Victorianitas

My new job starts very soon. I lack a contract. This is annoying.

I'm sure there will be a contract (I was only offered the job last week, and these things can take a while to get rolling at the best of times; plus, even in the darkest circles of academic gloom, I've never heard of someone being interviewed for a position for which the funding's already in place, offered the job, arranged start dates with, and then told 'You know what? Actually, no'), but there is not a contract right now. There's nothing on paper right now. And so, I'm handing in my notice at the library, telling my current department that I'm leaving and they'll need to find someone to cover my teaching, looking for a new place to live, and telling the letting agents that I'm ending my lease, all on the strength of a couple of phone calls. The time-frame doesn't allow much alternative to that, but I'm not loving it. Just a piece of paper, HR! Please!

There's a short version and a long version of what I've been up to for the past few weeks. The short version is just a row of exclamation marks, so moving on to the longer one:

I got a job.

An academic job.

A real, live, those-things-still-exist? academic job.

It's a fixed-term postdoc position (scientists, bear with me, you're far from home and things are different here) working on a big and fascinating project. The work will be really interesting, the people seem lovely, the job pays about two and a half times as much as all my existing jobs put together, and I could go on, but I'm still so stunned that they actually wanted to hire me that it's difficult enough to stop the confused blinking long enough to even type this.

It starts really soon. I'm hoping the confused blinking will have stopped by then.

I don't want to go into too many details about the project here - it's an unusual project that would be fairly easy to identify if I did - or about the university where I'll be working, although I don't think it'll give much away to say that their HR department could possibly get things moving re: contracts in a more timely and efficient manner than it's doing at the moment. Because, really, unless I'm holding that contract, I'm still not going to believe this is true.

From the assortment of administrators, librarians, technicians and minions who made up the welcome wagon. For the first five days of semester, we ran a general information desk that served as first point of call for all inquiries.

- An eighteen-year-old boy, looking perpetually lost, came wandering over at least once a day. The last thing he asked was "Where can I get something to make my bed look nice?"

- Parents: "Is there any way we can find out how [son] is doing in his exams and so on if he won't tell us himself?"

- At least four new students came to ask why they hadn't been told about the introductory sessions for their classes, only to find out that the system had them down as 'No current course of study'. Ah. Well. That's a problem. But Registry once entirely forgot about one department's entire year group of incoming PhD students, so I'm not jumping to student-blaming conclusions on this one.

- Parent: "Does she have to buy the books for all her essays?"
Minion: "Er, she can. The department will give her a list of required reading and recommended reading for whatever course she's -"
Parent: "And the recommended ones, will she have to buy those?"
Minion: "She'll have to read them. She can buy them if she wants. Some copies will be in the library."
Parent: "And will she be told which ones are in the library?"
Minion: "She'll get her reading list on Thursday. She can check it against the library catalogue if she wants to know which books are in there. It depends on what course she's doing."
Parent: "English."
Minion: "...right. She should buy the core books. And the recommended reading, that'll be stuff that might be useful for her work, so she can read it if -"
Parent: "When will she know if it's useful?"
Minion looks at Student. Student looks at feet.

- It's a lot easier to answer 'When do I get my personalised timetable?' when you have a large stack of completely blank timetables next to you. Personalise away! You can even doodle in the margins.

- Parents: "Are we allowed to go to the Residences talks as well, or is that just for them?" I don't know. Do you plan to be living there?

- One woman asked whether she had to go to 'all those lectures' for her classes, complained that the university had not yet made lectures available via podcast, and then asked if there was a limit to how many of her course credits she could 'use up' on learning strategies and writing skills half-credit modules as replacements for the core modules for her degree.

- One set of parents came boiling over with fury about The State Of His Room, meaning their son's perfectly average room in the university residences. "It's tiny!" and "There's hardly any furniture, just a bed and a desk with a chair and some shelves and things!" and "It's not clear which cupboard in the kitchen is his!", and on. The student didn't seem that bothered.

- About three hundred newly arrived students couldn't get their personal computers hooked up to the university network (complaints logged under 'The Internet doesn't work'). About two hundred and eighty of these turned out to need an ethernet cable. My answer to "But, isn't it wireless?" went from an explanation of the effects of multiple breezeblock walls on wireless signals (day 1) to pointing out that with the size of their rooms, there wasn't anywhere an ethernet cable wouldn't reach anyway (day 5).

- Parents, third day of semester: "So she's in this talk now. What are we supposed to be doing?" Getting a coffee? Going home?

- Student with handwritten timetable, concerned that he had a lecture clash. Checking his against the central teaching timetable revealed that one of his 'lectures' was a lab practical with several different timeslots. "See, when you got that one off the timetable -" "No, my dad did my timetable for me."

My life is full of 9am meetings at the moment. Since I am not a 9am person, this is making me grumpy. (Really, am I not paying enough of a tribute to the gods of early mornings by starting work at 8.30 five days out of seven? Can't I keep my two precious, precious mornings where the alarm clock doesn't wake me at all?) But it's induction weekend coming up, and so meetings there must be, including meetings where both academic and admin staff are present.

Well, there weren't any fights. I suppose that's a plus.

