To Post-doc or not to Post-doc: is this a question?

As a doctoral student the first time round, I struggled to imagine myself conducting a seminar or giving a lecture.  This struggle, allied to the knowledge that postdoctoral positions were thin on the ground, certainly influenced my decision to pursue a career in academic librarianship rather than pure academia.

I couldn’t have known that “thin on the ground” in the mid-eighties, would become “as rare as hens’ teeth” by the late noughties.  How ironic, though, that I rejected the choice when I might have had one.  Indeed, by not completing the first doctorate, the question of postdoctoral research simply never arose.  I had already jumped ship by failing to complete.

Turn the clock forward a quarter of a century, though, and the landscape has changed.  I’ve conducted seminars, sure I have.  I’ve spent most of my working life helping students – mainly, but by no means solely on a one-to-one basis – and given countless papers.  I don’t need to imagine myself doing it now!

And of course, I’ve completed a doctorate.  I don’t need anyone to tell me that the second piece of work was better than the unfinished first attempt.  Even if I’d finished the first thesis, I don’t think it would have been as good a piece of research, and certainly, the subject of late eighteenth and nineteenth century Scottish song-collecting has not only proved interdisciplinary (not even a consideration in the eighties), but also attracts more interest both from scholars and the wider community.  I’ve never, ever been asked, ‘But why Scottish song?’  I was regularly asked, ‘But why PLAINsong?!

But, as I mentioned, the landscape and climate have shifted underfoot.  A postdoc position?  Almost impossible to find, and from a personal perspective, barely feasible, for who with family commitments would exchange permanence for something less?!

So, here I am.  Knowing that it is conventional to speak and publish widely in the first postdoctoral year, I’ve been deeply, deeply conventional!  But now, a year on?

I’ll address that in my next post!

FacebookEmailPrintShare

About Karen Mcaulay

Karen McAulay is a music librarian by career, and a musicologist by inclination, which explains why she undertook doctoral research whilst holding down a full-time music librarian job. Having achieved the magical postnominals, she now indulges her research proclivities by exploring paratexts in early 19th century Celtic song collections, and draws upon her research experience on a regular basis when assisting staff and students with their information needs.

5 Responses to To Post-doc or not to Post-doc: is this a question?

  1. Hi Karen, I found your blog really interesting for the future.
    My position is opposite to yours; apart from being older, I am between two musical stools (chairs) so to speak. Although I have over forty years in composing, arranging, and playing – classical, choral, jazz, and educating, I can no longer find employment.
    This is because I cannot teach in a school – don’t have the school requirements, nor will a university accept my applications, because I never had a degree, I am entirely self-taught.
    I did work at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts until the past couple of years, and through them was awarded a certification of Fellow of the Higher Education Authority – but this counts for nothing, without the teaching cert, without the degree, I am considered as nothing. Terrible, after all these years of being so productive in all levels, live, on recordings, on television and so on.
    Having left LIPA I proceeded to Portugal, there to rebuild my career, but unfortunately, after two premieres of two separate compositions, one in Barcelona, and One in Portugal, the work stopped. So I am stuck here, with my wife and friendly dog, trying to get work back in the UK, so that we can return home, and I can work and be productive, and pass on my immense knowledge.
    I do acknowledge and respect your learning, but at the other end of the scale, it is appalling that education authorities should deem me to be unemployable because I don’t have the right bit of paper.
    Many best wishes for the future,
    Regards, Paul Mitchell-Davidson.

    • Karen Mcaulay says:

      I can see your predicament, Paul. It really is a catch-22, isn’t it? I’m not sure what to suggest; what do other readers think?

      (Actually, I wear my years lightly – thanks for thinking I must be young, but I’m not as young as you might think! Ah, me!)

    • Hi Paul
      Might be worth getting some advice on how to convert your skills to have equivalence with a PGCE – maybe also there are short courses designed for skilled professionals like yourself that give you this qualification? I haven’t looked into this but maybe someone here will know? I do feel that academia needs to realise that people develop skills outside their walls too and don’t all (thankfully) follow the same path of undergrad, MA PhD in their twenties!
      All the best and don’t give up hope
      Sue

  2. Paul,

    Sorry if I’m a bit late with my reply here but I might be able to offer some advice on your predicament.
    I was exactly in the same position a couple of years ago when I came back to the UK, after being in the US for a couple of years. Now although I left the US with an MMus, state schools in the UK were simply not interested because I didn’t have a PGCE and I must have applied for about 50 jobs over the course of 4 months, which I didn’t even get an interview for.

    However, I applied to an independent school. got an interview and got the job. It was literally my last chance before term started in September. I thought maybe I got lucky, but after working there for a while, I realised these type of schools really value ‘experience’ more so than a PGCE. Now I know you don’t have a degree, but I know that there have been cases of teachers getting jobs at independent schools based on their ‘experience’ alone

    I can’t guarantee this will work, but it may be worth a shot. Check the Times Education Supplement on a weekly basis. You never know!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/music/2011/07/03/to-post-doc-or-not-to-post-doc-is-this-a-question/
www.jobs.ac.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
41702
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:4FJUOGMEHX3BR5FI3U3ID7Q2323BB4R2
<urn:uuid:36b714e9-a873-40fb-9e22-5e76eccfca7c>
2013-05-25T13:25:18Z
83.137.210.122
sha1:DM66SAGFGAJYFDZVUW4JHL4ZDFLILJXV
<urn:uuid:b278eabd-015a-48de-98fa-7b999b26851c>
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/music/2011/07/03/to-post-doc-or-not-to-post-doc-is-this-a-question/
response
<urn:uuid:e54e0e3a-8dbf-4de9-918c-f92ccc930d29>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf