Nick Hopwood, Research Officer for Centre for Excellence in Preparing for Academic Practice (see also his website, offers this as a personal view of academic practice, focusing on the shift from being a doctoral student to a contracted researcher. Please feel free to comment below - how is this similar or different to your experience? Are there any issues you think are important? (The text is also available from the CETL website).
"In many ways my situation is not untypical of many other PhD graduates – I spent three years developing expertise in one area (geography education), and now work as a contract researcher in a different field (higher education). Academic career paths seem to involve all sorts of lateral jumps (between fields or institutions), insecurities (short contracts, getting funding), and tensions (eg. how to balance research, teaching and service).
Notions of identity and participation in communities are useful to me in thinking about where I’ve come from, where I am now, and where I would like to be. Thinking back to my experiences as a doctoral student, I can see changes in the ways I identified myself and was identified by others. I started as a novice, feeling very un-academic because I’d produced no knowledge and written no articles.
As I progressed through the cycle of data collection, analysis and writing up, my identity as a doctoral student shifted from newcomer to finisher. At the same time my identity as a becoming academic was also developing. I had a few conference and journal papers behind me – a written down, ‘out there’ kind of identity. Others started to treat me as an academic – asking me to referee for journals, emailing in response to papers, introducing me as someone who does a certain kind of research. This made me feel like I’d managed to infiltrate academic communities (albeit in a rather fraudulent-feeling way).
There is something of a rite of passage about getting a doctorate. Around the time of my viva I felt that going through the process gives you some sort of shared experience and understanding with other academics, and in some ways proves your worth in the face of ultimate peer review.
The tensions between student and academic identities have passed to the extent that I feel more (but not totally) secure in outwardly presenting myself as an academic. I’m now faced with a series of different tensions. On the one hand I want to develop my identity by doing more teaching, getting accredited as a higher education teaching practitioner, engaging in consultancy work, and writing for publication in journals and books. On the other hand I don’t feel I’ll benefit from my current job unless I get fully involved in what is a new field to me, and I’m anxious to get my hands dirty in new research. After all the progress I made in the world of geography education, I’m now a newcomer to higher education, lacking a shared knowledge of literature and people to legitimise my interaction in that community.
The UKGRAD course on careers in academia gave me valuable insights into everyday life as an academic, and helped me think strategically about moving up the academic career ladder. I now see academic practice as an ongoing developmental journey, of which knowledge production, publications, and teaching are but parts."
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