If most of your university time is spent around academics, your view of the non-academic staff is shaped by the views of those around you. Non-academic staff are something like the pest snails in my aquarium: they turn up out of nowhere, they reproduce at a staggering rate, and they get everywhere. Oh, maybe they eat algae. Still. Algae. Small price to pay.

This meeting, I got to see better than ever before just what the academic staff look like to the admin people. And. Well. I hate to phrase it this way, but we are a bunch of whiny self-centred little brats.

One meeting, about one very specific topic, and I counted:
- two people asking totally irrelevant questions about administrative matters that, they wished everyone else in the room to know, made them unhappy
- one lengthy grumbling interlude from the members of one particular department, re: a change in university policy that the academic departments are split over anyway, that required an actual shushing from the person speaking at the time
- four people saying some variation of "If I have to come in on Monday...", with the definite implication that though such a strenuous task might turn them into a broken and shambling wreck, they would be willing to make such a sacrifice for future generations of academics to continue the noble fight after they had gone.

Oh, people.

Now that Article One - my baby, my firstborn - has gone back out into the world to try its fortunes once again, and I can step back and think about it without a miasma of nail-biting guilt settling over me, I've realised something strange. The part of the article I liked best, the one part I was happiest with when I finished it the first time round, was grumbled at in both readers' reports. This in itself isn't surprising, but the part of the article I hated, the part I knew was weak at the time, didn't know how to fix without a major overhaul, and cringed at on re-reading, was received well. I know I'm not the most objective judge of my own work, but still, I can't help thinking that this is the academic equivalent of reviewing Return of the Jedi and telling everyone that the Boba Fett character was an unnecessary and irritating bit-part novelty, but the Ewoks were just great.

My patchwork blanket of summer jobs is still holding together well enough to keep me warm. At the moment, two of us are moving a large quantity of withdrawn library material into boxes and sending it off to loving homes in various departments, which involves a whole lot of stamping things with a 'Withdrawn From [Such-And-Such] University Library' and a small amount of making boxes. (Me and Dr K have agreed to ceremonially stamp each other's foreheads with that very same stamp when we leave here for full-time academic positions.) Because it's noisy and we need space, we get to do this in a gloomy area at the back of an old bindery.

Dr K got there before I did. When I met him there the next day, the gloomy area at the back of the old bindery featured:
- a desk,
- a decent swivel chair, on which Dr K was sitting,
- a computer, connected somehow to a network socket I didn't even know existed,
- a desk-tidy, filled with stationary that looks suspiciously purloined,
- and a phone. ("I feel like we're more important if we have our own extension," as he explained it.)

We might still be minions, but now we're minions with our very own in-tray.

Interesting post at the (seriously compelling) sociology blog Scatterplot on the subject of academic citation:

I’m not sure any “necessary evil” part of this job feels like a more pointless waste of time than when I’m searching on the web to find where a book publisher is located so I can fill in the [city] field in the sociology citation format. I wonder when was the last time that a single human being anywhere in the world used that information for any purpose whatsoever.

Plus, the corollary frustration of explaining to students (especially students who've never had to do any kind of referencing or bibliography before, which seems to be most of mine) why we make them do such pointless-seeming things as well. Because it's the way academia works, and it's about consistency and clarity and that works better if everyone's doing it the same way, yes, okay, I know that History and Politics make you use a different system, but this is the system we use in this department because it's about - I mean, we need to know the - well - look, because I say so and I am marking your work, all right? All right.

£42.78 is what it costs to get one copy of your PhD thesis (if it's exactly the same as my PhD thesis) printed on the right kind of paper and bound in the right kind of way. You could buy a lot of things for £42.78, and most of them will flitter before your eyes as you hear the cost, but at least you will have your thesis, bound in black with gold lettering, looking like it's a real book that you really wrote.. For a second, just a second, £42.78 will seem worth it.

And then you'll look again at that spine, with a vegetarian-spotting-chicken-on-the-pizza expression inching its way across your face.

And you'll say, Um.

And there'll be a brief conversation with the book-binding people, who will go and fetch more book-binding people, and there'll be some muttering and some whispering and some "well, when did you claim you sent this e-mail, exactly?", and some (quieter) "oh, that e-mail," and some apologies. Which will not help you very much, because there you are in a city that is not your city, tired, rain-soaked, fed up of your stupid PhD thesis and everything to do with it, and wondering what else you could spend £42.78 on. Now. Today. If you just walked out of here.

And you're also sort of hung over, but it's not exactly hung over, because while you were indeed drinking last night and while your first words this morning were indeed to tell your friend to change out of that bright pink t-shirt right now because there is a time and a place for verging-on-neon and this is very much Not It, you were fine four hours ago. You were fine four minutes ago. The hangover that kicked in just then has nothing to do with alcohol; this, my friend, is a PhD hangover.

And the book-binding people will say, reasonably enough, that they can have the whole thing done all over again for you inside two hours if you don't mind coming back then.

And what you'll think is not even that you're worried about your thesis, or that your PhD is resting on this being handed in on time, or that you have done so damn much for this thing over the years. No. What you'll think is: but it's raining.

And although you will eventually decide that, oh, all right, you might as well, and you will come back two hours later (even soggier, even grumpier), and you will pay that £42.78, you'll surprise even yourself by how close you came to giving up the whole degree at the last minute just because you'd had it with going out in the rain.

