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A practical way to conduct a job search or develop your career is to treat it like a project. “I want X job, so I will prioritize doing whatever it takes to get it.” If you’re an aspiring professor, you might focus on writing articles for the top journals in your field because that’s what search committees in your discipline care about. Publish or perish is a reality for some. Teaching, service, and everything else are just details on a CV.
Put this way, careers in higher education are simple. They are projects with binary results: success or failure.
You can’t blame academics for having a pragmatic approach, especially those who run experiments all day. With such high stakes and sunk costs in their careers, professors should apply surgical, if-then reasoning to all their decisions and optimize their time, energy, and resources.
But that’s a hard way to live.
“I spent two decades of my own life striving for success in academia,” wrote Kieran Setiya, a professor of philosophy at MIT, in his book “Life is Hard.” “I don’t regret that. What I do regret is treating my life as a project to complete: first earn a Ph.D., then get a job; tenure and promotion; teach a class, publish an article, a book, then another and another and another — to what end?”
Sprinting in Academia
It’s no wonder professors are subjected to things like the arrival fallacy, the tenure slump, or, in Setiya’s case, a midlife crisis. Professors must sprint to milestones early in their careers only to ask themselves later, “To what end?,” and then strive for administrative positions, become complacent, or leave the academy for different rewards.
“Universities have remarkably few levels of ranks, and the productive faculty members achieve them fairly early in their working lives: the first promotion comes six or seven years out of the postdoc experience (increasingly) or graduate school, and the next (final) promotion within ten years after that,” wrote C.K. Gunsalus in “The College Administrator’s Survival Guide.” “Unless your university has a robust supply of endowed chairs or other awards, the remaining rewards are almost all external to the institution and/or intangible.”
Projects Change
You might not care about status or other incentives in your career. You might be perfectly happy as a researcher or a rank-and-file staffer with no ambition to be manager. But how do you know that won’t change once you’ve “arrived”? Or, if you’re already there, how do you know that won’t change in 10 or 15 years?
That’s the problem with career projects and job searches. They might seem falsifiable when you start them, but the positives could turn into negatives over time. That said, a missed opportunity, rejection, or a failure could wind up being a stepping stone to success.
“But how do you know?” asked John Rindy, assistant vice president for career and academic progress at Slippery Rock University. “You’ve got to move around or try different things and interview at other places. This idea that you’re always going to be something or have this one job, that’s just not how it is anymore.”
Rindy acknowledged that there’s nothing wrong with being a researcher your entire career. No one is going to find the cure for cancer with itchy feet. People should strive to have fulfilling jobs that last for decades. But employee engagement is at a 10-year low, with 70% of Americans now disengaged at work, and more than half are seeking new jobs.
Two Questions To Ask
In addition to seeing what else is out there, Rindy advises higher education professionals to ask themselves two questions:
Are you interested in a broad-reaching career? Are you interested in doing better for your students?
Yes to either one (or both) should motivate you to learn more about your institution outside of your department and make connections with people in other functional areas around campus. This will simultaneously help you explore other career opportunities, perhaps in administration, and help you serve students by knowing more than just your “completed project.”
Two Benefits of Reflection
Next, develop a practice of reflection so that you understand yourself and what makes you happy, and not what appears to make other people satisfied. As self-help author Tony Robbins once said, “Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure.”
Another way to reflect is to focus on grasping the benefits of projects while letting go of their harmful side effects.
“By reflection on the temporalities of action, one can learn how to pursue a project, even the most ambitious, without subverting one’s life or seeing it solely in the glare of failure and success,” Setiya wrote.
Telic vs. Atelic
Stealing jargon from linguistics, Setiya said that things that can be completed, like building a house or getting married, are “telic” activities, from the Greek “telos,” whereas “atelic” activities, like parenting or listening to music, do not aim at a termination or a final state which they have been achieved.
“You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will. But you cannot exhaust them.” Setiya wrote. “They have no limit, no outcome whose achievement brings them to an end.”
Setiya said that people are always engaged in both telic and atelic activities. For example, he wrote a book that ended, but by doing so, he’s participating in an endless activity of thinking about the ways that life is hard. But with telic activities, “satisfaction is always in the future or the past.”
Bottom Line
The same telic-vs.-atelic thinking goes for job searches and careers. What will move you toward success is not the step-by-step process to complete a project, but how much you come to enjoy the journey without a destination. Opportunities come and go — some you obtain and most pass you by — but the search is endless.
Forget about the stonecutters or sailors envisioning cathedrals and distant shores.
If you’re doing it right, the work never ends.
