What can you do with a PhD in German?

Jennifer Askey on finding happiness as a career coach

Jennifer Askey is a veteran career coach with certifications in positive intelligence, emotional intelligence, resilience at work, and team roles. But she came to coaching in mid-life after a successful career in academe. Jennifer completed a PhD in Germanic Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Washington University in St. Louis and earned tenure as a professor of Modern Languages at Kansas State University, where she advised students, led study abroad programs, and served on the Faculty Senate. Jennifer resigned that position in 2011 after moving with her family to Canada, where she searched for more than five years for another faculty role before redefining her professional path.

We talk about why it took her ten years to fully transition away from academe, how she helps her clients expedite their own job searches, and how academics who are abruptly terminated or who fear that their contracts are not secure can take immediate action to “future proof” their professional lives. Watch for some of this advice in a series of forthcoming episodes on Jennifer’s show, The Mindful Academy Podcast.

To access my full interview with Jennifer and 12 other interviews with PhDs who have pivoted to industry, please consider upgrading your subscription today. As always, my deepest thanks to those who already have.

A Conversation with Jennifer Askey

Joshua Doležal: You have told a version of this story before in a piece for The Chronicle. Remind me what year it was that you resigned?

Jennifer Askey: 2011. And it wasn't an immediate resignation. I negotiated a yearlong leave without pay for my tenured position in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Kansas State University to, and here are my air quotes, “try out moving to Canada with my family for a year.” Like a crazy person, right? As if you're going to sell your house and relocate your children and do all of that just for a little experiment. I'm not quite sure what the story was my husband and I were telling ourselves, but it gave me for a bit a sense of “if this all goes completely sideways, I could go back.” It didn't take me long after arriving in Canada to figure out that regardless, we weren't going to turn around and go back.

Joshua Doležal: So it sounds like you didn't actually make a decision: I can walk away from tenure now. You sort of held on to tenure as a safety net, but then got yourself relocated and realized there was no going back. And so it became involuntary on some level. Is that fair?

Jennifer Askey: Emotionally, that is accurate. Like logistically, I resigned my position in 2012 and I did feel like I had a safety net there for a while, but emotionally, I mean, the story that I told for a really long time is I gave up tenure for my husband's career, which was a net financial, geographical, political, social gain for the family. It was just a net loss for my professional ambitions as a Germanist. I don't like framing it that way anymore. I think where I've gotten to now after 10 years, is that it [German PhD] is not a portable asset and it was not worth it financially. It was not worth it socially. It was not worth it in all sorts of ways. Certainly not worth it for my husband's career and being part of an academic duo.

So we moved to Ontario and we still had a house in Kansas. This was 2011. The house was not selling. I needed to get a job. I spent the summer on what would have been my sabbatical. I also gave up a sabbatical – that part I'm still bitter about, just so we're really clear.

Joshua Doležal: Totally understand!

Jennifer Askey: So, yeah, I did spend the summer making huge progress on my book, but then I needed to get a job. So I took a position at the branch campus of a large public university where I did sort of a special assistant to the Dean. I don't remember exactly what my title was, but I helped faculty members at this relatively new branch campus create new academic programming and revise existing programming. So there was some governance stuff. There was some curriculum mapping stuff. There was a nice way to sort of jump feet first into Canadian university life and how it all worked. So I did that for two and a half years.

And after I'd sort of learned what I needed to learn, I was getting a lot of messages from the administration on that campus that, oh, it would be really great to get you in a faculty role. There were three different “I have a plan to get you in a faculty role” conversations.

And they all petered out. The job was posted and by the time it had gone through the committees to get posted, I was no longer even qualified to apply for it because I didn't do disability studies or something else so this was a kind of bait and switch from the institution.

Joshua Doležal: It was not as much a factor of you voluntarily saying “thanks, but no, thanks.” It felt like something that was dangled in front of you and then pulled away.

Jennifer Askey: Oh, yeah. Multiple times. Absolutely. And then I went to a different institution where I got a renewable two-year teaching contract. It was renewable like three times, and my husband was employed there, and you know, I thought this will be grand – six years to sort of figure my next move out. Well, after two years, all of the people on temporary contracts in the humanities were no longer renewed. Nothing personal, just no enrollment. No money, whatever. So this gets us to 2016 and then it fell apart.

So I spent five years wondering: How am I going to fit into Canadian academia? How am I going to create Academic Career 2.0? Yep. Five years of that. And then when that was not renewed, it was abundantly clear to me that I was not going to try a third institution. I was not going to cobble together jobs. I wanted a career. I wanted a sense of meaning and contribution and stability. And that's when the grief hit.