Dear Miss Not-A-Doctor-Yet,-Maggot:

Congratulations! Academic Council has decreed that you do, indeed, deserve the status of Doctor of Philosophy. As such, you are hereby invited to attend your graduation ceremony on [a weekday]. Please respond to this e-mail NO LATER THAN the end of the month, letting us know whether you'll be coming along or not. (And do bear in mind that if you don't, we'll still charge you a graduation fee, because we're just like that.)

In order to graduate, you will need to submit yet another copy of the thesis you never want to see again, bound and formatted in accordance with the following set of mutually contradictory instructions WHICH MUST BE FOLLOWED EXACTLY. If you fail to comply with these instructions, your thesis will not be accepted as fulfilment of your degree requirements, and we will send your phone number to every student you've ever marked down for poor presentation. The cost of a single hard-bound copy varies depending on who you get to do the binding, how quickly you need it done, how far you're prepared to travel and precisely how many fits you think you'll have when the quote comes in, but we can safely say that it's going to sting.

If you choose to attend graduation, you must either hire (if you have a lot of money to shell out) or buy (if you have a spare Jaguar to sell) your graduation gowns. Bear in mind that these colours, which confer the highest academic degree you have achieved, are the ones you are stuck with for the rest of your academic career, no matter where you go and no matter how much cooler everyone else's look. Nobody tells you to think about this when you're deciding on a university, do they?

Anyway, we just wanted to say congratulations again, from all of us at Registry! It's been a fun few years, hasn't it? You and us, together? We've laughed, we've cried (well, you've cried - we in Registry shed no tears), we've had lively, energetic debates about matters like whether or not we had the power to physically bar you from the campus - ah, good times. And now you're graduating! Wow, it seems like only yesterday that your whole year group came in to register for your PhDs. Remember that? How we managed to lose all your details and send you back and forth across campus in the pouring rain all morning as everyone involved denied any responsibility? Oh, your little faces!

Anyway, it's been a laugh. For us. Take care, now!

Hugs and kisses,
Registry.

(p.s. - we also have very strong views about what to wear under your graduation gowns. Oh, come, now - surely you have enough money to spring for another new outfit on top of the graduation fee, the binding fee, and the gown hire? God, you are such a cheapskate.)

Let's recap.

I've passed the terrifying PhD initiation ritual. I've written eighty thousand words of passable academic prose in the guise of an Original Contribution To Research, which, in turn, met with the approval of my supervisor, the examiner from my own institution, and the examiner from somewhere else. I've passed the inquisition which calls itself a viva, even though I couldn't eat for about a week beforehand. I've fixed the fiddly little changes the examiners wanted me to fix. I've handed the final final copy and had it okayed by the relevant examiner.

And apparently, I've done all this to a sufficient standard that I can get an e-mail from Registry, this morning, inviting me to my graduation.

The last thing I want to do is annoy Registry, but damn it, Registry. When do I get to be called Doctor?

(I have a story to tell here about how I avoided deformity and blindness because somebody was an idiot about his title, but it'll wait for another day.)

List of things that are not working this Sunday morning:

• Student e-mail servers
• WebCT
• Intranet anything
• On-campus internet access (which has, luckily for my sanity, now been restored)
• Library catalogues
• Library systems
• Printing systems
• Photocopying systems
• All the tills and systems at the sports facilities, apparently; it's difficult to tell from all the distressed wailing, but they're certainly Not Happy about something over there
• The big flat-screen monitors that give students various bright-coloured and blinky bits of information
• The 'systems currently having problems' status page. (Helpful.)

And because it's a Sunday morning, the campus is not exactly crawling with technicians or helpful-looking senior people or indeed anybody who knows what the hell's going on. Reducing weekend mornings to a skeleton staff probably looked like a great decision from a budgeting perspective for a university anxious to set up various new projects for attracting new students; the reality, it turns out, is a constant stream of the students we've already got winding their way into the library, to be greeted by a staff of underpaid, disaffected minions whose best guess on the whole matter is "I dunno. EMP grenade?"

If you haven't yet read what Sisyphus has to say on the subject of how undergrads' education is affected when they're taught by those of us with eighteen jobs, no money, and a complete absence of job security in whatever teaching position(s) we've got, then you should. A sample:

Students don’t want rigor or quality even if they know that’s what they should want. It takes not only time and effort and experience as a teacher to push them to what they really can achieve rather than what they want to get away with ---- not only these qualities but also a certain sense of security, a willingness to be tough, to be respected rather than loved. And that’s not going to happen if next quarter’s employment rests on getting great evaluations and next year’s rests on getting out another article and 50 more applications out this month.

She's right, and it's something I've been thinking about a bit recently, trying to shuffle my teaching and my various other jobs around so that all of them get done to a passable standard. And 'passable' would be the word. I'm not saying that my students are getting completely screwed over, but they're not getting the same kind of deal that they used to, either. And there is nothing like working alongside this year's new TAs to have this brought home to you, believe me.

(Here, I'll go a little way towards defending myself by pointing out that some teaching-related corners could do with cutting once in a while. There's definitely a law of diminishing returns when it comes to teaching prep, and after a certain point, spending even more time preparing for your class can actually work against you; I know I've fallen into the 'damn it, I spent ages reading all this vaguely relevant secondary material, and if you eighteen-year-old first-years aren't going to come up with the same insights all by yourselves, you'll just have to sit here and listen while I lecture at you for three-quarters of a discussion class!' trap, back in the past. There's a happy medium. As for whether I'm currently hitting that medium, though, well... maybe. Possibly. No.)

