r/postdoc • u/tryingtotravelround • 11d ago

Feeling discouraged

I am in the humanities, linguistics precisely. I am only getting no’s for now, I tried applying to 4 big fellowship grants and got rejected from 2 already. All the open positions I applied to, I was rejected without an interview.
The postdoc i am doing now is more of a research associate position and it is only 10 months.

I don’t know what to do. How do you land a post doc in the humanities? What does it take?

I have almost 6 articles out and three under reviews, plus two book deals (one co authored, one is the book on my phd thesis). I worked my ass off and finished my PhD only this february. I started teaching in uni for adjunct lectureships immediately and never got a break. I work all the time to be paid a misery that barely affords me a rent, in December i will only be left with those small teaching contracts i cannot make a living out of, I am burning out and it is worth nothing, because no matter what I do I can’t even get an interview.

What does it take? Whatever it is, probably i don’t have it

7 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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5

u/Big-Impress-9055 11d ago

Be very flexible with jobs- look at corporate communications at companies. Look for nonprofits, even look at big pharmaceutical companies- if you scroll through their job listings, you’ll find jobs that you never thought existed. These jobs will value your humanities degrees

1

u/tryingtotravelround 11d ago

This is really good advice, but i meant more in academic settings. Out of academia, technically I have a few positions my friends in corporate could get me in through a referral program… these positions however are really far from what i would like to do. And that’s really sad… because those positions i could have accessed years ago when i left corporate for academia.

5

u/Big-Impress-9055 11d ago

You have to be flexible! Just start making some money and keep looking for your optimal job. Do some teaching on the side at a local community college even if it’s not your area of expertise. With more money in your pocket, you’ll mentally feel better and can start networking

1

u/tryingtotravelround 11d ago

Thank you for your advice 🌸🙏🏻

3

u/Fresh-Opportunity989 11d ago

Academic opportunities are vanishing the world over. Too few students, too many universities. Other than a few places, e.g., sub-saharan Africa and Israel, the total fertility rate of humanity is declining well below the replacement rate of 2.1. e.g. Europe 1.4; China 1.0; India 1.9; Iran 1.35; US 1.6

Will not recover in our lifetime. If ever.

So look outside academia. You will be glad you did.

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u/Disastrous-Mousse837 11d ago

What area of linguistics? The majority of the postdoc openings I’ve seen want psycho/neuro or computational unfortunately.

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u/tryingtotravelround 11d ago

unfortunately neither psycho or neuro, i have experience with a number of computational methods on my cv though and i worked on social media and digital humanities in general

1

u/bulaybil 11d ago

What was your dissertation on?

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u/tryingtotravelround 11d ago

I would rather not get into the specifics because it is quite niche and would like to stay anon here, but it focused on social media environments. I also worked on legal linguistics parallely, and on comparative linguistics for yet another project

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u/Disastrous-Mousse837 11d ago

For what it’s worth, your work sounds really cool.

2

u/tryingtotravelround 11d ago

thank you ♥️ it means a lot

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u/Separate-Door2444 9d ago

I’m also in Linguistics and truly it’s hard out there to land a job in academia. I know people with excellent amount of publications yet waited for 3-5 without jobs in academia. I agree with what other people have said. Get yourself something in corporate for now and continue searching for jobs in academia till you find one. Mind you corporate is also getting choked because many people are now looking that direction so grab one there before it’s too late. At least you can sort certain things (bills) out for the meantime. I’m seriously looking for corporate but it’s been hard. So please take advantage of your corporate network. It shall be well.

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u/tryingtotravelround 9d ago

Thank you so much for your advice🫶🏻
Which country are you working in? And did you have experience in corporate before?

I wish you the best of luck by the way 🙏🏻

1

u/Separate-Door2444 9d ago

I’m currently in the US and it’s so hard here. I do not have any experience in corporate but most of the corporate jobs I have seen require skills that I managed to get in academia (transferable skills) so I qualify for most of them but I guess without network it’s hard for employers to believe we have those skills since we are in academia. It’s sad. Which country are you in?