Recessions and health

Recessions can be good for your health.  Recessions can be bad for your health.  Apparently it depends on who you are.

Recessions seem to decrease the death rate among younger folks.  This has been attributed mainly to a decrease in automobile fatalities (see Christopher Ruhm’s work).  The thought is that during a recession there are fewer cars on the road, so folks are less likely to get into an automobile accident.

Oddly, recessions also seem to decrease the death rate among older folks.  Recent work on this finding (by Doug Miller and company) suggests that in a recession the quality of people working home health care jobs decreases the mortality of older peeps.

However, recessions aren’t all good.  A new paper by Courtney Coile, Phil Levine, and Robin McKnight finds a delayed penalty to hitting a recession (and losing your job) in your late 50s.  That’s the age when it’s hard to get a new job (because of things like age discrimination), but you were planning on several more years of highly paid (compared to your earlier years) work before hitting retirement, or at least before hitting the early social security claiming age of 62.  It is a difficult time to have to start spending down instead of bulking up.

Worse than that is the loss of health insurance in the years before Medicare eligibility.  The authors suggest that this lack of health insurance is driving the negative results that they find.

How negative?  They find that a worker who loses hir job at 58 in a recession lives 3 fewer years than a comparable worker who does not lose hir job.

What can you do, besides marrying someone who can cover you with hir health insurance?  Well… probably not much.  You can save a lot while you’re young.  You can create side incomes.  You can build professional networks.  And you can support pushes for affordable universal health care coverage in your state.

Are you protecting yourself from job-loss in your 50s or beyond?  If so, how?

Man’s search for meaning: Part 1, in which we do not understand

I was recently talking with someone wealthy and somewhat famous (on the internet).  He mentioned that since he’s become wealthy he’s been searching for meaning.  I was all, dude, I’ve noticed.  Not really into that.

We are from the midwest.  That means we are pragmatists.  We generally keep our navels covered so we don’t spend much time looking at them.  I thought that, but didn’t say it.  We do things because they’re The Right Thing to Do.  Not because of some grand purpose or passion or destiny or whatever.

Back when I had a ton of free time (see:  K-8), I would sit around in the back yard and analytically ponder the meaning of life.  I decided that the only true meaning of life was that of reproduction.  We were put on earth to reproduce.  I thought as a species that we had done (more than) a fine job of doing that, and we were at a point at which the human race would be fine and people could make their own decisions about reproduction using their rational minds.  (This was before I figured out what made boys so interesting and got the urge to go through the motions of reproduction without actually, you know, reproducing.  Er hem.)

Given that our main duty in life was being taken care of by the race as a whole, that allowed us to pursue other purposes.  I decided that I liked hedonism as a guiding philosophy and I would do the things I liked.  Being from the midwest, of course, I also had a large lump of responsibility.  So to quote the Wicca, “An it hurts no one, do what you will.”

I’m pretty sure I haven’t really thought about my purpose since.  Maybe at 3am in a college dorm hallway, but I probably just related the story above.  I have generally had better things to do and think about (like how sexy my partner is!).

I do, however, sometimes wonder why some people spend so much time on the question.  I sort of understand the self-help gurus– they like to separate desperately unhappy people with money from some of that money.  It’s the unhappy people who have no real reason to be unhappy that I just don’t get.  If it’s chemical, then why aren’t they searching for solutions in a doctor’s office?  If it isn’t chemical, then why are they allowing themselves to be unhappy just because they can’t find their “purpose” in life.  Whatever that means.  It seems like pondering the question just creates more angst.  So why not stop worrying about finding meaning in life and, you know, live life instead?

But, as I said earlier, we’re from the midwest.  We are incapable of understanding this coastal melancholia.  Perhaps that means we’re somehow incomplete or there’s something wrong with us.  But you know, pondering that question might make us sad for no purpose at all, so why ponder it?  If a person has that kind of free-time, that’s why God invented the modern novel.  (Or Cervantes invented it, depending on your view.)

*Some women search for meaning too, but we’re mostly too busy.  Second shift and mental load, dontcha know.

Do you spend a lot of time searching for meaning?  Do you think doing so affects people’s happiness levels?  Do you think this is something mainly done on the coasts (particularly the West Coast), and if so, why are there regional differences?

Ask the grumpies: A two-body problem solution?

