A Real Job

There is a lot more to say about the store.   Nupur and I have often talked about how we would make really good reality TV.  As Nupur puts it, we are waaay more interesting than those “Cupcake Girls”.   But alas, I started this blog series to talk about living the McPhD life, so I’ll get to those (mis)adventures first.

            It became quickly apparent that the store was not going to be securing us a stable income until year 3, at the very least.  We had a loan to pay off, inventory to buy, a customer base to build.  While my partner, Andrew had a full-time job as an elementary school teacher, we had expenses and a student loan to pay off.  Besides, my shelf life as a “new graduate” was near expiry, and I really felt I needed to get out in the field.  In the beginning of my academic job search, I would try for REAL jobs.  Real jobs in this context mean tenure-track positions – that gilded cage where the institution puts new faculty in a gerbil wheel and turns up the speed full blast.  Throw in a full teaching load, demand departmental service, and put the fear of god and hell in them to publish or perish come time for tenure review.  Tenure-track scholars have a handful of years to build a portfolio of all their accomplishments, like a prized scrapbook from the most hard-ass boot camp you have ever attended.  Their relationships suffer, they start to reminisce about their impoverished years as a grad student as the good old days, and in the middle of grinding out yet another research paper which they hope will be peer reviewed by a semi-reputable journal that maybe 3 people will ever read in their life times, they will suddenly be caught in an existentialist angst and ask themselves, “what is this life about, anyway?”  

            (Esteemed tenured friends, you can correct me if I am wrong.  Since I’ve never been on the track, I can only glean from observing your lives.  ROFLMAO, as the kids say these days)

            All that said, when the rare posting appeared that kinda, sorta look like something that I could apply for, I heard angels sing as clouds parted and rays of sunshine beamed on me.  Right away, I would start spinning my work into whatever they wanted it to be.  Cultural geography?  Sure!  Gender and queer studies?  You bet!  Do the moonwalk on a handstand?  Absolutely!  I would send off my CV, gorgeous cover letters that I would labour on for weeks, hit up my supervisor and committee for letters of ref and...wait.  And wait.  And wait some more.  Most often, if you are not short-listed, you do not hear anything back.  You are gum on their shoe, and not even a fat wad of it that bugs them, but just the trace of gum that they don’t even notice.  It started to get embarrassing when I had to ask my peeps for references for the 534th time.  I imagined them in their offices, in the middle of their very legit and important research that was going to change how the WORLD thought about EVERYTHING, and ding, there would be my measly plea for yet another reference letter. 

By the time I received insider information that one job I had applied for at a Toronto university had received over 250 applications and the 10^th job I had applied for had been cancelled due to "budget changes", the giant boulder of reality finally sunk in. I realized there were Humanities and Social Science Ph.Ds everywhere, sort of  like the walking dead. They were lined up in front of me at the Tim Horton's.  They were beside me shoe-shopping for their kids' shoes at Payless.  They were crying at some sad foreign film two rows down in a half-empty theatre in the middle of the afternoon. At my local baby/parent drop-in, I met two more.  We bounced our babies and whispered like a secret society while the other parents joined in on yet another round of Itsy Bitsy Spider at circle time. 

 (This doesn’t even include all the PhDs who are driving the cabs, phoning me from call centres, serving me coffee at said Tim Horton’s and cleaning the ivory towers.  These folks make up a special group that are granted settlement in Canada particularly because of their higher education, but quickly stripped of their credentials upon landing. Those fellow scholars from Asia, Africa, Latin America, are the McPhDs of all McPhDs.)

            So, completely freaked out, I started to furiously apply for the sessional and contract positions, scatter-gunning my CV everywhere. Sessional positions are pay by course positions.  They range from $6, 000 to $10, 000 a course depending on the university.  Don't ask me to break this down into an hourly wage because I only did it once, and it put me well below a living wage.  At the college level, salary is calculated per hour, per class hours (there is no accounting for prep, administration, grading, etc). According to a recent US stat, tenure-track, the proportion of tenure-track/sessional ratio is now at 35% to 65%.  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I heard a recent NPR show about the ever-rising number of PhDs on food stamps.  Sessionals do not get benefits or funding for research.  On some occasions, I've even wondered whether I would get a library card.  For reals.

If you're really lucky and secure a handful of sessional courses, you will likely burn out while teaching a bunch of undergrads who will facebook and text all class long about the vastly more important things in life like creating a new cat meme instead of listening to the lecture you have spent two months preparing.  Since you will be drained, and unfunded for your research, the likelihood of producing published articles will grow slimmer, making your chances of securing “the Job” even less likely.  And so goes the vicious cycle of the contingent University lecturer.  

The Toronto market is especially super-saturated.  Everybody wants to stay in Toronto.  I know some people in my cohort who spread out far and wide across the country and beyond to better their chances, but with a child, a mortgage, families nearby, I wouldn’t be able to re-locate.  But I did widen my geography.  I set my limits to the southern Ontario circuit, deciding that I would commute to wherever the Greyhound could go in less than 2 hours.  This would approximately add 4 or 5 universities to my net.  

 More waiting.  If they don’t send out replies for tenure-track jobs, they especially ignore you for sessional positions.  So you are less than that trace of gum on their shoe, you are just the slightest skid mark on the bottom of their sole.  Maybe a smidge of an ant gut that they didn't realize they murdered on the way from the parking lot to their corner offices high above the proletariat. Now, I suppose I should be fairer to “them”.  “They” are the overworked, tenure-track and tenured gerbils in the gilded cages mentioned above, their own rat race set in motion by policies and institutions that are creating a sweatshop of knowledge production. 

            Still, when I do get the odd rejection letter, I am grateful to the school for at least showing some common courtesy by acknowledging that I exist.  And trying.   Because lords and lordesses, I am trying.