{"id":2100,"date":"2013-01-07T14:11:30","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T19:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/?p=2100"},"modified":"2016-09-30T18:40:36","modified_gmt":"2016-09-30T22:40:36","slug":"make-your-own-luck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/2013\/01\/make-your-own-luck\/","title":{"rendered":"Make your own luck"},"content":{"rendered":"

What follows is a presentation I gave at the 2013 convention of the Modern Language Association (known fondly by many of us as #mla13) in the session “How Did I Get Here? Our ‘Altac’ Jobs.”<\/a> The session was a roundtable discussion, with pecha kucha presentations, about “alternative academic” careers. You can watch the slides with my audio, or read the presentation and look at the slides on your own. My thanks to Brenda Bethman and Shaun Longstreet for organizing the panel and to my fellow panelists and to the audience for a great conversation. (Update: Slideshare no longer supports slides with audio, or at least, no longer supports what I had done, so if you want to hear me, you’ll have to listen to this audio and click through the slides yourself; it’s around 20 seconds a slide if you want to keep pace.)<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/mla13altacslides-130107121927-phpapp02.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

[slideshare id=15891152&doc=mla13altacslides-130107121927-phpapp02]<\/p>\n

“Make your own luck” (MLA 2013)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am the Undergraduate Program Director at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a position I\u2019ve held for six years. It\u2019s a job that combines working in one of the premier special collections of early modern literature and culture with teaching a small number of highly motivated and curious students. This is the story of how I got here.<\/p>\n

I did a PhD in English, researching modern feminist performances of Shakespeare. After finishing, I was fortunate to get a two-year teaching postdoc, and after that, a one-year research postdoc. At the end of that, I got married to someone who had a job lined up in a Washington DC law firm, and so we moved and I started my life as an independent scholar.<\/p>\n

I spent the next year writing my book at the Folger. During that time, I became friends with a local Shakespearean who told me that her department was looking for someone as a leave replacement. So I spent the next year teaching drama and composition at The George Washington University and the following year as an adjunct at George Mason, a job I found again through my Shakespeare friend.<\/p>\n

Then I heard from my friend that the head of the Folger Institute wanted to take a year off. And so Gail recommended me to Kathleen, Kathleen went to write her book, and I ran the Institute for a year. At the end of that gig, another contact asked if I\u2019d adjunct at Georgetown, covering his Shakespeare classes, and so my George-trifecta was complete.<\/p>\n

At the end of my year at Georgetown I gave birth to my second child (I\u2019d had the first one after my GW stint) and I spent the following year trying to catch my breath and work out how to mother two children with a spouse who was frequently traveling and parents who were aging more rapidly than I was ready to admit. The lesson I learned was that I was not cut out to stay at home.<\/p>\n

Luckily, at that point my friend Gail, by now the Folger\u2019s Director, hired me as a consultant on a planning grant for developing undergraduate programming in book history at the Library. So I became an independent contractor, put together an implentation plan, and then became the inaugural Folger Undergraduate Program Director, a job that I love.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve used the word \u201cluckily\u201d to describe how I got to this place, and I certainly benefitted from luck. I live in a town rich in possibilities for Shakespeare scholarship, and I know people who led me to temporary jobs and to my current career. And for a long time I thought of how I got here as a product of luck.<\/p>\n

But another way to think about luck is to see it as the residue of design. I wasn\u2019t simply lucky. I worked hard\u2014persistently and creatively\u2014to be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that might come my way. I didn\u2019t always know what it was that I was working toward, but I was working nonetheless. So here\u2019s another version of the story of how I got my job.<\/p>\n

While I was turning my dissertation into a book, I submitted an excerpt to Shakespeare Quarterly<\/i>. My article wasn\u2019t accepted, but I had a nice correspondence with the editor and our paths later crossed at the Shakespeare Association conference. That editor was Gail Kern Paster, and when I moved down to Washington DC, we were both regulars at the Folger and we would chat about our research.<\/p>\n

