Unsupervised

My friend Jessica is about to hand in her PhD, and watching her go through the final throes of editing, footnoting, and formatting has thrown me into vivid flashbacks to this time last year. One thing she has said several times is that she doesn't know what she'll do with herself when she doesn't have this project hanging over her every day. It's a valid question, and I find myself taking stock of how I've spent the last year. But much more than looking back, I face forward, contemplating the blank of an unknown future.

A strange thing happens when you're an aspiring academic with a finished PhD and no job to go to. You have to: 1) come up with proposals for what you'll do next, 2) start publishing articles from what you've already done, and 3) begin the process of turning your dissertation into a book. In between doing those things, you must 4) apply to jobs for which you're not yet an appealing candidate. I've always liked organizing to-do lists into neat spreadsheets, and thus I am building a list of jobs for which even my supervisor says I shouldn't bother applying. Sigh.

So I turn my energy toward publishing, which includes doing new research to add onto what was in my dissertation. This is a thing I can control! I will burn through the work and spit out material so that I will have more citations to my name! Rawr! ... or so I tell myself. It has been refreshing and scary in equal measure to feel my way out onto new ground. For one article, I want to look at what some other Victorian poets were doing, as compared to Tennyson. I realize I know almost nothing about them, so I start poking around some introductory sources. So far, so familiar. Then I start finding relevant bits that I snatch up and hoard like the magpie that I am.

The really unnerving thing is that from here on out, I am literally unsupervised. When I produce a draft of something, I can't hand it to my supervisor for insight into what is innovative or obvious. Many of my original bits of research were suggested to me by others. Now I'm supposed to trust my own instincts, I suppose. And make use of my academic network, such as it is. Right now my nose says: "Sushi?" Okay, maybe that's my stomach. Be right back.