Tenured rock star in the humanities (we picked this name for her) asks:

Here’s my advice question. It’s a big one but you guys seem smart about thinking through decisions rationally and I think you and your readership might have some valuable thoughts. My husband and I are trying to decide whether to move.  I am a recently-tenured assoc prof in a humanities discipline at a fancy private R1 university. I get paid well (for a humanities prof) and have modest research funds and a sweet teaching load.

My husband is the trailing spouse. He has been working as academic staff here in a job he does not like. His humanities field is insanely competitive (200+ applicants for every job; he has been a finalist 4 times). Meanwhile he has published a book with an extremely reputable academic press, published some articles, and started working in the field of digital humanities — doing his own new research project this way, teaching a class in it, and starting up a DH working group on campus. All of this on top of his fulltime academic staff job and with zero support from the school.

This year he was successful on the job market and got a TT offer from a second-tier, but very solid, public university in a neighboring state. It is too far to commute and this school is willing to bring me in with tenure as a spousal hire. We both like where we currently live [ed:  A major city] and my brother and sister-in-law live in the same town. Second-tier but solid school is in a less-cool but still entirely serviceable and incredibly affordable large city (apartment here — with 2 kids — and big house there, etc.). We will still have our yuppie necessities: whole foods, trader joes, farmer’s markets, CSAs, bike paths, a bunch of cultural institutions, etc.

We feel like, given the humanities job market, we may never again have the chance at two TT jobs (we have, after all, been trying for 6 years), so this is a huge opportunity. But I can’t quite decide how important it is to be at an R1 and have that status, versus having both of us welcomed and supported at this other less-prestigious place.  My husband’s current job is not only totally unenjoyable but is a career dead-end. We are trying to negotiate something better for him at R1, but it will not be and will never be a TT job b/c they just don’t play that way.

I’m currently grief-stricken because of health stuff going on with my Mom and I’m finding it incredibly hard to think clearly and to separate out reasonable fear of change/moving from that grief from trust-your-gut messages about what’s really right here.

Any thoughts from you and your readers?

This is a really tough decision, especially when you’re worried about family health matters.  Our sympathies with you and your mother.

Our first thought is that when top women in our fields (and it’s almost always women) make these moves, they generally get their top institution to allow them to try it out for a year first.  Your husband would then accept his job and you would essentially keep both jobs for a year.  Technically you would be on unpaid leave from the hot-shot job.  In a year you have a better idea of the differences between the two institutions and your own preferences.  This doesn’t always fly, but it seems to be how most of the academic couples we’ve seen changing institutions make the move.  It is very hard to give up tenure at a top school.  (Websites like Sabbaticalhomes.com can help you find temporary housing, often furnished so you don’t have to move your stuff.)

Let’s say that trying it out for a year isn’t in the cards.  From your email, we’re assuming that staying together is important, so we won’t discuss options that include living apart. For other couples, that might be a solution.  (And we’ve seen this work out too, eventually.)

The main worry leaving your awesome school is that you will get to the less good school and find out that one or both of you is miserable, or your DH doesn’t get tenure and there are fewer opportunities for him in the new town than there were in your old city.

If that happens, all is not lost, assuming that you are still awesome. Because awesome people can move again.

So you need to make sure that if you move, your new position allows you to remain awesome.

What does that mean? Well, what is the teaching load like? (Include things like number of classes, number of preps, size of classes, grading support etc.) How much sharing of ideas etc. can you do with your new department compared to what you did with your old department? What kind of resources are they giving you in terms of travel bursary, research support, etc. compared to what you had before? How are the salaries different? (And is your current department countering with a better salary for you?) The new place doesn’t have to be as amazing as the old place, but it does need to allow you to continue to be a productive and happy researcher. Get things in writing. Negotiate. Don’t just be grateful to be a spousal hire– they’re very lucky to be getting you and you need to protect yourself. You’re a tenured professor at a top school– keep that in mind!  (And no, you don’t have to be a jerk about it– you just have to politely explain why you need these things.)

One of us is at a school that has better resources than its ranking– she still has a higher teaching load than she would at a top school, but the other benefits keep her more productive than she would be at a less resource-rich school at the same rank (and it helps that the resource rich environment is attracting more colleagues in her specific field area). The other one of us is in a resource-poor environment and it’s difficult to even get travel funds. These things are important.  Teaching loads are very important.  If the new school is resource-rich, then you can mostly ignore the prestige question, but if the resources are less than abundant, then your career may be strongly negatively impacted.

