Is there life after doctorate?

This week I'm wrapping up the loose ends of the doctoral journey. The University wanted a pdf file and a hard copy of the dissertation. First, I took my flash drive to Office Depot and had them print one copy (plain paper, no color, 391 pages [Can you bind it? No, are you crazy, it's 391 pages! That will be $31.28]). As I leafed through the massive wretched tome, I noticed the images of the rich pictures looked like blurry crap. Argh. At home I opened up the Word file and tried to sharpen and color correct the images to reduce the blur. It sort of worked, poor man's Photoshop, lame tools in Word. My challenge was to minimize the file size but maximize image quality... sort of like eating a gallon of ice cream and hoping I will still fit in my jeans. Whatever. I reprinted all the color pages using my own old leaky inkjet printer, inserted the new pages, and stuffed the whole thing in a box. The next day I went to the post office, bought a money order for $160 (I'm choosing Open Access, so anyone could potentially find it, should they choose to search on something so esoteric as academic quality in for-profit vocational programs), put it in the box with my Proquest order form, and shipped it off to the University. (Picture me wiping my hands.) Done. Stick a fork in me again, this time, it's really done. As long as I didn't get the pages out of order, or accidentally skip some pages, or fill in the form wrong, or put the wrong amount on the money order, or mail it to the wrong address...

Today I celebrated my new life as a Ph.D. by applying for an adjunct teaching position at a clone of the college that fired my compadres and me last May. No, not fired, we weren't fired. Laid off, is what we were, laid off when the campus closed. No fault of our own. Repeat after me. It's not a moral failing to be laid off from a job, although it sometimes feels like it.

The job I applied for today was for an adjunct Business instructor, three years of experience required. As I read the online application process, I realized they didn't want the cover letter I had so painstakingly taken time to customize just for them. How times have changed. They wanted the resume, but only as a means to fill in the online registration form. Nowadays, it's all about online tests. Before you can apply, you must take a battery of tests. Tests? Really? Just to apply?

Yep. The first one was a 10-minute timed test of math, logic, and vocabulary questions, all mixed together. As I looked at the practice page, I could feel my heart rate start to soar, my typical response to being timed or tested. Being both timed and tested launched me into overdrive. My hands began to shake. My mouth suddenly grew parched. Do I want this stupid adjunct job badly enough to go through this torture?

I took it one question at a time and soon began to realize that whatever capacity for logic my brain used to have must have been beaten out of me over the past eight years of doctoral drudgery. Here's a series of numbers; which one comes next? 15  32  486  2587 24. Hell, I don't know. Ask me another. Okay, a monkey is to manager as a centipede is to a _________ ? Oh, come on. Really?

I'm exaggerating. They didn't really ask those questions, but they asked ones similarly as incomprehensible to me and my tiny tired brain. But that wasn't even the best part. (Best, meaning, worth mentioning.) After ten minutes of this electronic waterboarding, I was allowed to move on to the next section: 12 pages (12, I kid you not!) of psychological questions about my working style, personality, attitudes, and beliefs, which I was to answer using a five-point scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree. Oh boy, Myers Briggs meets the DISC Assessment! I can do this. I'm the survey queen, after all!

I answered the questions honestly, all 12 pages. What could I do? There were so many similar and repeated questions, they were bound to trip up any carefully devised strategy within three pages. You know what I mean? Hey, wait, I know I've answered that question before, but I forgot how I answered it! Darn it! So I answered honestly. They will no doubt find out I'm an introverted (but highly educated) wackjob clinging to a tiny shred of optimism, nursing a slight mean streak, and presenting vast unplumbed depths of depression, probably due to an inability to manage and control outcomes. Har har har. Story of my life.

In the meantime, I'm still scanning family photos, a hundred or so a night for the past week. It's tedious work, but I am noticing a remarkable byproduct: I'm falling in love with my family. Near and far, alive and dead, I'm savoring the images of the people who inhabited my childhood. I've discovered the holidays are the perfect time to look at old photos. I don't care about Christmas and any of that hoopla; I do care about the people I've known in my life. Could be the season, could be the below-freezing temperatures, could be the completion of the long dark doctorate. Whatever it is, I'm feeling sentimental. I'm missing my sister, missing our dead father, missing the old calico cat, the decrepit farmhouse, the overgrown yard, the funky furniture covered with gaudy hand-made afghans... I'm not judging. I'm appreciating. I'm appreciating the good stuff and forgiving the bad stuff. I may be a party of one, self-unemployed, chronically malcontented... but tonight I'm celebrating.

Do I look like a risk taker to you?

I'm relieved to say I hit the ground running on my first day of freedom. I could have slept in. I considered it, actually. But I had a dental appointment to keep at noon, made six months ago when I was still employed, before I had a hint I would be laid off. If I had known I might have spent less on vampire romances and put more in the bank. But I digress. I got up, I went to the appointment (covered by insurance until the end of the month, thanks former employer!), and then I efficiently blazed a furrow through my errands, one after another: gas, post office, bank, thrift store (I was only going to drop off a box but I was compelled to go inside and look for said vampire romances. Sigh. Found a few. Yay.), and finished up at the grocery store, where they were out of carts, so I was forced to only purchase what I could carry. Darn. Still I managed to spend a few hundred dollars today, if you count the dentist.

