Choices of Language
The language used by academics to describe non-academic jobs is an interesting and very emotive, sometimes manipulative, thing. I’m beginning to realise that I’ve been drip fed an attitude that anything other than academia is less than, pretty much since the start of my undergraduate degree.
When I started university, I signed up for a 3-year straight BSc. Degree, having spent the previous nearly 10 years either working on self employed. I was quickly bumped up to a 4-year combined masters with a year in research – at which point the academic rhetoric started. There was already an assumption that the brightest and best would go on to do PhDs and follow academic careers, because that’s what the brightest and best do. Anything else is less than.
Leaving academia was already being talked in terms of “the real world” at best and already going as far as “selling out”. Of course there was an almost chuckled “all these skills you’re learning are transferable” (which of course they are, although I sometimes feel certain aspects should be a little more transferable, particularly with things like choices of programming languages they teach… Fortran? Really?), but that was said as a “a-ha, of course you could go and work in the real world if you really wanted to, but why would you want to?”. All the way through, talk of doing things other than physics, for those of us on the MPhys course was always somewhat derogatory. This was in the second semester of my first year of undergrad!
Fast forward to now. I’ve done a PhD. I’ve tried academia. It really doesn’t work for me. I rationally know this and am looking for and applying for jobs. There’s loads of really interesting, challenging and actually useful jobs out there which I am qualified to do. Jobs that’ll make a direct difference to peoples lives and be helpful to humanity. Jobs that will stretch me and challenge my brain and allow me to use all my skills and develop new ones. In the back of my mind I still have this slight “academic” voice in my head parroting the past seven and a half years of rhetoric, telling me that I’m “selling out” and that these “real world” jobs are less than. Thankfully I’m taking this as a challenge to prove them (and by extension, this little bit of myself) wrong.