Long journeys part 7: Matt Drabek

I work in assessment design and content development for ACT, Inc., an educational and workforce assessment company. ACT is primarily known for its college readiness assessment (i.e., the ACT), which is the largest college readiness assessment in the United States. My work primarily concerns the assessment of critical thinking, graduate admissions (i.e., the GMAT test for business schools, for which ACT provides test content), and the assessment of workforce and career skills. Previously I worked full time as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The University of Iowa, and I still occasionally teach philosophy courses there. It’s at Iowa where I received my philosophy PhD in 2012. I also maintain an active research program, attend philosophy and interdisciplinary conferences, and recently published a book, Classify and Label: The Unintended Marginalization of Social Groups.

My job market story begins 2011 and tentatively ends in 2014. Over the course of these four years on the market, I gradually transitioned from a fully committed academic to a more or less fully committed non-academic professional. I’ll say a bit about how that happened and the sort of transformation this involved.

In 2011 I was still a graduate student and went on the market with the well-known and ill-advised “spray and pray” strategy: I applied for over 150 positions, including all “AOS: open” ads. I landed 2 interviews, both for one year gigs far away from my Iowa City home. I came close to landing one of these positions, but in the end I struck out. This took an incredible personal toll, and I’m still not thrilled about giving the details. The short version is that the period of heavy stress that this caused led me to lose over one fourth of my body weight in about 2 months. During the worst period, I lost weight at a rate of one pound per day.

I went on the market in 2012 as a full time Visiting Assistant Professor who had a relatively stable position for the next six months and felt much better about the market than in 2011. I applied more selectively, sending out only about 50 applications and carefully crafting cover letters for each one. I did well, landing 4 or 5 interviews, mostly for tenure-track positions. I bombed one interview, but did well in the others. As with many other marketeers, I anxiously awaited word for on-campus interviews.

But by this point, I had my doubts about an academic career. Standard job market advice tells you to announce your love for teaching undergraduates, especially undergraduates who aren’t prepared for college and/or are extrinsically motivated by grades or career potential. But…was I really in it for the teaching? Did I really want to spend most of my professional life, even into my 50s and 60s, working primarily with 18-22 year olds? Perhaps the greatest sin of the philosophy job market and all the associated folderol is that it discourages people from asking questions like those. What do you love about academic work, and does a job as a professor allow you to develop this?

I want to be clear about this. I don’t dislike teaching. I simply re-evaluated the place teaching holds in my broader list of priorities. I think teaching is OK. Sometimes I get great enjoyment out of it, and sometimes it’s a little miserable. All in all, it can be a crapshoot from semester to semester. And I think it’s much easier to do the job well when you’re teaching 1 or 2 classes than when you’re teaching 4 or 5. What I (re)discovered is that I was involved in academia because I loved engaging with people about large and important ideas. Sometimes teaching facilitates this, but never in as satisfying a manner as research, conference travel, and engagement with colleagues.

But it’s not just about the old “teaching vs. research” question. I’m a person who wants to be closely attached to a place. I’ve always had a sense of place, and I like Iowa City. I could leave it – in fact, I did leave it for a year in order to live with my partner in Minneapolis – but I couldn’t just leave it for any place. And the thought of bouncing around for repeated one-year gigs or for a tenure-track position in somewhere I hated was depressing.  Maybe some of you can do philosophy anywhere. I found out that I can’t.

It was around this time that I found an ad for a non-academic position posted in the JFP, and it looked promising: it was a position with a company based in Iowa City and it appeared to be a way to apply philosophical training in a meaningful way. I applied for the position, interviewed well enough, received an offer in January 2013 with a salary comparable to assistant professors of philosophy, and accepted the offer. It’s the job I still have today.

The philosophy job market changed for me in a big, big way after this. For one, the stress was mostly gone. I had a good job that I liked, and this freed me up to start asking some very tough questions of academic posts. Another thing that happened in the fall of 2014 is that I received a major raise and promotion with ACT. I was now earning a salary comparable to a late assistant or early associate professor of philosophy, and the vast majority of academic posts would have entailed about a 20% salary cut. The salary cut would be more than that if you were to factor in my part-time teaching that I was still doing at Iowa.

So, I was on the market in 2013 and 2014, but I applied to only a bare minimum of positions, perhaps 20 or 30 in total over the 2-year period. I applied only to positions that I thought had the potential to be more satisfying than my full time job, and that wasn’t many. I applied exclusively to tenure-track positions. I applied only for positions that explicitly listed one of my research areas. I generally avoided applying to places where the teaching load is greater than 7 courses per year. But I also read department websites carefully. I avoided applying to departments that didn’t already have people doing work I’m interested in. I avoided departments where the faculty wasn’t diverse in terms of both demographics and research interests. Despite applying to only 20-30 positions, I landed about 5 or 6 interviews. No job offers followed. I didn’t bother going on the market in 2015. I’m always willing to listen if the right position comes along, but I don’t see myself actively searching for academic employment in the future. It’s always possible that something happens and I get fired from my current job. That’s the sad reality of the non-academic world (and, increasingly, the academic one, too). If that happens, maybe I’d return to academia. But it’s not in my current plans.

