job search, academic couple, stress, the usual

[fscs]

How do you deal with the stress of an academic job search when your partner is also an academic

Comments

[bex]

Oh, hello. Are you me?

This is where I fear I'll be in the next two years, but I just MARRIED my partner. To make it worse, we're in the same field. He is destined to be far more successful than I. I know what you mean about feeling like your professional life is all-consuming. In the next year or two, my husband will go on the job market and I want him to get the best job he can, the job that will make him happiest. A year later, I will follow.. And then what? I don't know that I'm as attractive as a candidate. My study area is likely a little more in demand than his, but he has reams of publications and I'm still working on my first. He has amazing contacts in the field and mine are slightly less stellar. He wants to be at an R1, top-tier institution and I... I just want a real job with a decent income. And I want a family, and I want to be there with my kids.

So. <3 You are not alone. I can't tell you how we handled it because we haven't, yet, so I'm really excited to see what others say. My husband is extremely supportive, too,

[posthumanthony]

I'm 1/2 of an academic couple. We met in grad school. After we got engaged (and before we finished our Ph.D.s) we agreed that we would defer to whoever got the tenure-track job first. In the process, I hit many snags in my dissertation work while she finished up, got published, and within 3 years scored a tenure-track line at a small college in the middle of nowhere. I came along as the ABD trailing spouse. But since the school was geographically challenged and always looking for qualified adjuncts, they hired me, and it was clear that they wanted me long-term if I could finish my Ph.D. Finished it that semester, and was hired full-time. Within 3 years of that hire, I was hired into a tenure-track line. My wife is now tenured (and chair of our department) and I am halfway to tenure. While the school is in a rural location, it's actually a very good institution and is on its way to really exciting things (upgrading from a College to University, offering more grad programs, etc). It's a very nice place to work

[dravogadro]

We're going through the same thing right now and I will be the trailing partner. He has had several successful job interviews but the most promising thus far is in a remote area. My career path is a bit more uncertain as it is a non-academic path which initially will limit me geographically until I can get more experience. We have done the long-distance thing before so while it is difficult and not ideal, we know it won't be the end of the world. (I am saying this because we do not have the family planning issue FWIW

[clickie]

This is what my postdoc advisor and his partner did: his partner finished his PhD first by a year or so and got a tenure-track position at a place he ended up hating, while my advisor did a postdoc in another state. After that, my advisor got a TT job offer from the institution he's at now, and his partner decided to bail out of his (tenured, by that time) job at the institution he hated and move out here to be with his partner. He eventually got an administrative position at this university and seems to be happy now.

[rebeccmeister]

I just want to say that I am really grateful to see this topic pop up here. It's a difficult one, and so I just hope to see more written on the subject in general. I'm sure that every person's situation winds up being a bit different, so a wide collection of stories seems like it would be the most useful thing to have, for some perspective

[biascut]

How do you deal with the stress of an academic job search when your partner is also an academic?I didn't, I opted out. My partner and me finished our PhDs at the same time, but she was much more strategic and career-focussed during her PhD, meaning that she was 2-3 years ahead of me in terms of the job market. I could see what I'd have to do to get to where she was (getting 3-8 month contracts in various places around the UK, some with an element of teaching, some without), and didn't much fancy it

[biascut]

Randomly, it's one of the things I like about being in a same-sex relationship: I don't think I would deal well if I was in the same situation and it had JUST HAPPENED to fall along the usual gender lines.

[melebeth]

I feel as though there's a really useful essay in that second comment. (You may not want to write it, no longer being an academic, but it would be interesting.)

[coendou]

It's definitely a hard thing to come to grips with. For the longest time I think that part of my aversion to leaving academia was that I didn't want to be one more woman leaving academia due to family. But the fact of the matter is, I have non-academic opportunities in my field and he doesn't. And if the academy doesn't give a shit about our problems, I don't give a shit about it.