Why I Stopped Trying to Have a Career

In September of 2021 I arrived at the Oregon State University campus on a sunny day at the end of the first week of classes.  I was there to meet the Faculty Chair of the English Department who had recently offered me a full-time instructor position that would start in winter term if I accepted it. By this time, I already knew I was unlikely to accept the job, but my husband and I decided to make a day of the visit to Corvallis and see if it would change my mind. After all, this was my dream job and the career break I’d been chasing for the better part of a decade. But this job offer was the beginning of the end of my aspirations to become a full time academic, or to have a career at all.

The beautiful OSU campus

In the beginning, I hadn’t really set out to have a full-time career in higher education. I found my way into a graduate program in English after years of customer service work. I had graduated from college into the Great Recession, and I felt like going back to school was the only way to break out of the rut I’d been stuck in for the past four years. I started to formulate a plan to get my MA in English and become a college instructor. I learned about adjunct instructors, part-time college professors who have low prospects of ever being hired full time and often teach at several institutions to make ends meet, accepting course assignments on a term-by-term basis. At no point was anyone ever talking about adjunct work in a positive light or telling me that getting a Master’s or Phd in English was likely to lead to a full-time teaching career. It was quite the contrary. But after years of working in retail and customer service, this didn’t sound like a bad gig. And at this time, I didn’t really care if it turned into a career.

Being part time and un-tethered to a single institution sounded nice to me. Working at multiple schools didn’t sound great, but I figured why not keep working in coffee and teach part time at one school? Working in customer service was fun when it wasn’t my only prospect, and for all the hemming and hawing about low pay for adjuncts,  I had looked up the numbers and it didn’t look so bad compared to what I was making as a barista. Then, of course, there was the fact that I would be doing work that was meaningful, that actually put something good into the world. This is really what I was after. I had fully absorbed the messaging that money doesn’t make you happy, that it’s the root of all evil. Decent pay and job security just weren’t priorities for me, but doing something meaningful absolutely was.

So I got my Master’s in English, and within a year of graduating, I had been hired at two schools and was teaching freshman composition classes while still working as a barista. It was fun and relatively flexible. Things were going, more or less, as planned. It didn’t take long for me to ditch the barista job. I liked teaching, and the work was abundant (community college registration reached historic highs because of the recession). Before long, I was teaching at three different colleges. I eventually bought a car so I could commute between multiple campuses in one day (I had been bussing and walking everywhere previously). I struggled to keep up with three email addresses, passwords, door codes, learning platforms, course descriptions, parking rules, and copy codes. But I did it for about 5 years before I started to long for something more dignified, permanent, and less frantic. Plus I had loans to pay off, and somewhere along the way, Portland had ceased to become the inexpensive renter’s paradise that I moved to years earlier. I needed a career.

I knew the prospects weren’t good for getting hired full time, but I started to focus my energy on just one school, Portland Community College, in hopes that I could build my adjunct job into a career. PCC was the biggest and highest paying institution I worked for, and I felt like there were more opportunities for advancement there than any of the other schools. I got a job tutoring at the writing center and landed a multi-year contract that made me eligible to get health insurance for the first time in my adult life.  My colleague and I started a successful Reading and Writing Center (RWC), and presented our work at national teaching conferences. Our presentation got the attention of the vice president of Norton publishing who flew out to Portland and visited our center and our classes and hired us as readers for Norton’s latest textbook. I got more involved with my department, frequently teaching professional development workshops, creating curriculum, and representing the RWC at more conferences. In short, I felt like I had a career. 

Me and my buddy Anna on our way to the writing center conference where we would meet the VP of Norton publishing (2016ish)

But there was one catch–I was still an adjunct, and had never even been invited to interview for a full-time job. In the 12 years that I’ve worked at PCC, there have only been three full-time job openings for English instructors. Two of them, I applied for and didn’t even get interviews. One, I didn’t apply for because I didn’t know I was qualified since it was listed under a different department that was set to merge with mine. I did interview for one temporary full-time position and didn’t get it, which is fine because here’s what “temporary full-time position” means: you work as a full-time instructor for one year and then if the school decides to create a permanent position, they do a national search for the job which you’ve been doing for a year, and you have to apply all over again, but this time you compete with hundreds of candidates from all around the country(PCC has a long history of choosing outside candidates in this process!). Or, the school can decide not to create a permanent job at all, and you just go back to being an adjunct after a year of being full-time. You also go back to making less money for the exact same work. So I chugged away at my pieced-together career, part of my income coming from running the Reading and Writing Center, and part of it coming from teaching two classes per term.