In short, I found out what was important to me in a job: a reasonable workload, living in a place where I can develop a sense of community, having colleagues who are doing interesting work, having a diverse range of colleagues, job security, and a decent salary.

Who’d have thought, right? What an entitled jackass I had become. Demanding to be treated like a decent human being and all. I understand that many people on the philosophy job market feel like they’re not in a position to list priorities like this. And maybe you’re not. But I’d still bet it’s in your interest to do more of this type of priority building. For one, it’ll help you avoid the still quite terrible “spray and pray” market strategy, and help you focus on applying smartly instead of widely. But it also might help direct you toward the “alt-ac” career that’s right for you, if you’re thinking about leaving academia.

What are the lessons for folks on the market? Maybe you have more thoughts about this than I do, and maybe your thoughts are the more important ones. I’ll sketch out some things I’ve learned:

1. There’s a complicated relationship between one’s desires and one’s life circumstances. When I interviewed for my current job, it’s true that I had already begun to reject the idea of an academic career. But I was far from comfortable embracing a non-academic one. You won’t fall out of love with academia overnight and you won’t fall in love with a non-academic post overnight. It took time to get comfortable with my non-academic career, but now I like it more than I liked academia.
2. I learned that I’m deeply uncomfortable with the way many academics speak about academia, and I’ve started to understand why people sometimes refer to academia as a cult. I still regularly hear people calling employment in academic philosophy a “vocation” or a “calling.” There was a time when I felt that way, and I don’t want to suggest that this way of thinking is never appropriate. But this attitude can enter into a very nasty feedback loop with norms in academia that treat you as a “failure” if you don’t succeed on the philosophy job market. And that’s just utter horseshit.
3. Taking full-time work outside of academia doesn’t have to end your research or teaching involvement. I wrote and published a philosophical book after taking my non-academic position (Classify and Label: The Unintended Marginalization of Social Groups, Lexington Books 2014). I’ve intermittently taught a course at The University of Iowa as a Visiting Assistant Professor. I also travel to about 3-4 academic conferences per year. It’s also possible to integrate academic and non-academic work. In my position with ACT, I’ve engaged with academics – including philosophers – in a variety of ways. Two philosophers served as consultants on a critical thinking assessment design project I’ve helped lead. I’ve done accommodations work with ACT, which sometimes involves drawing upon academic research on intersectionality, implicit bias, stereotype threat, and structural oppression. There’s plenty more I’m probably forgetting.
4. Luck matters, and this includes things like networking, place, institutional affiliation, identity, time of the year, and other things you haven’t even thought about. Surprise, surprise, right? Many people are now learning about things like rampant pedigree bias and nepotism on the academic job market (in addition to the biases, like gender and racial bias, that bloggers have rightly drawn attention to). Where you’re hired outside of academia will also depend in part on these things. I was fully qualified for the job I was hired for, but I’m not going to pretend there wasn’t an element of luck. The hiring manager attended, about 30 years ago, the same philosophy PhD program I did. The company advertised in the JFP. The company is based in Iowa City, where I already lived. These things worked to my advantage. You can change your luck to a certain extent. You can meet people at conferences, do research on other industries, seek out and attend industry conferences in your town, ask your advisers if they know any industry folks, etc.
5. The non-academic world is a different beast. The business world has its own academic/pseudo-academic jargon (e.g., “synergy”). Authority is sometimes wielded in a clumsy or foolish manner. There’s no such thing as one career path, especially for philosophers leaving the academy. But you can work some of this to your advantage. A person who can analyze ideas and cut through bullshit in a professional and friendly manner is a great asset to many companies, and many of them will see that. You’ve got plenty of skills to market.
6. We all know that there’s been a lot of great work done in recent years on cleaning up the philosophy profession. Some of you reading this have probably been involved in such efforts. There’s a culture of fear among grad students and among job marketeers that big name philosophers will ruin their careers, particularly in online spaces. So far I’ve found this to be far less of an issue outside of academia. And, of course, let’s not forget that the philosophers graduate students are afraid of hold little or no authority outside of academia.

Comments

[blaarg]

It's a mystery to me how my job applications will go this year. However, depending on how bleak things look, I may look for jobs outside The Academy.

But, I just don't know where to even begin. I've never even had a non-academic job. I don't really know where to look for them or how to write the relevant application materials. I don't have anyone to help me.

It's pretty scary.

[Helen De Cruz]

There are lots of altac resources, for instance this one by former philosophy professor Zachary Ernst http://goodbyeacademia.com/wordpress/

[Young Academic]

Thanks for this Matt. I'm a young philosopher early in his career who is not willing to give up everything (i.e. living in a place I like, being surrounded by friends and family, etc.) in order to get an academic job in a Philosophy Department and am always looking at jobs outside academia (mostly teaching at private high schools...I love teaching).

