(Working Women) - Liz, a PhD Student in Maryland

I am so pleased to have Liz as my first guest post for this "Working Women" series. She is someone who pretty much rocks it at wearing many, many hats, but not without relaying honestly how much time, work, organization and ambition goes into reaching for her professional and personal goals, and making things run mostly smoothly.

I know Liz from elementary, as we played soccer together (go Dynamites!) and grew up in West Linn, a suburb of Portland, OR. As I remember, she was one of the "smart ones," taking more advanced classes than myself, going on to a similar type of college, and pursuing an academic/literary life. Since high school, we have reconnected more or less thanks to the Internet, where I have (loyally) followed her blogs, "awww"ed over her Instagram pics of her sweet and spunky daughter Nora, and have a shared history of having lost a parent at a relatively young age. We have gotten to see each other "live" each summer in the last couple years, which provides more of an opportunity to creepily say "I know what you've been up to because I follow you online, but it is so nice to see you and how are you in real live person?"

Liz is a PhD student in Maryland and shares her professional story here:

Bio info - who are you, how old are you, where are you from, where do you live, what's your living/family situation, what are your hobbies, etc. Essentially, what's your background story?

Hi!  I’m Liz, and I’m 31.  I grew up first in California, and then in Oregon with Jo.  I went to college in Indiana, after which I settled in Maryland with my husband, Billy, who grew up here.  We live and work in the Baltimore/DC suburbs and have a two year old daughter named Nora.  While there’s not a lot of time in my life for hobbies right now, I do try to squeeze in some craft projects here and there.


What is your current job/profession? What path did you take to get there?

I’m working on my PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Maryland.  After double majoring in English and Secondary Education, I taught high school English for four years.  When I initially enrolled at Maryland as a full time master’s student in English, I thought I might go back to teaching high school after I finished my MA.  After a few semesters, I decided that I wanted to give the PhD a shot so that I could ultimately try to become a college professor.

What are the pros and cons of your current position?
My work is really rewarding and intellectually stimulating.  What I study for my dissertation is left up entirely to my discretion, so I’ve decided to analyze depictions of maternity and reproduction in American women’s modernist fiction. I’m trying to draw increased attention to these novels and short stories and hoping to figure out how they can inform current advocacy for reproductive rights.  As a feminist and a mom, I feel lucky to be engaged in work that is really meaningful to me-- my personal life informs my academic work and vice versa. I also love teaching, and my students at UMd are generally smart and motivated. Our department has many great professors and grad student colleagues, and I usually get to choose with whom I want to work. And for the most part, I make my own schedule.  Although I often work more hours than a lot of full time employees, the flexibility of my schedule is a big advantage for our family.

There are definitely some cons. The year that I applied to my PhD program, I was one of 11 applicants admitted out of over 300 applicants. We’re not just students, but we don’t have degrees or tenure yet, so we are in a sometimes vulnerable position. Many graduate programs are structured around an underlying assumption that your academic work will be your only priority while you are a grad student, and it is not an environment that is always supportive of my desires to have a family. The pay is pretty low for the amount of work I do and (ironically) for the amount of education I have. The job prospects for PhD graduates are pretty bad right now, too.  I do not have much “free time,” so I rely a lot on technology to keep me in touch with my family and friends.

Walk us through a typical day/week/month ...

I have three different jobs: I’m a researcher/student working on a dissertation, an instructor teaching English classes to undergraduates, and a member of a team working on a digitization project for the UMd libraries.

For my dissertation, I do research and write. The dissertation has to present original research, so beyond knowing a lot about my subject, I have to introduce ideas that no one else has come up with yet.  This week I’ve been writing a conference presentation on a novel written by Mary Austin in 1920 called No. 26 Jayne Street.  In addition to rereading the novel itself, I’ve been reading about the history of birth control in the U.S. and a biography of Austin.  After I present this research at an academic conference in NYC next month, it will get folded into a chapter of my dissertation on Austin.

As an instructor, I’m usually responsible for planning one new course per semester. We have “mentor” professors we can ask for help, but we are essentially on our own in the classroom.  We choose the course content, write the syllabus, plan all of the lessons/instruction, and grade all of the assignments.  This week I’m teaching The Coquette, a 1797 novel by Hannah W. Foster.  It fictionalizes the early American scandal of a privileged but unmarried woman who delivered a stillborn child in a tavern before dying.

