Grind less in roles that suit you more
Ashley Voeks on how pivoting from the humanities into industry restored her personal life
Welcome back to my interview series with recovering academics who have transitioned to new careers. I’m excited to share another success story from the humanities. Ashley Voeks is a former assistant professor in French Studies at Texas Tech University who now works as a customer success manager for Harvard Business Publishing. We talk about how her first job interview opened up a network that led to her first industry role and how she has leveraged that experience to move from an academic-adjacent position at McGraw Hill to a broader horizon with corporate clients in her current role.
Remember that if you’re missing the audio format, you can click on the headphones in the Substack app for text-to-speech narration.
I offer a preview of our conversation for free subscribers, but I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a full membership for the full conversation. In addition to two members-only interviews per month, $5/month or $50/year gets you access to 140+ thought pieces (and counting), longform essays for The Chronicle of Higher Education, podcast episodes, private discussion threads, and literary work published in journals such as The Kenyon Review. Your support also allows me keep growing the Recovering Academic community.
Another quick update: I sent an email yesterday about our first book club on Thursday, August 10, from 7:30-9:00 p.m., EST. The majority of survey participants voted for Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members. You can buy a copy on Amazon or Bookshop. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts! Please use this link to join the conversation. Passcode is DxB3u8.
A Conversation with Ashley Voeks
Joshua Doležal: You began, it seems like, with very much the same aspiration of anybody who's getting a PhD. You wanted a tenure track job and you actually made that happen. So yeah, I mean, I'll just read the list of positions you had because it, you were in that group that John Warner calls the “precariat,” or contingent faculty. You were an assistant instructor. And an instructor at Texas, where you did your PhD. Then you were visiting assistant professor at your alma mater Oakland University. And then you got the Holy Grail, the assistant professor gig at Texas Tech. So tell me a little bit about that journey and then sort of what led to you deciding you were going to leave it all behind.
Ashley Voeks: My background is in French Studies and so when I started graduate school, at least my doctoral program, I was pretty aware of what the job market looked like, and so I wanted to be sure that I had alternative routes and things like that. Initially, I wanted to be a professor. I absolutely loved the research. My research specialization was 16th century French literature. So very, very much a specialized field. And of course there were barely any jobs in my field. And so I thought, okay, well my chances aren't good, but let me just kind of give this a shot. My dissertation advisor at the time, he was doing a fantastic job of supporting me and trying to get me into the right conferences and meeting the right people so that I could make this dream come alive.
But I always had in the back of my mind, am I sure I want to do this? This is actually what I want to do long term. and so I tested out the academic job market waters in 2018. Our big conference for job seekers is the Modern Language Association.
And that year it happened to be in New York City. I had one lone interview and I was still ABD at that point, and I thought, all right, let me see how this goes. I went, I interviewed, had a great interview experience, but of course they wanted someone who already had the PhD in hand. I returned to Texas, and that last year of my program was just head down trying to get the dissertation done. I didn't even go on the job market and when June came around, I was lecturing over the summer and I thought, okay, I really need to start turning the CV into a resume.
I started applying for a few different things, having absolutely no idea what I was doing, and someone from that conference in New York City, from Oakland University, reached out to me and said, Hey, we have a visiting assistant professor position open. I know we were talking about this when we met for lunch in New York. Would you be interested in applying? I ended up getting that position and I enjoyed it. I liked being back at the institution where I went for undergrad. I still had that itch though – am I making the right choice? I'm not really sure. That year I started applying to some tenure track positions and also applying to some industry roles, where I was getting rejection after rejection. And so I thought, maybe this isn't as easy as I thought.
Joshua Doležal: Can I ask a frivolous question? Did you do anything dumb like I did when you were applying for jobs? Like get emotionally attached to a position or an institution before you even… For instance, I got an interview with the University of Alaska, Juneau, and I'm from Montana. That was my very first interview – it was a phone interview – and I changed my desktop background to bear fur. Very embarrassing. Did you allow yourself anything like that?
