Why I'm not an academic ...

I've always had a love-hate sort of relationship with academia. I love learning new stuff and getting to grips with ideas, but I get incredibly frustrated by the academic world and a lot of what goes along with it.

Throughout my career I've dipped in and out, with an MA in Applied Linguistics that helped me make the transition from classroom teacher to lexicographer (and beyond), thoughts of a PhD a few years ago that never went past a meeting with a potential supervisor and a bit of reading, then quite a bit of contact with the academic world as I got involved in EAP (both keeping up with ideas and research in EAP and getting to grips with texts from other disciplines). And as some of you will know, my latest foray has been into a slightly new area, embarking on a part-time MA in Forensic Linguistics last October.

I've found exploring the world of Forensic Linguistics fascinating and I've really loved learning new stuff. As my partner will attest to, there were days when I came home absolutely buzzing with new ideas and babbling on about possible new career directions. There was also a lot that I found insanely frustrating though and by the time I got to the end of my first year (the course is 2 years part time), those frustrations were starting to outweigh the excitement. It was a relief to get to the end of term and I realized that the prospect of having to do the same all over again rather filled me with dread ... which is never a good sign! 

I didn't want to give up too easily though, so I signed up for a 4-day summer school in Porto ahead of the Internatonal Association of Forensic Linguists conference, which I also registered for. The summer school consisted of a programme of largely practical workshops led by well-known forensic linguists, significantly, from different universities ... giving me a slightly different angle on the field from my MA course. It was an incredibly intense few days in terms of taking everything in, trying to process ideas to complete the practical tasks, both in the workshops and as 'homework', and in terms of some of the content; murder, drug-dealing, child abuse ... when you're dealing with the law, the topics are rarely light! But it was absolutely fascinating and provided lots of new angles on the field which hadn't cropped up on my course.

It also confirmed though that Forensic Linguistics is still a new field that's very much finding its feet. There aren't yet accepted methods and standards for the analysis of linguistic evidence. Instead, various academics are trying out different avenues of research, some theoretical, some practical, and those actually working with the police and courts almost all have 'day jobs' in academia. Which means that if I wanted to pursue a career, I'd not only have to finish my MA, but I'd really need to do a PhD too before I could even get a foot in the door. Which means more academia ... which brings me back to my problem ...

As I said, I love exercising my grey cells, but there are just some types of academic I really struggle with. They seem to fall into two camps. The first group are concerned with very abstract, esoteric ideas that seem to have little or no bearing on the real world ... study for study's sake. The second type are more practical, dealing with real data, but their studies have become super-narrow; they're investigating pronoun use by 15-year-old female English-French bilinguals in Vanuatu in text messages (that's a made-up example but not far off some of the papers at the conference!!). And when they present their research, they go into the minutiae of how they collected their data and exactly what they found, but never seem to get to any broader conclusions about what it might mean in the wider world. Leaving you with a distinct 'so what?' feeling.

And I can see that there's maybe a place for both types of study to feed into the general knowledge soup that eventually moves the whole field forward. But add onto that the insistence on using unnecessarily impenetrable language and an often shocking lack of rigour and  ... it's just not for me. And even if I wanted to focus on the more applied end of things that most interests me, I'd still have to plough through all that other stuff  - and cite and acknowledge it and 'situate' my work amongst it, etc. And you know, at this stage of my career, I just don't have the patience for often poorly-communicated ideas which seem to be going nowhere.

So somewhere in-between the summer school and looking at the programme for the conference, I decided it was time to cut my losses and step away from academia once again. I did go to a couple of conference plenaries, but I soon realized my motivation had evaporated, so I escaped the stuffy darkened rooms of the university to enjoy the Porto sunshine instead. 

What next? Well, I'll withdraw from the MA and go back to the 'day job' (which, thankfully, I've kept ticking over). I'd like to keep exploring Forensic Linguistics and maybe somewhere along the line find an 'in' where I can use my language analysis skills without jumping through all the academic hoops. Unfortunately though, once I lose my student log-in, I also lose access to all those academic journals. Journal subscription for Christmas maybe ...?