I have many fears about this new regimen. One is that I will spend my days efficiently running errands, briskly knocking items off my mundane to-do list.... toothpaste: check!... while completely avoiding the activities that could generate income. (Like, for instance, job hunting.) I have a to-do list a mile long of projects half-finished: scan family photos, recycle old paper, donate old binders and books, dust my shelves (I have ten million shelves, no lie!), sweep, mop, vacuum... ahhhhhh! Now my true colors shine. I have the time to do these things, and yet I resist. I guess I prefer to live in squalor. I feel like I'm missing an important food group if I don't have cat hair with every meal.

Speaking of hair balls, my next dissertation course started today. I uploaded my first draft of the Institutional Review Board application, which will result in receiving approval to interview human subjects. They can't be too careful with a researcher like me—I might be tempted to brainwash my participants into thinking that for-profit higher education is a scourge that should be banned from the land. Bwahahahaha. My chairperson will probably mosey into the course room in a few days and spy my submittal parked in the corner. Oh, look, she did something. After some back and forth, eventually she will allow it to be sent to the faceless nameless IRB reviewers, who will eventually allow it to pass, after ripping me a new one and sewing it closed with some warnings masquerading as compliments. Then, finally at long last, I'll be cleared to collect data. What does that mean, you ask? That means I will be approved to arrange interviews with ten faculty to discuss their definitions and perceptions of academic quality in for-profit Gainful Employment programs in vocational colleges like the one that just laid me off.

It would be the height of irony, the epitome of poetic justice, the ultimate toothpick in the eye, if I can't find ten teachers who would be willing to talk to me. That won't happen, I'm pretty sure. But it would sure be the height of something, after these eight years of persistent struggle, to have my efforts fall flat in a big ho-hum who cares.

I started out on this academic journey with a pie-in-the-sky, ice cream-colored dream—oh, la la la, I'll just teach marketing and management courses online to students who won't even know I'm wearing my pajamas! I'll make tons of money, write books on the side, and life will be grand! What a dream, eh? More like a delusion. In eight years, I've changed (I don't eat ice cream anymore), but more importantly, the world of online teaching has changed. Something like 70% of all college faculty are adjuncts, working long hours teaching one or two classes for very low pay and zero benefits. Plus the institutions now want their instructors to have current “real world” experience—i.e., a job. Well, of course you'd better have a job, because you won't be able to live on what you make as an adjunct.

Teaching is looking less and less appealing. I doubt I will be hunting for a teaching gig in the near future, even if they wanted a Ph.D. from a for-profit institution (scourge upon the land, etc.). The pajama thing still seems good, though.

Dissertation limbo and a diatribe about the Gainful Employment rule

My dissertation chair forwarded me a short, but positive comment about my concept paper from someone on my committee: "I found this easy to read and follow." That seems like good feedback, right? I'm delighted she found my paper easy to read and follow; however, what I really want from her is a thumbs-up on my concept. Does the fact that she found my paper easy to read and follow mean that she approves it? Or is there a big HOWEVER coming my way, followed by the dreaded PLEASE RESUBMIT?

Don't misunderstand me. I'm grateful. It was nice of my chair, after two weeks, to flip me this little crumb. I think the mentors and chairs have a finely developed sense of how long they can keep a student waiting for feedback before the student complains to the advisor. According to the syllabus, they have two weeks to turn around my submission. The longer they can keep me on the hook, waiting, the longer this course will take, and the more money they and the school will make.

Northcentral University is a regionally accredited online university. Regional accreditation is the highest accreditation an institution can earn. However, the fact that the institution is fully online is a red flag to many people. (How good can the education be if the students never interact in person or even in synchronous real time with each other or the professor?) NCU is also a for-profit corporation. I have some experience with the for-profit higher education world. Besides "attending" a for-profit university, I work for a for-profit career college. I often think about the uneasy tension between academic rigor and the profit motive.

When I look around our campus (three floors in a pumpkin colored rented office building surrounded by a busy retail hub the size of a small city), I see shabby carpets, old whiteboards, shoddy chairs, out-dated dilapidated textbooks, and weary instructors. The energy of former days is long gone. We don't offer the latest computer simulated learning environments. We don't have smartboards and projectors built into every classroom. Even our toilets don't work. I know we are losing money now, but at one point, our parking lot was bursting with cars, our hallways were bustling with students. Where did the money go?

I have mixed feelings about the new Gainful Employment rule recently adopted by the Department of Education. (The rule is designed to protect consumers and taxpayers from the predatory practices of for-profit institutions.) I want students to be recruited by honest admissions representatives. I want students to be presented with meaningful and challenging learning opportunities. I want students to have successful outcomes: graduation, employment in their fields, and the ability to pay back their student loans. I want all that for them, and if legislation is the way to "encourage" for-profit institutions to provide it, then I am in favor of it. And if institutions are not able to meet the new standards, then they should be encouraged to change or to close their underperforming programs.

But it's my job we are talking about. As a former artist and consummate under-earner, I fear joblessness more than just about anything. Even though sometimes I think calling myself a teacher is a gross misnomer, I don't have the integrity to quit my job quite yet. Maybe after I finish this Ph.D. Although at the rate I am going, it isn't likely to happen soon.

The 14th day will be tomorrow.