Because she knew my work, she recommended me to fill in at GW. Because I knew the Folger as a reader and program participant, had administrative experience from grad school, and was an active scholar in Shakespeare circles, I was a good fit for the Institute. By this point, I\u2019d come to know the Folger\u2019s culture and resources and that of faculty, students, and administrators at three of the area\u2019s largest schools.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d built a network of colleagues across Washington DC and across the Shakespeare community. When the Folger needed to hire someone who knew the Library and local schools, who had the administrative skills and the intellectual breadth to set up a new program, I met those needs. It wasn\u2019t luck that I got my job, it was years of hard work.<\/p>\n

Despite what I\u2019ve just said\u2014what I firmly believe about how I came to this #altac career\u2014it took me a long time to believe that I hadn\u2019t just accidentally lucked into it. I\u2019d never intended to do this line of work. I\u2019d intended to be a tenured faculty member; I spent years on the job market trying to get a job like that. But I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Because of that history, among other things, it was hard for me to see the planning that had gone into my good fortune. Because I didn\u2019t get what I thought I wanted, I didn\u2019t think I deserved the thing I\u2019d gotten. As some of you no doubt know, it\u2019s really hard to come out of an unsuccessful job search without feeling like you\u2019ve failed, that you\u2019ve fallen short.<\/p>\n

In my case, that feeling was exacerbated by the shape my family life had taken. My low-paying jobs were made possible by my spouse\u2019s high-paying job, and while I was grateful, I also felt like a kept woman. Add to that the problem that his career wasn\u2019t highly relocatable, and that once we had kids, it was not going to be practical for me to live apart from them.<\/p>\n

With only part-time work coming my way and small children to raise, I squeezed my teaching and my writing into the hours I had childcare and spent the rest of my time playing and teaching and coaxing my kids to eat and nap and use the toilet and make friends and give me kisses, and while I loved my family, I was exhausted.<\/p>\n

How grateful I was, then, to have a real job! How fortunate to be dealt such good luck! Gail Collins, in mulling over Hillary Clinton\u2019s wide-ranging and impressive career to date, with its twists and turns from despised to beloved, wrote that she has played the cards she\u2019s dealt<\/a>. That\u2019s one way to look at it. But I prefer Hillary\u2019s answer:<\/p>\n

\u201cI choose my cards. I choose them. I play them to the best of my ability. Move on to the next hand.\u201d There\u2019s nothing particularly wrong with seeing yourself as the beneficiary of good fortune, except for its flip side: if you got where you are by luck and then your luck dries up? You\u2019ll never get anywhere again. You\u2019ll never be more than your spouse\u2019s appendage.<\/p>\n

My point here is that I might not have been actively planning my #altac career, but I was keeping my eye open for opportunities to learn new skills and to meet potential colleagues. The years I thought I was nothing but lucky were the years I was unhappy and insecure. Once I realized my own strengths, I knew I could succeed at other things I wanted to do.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s one thing I went on to do: I knew the Folger needed to do a better job explaining the scholarship we do in publicly accessible terms, and I knew that I could do this. Since my job with the Undergraduate Program was \u00be time, I had \u00bc of my time I was willing to use to start a new blog for the Library. And I so convinced them to hire me to start The Collation<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Whether you\u2019re looking for an #altac career or you\u2019re not, my biggest piece of advice to you is not to wait for a giant hand to point you in the right direction. If you don\u2019t know where you\u2019re going, you\u2019re not going to see signposts leading you there. You need to make your own luck and trust that you\u2019ll recognize your place when you arrive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What follows is a presentation I gave at the 2013 convention of the Modern Language Association (known fondly by many of us as #mla13) in the session “How Did I Get Here? Our ‘Altac’ Jobs.” The session was a roundtable discussion, with pecha kucha presentations, about “alternative academic” careers. You can watch the slides with my audio, or read the presentation and look at the slides on your own. My thanks to Brenda Bethman and Shaun Longstreet for organizing the panel and to my fellow panelists and to the audience for a great conversation. (Update: Slideshare no longer supports slides with audio, or at least, no longer supports what I had done, so if you want to hear me, you’ll have to listen to this audio and click through the slides yourself; it’s around 20 seconds a slide if you want to keep pace.) [slideshare id=15891152&doc=mla13altacslides-130107121927-phpapp02] “Make your own luck”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[53,48,175,47,59,51],"class_list":["post-2100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-words","tag-altac","tag-gender","tag-make-your-own-luck","tag-mla","tag-personal","tag-talks","post-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwerner.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}