The problem was, though, that I hadn’t quite killed the academic bug in me. I still wanted to be an academic, just not in a department where even the HoD was too scared to take disciplinary action against a clearly terrible member of staff. So I looked and applied for hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs at various universities across the country. I would get to interview just fine and then it would always fall through. I never quite understood what was happening. I would ask for feedback and the same lame “other candidates closely matched…”, “it was a competitive…”, “you were very close, but…”. But what??
After nearly a year of searching for a job – and very much being at the point of utter desperation – one kind person called me to give me feedback from an interview that I was sure where the offer would be mine, and told me that the references being sent by my PhD supervisor were not great and that they suggested I choose an alternative reference in future. They weren’t allowed to tell me what was written in the reference, but that it was a documented reason why they were unable to offer me the position at that point in time because their university would question why they were doing so.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across that kind of honesty in anyone since.
I thanked them for the insight, changed who I was using as my reference and after a few more months of applications was invited to interview for a part-time position at a company. And I WAS grilled at interview as to why I hadn’t included my PhD supervisor as a reference. I clearly explained to them that there had been some issues where my relationship with my supervisor ended on poor terms, but from my CV it was clear that I didn’t let that reflect in my professionalism nor quality of work given that I filed a patent and published papers even before my viva. Sometimes you end up working with people where you have a personality clash, but you have to make it work.
I was offered the job.
It was a great opportunity and after a year and a half of searching, it made me feel like I had some worth again. But a month after I had started at the company, I was called by a university that I had interviewed at 6 months earlier. Given that I still wanted to be in academia, I pounced at the opportunity. It was a part-time 6 month role (a role that nobody in their right mind in academia would look to go for, which is why there was no interview for it, I mean why would you even advertise that?) and worked there part-time alongside my part-time company job.
The interesting part here is that then led to me being offered a full time position in that research group, on a grant that was applied for using the data I had generated in my part-time role.
How many of us have heard, doing your postdoc at a different institute to your PhD is meant to be a good thing? Too many.
The even better part was that my manager in the company warned me against taking a role in academia. They told me that I would get stuck as cheap labour doing somebody else’s projects for years, I’d do postdoc after postdoc, until I became “too expensive” to hire and that I would probably leave of my own accord before even getting to find a tenured position. That’s what happened to them, that’s what will happen to me. They told me I’d be better off in industry, and that the pay would match my skill-set and experience as I progressed.
But, I didn’t listen. I took the academic role anyway.
A month in and I recognised a person in the research group I had joined. This person was at the interviews that were being held for the first position I applied for a year ago. That’s the person who got the role over all other candidates. It became very clear in my time there that this person didn’t know their science well enough. They would constantly struggle with the science of the project they were doing.
Funnily enough I keep all the job applications/adverts I apply to, and looked up the job description of the job. This one was particularly distinct as it was a 3 year+2 year extension, followed by a promise for university support to apply for a fellowship position. So it stood out. I always thought that the role must have gone to someone particularly amazing. I was wrong. This person didn’t have the correct background for the job. The job asked for background in a fundamental science; this person did not have a degree in said fundamental science – i.e., biology, chemistry, physics, maths – at all. But the job description had this as an essential requirement.
The mind boggled. But then not so much boggled, when I learned that this person had not only done their PhD with said supervisor, but also their masters with them and had also done their undergraduate degree at the same university. They were a pet. There was no way anybody else who had come to be interviewed that day even had a chance, because this person had been promised this role from the start.
Baffling.