Joshua Doležal: So there was a lot of deferred grief or denial. You didn't feel like you'd actually given it up. You were still fighting for your toehold in the profession. And even at that point, it wasn't a decision that you made to jump off a cliff. You were pushed off. This is the reality check – you're in free fall. What do you do?

In my own case, it was feeling like there were these other imperatives, and the most powerful imperatives were family priorities, moving closer to elders for my kids, closer to my wife's family. That was a big driver. But it brought a wave of really intense grief and even now the feeling of loss is quite powerful at times.

Jennifer Askey: Can I ask you if that's a loss of a sense of identity and belonging, or…what is it a loss of?

Joshua Doležal: Ah, well, now you're asking the coach’s questions.

Jennifer Askey: Sorry.

Joshua Doležal: It's a loss of so many things. I mean, there's an ironic similarity between how women feel having fought against the odds to get a significant career, like an academic position, and how I felt as a man raised in a blue collar family where earning was everything, and if you didn't have a job, you were nothing. I had built this career with no support really from family, and a lot of discouragement actually, because I was being “brainwashed” by the liberal institution and so on. And then I beat the odds of the academic job lottery and made this life for myself. So earning potential was part of what I was grieving, but identity and belonging, too – the feeling that when I got up to teach, it really felt like it was the thing I was born to do. And having grown up as a Pentecostal kid without a TV, having a sense of being the weird kid, to have a place where I belonged without a doubt was a big thing. To give that up was painful, but that's enough about me. What was that grief like for you?

Jennifer Askey: Yeah, I asked the question because it was for me very much a loss of identity and a rejection of belonging. We as a couple couldn't make our institution in Kansas fit for both of us. And, did I want to teach German grammar for the rest of my life? No. I knew I didn't want that, which was what part of the reason I was willing to do this experiment. But when it became clear to me that that path was closed, the bottom fell out. I grieved a loss of identity, a loss of social prestige and cachet, but it was really like, “I have spent my entire life in education and I am now in my late forties and I have zero skills for the real world. I'm only good for one thing.” I had all of these narratives in my head like this. I refer to the summer of 2016 as the summer I held down the couch. Like, I just kept it from floating away by spending long stretches napping and sobbing with my dog on the couch. To the point where acquaintances and friends literally handed me their therapist's business cards. I think I had a sign on my forehead, like, “misery lives here.” At some point my husband said, I get it and I feel like shit about it because it feels like it's my fault. But you have got to get off the couch. Like go do something. Go volunteer. This is awful to watch.

Joshua Doležal: You had told me it took you 10 years to find the role where you're thriving now, but I had misunderstood that half of it was sort of squandered in this pursuit of a pipe dream. When I talk with other folks who identify as recovering academics, we say it's not a joke. There really is a serious recovery from the teaching high or the identity fix, whatever it is that then comes with the overwork hangover – you get this much reward for this much pain. It takes something like an intervention to just say, no, I'm done with it. And so you spent five years in that pattern of denial and then you spent another five years experimenting and finding where you are now?

Jennifer Askey: It was a summer breakdown that did drive me to therapy, but also to coaching. And the first coach I worked with was like, you need to deal with some anger before you are going to be productive. So you go to therapy and then you come back to me. But I did work with a couple coaches around, just help me find the next thing. And both of them at some point said, you might be wired for coaching. Once you're no longer in white hot rage and in grief, you could take who you are and some of those pedagogical skills and translate that to coaching. And so I threw myself into coaching, which then meant trying to figure out how to run a business, which wasn't great. But I was no longer grasping for the pipe dream. I was just trying to figure out how to make money.

Joshua Doležal: Well, so now you help people like me transition from academe to industry or nonprofits, but I assume that you try to help folks minimize their discovery so that it's not 5 to 10 years long. So how do you help people avoid your own timeline?

Jennifer Askey: I'm thinking of a client right now who has at least a solid year. They're in a visiting position and for at least a year various colleagues and administrators have dangled the conversion to a tenure-line. You don't want to let that go if it's being dangled in front of you. So as a coach, it's not my job to tell you what to do. I don't know your reality. I don't know your truth. But I do things like, okay, we're going to look at data and statistics and know that the chances of this panning out are really slim. And so, what is an aligned direction you could go? Most of the people that I’m talking to are like, all right, if I'm leaving the academy, I'm leaving the academy. There's no Center for Teaching and Learning or curriculum support or whatever – just get me out of here because I'm either a professor or just screw this joint. Which I think might be healthier. But for a lot of people, it's like, well, is there something else I could do? And so I talk reality a lot because we do grasp and we do conjure up the what ifs. A lot of what I do is “Listen, I've walked the road. I've watched a lot of people walk the road. Down that path is pain. Let's come up with a solid plan that you own, regardless of what you might be interested in.”