Well, my encroaching madness has been fought back by
invisible forces of luck and hard work. Suddenly I have a job that is pretty
much exactly what I wanted – teaching undergrads, in a city, in a new place,
with colleagues who seem incredibly kind and helpful. It took me a while to
figure that out, but eventually I did, thanks mostly to my friend Jenny.
Everyone had very mixed reactions to my being offered a
lectureship in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the New Jersey
Institute of Technology. (I know you all know this already, but let me
backtrack to the completely unreal three days that I spent quizzing everyone I
know about whether I should take this job.) My parents worried that it wasn’t
prestigious. Cambridge people wondered why I would ever deign to accept a
teaching job, and most recommended that I spend a jobless year writing up my
thesis into a book. After all, why would I ever want to do anything but
research, and in anywhere but Cambridge? (OMG.)
However, my beloved advisor Eleanor was full of positive
thoughts and very convincing reasons of why teaching is great. So was Jim, my
supervisor. Both of them had started in full-time teaching jobs, which I didn’t
know, and both of them love teaching, though they rarely admit it. They independently
articulated that Cambridge people don’t value teaching much and therefore it’s
not a good idea, professionally, to acknowledge that you value anything besides
research.
Then there was Anna, a new professor in my department who
was hired from a big state university in the US. At our weekly Jobseekers’
Coffee Meetings (a terrible name but a wonderful idea), she had once denounced
full-time teaching jobs as below us, as Cambridge graduates, and as an
effective way to sink your chances for a permanent job. Gulp. When I emailed
her about my job offer and asked her advice, she knocked on our office door ten
minutes later and invited me to lunch. She started off saying that full-time
teaching jobs are terrible, you won’t have time to publish and therefore will
be a failure in future academic job applications and thus in life, and also
teaching is so tedious and unrewarding, why not just do research for a year and
re-apply for fellowships next year? I stared at her and, unfairly, unleashed my
frustration with everyone else who had said the same thing. Basically, I think
teaching is the most worthwhile thing academics do. In addition to being
important, it’s also fun.
The other caveat to this story was that that morning, before
my impromptu lunch with Anna, I’d interviewed for a 4-year pure research job in
HPS, on a well-funded and well-respected project that I found alarmingly
boring. I despaired to Anna that I had just finished four years of research in
HPS and was not happy to do it again just now. She looked shocked. It’s true
that most Cambridge graduates are desperate to stay – forever, if possible, and
by doing whatever job available. But when I looked upset enough to convince her
that I really meant all this, she – glancing around us – changed tactics. She
echoed Jim and Eleanor that Cambridge people lose face for admitting that
teaching is important. She’d been giving me the spiel that matched most
Cantabridgians but now, in a low voice and a confiding manner, she told me how
much she had loved teaching philosophy at her former university, to mostly
nontraditional students: “How often
do you get to talk with a poor, overweight, underprivileged single mother about
the meaning of life?” She talked about really making an impact on students
(unlike Cambridge, where students are well-prepared and can learn with little
guidance), about the fun of controlling everything about a course (unlike
Cambridge, where all assignments and exams and grades are out of the
professor’s hands), about really getting to know the students (unlike
Cambridge, where professors lecture two hours per week and never hear the
students’ voices, let alone learn their names or know if they understand or are
interested). The fascinating thing about this conversation with Anna was how
she’d automatically given me the party line – research > teaching – without
asking me what I thought, what I value, what I want to do with my life. It
could almost be considered a Cambridge mistake, where professors are used to
not engaging with their students. It was not until I argued with her, and
probably looked tearful, that she reassessed her advice and gave me what
actually seemed like a more sincere answer.
Walking back from lunch down Free School Lane, the iconic
street that is home to HPS, I ran into Jenny. She had been the first person to
react to my job offer as purely positive and wonderful news. Since then she had
been getting increasingly excited about this job on my behalf, and she said to
me there in the street something like, Wasn’t this exactly the kind of job you
wanted? And I started to cry. Because she was right.
After the barrage of conflicting advice and a complete lack
of information about the Cambridge job even though they knew I had to respond
to NJIT after three days, I felt very sure. I’m thrilled to get to design
courses and teach. I’m thrilled to leave Cambridge. I’m thrilled to go
somewhere completely new and honestly just as foreign as Cambridge was four
years ago. At the same time, it’s terrifying to make another new start, knowing
no one and in a completely different role. At least there were a lot of new
students arriving at Cambridge in September 2008, who all needed friends as
much as I did, and I was just being a student again, as I always have been. How
will I make friends without “Freshers’ Week”? How will I plan courses on
technology and society, when I’ve barely studied that? How the hell will I lead
60 freshman science majors in explorations of the social sciences? What will I
do about having a boyfriend an ocean away?
It was this mix of happiness and terror that spurred me
through finishing my thesis, and I can only hope that it leads to other huge
and seemingly superhuman abilities. The next month will see the biggest changes
in my life so far and maybe any time after that... hold on to your hats.
