Well, I’m a month in to the new gig. I’m writing full time (sort of, see below). I’m not teaching (sort of, see below). Administrative and research duties have disappeared (…see below), and I’ve got tons more time to spend with my family (😔). Things are great, right?
Writing Full Time?
The big thing I grew to dislike about working in academia was working on “academic time.” If you’re a student or a teacher, you know it. It’s the sense that everything starts with an academic term (a quarter, a semester, a grading period, whatever you want to call it) and ends when final grades are submitted. On one hand, it’s nice to get a clean slate every few months, but on the other, the system really doesn’t allow for projects that fall outside those neat boundaries.
Case in point: I did academic assessment as part of my institutional service. To assess the quality of an academic program, you have to collect data, and most people like to collect student performances on final projects. Know when they don’t want to spend time gathering those examples of student work, explaining their assessment strategy and writing up the results? If you answered “after the term was done,” you were correct. Know when the best time is to do that stuff for final projects?
There are plenty of other examples out there — the research projects perpetually half finished because you can only get so much done in the week or two between terms, the courses that are always half planned because you split your breaks between course prep and research, the vacations only a quarter taken because you spent your break working on stuff you didn’t have time to do during your work hours because there was too much work to get any work done. Sucks.
Well, now I’m writing full time. There are no seasonal starts and stops where everyone begins or ends the work they’re doing. Everything is perpetually ongoing. It’s like a big ol’ writing train, cruising on by. And, I’m grabbing at the cars as they go to get projects here and there.
A lot of my time lately has been spent preparing, researching, reading, planning… not quite writing. I can’t say I don’t like it, though. I’m getting to do a thing I haven’t been able to do for a long time: sit and prepare to take on a major project. I’m able to ask others for advice (and get it!). I can look at examples of similar work. Even more mind-boggling: I’m writing about subjects that I don’t have a lot of subject matter expertise in, and my employer is paying me to watch lectures and read papers on the subject.
I’ve learned a lot about power substation design in the last four weeks, and I know I have only just gotten past the surface.
But you know what we always said in writing classes? The writing process is more than just the time you spend hastily slapping at your keyboard to reach a word count. The writing process begins with research and planning, even for the smallest tasks.
So, I’m not pounding out 10-15 pages a day like I did at the height of my dissertation. Today, I spent 5-6 hours of my work day producing about as many good social media posts. I’ll get a lot more done tomorrow, but writing full time has really meant devoting all of my time to the writing process.
No More Teaching
For the first time since the summer of 2008, I have no classes assigned to me.
Wow, that makes me feel kind of old.
For the first time since… I don’t know, 1990? Somewhere around there. For the first time since then, the largest share of my time isn’t being spent in a classroom.
Now, teaching is a hard habit to break, so I’m spending a lot more time prepping and writing content for the website I started building to house my IP, rhetoricalstuff.com. I assumed it was going to happen. You can’t just quit something you’ve been doing for a third of your life cold-turkey. But, I assumed I was going to go back through old rhetoric texts like I did with Aristotle, but put out annotations and notes for stuff like Burke, Malcolm X, Qutb… The things I always wanted to teach in class but could never find a low-cost textbook for.
But instead, what do I find myself doing? I linked one example above. I’m writing about the writing I do on the job, thinking about how I’d present the same task to students in my Professional Writing or Communication classes.
I don’t have a classroom to go to, but I’m still dealing with that urge to help others learn how to do a thing they might be interested in. But, I definitely don’t have any administrative or research duties. No sir!
Research Finds a Way
It’s like Jeff Goldblum says, “Your research paradigm finds a way.” Or something like that.
In my case, I did a lot of language and writing research, which is what drew me to assessment. Corpus linguistics, success metrics, genre studies… These were things I really enjoyed about grad school and academia. I still do. (I’m one of a small number of people who find r/antimeme genuinely hilarious, mostly because the posts are able to do the meme genre exactly wrong.)