But at least my teaching's getting done, to a point that's definitely a lot more... pointy... than some of my other stuff. If I cut too many corners on teaching, it'll have an immediate effect on my students; if I cut too many corners on job applications or working on publications or getting my damn PhD thesis hardbound and handed over to Registry, then that only affects me, and the effects won't become visible for a while. And it's the same way with the rewards: teaching can pay off instantly with a good, talkative class, and lets me actually feel like I'm doing fairly well at some part of academia; applying for jobs and working on publications and looking at my PhD ever ever again, on the other hand, is just misery-inducing. So when I do have spare time, it's... not exactly going towards advancing my research profile, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, I seem to have got off-track. Where I wanted to go with this is a conversation I had a few weeks ago with one of my friends, a TA who's nearly finished her PhD. Because there are some weighty staff shortages in her department, and because she's really good at (and enthusiastic about) teaching a particular part of her field that's notoriously difficult for students to get a grip on - let's say, French theory, although it's not - my friend's ended up with quite the teaching load. Quite the teaching load. Lectures, classes and sciencey-related lab things in large number. She's been happy with this so far, but now that she's close to done with her thesis - and now that her funding's close to gone - she's thinking about some other plans.

So, my friend speaks to her head of department, after he e-mails to let her know that she'll be given the same teaching load for the next academic year too. Says, well, you know I love teaching, but my funding's running out, and this won't cover my rent. So, here's an idea. You were vaguely talking about hiring a teaching fellow for next year if I left, right? Why don't you hire me at pro-rata teaching fellow pay for, well, let's call this part-time?

Splutters, worried-looking frowns, &c. Listen, he says, I know you're a great teacher, and I agree with you - the workload you've got here is easily what I'd class as 0.5 part-time for a teaching fellow. But I really don't think we can afford that at the moment. The students love you, though, and we don't have anybody who can teach the [French theory] stuff, definitely not as well as you can... how about you stay on your current pay for next semester, and we'll maybe think again the semester after that?

No deal, she says. Sorry, and you know I do love teaching, but on that workload I can't fit in enough hours elsewhere to get paid enough to live off when it's all added up.

Please, he says.

Sorry, she says.

An aggrieved sigh. Think about your students, he says.

No, she says. Your students.

She's my current TA hero for saying it, but it's a bleak, bleak world where such is the case.

The rejection from the journal arrived on the same day as the formal notice from my landlords, giving me two months to take myself and all my stuff to yet another home. We'll draw a veil over my first response to this, and just say that I've calmed down now.

On the first thing: there are not words to express how much I hate moving, except maybe to say that I hate it even more than all the people who've helped me move in the past and have sworn on their ancestor's blood that they will never, ever, ever, help me move again. I love the theory of moving, of being able to detach myself from somewhere as soon as the crack in the bathroom ceiling starts looking troubling and start again new somewhere else, but I have so much stuff now that the practice makes me want to die. I want moving to be like the end of Breakfast At Tiffany's, where I'd call up someone to pack all my stuff into a taxi as quickly as he could and meet me on the way to an airport; instead, it's like some twisted version of the twelve labours of Hercules, where I have to not only clean the Aegean stables but take them apart to reassemble somewhere else. So damn it, landlords.

On the second thing: okay, 'rejection'. It's a revise-and-resubmit. And it seems to be fairly good, as far as revise-and-resubmits go? Maybe? There were words like 'brilliant' in there, and more than one of them, and more than once. One reviewer recommended accepting it with minor corrections, and the other thought it needed heftier revisions to add more stuff about X, Y and Z, but loved most of P and Q, and some of R, and parts of S, and thought it would definitely be probably the kind of thing the journal wanted with those changes made. Also, 'brilliant'. They seriously said that.

But it remains a 'no'.

But it is not necessarily a now-and-forever 'no'.

And for all the nightmare stories I've ever heard about anonymous peer review, nobody ever mentioned that this would be the first point in my post-PhD job hunt misery that I might feel my kicked-around academic ego start struggling back to its feet.

My little brother's looking for a job in one of the sciences, which means that a) I might finally have to acknowledge that he's no longer six years old and b) I no longer need to go through the Academic Job Markets Are Scary And Mean Seriously I Am Doing Everything I Can Do You Think I Like Working All These Minion Jobs? talk with my parents every phone call, because Baby Brother is living at home again and can do it for me. And is, presumably, because now they're reminding me to work on my publications. Huh. I would say that I didn't need telling that, but given that I was spending my finally-a-day-for-my-own-research! day off playing Escape Velocity when my brother phoned me, maybe I do. Anyway.

I don't know enough about the academic job market in my brother's branch of the sciences - or in the sciences at all, come to think of it - to say much in detail about the kind of jobs he's looking for. Some kind of research assistantship thing? Or maybe a PhD? Or maybe one of those margins-of-academia jobs in government or industry that are lot more numerous in his field than mine? While he's got a lot more flexibility than I have in terms of what to do with his Masters degree that actually requires the use of his Masters degree, though, he's dealing with a lot of the same job market questions that I am. Namely: where the hell is this post-RAE jobs boom? And why did I have to click through five pages of 'further details' to discover that this apparently open position is not so open after all? And did I really just see a job advert for Iraq?