I know several women who have made this kind of a move, and they’re all pretty happy. Of course, they’re also making huge salaries at the less-good universities and they have other kinds of sweetheart deals (running a center, being allowed to make new hires, etc.).  You can’t just look a the question in terms of :  one Tenured job at a fancy school vs. one Tenured/one TT job at a not as good school.  You have to look at the whole package.  (And given that you’re moving to a Public university, I am sure you’ve looked at the salary scale of people in the department that wants to hire you…)

If you do decide to stay put… I’m sure your DH knows this, but given that you live in a major city with several universities, he should be networking with folks in those departments… if they like him enough they might be convinced to write a job description for him one of these years.  You can also go on the market yourself to places that have good spousal hiring policies, though it sounds like you’ve been doing so.

Good luck with your decision and best wishes to your family!

#2 would like to add that I support everything above and those are great points.  Given everything you’ve said, I think you should definitely go for it, just do itte, as CPP would say (keeping in mind the options above about trying to take a year of leave, negotiating for more resources, etc.).  I think whatever you decide can work out well for you and your family.  hang in there.  #1 is more ambivalent… the resources available at the new place are important, as is the counter-offer given by the current place.  #2  adds:  time for lots and lots of negotiation with BOTH schools.  Play them against each other.  If DH can get a lectureship, then stay!  #1 says:  Yes, tenure isn’t everything, but being productive is.  Letterhead is also nice.

Grumpy Nation:  TRS needs your help!  What advice do you have for her?  What should she be thinking about in making her decision?

In praise of our partners

We’re at the age where we’ve had friends divorce, but generally the question with them has been why it took so long.  We’ve been through transitions and tragedies.  One set of us is still going strong at the 19 year mark.

Bottom line:  neither of our partners is a flake with self-destructive tendencies.

I do not think either of our partners will have a mid-life crisis in a bad way.  Sure, maybe a mid-life crisis, but not the stereotypical kind where the guy sheds the wife and tries to find himself, in the end either finding nothing or a much younger wife.  I imagine our partners will instead find a new hobby or a new piece of electronic equipment, possibly a new career or a new start-up.  It is unlikely that they’ll turn into internationally traveling bums like one of our former classmates.

Our guys keep busy.  If they were idle rich they’d probably tool around with inventions.  And gaming.  And books.  And not feel like they were missing something in life.  They know how to entertain themselves so they don’t end up like a lost character in Emma who wouldn’t get into trouble if she just kept busy.  Idle hands and all.

Even though #2′s partner isn’t my physical type (let’s just say our preferences on body hair are orthogonal), I used to sit next to him in various classes in high school and I like him a lot.  He’s a really nice guy.  Grounded.  He’s already done his pudgy nerd to athletic stud thing and somehow seems to have survived without it causing him to question who he really is.  (Same thing with figuring out his finances and you know, growing up.)  Honestly he’s the first guy that #2 ever dated that I approved of.  Not sure where she used to find those jerks but her partner is totally a keeper.

My partner, of course, is practically perfect in every way.  The definition of keeper (or, you know, Mary Poppins… but he’s way sexier than Mary Poppins).

Maybe it’s our Midwestern pragmatism.  But I think we and our partners have a good sense of who we ARE, even if we don’t always know what we want to DO.  That who am I question just seems irrelevant.  There are yummy foods to be eaten, wonderful books to be read.  (In partners’ case add also:  games to be played.)  Navel gazing takes away from that.  Sure there are professional goals and so on, but that’s either to get more money or because we’re aware that we’re playing a game and you progress in that game by hitting those goals.  That and our research actually has some meaning– the questions are interesting and the answers are somewhat relevant.  Some day we might decide we want to play new or different games, but that isn’t going to spark some sort of existential crisis, even during the search.  My partner searches for a new hobby every 1-3 months.  Careers take a bit longer, but it’s the same idea, just more lucrative.

I strongly recommend dating an engineer.  Someone who spends more time with reality and less time navel gazing.  Someone who appreciates what he has and builds on it rather than jumping on whatever the latest fad or far-out conference presentation is.  Someone that you would trust to foster kittens in your house if he wanted to.

And this is why one should marry an engineer (or computer scientist).

(Really hoping this post doesn’t jinx anything…)

Ask the Grumpies: Should I get a PhD in Accounting?

