Is a career in academia a realistic option?

[MovingBack]

For someone in their late 40s, first class UG degree, first class masters and recent PhD (Oxbridge) but no teaching experience? I've read through lots of threads here and elsewhere that would lead me to conclude that it's not at all realistic! Any insight/words of wisdom please?

A teaching fellowship is rarely a good path to a permanent position though, Booboostoo. A couple of good research based post-docs building up a strong publication record is the way to go.

Magrat Depends on the broad field. It's unlikely that you'd get an entry-level lectureship in the humanities without teaching experience. The Humanities is the milk cow for universities NSS scores etc. Students in BA degrees expect (and deserve) good experienced teachers

I completely agree Magrat but in my field research posts are extremely rare and teaching fellowships are what you get if you are lucky. We standardly get 60-100 applications for each teaching fellowship, all from serious candidates. I remember colleagues appointing someone to a TF who had 4 publications! They had to apologise to other candidates about the ridiculously high standard but when good people apply for crappy jobs what can you do? There have been a lof of redundancies in my field so people with years of experience are applying for jobs that would normally be well below their qualifications. Younger people, just out of their PhDs, are pushed completely out of the job market. As far back as 2005 I remember having to write a reference for MacDonalds for one of our PhD graduates who had one publication in a top journal but couldn't find anything else. He gave up on academia after two years at MacDonalds but luckily found a position in a school so he is still withing the broader field.

I went to look at the careers advice and info around psychology after reading this thread last night.

May I ask - are all these cuts in relation to the lack of government subsidy and how HE is funded or is it a longer term decline in the availability of jobs?

Both.

Universities' funding has been cut. And that's after 10 years of growth, which didn't quite make up for 30 years of cuts here since 1979. I remember doing my PhD in the 80s. It was tough then.

Both.

Public HE funding has been largely removed by this government, almost entirely in non-STEM areas. And universities are being coerced, and have been for a while, into corporate models (with all the attendant obsessions with cutting jobs, upping workloads and "productivity", holding down pay, reducing pension entitlements at the same time as paying VCs more and more....) The mantra in the sector is "do more with less" at the moment, sadly - which translates to higher workloads, fewer jobs and systematic exploitation of academic labour amongst unestablished and junior scholars.

Oh how grim, thanks for replies. Im really considering. AFter teaching secondary for 11 years Im not sure I want to be back in that environment again.

I have (I think) rose tinted specs of working away in some sleepy dusty office doing reading and research. Not havign to get 'involved' and be like a fish in barrel. dont laugh

Well..Ive got time to consider all options I suppose. I have to consider I may be self funding and whilst I could afford to fund myself for Msc in neuropsychology with robotics (no 1 choise at the moment, at least it is a growth area) I dont know if i can justify diverting 'family' money away from whatever else if I'm not likely to secure a new career from with reasonable earning potential.

I have worked since I was 14 until the last 3 years of being a SAHM but doing second degree with OU whilst, you know sitting around in costa in toddler worldem - never mind I shall wait and see.

This may be very negative, but if you are looking for a stress free job where you can pootle about doing a little bit of research, academia is really not the place these days. Despite public perception, most academic jobs are live it and breathe it all consuming, type of work these days. There is enormous pressure to bring in large grants on a regular basis, publish frequently (my last place expected 4 publications per year, or pro rata for pt staff), supervise postgrads, teach, set and mark exams/coursework do required admin and carry out all manner of external "scholarly activities" such as sitting on advisory panels, editorial boards and so on. Further, contrary to popular opinion, postgrads do tend to need an awful lot of supervision, especially when your university insists you take on lots of overseas PhDs with only cursory knowledge of English or science and you are expected to somehow drag them through the process and get them to PhD standard somehow! Most of my ex-colleagues would work every weekend and most would still be working at midnight most evenings too. In 10 years I think I don't think I had a family holiday where I didn't take work with me and 2 days after ds2 was born, I was answering reviewers comments on a grant application whilst still in hospital! I know someone else who was finishing off a paper whilst in labour and a male (med school based) colleague who kept leaving the delivery room whilst his wife was in labour with their first child to pop back to his office and finish off work....