#SelfieEmployed

Yesterday was National Freelancers Day in the UK and it got me thinking about the pros and cons of working for myself. So here are four things I love and hate most about freelancing:

Loves:

1 I first went freelance back in 2000 primarily because it allows me to manage a chronic pain condition that makes it almost impossible for me to hold down a 9-to-5 job. That 'management' involves rubbish stuff like not having to be bright and perky on days when my pains are really bad or when I'm suffering from a 'painkiller hangover'. But it also involves fun stuff like finding ways to avoid long, unbroken stretches at my desk and making sure I move about as much as possible. At a MaWSIG event back in January, Antonia Clare mentioned my 'dance breaks' - where I get up from my desk for 5 mins and dance round my office to my favourite tunes. Well, these have now been replaced by hula-hooping breaks (thanks to Karen White), which take place in my back garden and also involve being very silly to dodgy dance tracks!

2 Being able to manage my own time has other advantages too. Rather than having to do things at the same time as nine-to-fivers, I can go for a swim, do a bit of shopping or get my haircut at those quiet times in the middle of the day. And no, it's not just slacking ... I still have to put in the hours to get paid, I just have the flexibility to shuffle them around a bit without having to get anyone's permission.

3 One of the great things about being freelance is not being tied to a job title. In my time as a freelancer, I've worked as a lexicographer, a materials' writer (on a massive range of different materials), as an editor, academic proofreader, reviewer, corpus researcher, teacher, teacher trainer, conference presenter ... who knows what I'll try next if it crops up!

4 Although I spend a large chunk of my time alone at my desk, I still come into contact with an amazing variety of lovely people. There are the people I work with on writing projects, both in-house and fellow freelancers. When I do training or give talks, I get to meet teachers and other colleagues from all over the world. And don't even get me started on all my fabulous network of folks I communicate with through social media and meet up with in person at conferences and events.

Hates:

1 My biggest bugbear about being freelance is uneven workflow. However hard I try to plan my schedule so I can tick along happily with a reasonable number of hours per week that will allow me to control my pain, it never seems to work out. Projects that I've planned to fit in perfectly get delayed starting then either they have to be done in half the time or they crash into something else I've agreed to and suddenly I'm working all hours and my pains are building up and I know I should ease off, but deadlines are looming. Then other times I find myself twiddling my thumbs, especially when planned projects are delayed or fall through, and I'm worrying about how I'm going to pay the bills.

2 Which brings me onto the irregular income. Somehow in 16 years I've always managed to make a living from freelancing, but my income's varied wildly - from a low of about £11,000 to around £30,000 in a good year. Sometimes the money comes in in little dribs and drabs, sometimes on a long project, I have months with nothing coming in then a big chunk at the end. I spent a whole year working on one royalties-based project living on just £5000 ... and as yet, I've made absolutely nothing back in royalties.

3 No sick pay, no holiday pay, no IT support ...

4 When you have a job, there's generally a fairly clear career progression; promotions to apply for, a ladder to climb. As a freelancer, it's much more difficult to see how you're going to progress. Over time, I've consciously developed new skills and specialisms, I've worked hard to build my profile and reputation (I'd like to think with some success), but that doesn't necessarily come with a pay rise. Rather depressingly, I often find myself being offered much the same rate of pay now as I was 16 years ago. I know that's probably more of a reflection on the state of the industry than on how much my skills are valued ... but it doesn't always feel that way.

So is it worth it? Well, when I was making my lists, I initially jotted down six 'loves' and could easily have kept going with more, but I struggled to come up with more than four 'hates' .... which I think says it all. #lovefreelancing

History repeating

Yesterday, there was a piece on the news about how new university graduates are struggling to find jobs because of the recession, which rather made me think of my own history repeating. I set off for university in 1987, at the height of the 80s boom. Growing up in Kent, I was surrounded at the time by young men in red braces with loadsamoney jobs in the City and, even at the end of my first year, I landed a summer job working in the computer room of a City bank earning what I think was probably more than I've earnt at any time since!

I graduated though in 1990 just as recession was kicking in and the well-paid, graduate job I'd imagined had vanished into thin air. Like many of my peers, my answer to the situation was to change tack and go off and do other things for a few years - in my case teaching English abroad. I suppose in hindsight, I could blame the fact that my career hasn't really followed a very conventional path and that I've managed to reach my 40s without ever having had a 'proper' well-paid job, a pension, a mortgage, etc on the timing of my birth and the economic cycle. But I wouldn't change all the experiences and adventures I've had along the way nor where it's led me to in the end. Perhaps though I wouldn't recommend that new graduates today follow exactly the same path; because when I found the prospects in the UK unappealing, I headed for Greece!