The first of these is another question for another day (and maybe another post, although last time I tried to write about the mechanics of the UK academic hiring system it only made me cry). The last of these could end up as an interesting point about the arts/sciences divide, because the job advert my brother read out to me phrased the living-in-a-war-zone aspect as a reason why the candidate might not want the job ("while based in a relatively peaceful area, the job still carries some risk of possible kidnapping, injury or death"), whereas the one I read for English a while ago saw it more as a reason why the hiring panel might not want the candidate ("MUST be adventurous, innovative and able to deal with unexpected changes to schedule and workload"). But the middle of these, the complete inability of whoever's in charge of this stuff at many universities to write a decent and useful job advert, is the kind of thing we can fix right now.

All we need to do, academic job-seekers of the world, is convince the universities to adopt a set template for their job adverts. We could even make it multiple-choice. Think how much easier life would be for everyone if job adverts read like this:

[permanent/temporary] [post rank] in [field] at [university]
Salary (please circle): Decent - fair - will just about cover the rent - hourly paid
How specific is this in terms of field?: Entirely open - Slight preference for area stated, but not a large deciding factor - Strong preferance for area stated, but we're willing to consider people outside that if circumstances are right - Stated area, or close to stated area, only - That specific thing, no compromises
Teaching load: Hell - Purgatory - Heaven
Current department atmosphere: Clear as a blue mountain sky - Mostly clear, with occasional grey skies and downpours - Perpetually overcast and stormy - Utterly toxic
Do you have an inside candidate (be honest)?: Yes - No

So much easier.

Hardbound thesis: 2x (£17.50 for printing + approx. £20.95 for binding) = £76.90
Graduation fee: £45
Gown hire (like hell I'm buying them): around £40
Approximate cost of graduation: £161.90

Anybody want to buy a kidney?

My PhD was passed with minor revisions, meaning I got a couple of months to fix some typos, shuffle around some footnotes, and add an extra paragraph or so into one of my chapters. If that doesn't sound like a couple of months' work, well, I won't argue; it's the sort of thing that could be done in an afternoon, easily. If I wanted to. If, when I opened the letter from Registry that listed the things I had to do, I hadn't put it back in its envelope, tucked it into a bookcase, and put the whole thing off until another day.

So seven weeks out of my eight weeks went past, and I didn't do the revisions, and my supervisor sent me pointed e-mails, and I didn't do the revisions, and my friends pointed out that I wasn't ever going to get to call myself Doctor unless I did the revisions, and I didn't do the revisions. I know, I know, I know. But that deadline was creeping ever closer, so today I sat down in the office and opened up the folder named 'FINAL final thesis', and found out why I'd put those revisions off for so long. It turns out, see, that putting the finishing touches on your thesis the second time around brings back all the memories of doing it the first time. And finishing the thesis the first time was Not Fun.

This was late September, when I spent most of my time in the office, working on my thesis, or at home, working on my thesis, or at work, sneakily proofreading chapters of my thesis whenever things were quiet. The rest of the time, I was planning classes and writing lectures for the courses I was teaching on, both of which were completely new to me. On Wednesday nights, I lectured from 6.30 to 7.30, then held a tutorial from 7.30 to 8.30, then went back across campus to my office and wrote until the ten-to-midnight bus home, then put in another hour or so of work at the kitchen table, then went to bed in time to get up for the 8.30am shift at work on Thursdays, after which I'd write all afternoon, go back to work for the evening shift, then head back over to the office at 9pm to write some more. Then home, then more writing, then back in at 8.30am on Friday for the morning shift... and so on. Sometimes I slept. I think. It's all a bit hazy now.

For the months leading up to September, there was ongoing noisy building work in the corridors on either side of my office. Drills, hammers, yelling, more drills, every day from nine to five. The evenings would have been quieter, but the only way to stop myself falling asleep at my desk was loud music, and so loud music it was. I was tired right through to my soul, and hating every word of my thesis. My to-do list was a five-page stapled document. I was terrified of not getting the thesis finished in time, and equally terrified of getting an extension and spending another three months living that way.

And then the computer ate one of my chapters, and I spent a day drenched in cold sweat and terror as the file retrieval software chugged its way slowly, slowly, slowly through the hard drive.

And then our printer broke, in a sneaky, underhanded way that disguised itself as just needing to be cleaned. We'd call the technicians; the technicians would clean it and print out a test sheet in dazzling whiteness; we'd express scepticism over the lasting power of the fix; the technicians would give us that 'yeah, right' look that only IT professionals have truly mastered, and leave; the printer would print fifty sheets fine, and then cover everything in smudgy lines of ink again. This went on for, I kid you not, months. Mid-September, ten days before two of us were due to print off our PhD theses on the printer that the technicians kept saying was fine, the head of department got involved and the whole thing turned into an adolescent carousel of snappy e-mails and hurt feelings: nobody had told the senior technicians! nobody had told the secretaries! and now we were whining and stamping our feet and going over their heads like they weren't trying to help when they hadn't even had a chance to get it fixed for us! Which, all right, fine, nobody knew, the fault-reporting system was messed up, but dear God we had more important things to care about and why won't somebody fix the damn printer?

