin Luetger-Schlewitt, a lecturer in leadership and career readiness at North Central College, notices how eager students are to become professors and other roles on college campuses. But there is often a disconnect, possibly because of students’ exposure to higher education professionals at a time when they are ready or forced to launch their own career.

“I love what I do and I’m very privileged to be able to do the work that I do, but there are a lot of misconceptions or myths about what it’s like to work in academia,” said Luetger-Schlewitt, naming compensation and common tasks among others. “I think sometimes students have received an overwhelmingly positive message that this is the best thing you could do (from people who really do love their jobs), but sometimes they’re not learning about the realities of that type of work or that type of industry.”

The actual content of a professor’s life rarely occurs to students, wrote psychology researcher Adam Mastroianni on his blog, Experimental History.

“(They picture themselves) walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, ‘I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!’ and everyone waving back to them going, ‘Hi professor!'” Mastroianni mused, before later adding, “When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives it’s often because they haven’t unpacked.”

So let’s do that in what might seem impossible in the next three steps. To perpetuate the cliche, you might have “a lot to unpack here,” or you might just be eager to pack for your career journey to an unknown destination. Either way, follow this:

Step 1: Lifestyle Planning

The first exercise is to practice what Georgetown computer science professor and author Cal Newport calls “lifestyle-centric career planning,” which can be summarized as determining the lifestyle you want and then working backward from there. Determine what your ideal daily life would entail and you figure out how your work can get you to that lifestyle. This includes your professional life as well as personal, such as where you want to live, how much leisure time you have, and the income to support your lifestyle.

“You’re building a concrete image that does not have specifics about your specific career or specific work you are doing,” Newport said on his podcast, Deep Questions. “You then use this image to figure out what job you want or what career advancement to take because then you have a simple question: ‘Of the things available to me now, what will most effectively move me closer to achieving this lifestyle?'”

This, according to Newport, gets you away from vague approaches to making career decisions such as your passion or true calling or what seems most respectable or stable.

Step 2: Pre-Experience

Your lifestyle-centric career might be obtaining a job that you don’t know much about. There could be tradeoffs that you are unwilling to make or, alluding to Mastroianni’s blog post title, crazy enough to endure.

The only way to learn about the thing you want to do is actually talk to people who are doing the thing. This seems like perfunctory advice but it’s amazing how many people don’t take the time to do this research. There are two reasons: 1.) they don’t want to, perhaps subconsciously, shatter the perfect image they have of their idyllic dream job, and 2.) the idea of conducting an informational interview seems too formal or like an interrogation.

Don’t let your hesitancy for job exploration become a protective strategy for your ego, like procrastination. Pursuing a career is too important. You will regret not talking to professionals, especially if you discover that being a professor involves more time in front of a screen and less classroom time than you anticipated.

Information gathering should also be complemented with visualization exercises in what University of Michigan psychologist Oliver Schultheiss calls “pre-experience.” He and his co-researcher Joachim Brunstein suggest that engaging in goal imagery helps a person realize what it would mean to strive for a specific goal by experiencing how emotionally satisfying its pursuit and attainment would be for that person.

Recognizing how satisfying a job will be in advance, in spite of — or maybe even because of — the difficulty, is essential to the unpacking process.

Step 3: Social Interest

Finally, you’ve already explored how you want to live and what you want to do, but one of the biggest predictors of career satisfaction is the who, as in the community that you will belong to and the people with whom you will be spending most of your time with on a daily basis.

We tend to think of careers as a solo endeavor, but there’s a body of research indicating that psychosocial factors are a part of the equation and even the leading contributor to job satisfaction and performance. This includes self-determination theory (autonomy, mastery, and belonging) and Gallop research that continues to show the importance of having a best friend at work.

Let’s return to Luetger-Schlewitt, who is a trained psychotherapist. She has studied the effects of social interest within the Adlerian psychology framework that people have three life tasks in which they find meaning: work, love, and friendship (or social connection).

Social interest encompasses the ways in which people feel connected to any community that they’re a part of, and that influences their three life tasks.

“Social interest makes it possible for us to feel whole as a person and have positive outcomes,” Luetger-Schlewitt said. “If we’re not feeling welcomed in our communities, we might struggle in work or in our personal relationships, and that’s going to make us feel discouraged. It’s directly tied to a person’s overall well-being.”

Her advice goes back to Step 2, talking to people, but doing it through a social interest lens to understand how each school, each department, and each discipline fosters a sense of community.

“Start looking into what the culture is like in those colleges or universities that you want to work for or what the discipline is like, because each one is different,” Luetger-Schlewitt said. “Talk to a wide variety of faculty, not just tenured faculty but adjuncts, lecturers, and non-tenure track full-time faculty.”

While it might be difficult to evaluate an institution or department from the outside, you can learn a lot about how welcoming they are from observing the community and talking to people with different statuses within it. This goes for hierarchy of professionals but also students.

Bottom Line

When you unpack a career choice, you will find that decisions aren’t really about a desired career: you’re choosing a lifestyle, a set of tasks, and a community to join.