Lastly, I am working with a team of librarians to create an online digital edition of letters for Katherine Anne Porter (one of the other authors I study in my dissertation).  My role has been to prepare the letters to be digitized, keep an inventory of them, and then clean up the metadata after they are scanned.  This basically means sitting at a desk typing things into Excel. This week I’ve been separating a spreadsheet with about 10,000 lines and about 12 columns into three different spreadsheets.  But now that the digitization of the letters is done, I will get to do more fun stuff like helping to decide how the web interface should work.

In terms of a typical work day: I wake up at 6am.  I get Nora to day care by 7:30, and then I commute to campus or drive home and work until around 3:30, when I commute back to get her.  We get home around 4:30, have dinner after Billy gets home, and hang out as a family.  Then after Nora goes to bed at 7, I work for another 2 or 3 hours.  If I have a deadline approaching, I stay up until 12 or 1 and/or wake up at 4 or 5 until the work gets done.

What is something about your job that other people might not know or expect?

People have a tendency to assume that being a graduate student is a lot like being a college student. They seem to think that when the semester is not in session, or if I’m not teaching that day, I must be relaxing at home. Really, though, the schedule of a PhD student is much more like the schedule of a college professor—I research and teach, just like most professors do these days.  Before I had Nora, I was working 60-70 hours a week as a student taking classes, teaching, and working in our business office.  Now that I’m at the dissertation stage and I have a family, I try to keep it closer to 40 hours a week.

 

How much do you make?

I was admitted as a fully funded PhD student, which means I am paid a modest stipend and I get full tuition remission.  The stipend itself is about $19,000.  If you factor in my in-state tuition remission and the extra money I make by working additional jobs, my “income” is about $30,000.  Conversely, if I had stayed at my high school teaching job all these years, I would currently be making between $65,000 and $70,000.  So yeah, I’m not doing this for the money.


Do you anticipate making any career changes in the next 5 to 10 years?

I hope to finish my PhD in about two more years, after which I’ll apply for English professor jobs.  Since the academic job market right now is overly competitive, the chances of getting a job are slim, even for the best candidates.  I’d like to teach at the college level, but there are plenty of other things I would be happy doing once I finish my degree, as well.


If you could have any other job in the world, what would it be?

My dream job outside of academia would be to find a position that utilized my writing skills, my research background, and my experience with teaching/public speaking to work for women’s reproductive rights and support women-- maybe at an organization like Planned Parenthood. 


If someone else was interested in your job, what piece of advice would you give them?

My first graduate school advisor told me that if you love to read, don’t get an English PhD—join a book club.  This is a research degree, not a reading degree.  I guess my number one piece of advice would be to ONLY enroll in a PhD program in the humanities if you are funded and can live on the stipend provided.  Since the pay and job prospects are not good, the only reason to get an English PhD is if you value education and the opportunities it will provide you much more than you value money.  I cannot put a price on everything I’ve learned or the ideas I’ve generated since I began graduate school, nor can I believe I’ve had the privilege to THINK for a living for the past six years.  But it is barely a living, and it offers very little job security, so I’d recommend that people considering the degree go into it with a realistic picture of what it will add to their lives.


How do you balance work life and home life?

There are a few clichés that really do speak to my experience: I take everything one day at a time, I am ridiculously efficient and I manage my time down to the minute, I keep the goal in mind when things get especially hard, and I try to make sure I get enough sleep.  But really, the thing that helps the most is trying to ignore everyone else’s expectations for me and to focus on my own.  In her short story, “The Walking Woman,” Mary Austin writes about a character who “had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it.”  That is what I aspire to do.  I would never get through a day if I measured my progress by comparing myself to other students in my program, other career women, other moms, other wives, or other peers.  It’s too easy to get discouraged by these comparisons, because I can always see where I’m coming up short and I can never see where anyone else cuts corners.  So I spend as much of my time as I can doing the things I really want to do, and I count on the satisfaction I gain from those experiences to buoy me through the time I have to spend doing things I’d rather not do—like cleaning the house, grading quizzes, commuting, etc.