Three days before the PhD was due in, I was sitting on my desk trying to reassure the head IT guru that nobody had meant any offence by the whole thing, really, honestly, and it wasn't that we were angry with him, per se, or any of the others, and we knew everyone was doing the best they could, really we did, but things were kind of urgent here so - no, no, I wasn't implying he didn't care about that, it's just that we are handing these in on Friday so - no, we weren't mad at anybody personally... etc. It was one of the most surreal moments of my academic career so far, perfected when my e-mail notification went 'bing!' and the IT guru saw an e-mail from the other nearly-done printerless PhD student titled something like 'Re: WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE INCOMPETENT FUCKWITS AND HOW IS IT OUR FAULT?' Heh.

I was crushingly, achingly tired, and writing, writing, writing (and then teaching, and writing lectures, and going to work, and coming back to the office, and writing, writing, writing some more). I wanted to curl up in a little heap under my desk and cry myself to sleep, and if I hadn't been so scared of not being finished in time I think I would have done. I remember sitting in the office late one night, my head buried in my hands, muttering 'I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this,' over and over again. When I found out I had an extra two days to finish the thesis, I considered taking them for maybe thirty seconds before deciding that if I had to spend two more days on the damn thing, I would either collapse or go crazy or both. I knew that. I still know it now.

And yet, the day of the deadline I'd passed into some weird euphoric state, smiling and joking and noticing how beautiful the world was. I didn't care that I'd had two hours of sleep, or that the new printer was spitting out my pages all over the floor, or that I'd forgotten to bring in my student card and would have to face down the ogres at Registry without it. The world was a good place again. I was almost skipping along the path down to the Registry office; I couldn't keep myself from smiling for hours afterwards. I had my self back. And what got me from misery to euphoria was the knowledge that it was done, and that I was never, never, never again going to have to spend one more night working on that damn thesis.

All of which is why I left my corrections to the absolute last minute (and why I was back in the office three hours ago, yelling "Oh, you will NOT do this to me again!" at a printer). But now, finally, finally, it's all done.

Can I call myself Dr yet? Please?

A day off! a day off! An end to fourteen-hour shifts and dealing with bizarre student convictions over the phone! ("I couldn't return it over the weekend! You can't fine me when you're not even open at the weekend!" "Um, we are open over the weekend." "You're not open at the weekend!" "How do you think I answered the phone?") And a whole day to plan classes and work on my article.

I'm getting quite fond of this article. It's got nothing to do with my PhD thesis - which is probably reason #1 why I'm enjoying it, to be honest - and getting ready to write it meant hunting for books in the Philosophy section of the library, somewhere I haven't spent any serious studying time for a long while. My undergraduate degree was joint English and Philosophy; being back among philosophy books feels enticingly illicit, like cheating on a lover with an ex. I let my fingertips run over the spines of the Kant books on my way past their shelves and didn't even realise I was doing it.

There are problems with writing publication-worthy articles about medium-dense philosophy issues in thumpingly-heavy Victorian novels, though. Fourteen-hour shifts constitute most of them. When the library's quiet, as it is in the late evening, I can work on my own stuff in between students coming to the desk... but I'm tired. Or, I can turn on the home computer and work for a couple of hours before going to bed... but, again, I'm tired. It's not that I can't force myself to write when I'm tired - I wouldn't have got through the PhD if that was true - but I can't write well when I'm tired, and I certainly can't write well about really complex topics that require a lot of cerebral processing power. After a long, long day at work, my brain just can't do the kind of philosophical heavy lifting this article needs. You need publications to get a decent academic job, but because you don't have a decent academic job you need to spend your time doing the kind of time- and energy-consuming work that makes it incredibly difficult to work on your publications. I feel looped.

(And please, please, if you're tempted to leave a comment about how this is exactly what it's like for academic staff having to juggle their own research with their teaching and admin commitments, and how writing the PhD is the best time of anyone's academic life and never again will my days be so footloose and fancy-free, resist that temptation. That kind of free time and research-focused life was not a feature of my PhD years, either.)

And anyway, so. I was looking forward to having a whole day off to work on my article, but fate is cruel, and because I dawdled around and did nothing constructive all morning, it hit me with a sudden and hellish migraine in the afternoon. I would have spent the next few hours in bed if my bedroom hadn't been too bright; instead I curled up on the living room sofa with the curtains drawn and a blanket pulled up over my head, arms wrapped around my skull, sobbing, while I waited for the painkillers I didn't take in time to kick in. When the pain went away, I didn't dare move my head for an hour in case it came back. Literary criticism was not exactly at the top of my priorities list.

And now it's half past ten, and my brain's recharged enough that I probably can work on that article, for all of an hour and a half before going to bed in time to get up for work tomorrow. Damn it.

Something curious I've noticed when telling people I work on nineteenth-century literature is how many of them assume I'm looking at gender and sexuality. I'm not really working on either, at least as a central issue to base my analysis around; I even steered away, quite deliberately, from one particular interpretive path which would have focused my PhD thesis on women's bodies and women's agency. It would have worked fine, don't get me wrong - there's some great feminist criticism already done in my little subfield - but there were other paths, too, and I picked one of those instead, making the occasional textual nod to the landmarks my colleagues on those paths had discovered as I went. Which is how we work, after all.