TH asks:

I’m 31 and in my junior year of college, majoring in accounting. I started back to school part-time ten years after dropping out in my first semester to move across the country for Loooooove… a couple years into school I wound up divorcing and am finishing up on my own with a great deal of emotional support from far-flung friends and family.

I was raised to be a good Christian wife and make lots of babies. I’m not doing any of that now except maybe the “good” part, and when I realized that my current program of schooling would end in a master’s degree, I was astonished. I was homeschooled all the way through high school, and while my parents assured me that I was smart enough to be anything I wanted, I wasn’t steered towards higher education in any way, although they’re both college grads and my dad is an MD.

Last year, a professor in one of my classes asked me if I’d considered a PhD in accountancy. I didn’t even know there was such a thing then, and certainly hadn’t considered it for myself. Circumstances being different then, I decided I wasn’t interested at the time but might consider it at a future date.

Circumstances have changed, and I got an e-mail from the same professor this weekend (he’s now teaching overseas, his gain and my loss) asking if I’d thought more about it. I hadn’t, but now I am.

You’re in academia. I don’t know anything about what that’s like. Do you have any thoughts or advice for me? I can do the coursework. I’m smart, and I can work hard. I’m carrying a full-time courseload, working about 30 hours a week as a self-employed editor of court transcripts, and my GPA just dipped from a 4.0 last semester. I ran some numbers today (average CPA salary, average accounting professor salary for new entrants) and financially it would put me ahead to get the PhD and work as a professor. There’s high demand right now.

Things I don’t know: If I’m going to hate being a professor. If there’s so much bureaucratic bullshit I’m going to want to drink myself to sleep every night. If I can learn to be a good teacher. If I can learn to talk for hours without losing my voice or coughing to death. If I can come up with subjects to research. If I can survive a PhD thesis defense. If adding five more years of school is going to destroy my chance to meet someone awesome who wants to have a family with me, and get that started.

I realized today that some of my reasons for brushing this off earlier are bogus – like being afraid that being visibly very schooled/”smart” will scare guys off because it intimidates them (my ex got more insecure the more I learned, which he didn’t need to be insecure about that). So that’s challenged me to reconsider.

Accounting professors are going to have a different experience than many of our humanities readers. You are absolutely right that the demand for accounting PhDs outstrips the supply. You would also most likely be looking at a 6 figure salary or close to one straight out of school. But I’m sure you’ve looked at the numbers and have a more accurate picture than I do. (Disclaimer: I haven’t looked at the numbers in a few years, and I don’t remember them exactly, just that they were up there with Pharmacy PhDs.) You’ve also noted that the accounting PhD takes less time than most humanities or science PhDs (on average, 5 years). Another nice thing to note is that it is not uncommon for people to start accounting phds later than their early 20s, which you tend to see in some other disciplines. You would not be out of place (not that that should bother you if you were!).

The number one thing you need to know about going into academia is whether or not you will enjoy doing research. I have to confess that I don’t have any idea what kind of research it is that accounting professors do. This year or next, see if you can do a research assistantship with an accounting professor, or even better, a guided research project of your own. If it turns out you don’t like doing research, you can still teach accounting with a masters degree, and adjuncting accounting classes pays more than adjuncting humanities classes does.

When you look at accounting programs, an important thing to ask is what the pass rate is– how many people get kicked out of the program or drop out. Some of the accounting PhD programs are pretty brutal and arbitrary in that respect.  Check to make sure they want you to succeed.  Talk to current students.

>If I’m going to hate being a professor.

Probably not. Especially if you can manage your time well, not stress out too much about tenure (and with a PhD in accounting, you should be able to find a job if you leave), and not stress out too much about teaching evals.  The only way to find this out might be to try grad school and try to get a handle on it; you could also try doing as many informational interviews as you can with professors and try to get their honest opinions about what it entails.  The good news is, they should all have office hours you can drop in to.

>If there’s so much bureaucratic bullshit I’m going to want to drink myself to sleep every night.

