Dr Yvonne Couch
It’s still Friday afternoon and I am still cogitating on academic life for no good reason other than it’s raining and I don’t want to go and get my PCR results from another building. But I’m hoping that my procrastination will fill at least 8 minutes of your day whilst you’re on the bus or waiting for your computer to reboot.
Today’s piece was actually inspired by a school friend who I hope will not mind me telling this story. She was my one friend from our year 5 friendship group who went off and did a PhD. All our other friends were sensible and got normal, well paid, regular jobs. This particular friend stayed in academia for some considerable time and then, voluntarily, chose to leave. We met up recently and I asked her whether she struggled when she left. She said she cried for an age the day she finished, even though it was her choice to leave and that various aspects of her job were genuinely making her unhappy, she still felt like she was losing a piece of herself. So today we’re going to explore why that might be.
Because I wanted to try and make this less waffly than my other Friday afternoon piece, I thought I would look for some nice nerdy primary literature to help us all out. Turns out this is quite challenging because I don’t know all the important psychological terms for any of this so I just started by googling the question ‘why do some jobs affect your sense of self more than others’. This led me to a BBC article entitled ‘Why we define ourselves by our jobs’. This started the ball rolling with someone called Prof. Anne Wilson.
Prof. Wilson runs something called the IMPETUS lab in Ontario and they study motivation and identity, amongst other things. In the BBC article, she describes how the issue with identifying yourself as your job is particularly prevalent in jobs where there is no real ‘9-5’. People who set their own hours, like academics, can end up letting their jobs fill time which ‘normal’ people would spend doing other things like having hobbies or seeing friends.
I am a good example of how this can accidentally happen. I am absolutely not an over-worker by any means. I am clearly writing this instead of doing a Western blot and I have a stuffy nose so very firmly want to go home just after lunch today. But I start work between 6.30 and 7 most days so I can miss the traffic, meaning I’m usually home by 4 or so. My partner often doesn’t get home until around 7 but sometimes he comes in and I’ve sat down at the kitchen table to have a meeting or send one email and gotten distracted and am still working. At which point he very firmly tells me I’m not paid enough to work this many hours and I should stop.
Wilson terms this ‘enmeshment’. This is actually a term from the field of relational psychology and is usually applied to dysfunctional families or couples. It specifically describes a ‘dysfunctional relationship dynamic, characterized by blurred boundaries, excessive emotional dependency, and a loss of individual autonomy’.
And you can see how that would be problematic in a relationship, but even more so in a career where the factors affecting those boundaries and autonomy are so much out of your control. If you do not have a point where your job stops and you start, or where your commitments stop and your life starts, then your boundaries are blurred. If your sense of achievement is based on papers and grants, you remain at the whim of luck and timing.
These factors are important because, as Wilson goes on to point out “If you tie [your self-worth] to your career, the successes and failures you experience will directly affect your self-worth,”
But how does this happen?
It all starts, at least I’m going to say it all starts, with something called identity construction. According to the internet this is ‘the ongoing, dynamic process through which individuals define who they are by synthesizing personal experiences, social interactions, and cultural contexts’. Identity construction is basically the process by which we develop a sense of self. So you can hopefully see, after all that word salad, how our environment and our experiences within academia shape our sense of self.
In the majority of academia, you don’t just learn how to do the research, you are encouraged to think critically, you are taught how to present and how to observe, you are taught how to speak and how to question, all of these things gradually become ingrained in your personality to the degree that they become part of you. They influence how you see the world and as such, how you see yourself within that world. So identity construction, or sense of self, involves learning what an ‘academic’ looks like. This involves learning the criteria by which they are judged and how they are defined as worthy. This means that evaluation is constitutive of identity. You learn what counts (money, papers, TED talks) and you shape yourself according to those criteria.
But we’ve done countless versions of this blog where we discuss how opaque evaluation criteria are, how much luck and timing are involved in grant success, how much paper evaluation depends on the reviewers you get even how much better men are at going for prizes and accolades than women.
This uncertainty around evaluation leads to an uncertain sense of self.
Let’s have a concrete example. I applied for a fellowship. My science was evaluated locally by people who had no skin in the game, i.e. they didn’t care about my work and were not involved in it, and they said it was good, well written and interesting. And yet I failed.
Because of the inherent uncertainty in the system, my sense of self-worth and fundamentally of self, have been undermined. If I have done everything ‘right’ and still failed, and I see people doing things ‘worse’ and succeeding then where are the boundaries? I even asked a senior academic this. Clearly I failed for a reason, what did they think it was? And it apparently ‘looks different for everyone’ which is obviously an issue. If nobody understands the rules then how are we meant to play the game? We’re left thinking “I don’t know what kind of person I need to be and even whether who I am has value here”
Now. Let’s move on from the self-pity and the wallowing and determine whether there’s anything we can do about it.
Sarah Bentley and colleagues wrote about identity construction in a paper entitled ‘Construction at Work: Multiple Identities Scaffold Professional Identity Development in Academia’ which showed that PhD students are better able to construct a confident professional identity when they are not confined to a single ‘academic identity’, but rather had lots of overlapping experiences that helped them make sense of who they are. Students who had experiences beyond academia had a broader, richer sense of self, were better at seeing the PhD as a means to an end and they weren’t trapped into seeing academia as their only possible future.
I was in a meeting once with a funder where we were discussing the implementation of the narrative CV and one extremely belligerent academic said that they had no interest in students who were doing anything other than science. No teaching, no hobbies, nothing. Just research. But Bentley’s work argues that this is actually bad for the sense of self. If you just do science you will end up seeing yourself, as I often do, as ‘just’ a scientist. This is not only not great for your self-esteem, but it’s also not great for your capacity to see your potential in the future.
My own identity and sense of self worth is a constant work in progress. My experience with coaching has taught me to try and see my job as just a job and not as my entire being. My wonderful colleagues and students constantly remind me of my value. And I am trying to explore other ways of using my skills so that I have, as Bentley suggests, a fuller sense of self. These articles are part of that.
Fundamentally, academia creates a stronger sense of identity because it doesn’t just reward what you do, it defines who you are, and then evaluates that continuously. So as junior academics (or even senior academics) if you’re reading this and feeling like ‘I am a researcher’ will be written on your grave, remember to go and explore some other things as well because you are not just a researcher you are a myriad of things, all of which have value somewhere.
Dr Yvonne Couch
Dr Yvonne Couch is an Associate Professor of Neuroimmunology at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. It is her passion for problem solving and love of science that drives her, in advancing our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different careers topics in her monthly blogs – she does a great job of narrating too.