Magrat's experience is identical to mine.

As a junior member of staff I had an unrealistic teaching load, my first year I taught 5 courses all lectures and all seminars (effectively repeating the same seminar for different small groups of students 10 times for each of the 5 courses over a period of two weeks before starting again with seminar 2 - does that make sense) and all the seminars for one more course. It was an insane idea but my department had gone from 10 FT staff to three, two of whom were on research leave and my position covered both.

As a more senior member of staff most of time was taken up by completely inane admin tasks. I am not too bad at admin organisational skills but this was a system stacked against you: it may have taken me a month to complete all my course reviews (analysis of student evaluation questionaires, minutes of meetings addressing actions, correspondence with external examiners, applications to the Teaching and Learning board, etc.), all finally submitted when the Uni would retrospectively change the form required to submit all this and expect us to re-do it all - Kafkaesque situations. The other massive admin task was applying for major research grants. I would need to have one of these in the pipe-line all the time and it would involve endless meetings with funding bodies, insane amounts of paperwork, liaising with colleagues in other departments/universities, etc. all with a miniscule chance of success. To depress you further, even getting the grants was not sufficient for "the good life". I was co-director of a bid for 2.5 million pounds, which is a massive amount in the humanities, and we still didn't get much out of it in terms of research time. Huge chunks of it just went to the University, e.g. 600,000 for 'refurbishing' the building (and no it was not the Windor Castle restoration after the fire, it was a semi in Leeds!), enormous amounts of overheads for each appointment absorbed by the Uni under the heading 'full ecomonic costing' (= how to use research money to pay our debts), etc. so that when you ask in the end, what did that money do? the answer is not much.

Thanks for those insights, it resonates strongly with me. The ever present thinking about work or doing it. I used to be in middle management in schools...but this was before I had two children. I don't want to go back to that.

I was looking forward to studying past by current BSc with OU and being in a brick uni again for MSc. Any path in Psychology must include some post graduate training or further study.

I am reconsidering my options. Do you not feel a deep sense of satisfaction having contributed to the research in your given fields and how this has supported development of subject? You know your legacy when you are ling gone? Or is all that overshadowed?

I'm looking at clinical psychologist.

The thrill of getting a paper published, getting a large grant funded or the euphoria after a large conference lecture has been particularly successful is great. However, I found that as my research group increased in size, I was doing less and less hands-on research and more and more admin (project management, financial management, personnel management, grant writing, paper writing, sitting on different committees for endless hours, coursework marking, exam setting and marking, reports on student performance in exams, statistical analysis of student performance in exams, redesign and re-validation of the undergraduate degree, responsibilities to journals - peer-review, editorial decisions etc, just to name a very small part of it), that my job was no longer about doing active research, but about managing and facilitating others to do the research I loved. This is a necessary progression in academia. If you want to move up the career ladder, you find yourself taking on more admin and chasing more money (despite the misconception of some PhD students, the university does not give you any money for research, so everything done must be funded by money you find and running a science lab is expensive business) whilst the active research is being done by your group.

In addition, you are only as good as your last paper/conference lecture and extensive travel is an essential component of the job. If you are not visible, you cannot network and get your work (and yourself) noticed. Whilst I was on maternity leave with ds2 I attended 4 international conferences. There is no possibility to take a year out completely if you have a research group to manage and if you want to remain visible in your field. After having ds1 I attended my first conference after having him when he was 4.5 months old. The conference was in the States and meant a full week away.

Also bare in mind that academics do not get the same holidays as undergraduates. There are no holidays every 6 weeks and no long break over the summer. This means your children will need to be in holiday club during school holidays.