One nice and not so nice thing about accounting: Most likely you’re going to be in the business school. On the one hand, you’ll have fewer crazy colleagues than you might in some other fields. On the other hand, you’ll have colleagues who are business professors. How much do you like economists, marketing profs, etc.? You will also most likely have to wear suits, or at least business casual. Business schools generally have more resources than the rest of campus, you’ll be less resource-constrained, the rest of the campus will resent that slightly.  (And if not in the business school, then a subset of the economics department, though from what I understand accounting profs in econ dept are kind of second class citizens compared to accounting profs in business schools, but this may be because accounting profs in econ dept tend to be at SLAC and often do not have PhDs.) You’ll probably have the same bureaucratic BS more or less than you would have working at a mid-size to large company, depending on the kind of university you end up at. So non-trivial, but not more than you’d have in any big business.

>If I can learn to be a good teacher.
Yes. Another note: Business students are really obnoxious and entitled and whiny. However, I hear that accounting students are the least obnoxious group within business.  And other students are obnoxious and entitled and whiny too, so it’s not like you can escape that.  (But business students are especially bad.)

>If I can learn to talk for hours without losing my voice or coughing to death.
You won’t need to. Case studies!  But if you *need* to talk for some time, there are techniques you can learn.  (Relaxing your throat muscles!  Drinking lots of water!  Learning to project from the diaphragm!)

>If I can come up with subjects to research.
This is really important. Talk to professors about this starting now. Tell them you’re interested in research and ask for opportunities. Think about the big questions and the little questions in Accounting. Read papers. It may take a few years to figure out the answer to this question.

As much as you can, try to get research experience — sign up now for next semester.  Work for a professor.  Read articles and see if they get you excited.  For most PhDs, you simply must love research in order to make it through.  Try to find this out.

>If I can survive a PhD thesis defense.
Yes.

>If adding five more years of school is going to destroy my chance to meet someone awesome who wants to have a family with me, and get that started.
Lean in. Also go someplace with a good engineering school. Engineers are sexy.  If the person you meet isn’t down with you having an advanced degree, you don’t want them anyway.  Plenty of my friends had babies in grad school, or got married, or got divorced, bought a house, got a puppy.  You can make your life work.  [If you get a puppy though, make sure you have an equal partner in house-training.]

>I realized today that some of my reasons for brushing this off earlier are bogus – like being afraid that being visibly very schooled/”smart” will scare guys off because it intimidates them (my ex got more insecure the more I learned, which he didn’t need to be insecure about that). So that’s challenged me to reconsider.

Like I said, engineers! They love smart women. Any guy worth having does (at least any guy worth having if you’re a smart woman!).  We repeat:  if a man doesn’t want to be with a woman who has a higher degree than him, DTMFA!

And that brings us to the last point. Even with an accounting degree, you get very little choice about where you move to after you’re done. We’re living in places we wouldn’t choose if it weren’t for the job. There’s a limited number of professor jobs in any discipline each year and you have to have a certain amount of flexibility. If you absolutely have to live in a specific city, it’s unlikely you’ll get a TT job there. It’s possible, but not likely. If you are location dependent, see what kind of jobs you can get with a PhD in accounting in industry and/or government (depending on the location).

Good luck with this decision!

Readers, anything we forgot?

Ask the grumpies: Lower cost pampering substitutes

In Monday’s post, Debbie M brought up the point that if you figure out what it is you really want when you’re thinking about that Caribbean vacation or whatnot, you can often figure out a way to meet that need much less expensively.  (I believe this may be mentioned in YMoYL, but don’t quote me on that.)

She says:

And then there’s also strategizing about what makes you happy. If you want to feel pampered, do you need to visit a tropical island? Or would you be just as happy with an in-town spa or fancy hotel, a massage, a facial, or, in my case, fresh-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies and a good book? Basically, whenever you’re about to spend money (or time), you can try to back up and figure out what your real goal is and then try to brainstorm if there is any better way to achieve that goal.

That got into a conversation in the comments section:  what other ways can you pamper yourself at a lower cost?

Debbie M asks:

And maybe oilandgarlic can share a list of Frugal Substitutes! We can always use more of those!  And Flavia, I’d like to hear more examples you’ve found where you can convert more expensive indulgences into cheaper ones.

At grumpy rumblings we are big fans of buying whatever you want at the grocery store, thus saving money from unsatisfying meals out.  (Though we do eat meals out!)

We re-read things sometimes instead of buying new.  And, in general, reading about things is a nice substitute for inventing a fantasy travel device.

But I dunno… we’re not big Mani-pedi people, so it’s hard to think about what is a substitute for something else and when what we do we’re doing because it is better than something else.  We actually prefer staycations.

