A Man Without a Plan

A Matt Reed blog post from earlier this week on “Alternate Careers” has gotten me thinking. In it, he asks what the plan B was for people who have found themselves in academia.

Mostly I’m thinking about the life I’ve lived without having a plan, how this came about, how and why it seems to be working out, and what those things say about the world I grew up in versus the world as it is today.

Like Matt, I suppose I had a few “If I was a different person” alternatives during my youth. Drummer in a touring rock band sounds awesome until I realize that my middling abilities and penchant for 9:30 p.m. bedtimes are incompatible with the rock-and-roll lifestyle.[1]

I’m simultaneously chuffed and chastened that I achieved a couple of Matt’s alternate careers, newspaper columnist and novelist. These were on my radar since I was 10 years old and the novelist Jon Hassler[2] visited my fifth-grade class and I saw that the people who wrote the books I love were regular and real. Like Matt I too was a Dave Barry fan, but growing up in Chicago, Mike Royko was who I wanted to be.

But as Matt notes, these are both in his “if it were a different time” category, which means despite these achievements, they are not careers. For my (published) novel, the advance was between 10 and 20 percent of what I would’ve received had it been published 20 years earlier. I’ve written a weekly column for the Chicago Tribune since 2012, and while the money is a nice supplement to my income, if I was required to live on it alone, I’d be near poverty.

Also like Matt, I once seemed on a trajectory for law school, though my feelings were more like “if there’s nothing else I can do,” rather than actual desire. Working as a paralegal at a large firm in Chicago made me so desperate enough to do anything else, I went to grad school for creative writing.[3]

Unlike Matt and probably a lot of the other Inside Higher Ed readers in academia, a job in higher ed was never part of my plan. This lack of a plan likely explains why I no longer work full-time in higher education. On examination, I’m not even sure I can point to anything in my life I can recognizably identify as a “career.”

I suppose I have a career as a writer, but there was and is no plan associated with this position. I write things of interest and then try to find audiences for them. Over time this has accrued into enough paying work to perhaps qualify as a career, but a sudden reversal of fortunes for the publications that make up my steady gigs could end the career overnight.

My current full-time job in market research is just about to reach the one-year mark, a continuation of four years in the industry from 1997 to 2001. Can you have a career in a field that you did not work in for more than 15 years?

One of the reasons I never had a plan is because I hitched wagons with someone who had a plan since she was a child. There is a picture of my wife at maybe 4 years old with a guinea pig on her lap, dog at her side and a cockatiel perched on her head. Thanks to lots of work and study, the pint-sized Dr. Doolittle turned into a veterinarian who after we got married decided she wanted to do four post-D.V.M. years to become a veterinary specialist. Even if I had a plan (I did not), we could not be both where she needed to be for her training and where I needed to be to pursue a tenure-track path.

So I didn’t. I taught, I wrote, I worked. We moved four times over 10 years for her career, and I latched onto the opportunities that came my way.

I turn 50 in April, and life has gone by in a blink.

There are a few things I’ve been thinking about following all this thinking:

Not having a plan has some benefits. My wife has been immersed in her field for close to 30 years, is still shy of 50, and neither of us foresee her sticking with it much past 55 if even that long. On the other hand, I’ve reinvented some part of my work pretty regularly every four to six years, and I feel like I’m just getting started. I’ve never done any one thing long enough to get bored.

I’m deeply thankful for my liberal arts education. Dismiss the clichés about learning how to learn all you want, but having absorbed that ethos and maintained my native curiosity over the years has allowed me to shift course with relative ease. A narrower educational experience may have made everything harder.

It was much easier to launch a life without a plan back in my day than today. I did not have student loan debt. Even in a middling economy at the time of college graduation, I did not worry about getting a job that would pay my bills. Lots of opportunities in my areas of interest have devolved over time, but today is even worse.

For me, if the times were, in Matt’s words, “A wee bit different,” the thing I would be is a college professor. I look at my CV, my experience, my desire, and I possess every conceivable qualification, but I do not live in a time where it is possible.

Honestly, though, it’s worked out about as well as one could hope, and all without a plan. I hope there’s still some room in the world for young people today to figure things out as they go without paying too terrible a price.