What makes it even worse is the disdain academics show toward “popular” historians and journalists who are able to convey the same ideas to the masses far better. There’s of course issues with non-academic sources, but the dogmatic dismissal was a mentality I simply couldn’t deal with. If my articles as a journalist counted, I’d have way more publications than the average grad student.
Yes, true. It’s dumbfounding that so many academics don’t get it. No one is reading our work except the grad students we assign to read them. It’s the tail wagging the dog.
There are definitely other pathways from international relations, including political risk and security consulting, among others. I wish you all the best, I think it's always good to be able to know when to cut things off (sunk cost fallacy being all too easy to fall into).
Such jobs are pretty uncommon or nonexistent in Japan, unfortunately. The only way I could’ve possibly used my IR degree was moving back to the United States and finding a job in the DC area like most in the field, but that isn’t an option for me as someone who has no intention of leaving. That’ll be covered in the next column, so stay tuned.
That all sounds like a tremendous headache and not a lot of enjoyment to get out of it even if successful. Believe me, I know the feeling. I started off in the electrical field and kept bouncing from one non-start job to another before switching careers to nursing which has been much more stable for my family.
In retrospect, I should have been writing novels and could have been in on the big golden age of amazons self-pub wave but that’s hindsight
Indeed. I suppose the only consolation is that I at least recognized this sooner rather than later. Many get burned by academia when they’re trying to find a job, get tenure, etc. so it’s quite a brutal world.
I’m glad to hear you found a job that’s working out. I hope that my existing audience will lead to some kind of initial readership with the books I intend to write. Would certainly be happy if what I put out one day is as successful as The Black Crown!
Spot on with the critiques here. Academic publishing is annoying and tedious. The writing is often terrible. And Im saying this as an academic…
What makes it even worse is the disdain academics show toward “popular” historians and journalists who are able to convey the same ideas to the masses far better. There’s of course issues with non-academic sources, but the dogmatic dismissal was a mentality I simply couldn’t deal with. If my articles as a journalist counted, I’d have way more publications than the average grad student.
Yes, true. It’s dumbfounding that so many academics don’t get it. No one is reading our work except the grad students we assign to read them. It’s the tail wagging the dog.
There are definitely other pathways from international relations, including political risk and security consulting, among others. I wish you all the best, I think it's always good to be able to know when to cut things off (sunk cost fallacy being all too easy to fall into).
Such jobs are pretty uncommon or nonexistent in Japan, unfortunately. The only way I could’ve possibly used my IR degree was moving back to the United States and finding a job in the DC area like most in the field, but that isn’t an option for me as someone who has no intention of leaving. That’ll be covered in the next column, so stay tuned.
That all sounds like a tremendous headache and not a lot of enjoyment to get out of it even if successful. Believe me, I know the feeling. I started off in the electrical field and kept bouncing from one non-start job to another before switching careers to nursing which has been much more stable for my family.
In retrospect, I should have been writing novels and could have been in on the big golden age of amazons self-pub wave but that’s hindsight
Indeed. I suppose the only consolation is that I at least recognized this sooner rather than later. Many get burned by academia when they’re trying to find a job, get tenure, etc. so it’s quite a brutal world.
I’m glad to hear you found a job that’s working out. I hope that my existing audience will lead to some kind of initial readership with the books I intend to write. Would certainly be happy if what I put out one day is as successful as The Black Crown!
Building a readership is the hard part of being an author. I know you'll nail it, bro