Donna Freedman had a recent post about having a pretend breakfast cafe with her nieces and nephews as the staff.

Grumpy readership, help Debbie M out– how have you converted expensive indulgences into cheaper ones?

Academia is just a job

Really.  It is a job.  It’s not a calling.*  It’s not the route to superiority.  The PhD is a job qualification just the same as a plumber’s license or RN or bookkeeping license or what have you.  It qualifies you to teach certain kinds of students  and to do certain kinds of research.

Some folks get caught up in the maximization aspect of tenure– all their lives they’ve been getting good enough grades to go to a great college, then great grades in order to go to graduate school, then struggling in graduate school to try to win.  There’s a defined path up and pressure to reach for the golden ring of being a tenured full professor at a top R1.  Just knowing what to strive for when you’ve been striving all your life can be easier, even if leaving that path might make you happier.  The world out there is a great unknown.

Leaving academia does not make you a failure.  Once you’ve left there’s a big world outside where nobody cares if you’re a professor.  They’re just impressed you got the PhD.  And maybe they care more about your car or your house, but you should still make those choices based on your priorities and what you can afford.

Do a cost-benefit analysis about what is important.  Weigh the pros, and the cons.  Academia has nice things, like flexibility, academic freedom, tenure, working with other PhDs, and so on.  But it also has downsides– you don’t get to choose where you live, lower salaries, the tenure clock can be harsh, you may not like those other PhDs you’re tenured with and see all the time, and so on.  Think really hard about whether or not what other people think should enter into your cost-benefit analysis.

Do people on the TT feel superior to those not on it?  Probably only the insecure ones.  The rest of us, the majority of us, don’t really think about anyone but our own little circles of families and friends, just like most people.  Most of us on the TT realize that we are partly here because of luck and persistence; we all have friends who are just as smart as we are (or smarter!) who haven’t been able to land a TT job in their field because of the market (or, even more impressively, have done that cost-benefit analysis and have willingly chosen not to!).

For all our non-pf readers, we strongly recommend you read Your Money or Your Life: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century.

See, there’s another way you can win at life by maximizing something, if you still want your ambition to head up a straight path.  You can become financially independent.  Then if you’re financially independent, who cares if you enjoy teaching students in your spare time or writing papers or doing volunteering or what have you.  The rat race is just an aside.  And you can feel superior to everyone else stuck striving for something they may never reach.

Or you can just live your life moving forward in whatever direction the future takes you.  We all end up at the same destination, so enjoy your individual journey.  It takes energy we don’t have in order to care what other people think of us.

*Hint:  A calling is what they call it when they want you to do it for no money. If fewer people were fooled by this “calling” garbage, then people wouldn’t be willing to do academia for no money.  We want more money, not more dancing dogs.  I didn’t get into academia for the money, but I didn’t get in it to be screwed over, either.

How did you choose your job/profession?  

Ask the Grumpies: Should I stay or should I go now?

Pessimistic grad student sent a question to us, to Wandering Scientist, and to Isis-the-scientist.   We’re curious to see their responses!  (And we’ve bumped this week’s Google questions to next week– sorry!)

She asks:

I’m a female PhD student in a natural science.  I originally entered graduate school because I wanted to teach and conduct research.  I knew the job market wasn’t great, and that women still had mountains to climb, but it seemed scalable.  Now, the further along I get, the more insurmountable the challenges appear to be.

I’m also frustrated that gender/ motherhood still seem to hold so much sway in career prospects:  women receive about half the PhDs, but rapidly drop off in the postdoc ranks and have a low representation in tenure track jobs (the well-referenced leaky pipeline).  Part of me wants to pursue academia and fight the good fight at a liberal arts college (not R01) type school and not contribute to that leaky pipeline.  The other part is more jaded—with such low job availability (and even if you land a job, terrible grant odds), it seems like the more realistic and practical option is to pursue a non-academic path—either after a postdoc, or just dispensing with the post-doc altogether—instead of 5+ years of frequent moves/ low job security/ lack of guaranteed retirement benefits/ maternity leave.  The other factor is that non-academic jobs may offer better ‘balance’, and be more portable.   I’m also trying to balance the desire to be close to my spouse—I draw the line at long term long distance, after doing it before—and my desire to have kids sooner rather than later.

