Post Academic

We used to celebrate random milestones more often in the past, probably due to the immediate excitement of starting and maintaining the blog.  We haven’t marked one in awhile, in part because we lost track of time and what counts as an accomplishment, but we are commemorating our first half-year as Post Academic!  Not to toot our own horns, but we’ve achieved a lot of the goals we set out to meet when we started the blog and wrote up the statement of purpose, which we probably need to refresh now.  Indeed, maybe the best way to judge whether or not we’ve done anything–at least for ourselves–is that our bios are now outdated.

"Six-ball rack" by SMcCandlish (Creative Commons license)

Rather than just point to our favorite posts to reminisce, let’s take a progress report to see if we’ve made any, you know, progress…

#1. Did we get jobs? YES, we did get jobs, as Arnold documented.  Of course, Caroline did too, but she’s more circumspect and Arnold is a much harder case, really.  Not sure if we’ve helped anyone else with concrete results or even could, per our statement of purpose, but we’ll take credit if anyone wants to give us any!

#2: Did we keep our minds and writing skills sharp? Another yes at least to us, though you, gentle reader, would be a better judge of that.  One thing we’re definitely proud of is posting every single day during the last six months, often with multiple entries per day back when we started.  Writing the blog has not only pushed us to write regularly, but it’s also imposed some much-needed discipline.  Plus, we’re getting caught up with the social networking era, since we’ve been able to link up the blog with Twitter and Facebook, which we’ll try to keep expanding on, too.

#3. Did we get seek out audience participation and get much? Yes, we’ve gotten great feedback from our very smart and faithful readers!  And that day WordPress touted Caroline’s post was most heartening because of all the wonderful responses we got in the comments thread.  Still, we could do better on encouraging more audience participation than just running those fun little polls by putting out more calls for folks to contribute, although a lot of you have your own great blogs already.  So if, say, anyone wants to be a guinea pig and ghost-write a diary-like series about her/his experiences on the upcoming academic job search, we’d love for you to get in touch with us.

#4. Did we piss anyone off? Not as many people as we think, but probably more than we know.  We did get a testy retort from one of the subjects of a snarky post, but we might’ve deserved that.  We probably don’t have the constitution to get into flame wars any more.

#5. Did we get academia out of our systems? Yes and not really.  Caroline had gotten past the neuroses of academia long ago, which is why she’s able to write with more perspective and offer less baggage-laden observations.  Arnold is still working on it, although maintaining a blog that gives iffy advice on how to approach diss writing and job rec gathering doesn’t really show much improvement, does it?  But he really has gotten past a lot of the mental blocks in his way just six months and one day ago.

Thanks to everyone who’s read Post Academic!  And here’s to another six months and hopefully more, if we can only get ourselves on the blogging equivalent of the tenure track…