Thursday, July 14, 2005

I'm blogging, therefore I won't get a job in academia

Tonight I decided to google some words to try to find other dissertating (or recent Ph.D. graduate) mothers in blogosphere, and I was successful! I haven't yet read much of these blogs, but they look promising:ABDmom (a fellow All But Dissertation mother), Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (a mother of two working on her dissertation), 11D (recent Ph.D. and mother). And I know there should be more out there.

Both SITBB and 11D mention a recent article in
The Chronicle of Higher Education that I don't know if I can link to here because I'm not a subscriber (you could get there from the above mentioned blog entries). The title is pretty scary: "Bloggers Need Not Apply" and I once again think that I have no future as an academic. No, not because I blog, but because reading about the process of hiring, interviewing, evaluating candidates, etc, makes me think again that I don't fit in. And the most important part - I don't really want to, or care too much [edited to add - see, if a search committee ever reads this, I'll be in deep trouble, right? You're supposed to "worship academia" and all it represents, I guess].

The difficult part with this whole academic "thing" is: I still have to go through the motions, the painful process of writing a dissertation, all for "nothing". Yes, because I do want to finish, even if I don't know if I'll get (or think I have any chance of getting) an academic job. Well, more on that later (I mean, in a future post).

The funny thing is that I have thought before about whether blogging could jeopardize my "academic career", and I've even written in an earlier post that probably nothing would happen to a graduate student. Well, maybe not. Oh, yeah, cyberspace can be "dangerous" in more ways than one realizes.

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