Non-academic jobs for my skill set tend to involve government work (also less hiring these days) or non-profits—there isn’t really a traditional industry option in my area (without extensive retraining), otherwise I’d love to consider it.  I could potentially also look at teaching only (community college or non-tenure track lectureship) jobs if I avoided the adjuncting dead-end.

I’m conflicted.  I’ve planned to pursue academia since high school (!), with no deviations along the way.  Abandoning that career path feels like giving up on a dream.  I also don’t want to give up before I’ve really started, particularly with the ‘lean in’ mindset of Sheryl Sandberg and others.  However, I’ve met enough older, jaded post-docs, with no career prospects in sight (at a very highly ranked department) to make me wary of following their footsteps.

The most logical step is likely to reconsider my direction after a post-doc.  But, I’m finding that my pessimism is harming my enthusiasm for my work, and I’m wondering if that’s a sign I should strike out in a different direction sooner rather than later.

Well, we’re social scientists and the job market is better for us.  We have met folks with your exact same story (minus the being female part)… in graduate school to get a social science PhD after ditching natural science graduate school, and another with a degree in physics from a top school who was doing RA work for an economist after he graduated.  Several schools have masters programs in which they train scientists to become finance people who can work on Wall Street.

We might have a post up next week titled, “Academia is just a job”… it’s almost finished but we haven’t gotten around to finishing and queuing for the week.  But it is true.  Academia is just a job.  The PhD is a certificate that you need in order to do certain kinds of jobs or to get a certain salary scale (for instance, in gov’t work).

It is true that it’s a job that has nice perks, like flexibility, academic freedom, tenure, working with other PhDs, and so on.  But it also has downsides– you don’t get to choose where you live, lower salaries, the tenure clock can be harsh, you may not like those other PhDs you’re tenured with and see all the time, and so on.

Still it is just a job.   Even after we have tenure, we may not stay as professors forever.  The siren call of Northern California is always in the background, singing to us of its weather and food and natural beauty.  Not to mention all of our other friends from high school and a few from college.  (Oh, and also the $.  But that’s kind of balanced out by the cost of living.)

I really like academia, but when I started I said that I would not make any major sacrifices in my life just for the sake of a job.  Because I would feel bad both not getting tenure if I’d made those sacrifices and if I got tenure having made those sacrifices.  In each case I’d feel better off seeing if I could have done the same thing without the sacrifices.  That’s not the same as leaning in– I figured I’d try for both tenure and a family and if it didn’t happen, well, I’m a smart, educated, skilled, person whose abilities are worth far more in industry than they are in academia. And so long as I enjoy the journey, it doesn’t really matter if I make it to the prescribed destination.

I do not think that industry offers better hours than academia.  Both industry and academia will try to take as many hours as you let them take.  You have to set limits for yourself– at some point the job no longer becomes worth it if you kill yourself to do it.  Cloud also talks about how you start screwing stuff up if you work too many hours.

I’m also not sure that fixing the leaky pipeline for a field that has too many phds and not enough jobs for them is the best use of your woman-power.  There’s still plenty of trail-blazing to do outside of academia as well.

My advice… figure out what you want to be doing next year.  Are you interested in the projects you’ll be working on?  Do you have other opportunities you’d like to compare?  Think about several different 2-5 year plans.  Make your fertility decisions separate from your employment decisions (there are a few cases in which you would want to combine the decision, but not with most civilian employment).  Save up enough money that you have an “FU fund” to turn employment risks into calculated employment risks.

And remember, even if you’re in theoretical physics, you can always make a ton of money working in finance.  Yes, there’s retraining, but it isn’t as much as you think.  That PhD taught you how to learn.

Grumpy Nation, if you haven’t already given your wisdom elsewhere, how about sharing it here?

Mental load and menu planning

Sometimes the biggest problem with weeknight dinners is figuring what to make when you get home from work.  Generally you’re somewhat hungry and exhausted from making too many decisions at work and an additional decision, even of just what to have for dinner, puts you over the edge.  Even adults can have low blood sugar melt-downs.

Now, to fix this problem, you could do what one set of our friends does and have the same thing to eat every week.  Monday is chili night.  Tuesday is Spaghetti night, and so on.   (Wasn’t there a commercial about that?)  Problem solved.

We need more adventure than that, however.  Otherwise I might have to take up skydiving, and nobody wants that.  So that means new and different meals that can be made quickly on weeknights with minimal advance planning.  Pantry meals.  Or meals with ingredients that will last between weekly grocery store trips.