 The prospects of getting hired full time at PCC were bleak, but I at this point I wanted a career, so that meant applying to any full-time positions that came along. Applying for academic jobs is a job in itself. Cover letters are essay assignments, where you’re expected to write 3-6 pages responding to specific questions from each institution. Unlike the standard single-page business resumé, an academic CV can be up to 10 pages long. And in addition to an interview, candidates are expected to prepare a teaching demonstration for the committee. In all, the process usually takes 2-6 months.

When I got the call offering me the position at Oregon State, I was in shock. Jeremy and I talked about the possibility of moving and began to imagine a life outside of Portland. I pictured myself with a full-time job and all that comes with it: retirement, a 401K, job security, summers off.  I should back up here and say that at no point in the application process did I know what the pay was. The job posting had said “pay commensurate with experience,” and I had assumed that since I had 10 years of experience and this was an enormous state school, the pay wasn’t really going to be an issue. I received the official offer via email about a week after the phone call, and for the second time, I was in shock. OSU was offering me $42,000 a year to teach a total of 10 classes per year. I was currently making significantly more money than this teaching 9 classes per year at PCC. Of course I negotiated for more. OSU went up to $45,000. I googled  the average salary for a grocery store manager in Oregon. It was more than $45,000. It turns out I actually couldn’t afford to have a career in academia.

I began the new school year right back where I’d started, with two part-time jobs at PCC. On the one hand, my pay for adjunct work wasn’t looking so bad. On the other hand, my second part-time job at the institution was on the chopping block as we’d entered into a tumultuous college reorganization. The pieced-together career that I had worked so long to build was in danger, and I’d just turned down the only offer of full-time work that I had received in more than a decade of teaching college. On top of it all, I applied for one more full-time teaching job at another community college the next year. This one listed the pay in the job posting, and it was $65,000 a year. I got an interview and scheduled a date on zoom. The day of the zoom interview, painters showed up to start pressure washing my apartment building. They were directly outside my window, on the roof, in front of my desk, making a deafening racket and shaking the building. I thought how nice it would be if I could afford to own a home or if I had a job that gave me an office. I frantically packed my things, drove to campus, and settled into an empty room just in time to log onto the interview and start my teaching demo. Despite the chaos, I felt okay about it. A week later I got the notification that I hadn’t made it to the second round of interviews.

 But I was beginning to see an alternative path. What if I went back to my original plan, the one I had when I started graduate school at age 24? Treat adjuncting like the part-time job that it is, and assume it will never turn into anything else. No more trying to prove myself to the institution, no more doing extra unpaid work in the name of building my CV, no more viewing academia as the only possible source of income. I remember my early teaching years fondly. It was so invigorating and fun. I had never had such intellectually stimulating and challenging work, but also had so much freedom. I showed up and taught my classes, and all the other hours in the day were mine to do with what I pleased. In those years, I never attended a single department meeting, I wouldn’t even have known if there was a college-wide reorganization. I occasionally attended professional development workshops to get new ideas for teaching, but I mostly just went to campus, taught my classes, held my office hours, and then spent the rest of my days grading at cafes, or reading novels, or going for runs in the middle of the day. I wasn’t making much money, but I would get part-time work at a bakery or café during the summers and then travel for the last month before classes started. Now it felt like every bit of energy I had after teaching my classes and running the RWC (my actual jobs) went into applying for different versions of that same job.

Was it possible, now that I was almost 40, to go backwards? To treat the institution with the same level of commitment that they treated me? I was suddenly so far from my original vision. I was on campus for at least 40 hours per week, despite the fact that I was being paid for about 25 hours of work. I frequently wrote notes in my planner reminding myself to stop working and use the bathroom or drink water because sometimes I would go an entire work day without doing either. 

I started making memes around the same time I started questioning my choice to have a career in academia.

