Postdoc Arrrgh

Or, as I like to say in honor of regretsy: fuckery! Whimsicle fuckery, I say!



Dear innocent and misguided grad students: I am here to tell you that "postdocs" which are really highly-teaching-intensive VAPs or lectureships are the height of evil, and you should beware them.

Not only is there a high learning curve to just understand a new school and its mores, (Ooh I need to schedule a library instruction day ... where is the library? And why did I just get an email saying I need to go to the HR dungeon to sign something before they will disburse my paycheck? Oops time for the next class to start) not only is there a high learning curve for dealing with multiple preps for the first time, and not only is teaching composition incredibly time-consuming and full of official and unofficial assignments to grade --- to say nothing of the energy and money expended on moving halfway across the world --- but also, as soon as your semester has hit the high point of grading and random crappiness and your students have gotten over the "honeymoon period," the whole job application season explodes and takes up every last second of your nonexistent spare time.*

Arrrgh!

I have essays. I have other assignments I need to finish scribbling frantically on and check off in my gradebook. And I have not started any of them, because I spent all of today --- my "free day" --- schlepping out damn job applications. I don't think I even care about quality at this point anymore; they should be polished after four years of refining.

Plus I ran out of socks and underwear partway through this week so laundry today was not optional; it was a dire necessity. I'd like to clean the place, also, but that isn't looking feasible for this week (or month?) as I still have to read and prep all my classes for the beginning of next week, in addition to scaling this mountain of grading. Ooh and groceries; no wait let me count the number of cans of soup ... I'll try to put that off until next weekend.

And as long as I'm ranting, I will save some bile for the stupid online job apps that force me to give recommenders' emails and then automatically email them a letter request: look, princesses, my recommenders have between 15 and 20 students out on the market at any one time, each, and we're all going to apply to every fuckin' job that has the remotest applicability to us, so we all signed up for our dossier service, so as not to waste our recommenders' precious time with 60 or 70 goddam letter requests! It's not just that asking for tailored letters for each job is an imposition on my relationship with them, but that they are all whip-smart and I really want them to publish their next book! How will they get their work done if they are flooded with your damn letter-request emails? Arrrrgh!

Besides, Dr. Nonsequitur has yet to master Interfolio, or even, really, email. Your automated request to "hi, please upload a fresh letter with electronic signature thing to our specialized job website you will have to create a login for" is just going to make Dr. Nonsequitur very very confused, and then this person will either call me, or call in the dept. secretary for help, or bring in the dept. IT guy, or, most likely, all of the above, along with much dithering about and confusion, and finally Dr. N will force the latest slave advanced grad student who needs his prospectus signed off on to come in on his off day and find, scan, and upload my letter for the prof. I'd be worried about the grad student reading my confidential letter if I wasn't pretty sure that, given the amount of scutwork he has done editing up all of Dr. N's manuscripts, he has already helped write it. But really, people, your stupid "automated" request is going to bring at least one, if not two (I'm interdisciplinary) departments to a screeching halt. Are you happy?



* note to my students: Milton can write a periodic sentence and shake foundations. Johnson's sentences have the beauty of mathematical equations despite their length. Faulkner can write a 46-line sentence with three sets of nested parentheses and still have it parse perfectly. You peeps, however, are just dribbling effluvia onto the page without benefit of kleenex or even punctuation. May I suggest you exchange some of those apostrophes for commas and periods, and read over your dang work so that you catch where you directly contradict what you started out with at the beginning of the sentence? Don't make me Regretsy!

kisses,

Dr. Cog.

Dude, this whole adulthood and responsibility thing is a real bummer

This week I did a lot of orientation and benefits-type stuff. I am so glad to be in a position where they give me some benefits along with a piddly little salary, but having to deal with all these signs of maturity is also a bit depressing. And confusing.

This, then is the second in my series of posts about how a postdoc is and is not like a tenure-track job. The first one was this response to Tenured Radical's post about finances as a new professor. Being the only one or one of a handful of postdocs in a new faculty benefits meeting is weird. I'm here but I don't really feel like a grownup or a member of this community. New faculty, on the other hand, see this place as their new home, as a place they may be staying until retirement. It was kinda strange hearing about the history of the university, the location, little squibs of details about past politics, and just flushing it out of my brain because I'm not going to be here for long.

On the other hand, it was interesting watching people negotiate their benefits --- some of them are more interested than others in portability. I can tell you who is looking forward to staying here and who is already thinking about venturing off again, and some of the people I talked to (or overheard behind me) have spouses who are not happy to be in this state. Which is funny, cause one of them told me this and I asked where this person had done the PhD and I don't see that state as any different from this state. Could be a close-to-family issue, I guess.

I was glad there was another postdoc in the room so that I could trade off the question "is this transferable out of state?" This means I will take the alternate retirement plan that moves instead of a state pension, which pays off better, but I know I will be moving out of here.

Then we had to discuss the depressing details of naming a next of kin, dealing with short term or extended sickness, or getting hurt on the job. You know, after watching last season of Mad Men, accidental death or dismemberment is a strong likelihood even in an office setting:


Now I have a stack of paperwork as thick as a phonebook that I have to read through and sign various things, and decipher the difference between two arcane health plans and choose one, and find all the piddly little personal-ID details to fill out the rest of these things, and then make an appointment to turn this all back in to the HR lady. Gah.

And each thing I sign up for will make my little take-home check a little bit smaller still. I'll do the 401K match, of course, since I've never had one before. But my monthly parking pass gets automatically deducted, too, and each little thing nibbles away at my paycheck and changes my budget.