There are online services out there that will give you a weekly menu plan complete with grocery list, taking the thinking out of the process.  We tried a couple of these at various points, but they always seem to call for exotic ingredients that we can’t get given our lack of Whole Foods, take much longer than the 20 min we have for making dinner (if the cookbook is called, “20 min meals” it is LYING), and end up leaving mostly unused jars of ingredients in the fridge to rot.  Alternatively, they focus on pouring can of Campbell’s X over Pillsbury Y, which is not only unhealthy but doesn’t taste great if you’re unused to so much processed stuff.   So, a great idea in theory, but in practice they seem to be unworkable.

Fortunately it’s pretty easy to cobble together your own menu plan with minimal mental effort using one or two cookbooks by the mother-son team of Nancy and Kevin Mills.  If there are 1-3 people in your family, use Help! My apartment has a kitchen!  If there are 3-5 people, use Faster!  I’m starving!  Obviously you can use your own cookbooks, but we like these because they are actually accurate in terms of preparation time, they use simple healthy and inexpensive ingredients that work well with a pantry, they have a nice variety of cuisines, and the meals are darn tasty.  For non-meat eaters, Kevin Mills married a vegetarian before writing Faster!, so that book has more suggestions for making the meals veggie-friendly.

Open up your book of choice.  Go to the first section (possibly salads, maybe appetizers), pick the first meal from that section (or the first meal that sounds good).  Write it down on one sheet of paper (or used envelope) and put the ingredients that you do not have on your grocery list.  Then move to the next section (chicken, for example), and pick the first meal from that section, adding its ingredients to the grocery list.  Continue until you have 5-7 meals listed on the paper.  Then go grocery shopping.

When you get home from work on Monday, instead of wondering what to have for dinner, just pick the first meal off the list and ~20 min later it should be ready to eat.  Get the partner and/or kids involved too, if applicable.

What if you don’t feel like that day’s scheduled meal?  That shouldn’t be a problem, just pick a meal further down the list– you should have all the ingredients from all meals on hand.  We usually just have a list of meals, generally one or two more than we’ll be making before we next get to the grocery store.  The default no-think option is the top one, but if that doesn’t sound good, we move to the next.  Also we will often have one night that’s just leftovers (if not all of the leftovers have been eaten as lunches), or people can have leftovers instead of the planned meal.

The idea is that this kind of planning is more flexible than a strict menu plan and also takes less thinking than other forms of deciding what to have for dinner.  There’s a default option for each day each week that is a pretty good option.

Is figuring out what to make for dinner stressful for you?  Have you found ways to cut down on the mental load?

What’s your gazingus pin?

I could have sworn I already did a post on this.  But I was trying to type up a tiny rant and wanted to link to it and I could not find it!  (Right now I’m thinking it was a post on a forum and not on the blog.)  And the tiny rant won’t make as much sense if you don’t know what a gazingus pin is.  So this post is so a future post makes more sense.  :)  Also, it’s an awesome idea by itself, thanks go to the book Your Money or Your Life for initially posing it.

A gazingus pin is something that you just buy.  You may not have it in that color.  You may not have quite that flavor.  You tend to have a lot of them, far more than you really need, and sometimes you may even have more than you can use.  Common examples are flavored lip balm, or shoes, or yarn.  Alternatively they could be the latest electronic thing, or power tools, and so on.  They’re tiny pleasures, but if overdone, the pleasure can be diluted because it has become a habit more than a treat.  And sometimes they’re not so tiny pleasures because the gazingus pin in question is expensive or the sheer quantity of pins adds up disproportionate to a person’s budget.  When either one of those scenarios happen, it’s a good idea to think mindfully about the spending habit and maybe even cut back on it.

At grumpy rumblings, it’s pretty obvious that both of us have the same gazingus pin:  books.  And this isn’t a habit that we’re willing to give up.  However, it’s a habit we can afford.  We don’t let it interfere with maximizing our individual utilities subject to our budget constraints.  We also put book-wants on our Amazon lists rather than just buying them.  Using the Amazon list in this way, btw, is a form of delaying gratification to get only what you really want– a month or so before Christmas or her birthday, #1 will cut out the books she didn’t really want, thus limiting the total number of book purchases.  Eventually all those books will get read and/or reread.

What’s your gazingus pin?  Are you buying the right amount of it?