dagblog - Comments for "Career Advice from Actors to Academics"

I was just making a snarky

Verified Atheist — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 12:44:22 +0000

I was just making a snarky joke about creativity.

As for low-paying post-docs, you're absolutely right that we have quite a few in the sciences. Far fewer in many (most?) engineering disciplines as industry is quite happy to hire from there.

True story: after getting my bachelor's in physics, I went to a job fair at Georgia Tech. Lots and lots of companies at this job fair. Of all of those companies, only one listed that they were interested in physics majors. When I approached the representative of that company, he had informed me that they had made a mistake. They had just been checking off all of the majors, and had forgotten to deselect physics.

Re: the club. Was just a

Michael Maiello — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 04:46:01 +0000

In reply to Yes. Your teachers were

Re: the club. Was just a gentle rib. Didn't anyone ever give you the bylaws when you joined?

Who says it's only the

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 03:35:50 +0000

In reply to You guys are just jealous of

Who says it's only the humanities?

There's a new generation of starving post-docs in the sciences, for whom low-paying post-docs only lead to other low-paying post-docs.

Yes. Your teachers were

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 18 Oct 2014 03:34:44 +0000

In reply to Your point about what they

Yes. Your teachers were interested in you as an end in yourself. The boss, on some level, viewed you as a means to an end. That's a huge difference.

There's a halfway transition between undergraduate and graduate or professional school. Your undergrad college was happy no matter how you thrived, so long as you went on to thrive, and the college admissions process is therefore heavily geared around the idea of the applicant as a whole person. Graduate and professional schools are interested in their students becoming a certain thing; they make their students into professionals of a specific kind. Applicants who write essays about their well-roundedness (when the admissions committee is just looking for future lawyers or scientists or historians) shoot themselves in the foot.

As for fairness, and joining the club: I hope I didn't imply that any of this was about fairness. And I don't think I've ever been quite out of the club. Trying to sell short stories was the best possible preparation I could have had (except perhaps for going on acting auditions) for the kind of rejection that the academic life demands.

You guys are just jealous of

Verified Atheist — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 23:21:33 +0000

In reply to Your point about what they

You guys are just jealous of us engineer/scientist types who get to really use our creativity and imagination.

Your point about what they

Michael Maiello — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 20:46:30 +0000

In reply to Career Advice from Actors to Academics

Your point about what they need and what you need can't be emphasized enough. There was a point in my late 20s at Forbes, after years of working on my writing pretty much as a kid where every teacher or editor just wanted to give me the tools to develop that I noticed something rather odd... writer types, whether professors or editors, are writer types. They have a lot in common, especially with how they relate to people. A friend and I were outside discussing one of our editors and some of the advice he'd given us that seemed not wrong, necessarily, but somehow off.

It dawned on me... "You know, he might want us to stay and work here forever and he also might want us to be happy with our current roles, at our current pay, for as long as possible."

I think neither of us, after having been exposed to so many writing teachers who were just like this editor, had realized before then that this editor couldn't really be concerned about turning us into Thomas Wolfe and Joan Didion.

As for this, my friend:

Somewhere along the line, teaching college turned into an arts job, like acting or sculpting. That's not good, but for now it's the reality, and it has to be dealt with.

You know, it's not fair for actors, sculptors, musicians, painters and playwrights, writers and poets either. Welcome to the club!