So, one of the first pieces of writing I was assigned here was an email about a newly released technical paper (a power company in San Diego had trouble figuring out where a problem was on their power lines, and when they fixed it, they found an unrelated but potentially larger problem). I didn’t know much about the audience, except that it was an email list that included basically all interested people who spoke English. (In composition classes, we’d call that “not an audience.” At least, not enough to write something to them.)
There were some ground rules about writing these kinds of emails: subject length, email h1 length, body content length… Most of the focus was on word count as it correlated to success (number of people clicking a link in the email). The applied linguist and comp teacher in me said that can’t be the only thing that impacted people. I mean, raise your hand if you’ve ever decided to click a link in an email just because it had the right number of words.
Now, put your hands down. I can’t see them. You look silly.
So I took the database of email metrics and I scrounged up the body text of every email. I generated a jargon list of industry terms and terms specific to this company, largely based on the emails themselves (word frequency within emails combined with word frequency in American English). I disaggregated the emails by structure type (prose versus list, for instance), by frequency and placement of jargon, by cohesion with subject line and h1 and…
Well, I found myself doing a freaking research project. I don’t know that my findings are conclusive enough to inform best practices (the n of every cluster is too small, the variances in performance too large, and there are just too many unknowns about the audience). You know what my colleagues and I have been doing on Friday mornings for the last few weeks?
That’s right. Talking about my analysis of the emails to update our best practices document.
Family Time
Well, I’m not generating text for 8 hours a day, I’m still finding ways to do instruction, I’m still conducting research, so life isn’t too different. One thing that is definitely different is that I work eight hours per day. In fact, I asked my supervisor a question about getting access to the organizational MS Teams space on my phone because there was a social group I wanted to engage with, but I didn’t think I should do it during my working hours.
I was given a hard no. I was told (not suggested) that my time was my time, and outside of work, I should not engage with anything like work. Later, she also thought it might be a violation of company IT policy to connect an outside device to the network.
Part of this was because, during my interviews, I said that I was leaving academia because of work/life balance issues. The fact that I did a video-call interview on “Thanksgiving vacation” from my office (because I had work to do that day) probably telegraphed more information than I wanted it to.
Unfortunately, packing up and moving a family of four plus pets when you’re used to working on academic time isn’t really doable. I’m living in my wife’s parents’ basement and commuting an hour each way (in good weather) to work. She has the kids (and pets) down in Oregon and is trying to finish getting the house ready to sell. I get 20-30 minutes of video-chat time with the kids each night.
Now, here’s the part where reader response is really important, because this is either sad or heartwarming. Those 20-30 minutes are more quality time per day than I got with my kids for the last few years in academia. Whatever device we’re talking on, they are the only thing I’m paying attention to. I’m not worried about things I need to stay up grading after they go to bed, whether I’ve planned my classes for the next day, whether those emails languishing in my inbox can wait another day or two for a response, whether those institutional reports can be turned in a week late, whether this, that or the other.
It’s February 1, and I left Oregon on December 29. I was back home for the weekend before Civil Rights Day (a company holiday) to help pack and move some stuff up to a storage unit here. Including that weekend, I’d say I’ve had about 30 hours of real quality time with my kids, living about 500 miles away. If I was still teaching, I wouldn’t have gotten close to that. I might be physically present in the house more often (well, maybe more often, a scheduling snafu had set me teaching a morning class and a night class, so half of each weekday was going to be spent on campus).
And, you know what? We’ve plotted out the worst-case scenario. We’ll move into a house or apartment in May at the latest, and I’ll be commuting far less (maybe 30 minutes a day if I walk to work). Weeknights are going to be actual family-time now, and weekends… woah. Imagine that. I’ll get a whole two days every week where I’m not expected to catch up on prior week work or get ahead on the next week.
Epilogue
Just because I feel like it’s necessary: I’m not complaining about the new job. I’m still in the honeymoon period, but I don’t see anyone burned out and jaded with the work among my colleagues. I don’t expect things to get Bad in the same way academic jobs do. This post is just something that I realized while I was cruising along the highway at 20 mph behind a semi tonight (very icy, everyone took it slow). I’m still doing many of the skills that were a core part of my academic life, but the context is different. How much more different, we’ll see over time.
