In a post I wrote in 2013, shortly after launching this blog, I introduced you all to PhDgirl – my alter-ego, my superhero self, who was confident and clever, who could write and think and speak eruditely and articulately about her research. In short, she helped me to ‘fake it’ til I made it, to claim a researcher identity I didn’t always feel completely at ease with. She morphed into EarlyCareergirl as I moved into my postdoctoral period, typically about 5 years long (although definitions of early career differ). But the essence of PhDgirl remained with me as I worked out how to really own the title of Dr, how to keep building and growing my knowledge, networks, expertise and experience; she came with me to conferences and job interviews, to workshops and short courses I taught, and she helped me realise I wasn’t completely faking it anymore, and that I had made it – to my Early Career phase, at least.
In 2019, I wrote about coming to the end of this phase, which reflected on what I had experienced of ‘early career’ and what was ahead as I started a new phase – ‘mid career’. I shared some of my anxiety about things speeding up and getting more complicated – about the influence I was expected to have on the career trajectories of others, and the need to think beyond just my own ambitions and goals. How do I move forward and what kind of researcher, practitioner and colleague do I want to evolve into?
This is where I want to pick up my career evolution story. A lot has happened in the last 6.5 years since I wrote that post; I have been challenged and have grown in ways I hoped and expected to, and in ways I was not expecting or planning for at all – and I am not including the pandemic here and all the learning I had to do about creating engaging learning environments online! When I last wrote about this in 2019, I felt I had climbed a mountain of sorts – I had learned so much about how (not) to write a successful journal article, how (not) to run an engaging seminar or workshop, how to supervise a doctoral researcher, how to design and manage short courses – and I was really proud of myself and pleased with my progress. I was on a path I figured I would stay on for several years, just digging further into my academic development work and research.
But then in 2021, my dream job was advertised, in a different country, in a different higher education sector, and I applied for and was offered it. Suddenly, there was a new path in front of me, and a whole new mountain range to climb. Settling into my mid-career period took on a different resonance: I had to learn how a new higher education system works, how a completely different university functions, how to line manage colleagues, how to create and facilitate much larger programmes and events for researchers across the disciplines, and get to grips with a new policy context. It was a steep learning curve that I was managing along with considerable personal struggle and grief. I realised that I needed a new alter-ego, someone with a bit more clout than PhDgirl was created for.
Enter MidCareergirl. She has something about her that I like – a confidence and sense of herself I continue to aspire to and sometimes do feel I embody. Her hair is also fabulous! 🙂
I think that’s the bit that feels most different to me in this middle-of-my-mid-career phase: the confidence I feel I am expected to embody and project outward. I work with doctoral candidates and supervisors, many of whom come to my workshops and consultations looking for advice, guidance, and answers to questions. While I don’t feel I have to have all the answers and all the right advice – that wouldn’t be feasible – I do feel like I need to be calm and confident enough to create a space that offers them some calm and an opportunity to ask questions and consider possible solutions or answers. The same is true of my line management role, which also requires me to have confidence in what I have learned and my experience, so I can share my learning and advice with those I am mentoring. I do feel this confidence to a greater degree than I did a few years ago. I am older, a little wiser, and I do feel I have earned this place in my career.
But there is so much more to learn, and there are new areas I have to move into and become proficient in that I don’t feel very confident about at all yet. I need to be bold in applying for grants to run impressive projects with teams, governance and big ambitions attached to them (and I need to reach out to peers and lead conversations that mean these projects will get created in the first place). I need to become much more comfortable and capable of writing different kinds of research outputs I am not very experienced in yet. I need to be brave in taking on leadership positions beyond those I have held so far. This is where I call on MidCareergirl. Look at her: she can write for The Conversation and not make it a Whole Thing. She can write to peers and open a conversation about collaborating on a big research project and play her role in managing that. She’s a boss. She’s got this.
But, in calling on my alter-ego to help me fake it a bit until I work out how to make it, and climb these new mountains, I need to be careful not to put myself in bigger roles before I am ready, especially if I am taking others along with me. I have expertise now, and a specialism, but I hesitate, still, to call myself an expert. I think to be good at what I do, I have to have the humility to see how much I still don’t know, so I can hear and respond to critique and advice, and keep learning and growing. I have realised that the feeling of being an ‘imposter’ never really goes away, but what it feels like and the ease with which I can work through it and not let it paralyse me, has changed. The more I know, the more I can see how much there still is to know, but that is not scary; the not-yet-known presents opportunities and potentially exciting new paths forward. This is one bit of mid-career I am really enjoying: I have so many ideas, so many things I want to do, and there is so much to learn, and now I have the capacity and skills, and enough confidence, to try things and be okay with failing upward and better with each try.
My current challenge is working out to to do enough of what I love and what excites and nourishes me, intellectually and emotionally, that doing the work I don’t love is less of a drain on my energy and drive. And, in doing more of what I love, how to be strategic with my focus and energies in line with my longer-term goals and ambitions. I am working out, too, how to put myself in the lines of sight of the right people but keep the radar high enough to enable me to work creatively and freely underneath it, how to balance home, myself, life and work in new ways as I move further into middle age and all the changes that come with that. I am still becoming, but in new ways that present new challenges, and new opportunities to move myself, and my career, forward.
How to write a PhD in a hundred steps (or more) 
Hi Sherran Clarence
Thanks for that interesting and informative blog. You’re right insofar as you go – but, with respect, that’s not very far. You’re surely correct in the way that you set out the steps of an academic career plan and being organised and focussed is surely better than being chaotic, at least in terms of keeping a wage packet.
I I observe (I have recently re-joined academia from a career elsewhere) that many – perhaps even most – academics do not have rich lives. I mean by this that it seems that the burdens of teaching and research and perhaps the academic dust itself seem to have poisoned what (though I’m not a Nietzschean) seems like their life force – ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.’ Their lives seem dry, bereft of joy, sorrow, of excitement, of danger even that, with luck, is a common component of lives elsewhere. Sensibly of course because it’s an academic blog, you don’t talk about the rest of your life; or suggest that an academic life ought to be lived in the round – but surely we are all or can aspire to be many things besides our jobs. I had a job with a title and an honorary livelong title but I was never nor am defined in any way by that. For me it’s always been a job description simpliciter. Just imagine though telling all academics that their PhD’s were now invalid and could not be used again; that all those letters after their names should be discarded; and that their only title thereafter would be ‘university teacher’. Why not?
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Thanks for the comment, Jonathan. My blog is a space where I share my thoughts and experiences, and my research, as a woman in academia. I do share a fair bit of my life with my readers in my posts, but as you say, this is not a life blog; I am focused on the work of doing doctoral research and being and becoming a researcher. Academia is not a happy place for many teachers and researchers right now, in many countries, but I also know there are many academics who choose to find purpose and joy where they can in amidst the stress and overloaded workloads we are grappling with in our own contexts. I choose to do this, because I choose to remain in academia, and because being a researcher and a writer, a teacher, is a big part of who I am. Everyone has the right to find their own meaning and value in the work they do, and define themselves in whichever way most has meaning for them. I’m not trying to represent all the facets of an academic career – there are so many ways to create and have one. I am merely telling my story, for those who find something of themselves in it and hopefully feel encouraged or seen in some way.