Well it sure has been awhile, huh? I swear - and this is what everyone always says, isn’t it? - that if you look in my drafts you’ll find a half dozen attempts to write an update. Here’s another thing that everyone always says: life just got in the way.
As it turns out, it’s been basically exactly a year and there’s much to recount.
I got a job. A big boy job that comes with a salary that is actually commensurate with my experience, comprehensive vision and dental, and a whole host of other things that I’m not sure how to deal with. Life comes at you fast, or whatever.
In truth, I hadn’t intended to take a job this year. I had intended to ‘soft’ go on the job market (think ‘soft-launch’ but for my career) and only apply to things that felt like perfect fits, things I would’ve been sad to miss out on. And so that’s exactly what I did. The ‘problem’ is that I got an offer I would’ve been a moron not to take. I applied for a handful of opportunities - the job I took (a professional faculty job I’ll talk more about in this post), a tenure-line faculty job at a local university here in Virginia in media studies, another tenure-line faculty job at a university in North Carolina (that actually, funnily enough, I chose not to do my PhD at), and a postdoc in the Midwest. Because of the nature of the deadlines of all of these opportunities, I actually ended up signing my contract for Job #1 before even hearing back from most of the other ones. C’est la vie.
Despite being at my home institution, the job that I applied for, was offered, and ultimately accepted had a rather rigorous interview process. I applied for the job in early August and signed my contract right before Thanksgiving. In the time that intervened, I did three rounds of interviews + a campus ‘visit’ which involved a day-long series of meetings and a teaching demo. I hate to be the kind of person who chronicles how busy they are mostly because I find that it’s a real moral shortcoming to flex about your busy-ness because it reveals the true extent to which you are actually awful at managing expectations and responsibilities, but I don’t think I’ve ever been as busy (and hope to never be as busy ever again) as I was this fall semester. I was teaching a class (more on this in another post), applying for jobs (maybe more on this in another post), writing my dissertation at a more accelerated pace (definitely more on this in another post), and working my other jobs: chairing a conference organizing committee and handling a lot of communications and logistics work for that, serving as an academic coach for two undergraduate students, working in the writing center as a graduate writing consultant, and attending to my work as the peer review editor of Sonic Scope. Before the semester started I told Carly that it was going to be a busy semester. I don’t think either of us had any idea just how true that would be.
Now that the dust has settled - grades have long been entered, evals have been received, I have quit almost all of my other jobs, and I have a full draft of a complete dissertation (!!!), I guess I’m finally ready to talk about moving into this next chapter of my life.
As many/most of you already know by now, I accepted a full time job as the assistant director of the Writing and Communication Center here at William and Mary and I started on January 10th. It is an opportunity about which I’m really excited (admittedly this has waxed and waned in the last few weeks as the dissertation assumed all of my effort and energy), and it is more or less a dream job that allows me to do all the things I love about being an academic - teach, support grads and undergrads in their writing through direct programming, do research (+ write), and help support writing across the college. I’ve only been in the job for one full week - so I am certain that I will not always feel this way - but I have felt acutely like I am finally doing something that aligns with my professional goals without sacrificing the other things I care about. I will elaborate on the existential crisis that was this job search at a later time, but for now I’m basking in feeling like I made a good call.
What has shocked me most about full-time employment is that when I come home at the end of the day, though the sun is mostly set, I still feel like I have space in my brain to entertain other things. I’m working on building out my course for the fall (I have a 1/1 teaching load in this role), putting together workshops for the spring semester, and thinking about new initiatives I’m passionate about getting off the ground in the future. In the fall semester I felt like every time I came home from work I could mostly manage to make dinner and scroll TikTok until my eyes bled and that was about all I could muster in terms of intellectual output. It feels good to think about putting the leftover brain power to good use. I finished a draft of an article I’ve been working on for too long! I am working on a book review I forgot that I agreed to write! And I have a couple of conference papers I need to start drafting! For once, though, this doesn’t feel exceptionally daunting. I will probably elaborate on this more later, but I think that moving into a job where my constant train(s) of thought don’t look like this anymore: will this help set me up to get tenure? oh, then I probably shouldn’t be doing it? but wait, this is the thing I want to be doing? is actually very helpful.
I don’t have much else for right now, just kind of wanted to bust the rust on thinking publicly in this space again. Stay tuned!