My Academic Story

I have wanted to be a teacher ever since I was a 5 year old Kindergartener.

My biggest challenge was figuring out what grade I wanted to teach. As I advanced through school, I wanted to teach every grade I was in. In fifth grade, I wanted to be a fifth grade teacher and so on. By college, I wanted to teach college. Moving on to graduate school did not make me want to teach graduate students so college it was.

I was always someone who kept a journal or diary, but I started writing more when I was 14. I wrote a poem for a class. My teacher liked it so I kept writing. By high school, I was taking creative writing classes and thinking I would major in English in college.

I took an introductory psychology course my freshman year of college and I started thinking that maybe I should be a psychology major. My high school didn’t have psychology (it was a new high school) so college was my first exposure to the field. I liked psychology until I had to take statistics which was not pleasant. That was it, English it was.

I graduated with an English degree and naturally had to keep going because college professoring required a PhD.

I took a break after my master’s degree program. That was 2007 and the economy wasn’t doing so well. I got laid off from my job at the time and thought this is the time to finish my journey. So I started my PhD program in 2008.

I enrolled in what I thought would be a 4-5 year program. Then on to the hallowed halls of academia. Oh, what folly! (By the way, humanities PhD programs are some of the longest. 10 years isn’t unheard of.)

By year 6, I was re-thinking things. By then, I was at least chest deep in my dissertation and working full-time. A lot of my fellow classmates had graduated. I was weary, but determined to finish despite some professors’ doubts that I would.

The closer I got to scheduling my defense date, the closer I got to the unique stress of applying to jobs. I had to be very persistent (that’s putting it nicely) to get feedback on my CV, cover letter, teaching statement, and research statement (because, yes, it takes all those documents just to apply). I wondered if anyone on a search committee actually read all these documents. What was the point of it all?

In addition to working full time, I was also teaching at night to get experience. Like anyone who is new at something, I was pretty bad at it. I turned to the one source I knew to get better--Google. I found a list of classroom activities and began incorporating them into my class. We played bingo to review for exams, I told stories, we had lively small and large group discussions. This was more help than my department gave me.

It was at this point that I got bit by the instructional design bug.

It would be another 2 years before I would graduate. (That’s right, it took me 8 years to get my PhD). By the end, I knew I wouldn’t want a tenure track job, but teaching wasn’t off the table.

College teaching jobs are mostly adjunct jobs, especially in the humanities. There are some permanent and even tenure track jobs. I have friends who hold such positions. But did I want to move for them? Did I want to adjust to a new place and find a new doctor, dentist, hair stylist, friends? Did I really want to do research? My answer was slowly becoming no.

I was still working at the university I graduated from. Was I going to leave higher education for good? Slowly that answer was becoming yes. I knew a lot. I wanted to do something with it. So I stopped applying for teaching jobs altogether and began applying for instructional design jobs.

It would be another 3 years of doing some training on my job, networking, and volunteering before I had an official instructional design job.