It is really good to have voices like yours which emphasize how leaving academia is not tantamount to failure (it isn't, and the thought that it is is awful for our profession and those of us in it) and that one can have a good life outside of it.

[anon]

Thanks for sharing Matt!

[Matt Drabek]

Thanks for the comments! I avoided getting into the details of putting together non-academic application materials because there's a lot of stuff out there and it probably does a better job of telling that tale than I could do. Helen provided a good link. But I do think a really quick bare minimum would be setting up a linkedin profile and filling it out with keywords, and constructing a basic resume that contains important keywords in your target industry.

[Milquetoast]

I'm late to the thread but thanks for sharing. As someone who's very likely to be hitting the non-academic job market pretty soon this post was reassuring.

At point 3 you say: "Taking full-time work outside of academia doesn’t have to end your research."

I'm curious if you feel you have more freedom in terms of the directions your research can take because of your non-academic career. It seems to me that one wouldn't have to be so concerned about towing the mainstream line. That would seem like a perk.

[philosophy phailure]

From point 2 above:

``But this attitude can enter into a very nasty feedback loop with norms in academia that treat you as a “failure” if you don’t succeed on the philosophy job market. And that’s just utter horseshit.''

Not only is it utter horseshit, but given how pathologically status-obsessed academic philosophy is, and how basically everything worth wanting in an academic job is being strangled by the the corporate zombies that run universities and set education policy, it is staying in academic philosophy which is the real failure, intellectually and morally.

Intellectually, because `succeeding' on the job market requires turning yourself into, or pretending to be, a plaster cast of your academic liege lord. Morally because you perpetuate a system which exploits and manipulates you and your colleagues.

If you are lucky it will also be a personal failure, for continuing in a profession that has poisoned the love which made you want to be in the profession in the first place.

[recent grad]

Preach, philosophy phailure.

I don't even know if I would take a TT job this year, if offered. I can picture hating myself in five years (a fortiori 20 or 30!) for precisely the reasons you mention.

[Matt Drabek]

Hi, Milquetoast. Whether or not I have more freedom in terms of research direction may depend on how you look at it. On the one hand, sure. I have total freedom. I face no pressure whatsoever to publish in the "best" journals, and if I'm not interested in the topics that are valued by the field overall, I don't need to write about those topics. I spend no time thinking about topics I'm not fully interested in. But on the other hand, I don't have as much time to read the literature as a T/T professor. I work a full time job and I've done a much better job as a non-academic than I did as an academic of maintaining other interests and hobbies (e.g., pleasure reading, travel, knitting, time with friends, local activism, etc.). And so I'm unusually dependent on the research base I built up as a graduate student and during my first year out of grad school. This is obviously somewhat limiting in terms of my ability to jump into completely new topics and research areas.

[Guy]

Dear Matt

Thanks for discouraging people from using the spray and pray method, applying to EVERY single job whether there is a fit or not. It is really bad for search committees and, as you suggest, it is not especially good for a candidate on the market.

[pba]

Do you have any objections to working for an "educational" testing organization? Do you think the common objections apply? I've considered such a career path but am hesitant.

[Matt Drabek]

Hi, pba. This was a major concern when I was interviewing and mulling over the job offer. I definitely considered myself a skeptic of testing and its value to the educational system.

I think the biggest thing I learned when I jumped into the industry is that a ton of research goes into what gets tested, why it's tested, and how the tests are put together. Also, many of the companies involved in the industry (e.g., ACT, The College Board - which does the SAT, ETS - which does the GRE and TOEFL) are non-profit, mission-driven organizations where people do care about the mission.

Insofar as there are problems associated with testing in the United States, and there indeed *are* problems associated with testing, those problems tend to come from sources like this: underlying factors that cause schools to excessively rely on standardized testing (e.g., underpaid teachers, under-qualified teachers, overbearing principals and/or school boards), schools using standardized testing for purposes that are inappropriate or ill-advised (e.g., for teacher raises and/or promotions), federal and/or state policies that mandate excessive and/or unnecessary testing.

It's also worth noting that many of the objections that you find out there unfairly conflate testing with distinct, but somewhat related, phenomena. For example, many people lump in objections to the *Common Core State Standards* with objections to testing, even though the Common Core is a set of educational standards and not a standardized test. There's no such thing, for example, as a "Common Core test", even though you'll see a million news stories about this alleged entity. Many of the alleged objections to testing are actually objections to curricula or textbooks published by for-profit companies like Pearson or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), companies that are involved in both the testing industry and other industries. If you saw John Oliver's recent segment on testing, for instance, this is most of what he was really objecting to.

So, in short, what I've found is that the non-profit, mission-driven side of the testing industry has a lot going for it and a lot to offer. It also has many challenges to overcome in terms of marketing itself to a world where it's easily conflated with the problems of the educational system and the less scrupulous, and less rigorous, side of the educational industry.