Ashley Voeks: This is something that I would tell former students a couple years after. I would spend a lot of time overanalyzing the job ads. It's important to research the company to try to understand the culture. But I was doing all those things before I even had a phone screening. And I started getting some of those rejection letters that clearly went through their applicant tracking system -- no human eyes ever saw my resume. And as soon as I started to realize, okay, they're getting 300+ applications, they're not even looking at my resume. Maybe before I start getting emotionally invested and getting really geeked about the comfy culture or what they're doing, what they're working on, I should probably return to the drawing board for a second here.
I hadn't done my homework. I hadn't thought deeply about what does it take to be a competitive applicant for an industry role. So by the time March 2020 rolled around, I had an offer at Texas Tech University and I didn't think I wanted to take it. I still wanted to, keep my options open. I was still very serious about looking at non-academic roles.
And then the pandemic happened, and here I am sitting with an offer from an R1 institution and I thought, what feels safe right now? And for me it was like, this is the only thing that feels safe. There are zero unknowns about continuing this academic route. I don't know what tomorrow is going to bring. I don't know what kinds of industries and companies are going to go under completely. So I know that universities are going to pivot to online teaching. I'll still have a job at the end of the day, so I'm just going to do this thing. And so I don't know if it would've been the same story if the pandemic had not happened, but definitely job security and safety in the short term really motivated my decision just take the offer that I'd been given.
But that itch that I hadn't yet scratched just resurfaced after a semester or two. And it really wasn't until I had my performance review after a full year where I really kind of took a step back and thought, oh crap, I don’t know if I'm doing the right thing.
I remember sitting down with my department chair, and she's looking at my CV. She's like, okay, great. You published two articles. Good job. You checked that box. Your teaching evaluations look great. I see that you've done X, Y, and Z as your commitment to university service and departmental service. Just keep doing this for the next five, six years, and you'll be eligible for tenure. And my heart stopped in that moment. I'm going to just keep doing this again and again and again. I feel embarrassed about it, right? Because I'm a humanities PhD. I'm someone who's very introspective. I really like to think and overanalyze things, but I had never asked myself, Ashley, how do you work? How do you like working? I don't want to say my job was monotonous because it wasn't. I had a lot of, freedom to pursue the topics that I was interested in. But I wanted to be in an environment where changes were happening more frequently. Where I was being asked to come into a conversation to bring my expertise, my energy, and contribute to some kind of change. I wanted things that were a little bit more fast paced, a little bit more innovative.
Joshua Doležal: It's interesting that you would've been steeped in academic socialization as a graduate student that was very much preparing you to do that thing for the next 40 years. So it really took you by surprise, the sameness of it?
Ashley Voeks: Yeah, the sameness of it did take me by surprise. It may have been different if there was a job opening at an institution that was more teaching centered, where there was more emphasis on service. At Texas Tech University, it's like 60% research. I enjoyed the research, but, I enjoyed the teaching and the service more. I knew that I was not particularly the right fit, but I also didn't feel that moving to a different institution would be different. And so I thought that the best decision that I could make was to start planning my exit.
And then the last consideration, it was very practical. I was not happy with the pay. It was a pretty big factor.
Joshua Doležal: Even at an R1? So my perception, having taught for 16 years at a private liberal arts school where nobody really expects top drawer compensation, is that R1s are typically the flagship, and Texas Tech is certainly large enough. The profile of a lot of their programs would suggest that they have more money, but they didn't prioritize faculty salary, it sounds like?
Ashley Voeks: No, not for languages.
Joshua Doležal: You had been kind of preparing yourself for this all along and dipping your toe in and applying for jobs in industry. So it wasn't really a pivot exactly. But you became more intentional then. And you did land your first job at McGraw Hill. What were some of the dead ends that you tried and then they just weren't going anywhere… Did you try instructional design? Did you try user experience research? How did you settle on publishing?