As is the case with many people, the pandemic slowed me down and gave me some space to think about my job differently. This notion, that perhaps I could go back to a simpler relationship with work, began to take hold. I noticed how much time it actually took for me to complete the work I was being paid for. I noticed how much mental and emotional energy it took for me to do the other, non-teaching institutional work that I was committed to. As the coordinator of the Reading and Writing Center, I was paid for 10 hours of work a week. But I was also always on call in case of a crisis. There was always a crisis.  

I was making ceramics and selling my work, but each day that I had a midday two-hour meeting or a last minute sick tutor who couldn’t make their shift, my entire day was lost to my 10-hour-a-week job. This was happening every day. Why did this shitty part-time academic job have such a hold on me? Was it actually getting me closer to having a career? For a brief period, I thought maybe my future career lay in a management job for student services, since it felt like I already had a management job that I wasn’t being paid for. After all, I had started the Reading Writing Center that I was now coordinating. I had also created the system that the whole tutoring services department was now using for online appointments. When a management job opened up at my campus, I applied, thinking I was a shoo-in with my 6 years of experience founding and running a tutoring center at that very campus. But I was notified by HR that I didn’t meet the minimum qualifications for the job and my application wouldn’t be moved on to the hiring committee. My 6 years of experience were not categorized by the college as “management,” making me ineligible. So, not a potential career after all. Got it.

I briefly toyed with the idea of quitting academia altogether and embarking on a career change. My friend and I started an artist collective that curated an online shop and hosted fundraisers and pop-ups, and I wrote all the copy for our website and all the promotional materials and communications for our events. I enjoyed the work and started looking into communication and copy writing jobs. But the whole process felt utterly demoralizing. I had already spent a decade building a career. Did I really have it in me to start all over? Most positions were either entry level, meaning they paid the same as the OSU job, or required a decade of experience in the field. I looked into curriculum design, a thing that I felt certain I knew how to do because I’d designed all the curriculum for every class I had taught for the last decade. But it turns out I would need another Master’s degree to qualify. I didn’t really want to go back to school, and I definitely didn’t want to go into debt for a job I didn’t even know if I’d like. Could I ever just stop trying to have a career?

The notion of “career” has been ingrained in my subconscious since probably forever. I’ve internalized the messaging that a job is okay for a while, but it’s important to eventually build a career: that a career gives your life meaning, that it says something about who you are and what you care about in the world, that it uses your strengths and your talents and allows you to be appreciated for your skills. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is a popular phrase used to demonstrate the implicit higher calling of a career as compared to the lowly job (by the way, plenty of people have produced brilliant think pieces about the ills of “do what you love”).  But the pursuit of a career has made me weary. I love most things in my life more than I love my work. Why can’t I invest my energy in those things rather than constantly striving at the unpaid labor of career building?

So this is where I've landed: if I have work and it’s providing me with the income I need to survive, that’s enough. There are so many things to do with the hours that make up my life, and I want to spend as few of them as possible working on my career. I want my work to be something that I’m good at and I take seriously, but that doesn’t take up so much mental energy that I have nothing to give in any other area of my life.  I know this isn’t unique. I think most people want this relationship with work.

I’m lucky to have a strong union at PCC, which means that adjuncts are close to pay parity with full-time instructors (we make a similar amount per class, but aren’t allowed to teach a full course load), and thanks to the union, I will continue to get pay raises based on my time at the institution. In other words, I make a lot more money than I did when I first started teaching, so I can afford to teach part-time at only one school now. I’ll never have tenure or full benefits or job security, but most Americans don’t have those things, and it’s a small price to pay for having my life back. I’m not an apologist for the adjunct system, far from it. It’s exploitative and unethical. But it’s also not a career, and I’m beginning to embrace that.

Last year I quit the Reading and Writing Center job. I’m attempting to go back to the freedom of my early adjunct years, when I didn’t aspire to do anything but teach my classes and enjoy the rest of my life. My only commitment to PCC is as a part-time instructor. I still do some extra stuff, but only if I’m getting paid for it and it directly contributes to my teaching. It is truly part-time most weeks. I spend about 20 hours a week at the ceramics studio, and I always have time for bathroom and water breaks when I’m teaching. Just this week, a colleague forwarded me a job posting for a full-time teaching position at another Oregon community college. I didn’t even click the link.