Month: January 2013
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A job interview
I had a job interview a couple weeks back. I wasn’t offered the position, but I still consider it a success. A celebration, even. Here’s what happened: Earlier this month, after talking with Natalie Zina Walschots, I started to be much more active on social media. That Friday, I mentioned Jessica Langer in a #FF…
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The importance of blogging
Reading an interview with #altac blogger Liana Silver got me thinking about the importance of blogging in my life. I first started to blog in June 2006. Life was pretty good: I was nearing the end of my second year of my PhD, was finishing up a stint as president of our graduate history society, my comprehensive exams…
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“I’m a loser”
A lot has changed since the fall. Back then, my dissertation defence was several months old and the final version was long handed in. But I felt I’d barely progressed. My post-PhD job prospects seemed poor, and I felt pretty low. When friends and acquaintances asked me what I was up to, I would tell them,…
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Transition Q & A: Natalie Zina Walschots
Natalie Zina Walschots is a music writer, poet and editor based in Toronto. She earned an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Calgary. Read more about Natalie at her website and find her @NatalieZed. When you finished your MA, what did you plan to do next? I initially intended to move…
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Transitions, transitions
On Monday I conducted an interview with a guy I’ve decided to write about. It’ll be my first real stab at a non-blogging, non-work, non-academic writing project, and I’m excited to see where it will go. Shandy Brown is a great subject. We met in 2006 on a plane leaving Toronto for San Francisco, and…
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CV to resume
It’s a standard exercise advice columns and career centres assign post-PhDs seeking non-academic employment: turn your CV into a resume. Unfortunately, doing so isn’t straightforward. And completing the exercise isn’t necessarily the best way of going about things. Trouble is, one’s academic path is only that. What it leaves out may well be the aspects…
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What I’m reading
Frazier, Ian. Travels in Siberia. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. This is a wonderful book. Frazier, a regular contributor to the New Yorker, first fell in love with Russia in the 1970s. Since then he’s travelled to the country a bunch of times. Most significantly, he went on a five week car journey…
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Wasted talent?
When my time came to be “on the market,” I wasn’t. I never applied for an academic job. This wasn’t so much because I decided not to; rather, the thought of doing so made me cringe. Big time. Luckily, I’d gotten some decent scholarships, lived cheaply, and at the end of my PhD could afford…
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Informational interviews
All the “how to get a job” books emphasize the importance of networking. Informational interviews, they say, are a great way of meeting potential career contacts and learning about job options. For an academic seeking post-PhD work, or anyone transitioning from one career to another, networking is often essential but it’s not always obvious where…
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Scheduling
I’m an organized person, mostly. But I am easily distracted, and often forget to keep focused. I make endless to-do lists, cross some things off, and then the rest of the items just sit there, never getting done. It’s not that I don’t want to do them, or can’t, or don’t have the time. I…