If you are only looking at academia to do a PhD, it is a completely different story to being a full-time, permanent academic. Doing a PhD is a time where you get a focus almost exclusively on your research (though this is all consuming, it is a luxury that academics don't get later in their careers). However, don't think that a PhD will immediately open doors to an academic position. In my field, most people in permanent positions will have done at least 5-6 years on temporary postdocs first (hence the reason why most University Lecturers are in their 30's before getting a permanent job).

Seeing your paper or book in print is a huge thrill, matched only by the disappointment of the endless rejection letters and the dread of looming deadlines! You really need a thick skin because the rejeciton rates are very high, the comments are sometimes off the mark and frustrating and a lot of it is down to luck.

I also found like Magrat that admin took over all aspects of work. Even on research leave I had to keep up with more senior admin tasks that could not be delegated to teaching fellows and I had to keep my PhD students (in an ideal world this should be a pleasure of collaborative research, in the real world it's a mile long paper trail documenting missed meetings and failure to reach targets).

Oh yes, the rejection letters. Sometimes this is strategic. An example: as a new postdoc in a different group from the one where I did my PhD, I submitted a paper. Off the paper went for review and I met up with my old supervisor at a conference. Ex-supervisor was by a long shot the biggest name in our field. Ex-supervisor (after a few beers) told me they were reviewing my paper. OK, I had thought they wouldn't be allowed to review my paper since we had published together within the 3 years prior, but hey ho.... Until the next day, when ex-supervisor was presenting at conference and presented work strangely similar to my own in the paper they were reviewing. Of course, this meant my paper was rejected whilst their work was accepted 6 months later by the same journal... Yes, I could have complained that I had proof of having done the work first, but you just don't do that to the biggest name in the field.

This is not uncommon and I learned from watching more experienced academics to protect my work, but this does mean that the idealistic intellectual freedom is something of a myth.

A postdoc of mine also took work we were looking to patent to the next group he moved to and wanted to publish it from there without anyone from my group as coauthors. Thankfully in that case the University stepped in within an official capacity and he was stopped, but not without damaging our ability to patent the work.

I could go on with more and more examples.

Magrat yes I think it's surprisingly common. It sounds like I'm in a very different field, but someone v senior in my own department was a reader for an unpublished chapter of my work for a job application (I know as he was on the committee and asked me questions in the interview about the piece). About nine months later an article of his came out which included a section that was strangely and strikingly similar to a section of my piece. I had wanted to send my piece off to that same journal (thankfully I hadn't already done so). I still haven't published that as I'm going to have to substantially change it. This is someone who is now v senior in my own department so there is no way I can even mention it to anyone but it still gives me the rage (and when I'm sitting in a boring departmental meeting I enjoy fantasising about ways if getting my revenge....)

Oh my words, I really don't know if I'm the sort of person who could keep quiet about the lack if equity and professional disrespect.. I so would fantasise too.

I think I'm edging to a client facing role. however I will still need to do a PhD, have relevant work experience and published work. I will be sure to enjoy being focused on my research when I get there.

I'm very grateful for the insights really want to be in the right role.

Wow - I haven't been back for a while and I'm delighted to see so many fantastic contributions to this discussion. Thanks also to andsmile for asking all the questions that I wanted to know the answers to

It sounds like a total non-runner for me, on all kinds of levels, although I've printed out the discussion and I'll mull it over for a while.

Many thanks to everyone for being so generous with your advice and information - I really appreciate it

Aha OP helloooo! well thanks for starting the thread. When I read your OP and your qualifications I immediately thought it all looked quite impressive.

I still think about a quiet dusty office, doing my reading and writing important emails but I can see I had my peachy coloured glasses . One of the nails in coffin was the constant pressure to get bids in and travel - I have a family and DH's job that just isnt compatible.

Good luck OP - you could always consider an associate tutor role with OU? many of these still work full time jobs.

To the OP - will depend on REF rather than teaching experience. The best researcher in our department is new to academia and is 41, and it's because he had a great 2014 REF submission and looks like he'll repeat that for 2020. Salary is shite though!