And yet, and yet. People assume things. It's a bit weird to be introduced to people as 'working on women's writing' when I'm not, to say the least, but mostly the assumption's more subtle than this: people recommend things to me ("you should look at this poem - it's doing really interesting stuff with gender dynamics!"), or ask me general things about my work ("The eighteen-whens? Oh, right. So, were there many women writing then, or have you found it difficult to find stuff?"), or, most often, just vaguely steer conversations into areas where I'm - well, not so much out of my depth as in a completely different swimming pool. Academics and non-academics alike (except for other Victorianists, which may or may not be significant), there are a whole lot of people who either think I am working on sex and gender in Victorian literature, or who want to talk to me about sex and gender in Victorian literature anyway.

That's why I'm lumping them together here, although there's a lot of space between, say, 'working on lesser-known female authors of the 18-whenevers' and 'working on transgressive sexualities in the sensation novel' (both of which are equally distant from what I'm working on). The assumption isn't that I'm either looking at the portrayal/position of women in Victorian literature, or looking at what kind of discourses of sexuality existed in the literature of the period; it's that I'm working on, or at the very least interested in, both. Like an Amazon package deal. Does scholarly interest in one denote scholarly interest in the other? Well, I suppose so, at least to a point; you can't really talk about sexuality without talking about gender, can you? But even so, I suspect the conflation of the two isn't entirely fair to either, and not least because it's very possible to work on women's writing without working primarily on sexuality. And I think there's an assumption at work here, floating wispily around in the ether, about what it means to work on sex and gender and what underlying motives and interests would point someone in that direction.

I'm also wondering whether it's an assumption about the field, or about me. Because I'm shallow sometimes.

Either way it's sometimes a tricky one to deal with, because I don't want to get inadvertently recruited into someone else's personal crusade: "God, I'm so GLAD you're doing REAL work! These people are just obsessed with sex, and it says more about them than it does about the books," and so on, and so on. I won't dispute that there's some pretty awful scholarship out there on gender and sexuality, and that we're perhaps a leeetle too fond of the word 'transgressive' sometimes, but, seriously, the whole field? I think not. And the good scholarship out there on gender and sexuality is a necessary and interesting part of the field, and I have no interest in writing it off as the collective neuroses of repressed academics.

To be fair, though, that one comes up a lot more often outside academia. Within academia, it's a more positive thing, something like "well, naturally you're working on these interesting and valuable areas! You're a Victorianist!" But I think it's the same assumption, even if it's coming from a different perspective.

So, I wonder. Is that the general, unspoken, floating-around-in-the-ether understanding of what's to look at in nineteenth-century literature? That, since we spent so many decades conveniently ignoring most female writers and setting the Victorians up as a monolithic society of repressed prudes, our task now is to fill in the gaps? And, coming back to shallower waters, how much does me being young and female affect what people think I work on?

(Apologies for the rambling, here; I'm still thinking out loud on this one. I was going to move on to some reflections on how my students view Victorian sexuality, and on how they think they're supposed to view Victorian sexuality - but that'll have to wait for another post.)

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* This doesn't really work as a title, I know, when one of my points is that Victorianists work on plenty of stuff other than sexuality and gender issues. Forgive me. I couldn't resist.

In honour of passing my PhD, I fell asleep at a party. A party that some friends threw especially for me. I am either a) getting old, b) getting boring, or c) getting a well-deserved kicking from my sleep-deprived body and mind, and whichever it is I'm glad for friends who don't mind dropping their plans to go out dancing in favour of the much-maligned Quiet Night In. But, still. I have not been the world's best company this week.

In other words, it turns out that passing one's PhD is something of an anticlimax.

At least, it is at first. That's wearing off now, and I'm a much more cheery soul. At first, though, it was days and days of shaky, nerve-jangling jumpiness, punctuated by falling asleep at odd moments. I was warned about this, but since handing in the PhD felt great, and since I've grown tired of hearing people take all the fun out of my PhD-student life - "Ryan Adams is not really your boyfriend" this, "Sweetheart, I don't think your library minion job actually is cover for your espionage work within a black-ops division that may or may not itself be cover for a mercenary organisation obsessed with a fifteenth-century inventor prophet" that - I disregarded the advice and then wondered why I wasn't bouncing over rooftops singing some celebratory song with 'Doctor' featuring prominently in the lyrics.

To the nearly-there, do not be disenchanted: it wears off, it gets better, and writing the damn thing is, on balance, probably all worth it. Just don't expect too much of yourself to start with, and make sure you've got somewhere comfortable to curl up at parties.

A few days after handing in my PhD thesis, when I was still coasting on a wave of euphoria so high I couldn't even feel what should by rights have been a fairly nasty hangover, one of my non-academic friends from long ago got in touch to ask what I was up to. She'd been out of the loop for a while, so I not only explained that I'd finished the thesis but gave her a brief overview of the months leading up to it - last buses home from the university, sleeping in offices, living out of vending machines - just to underline why I was so pleased the thing was done. Yay! I said.

Yay! she said. And then she added: But now that your cushy student life is over, you'll have to get a proper job and join the rest of us poor sods in the real world!

