The Future Is Now

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.