You know, there's a way in which ignorance really is bliss. Just like the one up side of having no money is that doing taxes is a breeze, the one good bit about working jobs that pay nothing beyond an hourly wage is that you don't have to think about all this crap. And what's frustrating is that, since this is a postdoc, I'm going to have to deal with a new and different pile of bureaucratic crap in a year or so. It's not that I'm not glad to finally have benefits. It's just that, like the prospect of my death or surviving cancer or loss of limb or the number of employable years I have left, thinking about it is kind of a downer.

Postdoctoral Money Woes

All PhD students should take note of Tenured Radical’s important financial advice for when you go off to start that tenure-track job. It’s useful and very important. However, they should also be aware that this advice is the best-case-scenario: from grad school to the tt. My posts are going to be about a more difficult, and more common path: from grad school to adjunct teaching to unemployment to postdoc. (to, I hope, a real and permanent job in the near future.) And it’s not so much going to be advice posts as me going off a cliff and saying afterwards, ooh, I wish I hadn’t done that. (imagine that as a little voice fading away into the canyon: Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!)

I’m planning money and its really frustrating. I’ve already spent my entire year’s salary. Imaginatively. Luckily I like the planning and the window-shopping and the waffling indecisively over what type of thing or color of thing I want to buy almost more than the actual buying, so when I made up a big list of all the stuff I would like to replace with new things, I slapped in some estimates and toted them up and decided I should probably save some of it at least for food and rent.

So I started making a budget and looking at apartments on the web. That’s really frustrating too. I should stop and note that I have always been very good at entering all my expenses in to quicken and keeping track of my money and avoiding overdrafts or other fees or spending to zero balance, but being strapped and unemployed is so hard. I wouldn’t check what I spent against my budget, since the budget was essentially “zero,” and I would often treat myself or let myself get a little something just because I get so depressed and feel so strapped, you know? So I kept records but didn’t really look at my spending patterns. Just now I used these last couple years of expense tracking to make a retroactive budget in all the important categories.

When I totaled up everything to make a typical budget month I was pleased to see it almost exactly match my soon-to-be take-home pay. Wait. I haven’t added rent in there. How can that be? How can I be moving to a (slightly) bigger salary than what I had here in GradSchoolLand and not be able to fit in rent? How have I been surviving with these levels of expenses --- these are actual expenses recorded from my receipts --- with an exorbitant rent rate? I am so confused. And pissed off. How can I buy some new stuff like a couch that doesn’t need propping up or a working vacuum cleaner if my budget doesn’t even cover rent?

Not only that, but this is not a permanent position ---- I will need to budget moving expenses (more likely mooch them off of my dad) and pay for another job market run this year. Know how much I spent on job-related expenses last year? 2000 dollars! I spent 1600 the year before that! I will have to put aside over a hundred bucks a month to pay for that again! And if I am lucky and land a permanent job I will need to pay to move again, so I’d like to have money saved for that eventuality. And I’d like a savings cushion in general. And to start saving actual retirement-type stuff. At least to not add any more debt while I’m there.

Sigh. Clearly I need to see this not as My First Job but as an extension of grad school living. A year of field research, as it were. Scratch tv from the list and movie outings. Back to no alcohol. Continue holding as close to zero as possible on the clothing expenses. (My shoe expenses have been a totally-uncalled-for pick-me-up and I need to go back to just admiring them in pictures.) And I had really wanted to move on up to a bigger apartment, have an office separate from my living room and bedroom, and I think I should stay at a one bedroom. Double sigh. (Yeah, rent is much cheaper in Somewhere Else, but I’m not going to go all the way down into the lowest rent rates for someplace skeevy and potentially unsafe. Or unairconditioned.) I even looked into asking for a spot in grad student housing, if you can believe that, but I’d have to drop to a studio there to go cheaper than the off-campus one bedrooms I’m looking at.

My cats are a large fixed expense that I can’t exactly skimp on --- what, should I not feed them? Not take them to the vet when they are sick or licking themselves raw?

I’m even more waffly on the food expenses, since I know from experience that writing at home and not having tv or being able to go out for fun means that those expensive coffee drinks are so important just to get me out of the house and not go stir crazy. But yeah, they really do add up. But then, sanity and being able to force myself to grade for two hours is also vital.

(much like beagles, Academic Cog is lazy, stubborn, and highly food-motivated. She's not as cute as actual beagles, but more housebroken.)

And a major major part of my budget expense would be those damn student loans. Yeah, I totally appreciated them when I was a student. And if I had gone straight from being a student to a decently-paying tenure track job, they would be a big but manageable and slightly annoying payment to make every month, like a car payment or something. But instead I’ve had one job to pay them, another to (not really cover) the rent, and a third little job to kinda pretend to cover my actual living expenses but really need my dad to step in and help a lot. They really suck. I don’t want to not pay them back right now because I have been paying for a year or two now and that was just on the interest! I haven’t even started chipping away at the principal. So I’ve just been pretending that my rent is 250 dollars higher than it is and assuming that it’s non-negotiable. This makes the super-cheap rental rates in Somewhere Else much less so, as well.

Meh. But, you make your choices and you live with the consequences. This would be why I rant and fume at grad students about not taking out loans if at all possible. If you think this is tough, ask some of my friends who have 70k and 100k loan balances ---- they have tt jobs but are still living like students --- living more like students now than when they were students! *(and as long as we’re on my friends as object lessons, they haven’t really started paying down the loans yet because they had to get their credit card balances under control first. Racking up the student loans is bad, but the credit cards can be even worse news so be careful and try to stick to loans with the subsidized interest rates.)* Ok, this ends my latest installment of ranty advice.

Maybe I will have to make a note to myself about “being a grad student on field research” and post it somewhere I can see it to keep my spending in line. But I am buying that new couch, dammit. There’s no point in paying to ship a broken couch cross-country.