So I shot her. No, I didn't. I don't quite remember what I did, except that I think some of the other people in the office took me for a coffee and spoke to me in calming tones for a while. I'd had the exact same argument with this girl a couple of years before, which is why I was so careful to point out that "Thesis done!" came with a backstory of "...and it was really hard work, before you ask," and in a sense I wasn't even surprised to find out that she hadn't quite got it this time, either. And hey, I got to read books all day, right? I was doing what I loved, right? She has a 9-5 job in an insurance company; why on earth would I complain? Obviously, I must not understand the workings of the Real World. I was lucky.

Okay, this isn't a post on Why Some Of My Friends Are Clueless. Thing is, this attitude isn't exclusive to my friend, nor to the non-academic world. The recent fight in the academic blogosphere over whether junior academics should ever - dear God! - look for jobs at other institutions comes from the same root, with the people in the 'no' camp arguing on the grounds of ingratitude and selfishness on the part of the job-hunters: if you really loved your subject, and if you were really dedicated to your department and your students, you wouldn't care where you lived and worked! You're getting to do a job you love, at a time when there are dozens to hundreds of unemployed academics who'd be so glad to get that job they'd never complain about anything, and you're still not happy? Don't you know how lucky you are?

And we internalise it, because we recognise that there's truth in it - life of the mind! getting paid to do what we love! teaching the next generation! reading books all day! Does life get better than this? - and resolve to appreciate our blessings and not complain about anything but plagiarists, and thus we rise through the ranks, until we're junior staff somewhere with a massive admin workload and bitchy colleagues and far too much teaching of students who just don't care and not enough time left for the research our heads of department are breathing down our necks to make sure we publish, and realise this is not what we thought we were signing up for, and then we snap and decide we hate everything, everything, about our jobs, except obviously we can't complain to the people on the rungs above us, so instead we get drunk at department functions and explain our woes to the PhD students, who nod and look thoughtful and say they're taking our warnings on board, but who are actually thinking - I guarantee you - something like "Oh, diddums, I do thirty hours a week at a retail job I hate, and you've got the job I want, and you complain because you have to go to meetings? Don't you know how lucky you are?" And so it continues.

Lucky or not, we're all going to go insane if we think like this.

I work for the university now, in several different jobs which still don't pay me much combined, but I've done jobs that were harder and paid me less. The lowest-paid was a care assistant, for which I got minimum wage (and because I was under 21 for most of it, not even adult minimum wage) and worked ten- and twelve-hour shifts, split between day and night. It's a hard, important, underappreciated job that deserves to be paid much, much better than it is - God knows how my colleagues were managing to raise families on that kind of money - but it's not the worst job out there, by a long way. I remember Dorothy, an 89-year-old resident, telling me about working in the mills when she was sixteen; 6am to 6pm six days a week, no talking on the job, half an hour for lunch, an hour's walk there and back, and all the pay to her mother at the end of the week. Since me and one of my colleagues had just been grumbling about working the dreaded 1-10pm shift, I was expecting her to follow this with a dressing-down about not knowing we were born, which wouldn't have been out of place. Instead, she said "I'm so glad you girls don't have to work like that any more." There were people (the boss included) who didn't seem so bothered by the terrible wages care assistants got, because it's a vocation, and you wouldn't do it if you didn't love it, but Dorothy and her friends weren't among them; the loudest protests I heard about our pay when I was working there came from former mill girls.

Which isn't to say that academics don't have it much better than care assistants, nor that care assistants don't have it better than 1920s mill girls, nor that 1920s mill girls didn't have it better than 1850s child chimney-sweepers. (People working 9-5 jobs in car insurance come somewhere between 'academics' and 'care assistants', I reckon.) But there isn't a point on that scale at which all complaints become irrelevant.

And yet, this seems to be how we think. As one example: my TA cohort was recently caught up in a pay dispute with the university over a proposed hefty pay cut to our already-measly wages. A lot of people were reluctant to take the protests beyond office grumbling and into actual negotiations, and they weren't entirely unreasonable in that; nobody wants to piss off the department, and some teaching for low pay is better than no teaching at all. Still, most of the reasons given centred around TA work not being a real job, because it's something we're training to do and because it's something we need for our CVs anyway. If we're doing this for the experience, not for the money, we should consider it a favour that the university pays us at all. And they could always give our teaching to somebody else; we should consider ourselves lucky to get any teaching, shouldn't we?

Well, no. Individually, the university is indeed doing me a favour by giving one particular group of first-years to me rather than another TA; collectively, the university benefits far more than we do by giving all those groups of first-years to TAs rather than hiring teaching fellows. We do need the experience, but this doesn't stop it being exploitation. That's what makes it exploitation. And yes, we love the work, and we didn't go into academia for the money, but I'm not asking for a company yacht and a £15k bonus, here. I just want my three jobs to add up to enough to pay the bills. Please.

We do need to accept that we're lucky, that there are people out there doing far worse jobs and living far worse lives than ours. But if we act as if all our good fortune will be snatched away from us the minute we dare to express any discontent with anything, we're only going to be hurting ourselves. It's not a betrayal of everything we stand for if we want to move to another institution, or if we protest a pay cut, or if we point out that sleeping in the office is not exactly the best way to spend a night, and smiling through all of that won't create solidarity with the rest of the world. It'll just drive us crazy, and then we'll snap and start biting students or something.

We do live in the real world. We know that, right?