Lindsay: So you get caught in this cycle and you're working so much and your brain is like fried. You can't get a raise or that next level of, of teaching contract until you finish your Ph. D. But you're so caught up teaching for basically peanuts that you have no mental energy or time to finish the Ph.
Matt: D. Hey folks, and welcome to the Grad School Sucks podcast.
Matt: The show for academics who want to learn about non academic I've got a fantastic conversation that I want to share with you today, but before I get there, I want to say many apologies for going a few weeks without an episode. Earlier this month, we had a big snowstorm here in Kentucky that shut down the schools for about a week.
Matt: Forcing my son to come home and do virtual school at home with me and my wife. And then right after he went back to school, it was time for me to move my family into a new apartment. So I did not plan to take this many weeks off, or really any time off at all. But, things just happened, and I had to attend to other priorities.
Matt: But, we are back, moving forward with weekly episodes, and today, I'm going to share a conversation with you about adjuncting that I had with Lindsey Handren, a social and health psychologist who is working to finish her PhD. She spoke recently with me about adjuncting, or the act of teaching part time at a university.
Matt: And in my conversation with her, she shared the following things. How she got started with adjuncting, the positives and negatives that she experienced as an adjunct professor, the pay scale for adjunct teaching, and who she thinks Should and should not consider adjunct work and what she has planned next for her career as she has left adjuncting behind.
Matt: I think this is a fantastic episode that really exposes the reality of adjunct work and how much of a trap it could possibly be. And that being said, if you're interested in adjuncting or simply want to know more, I highly recommend you listen to this episode with Lindsay. Be sure to connect with Lindsay on Instagram and LinkedIn, and I will have some links in the description of this episode where you can find both of her profiles.
Matt: And without further ado, let's get to the show. Lindsay Handren, thank you so much for coming on the show and chatting with me today.
Lindsay: Yes, it is super exciting to finally hang
Matt: out. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so before we get started, uh, for folks who want to connect with you, you recommend Instagram and LinkedIn.
Matt: Is that right?
Yeah.
Lindsay: You can find me on Instagram at Linuscent or on LinkedIn. Perfect.
Matt: Yeah. And I'll have links to both of them in the description below so people can find them. So Lindsay, one of the topics that, sorry, could you give a little just bio into like what your background is and that kind of a thing?
Lindsay: Yeah, so I have a mixed bag of background, but academically I am a PhD candidate in Applied Social Psychology. It's a, my program is super research intensive, so a ton of background in research methodology and statistics. It's mostly quantitative, but some qualitative stuff. So I have a ton of transferable skills that I'm only recently finding out are transferable, but I have my master's and I've been working on my dissertation.
Lindsay: So it's been, it's been an exciting academic journey so far.
Matt: Yeah. And, and one of the things along the way, absolutely. One of the things that I feel like has like underscored some of our conversation over the years has been. Adjuncting. Yeah. And so I was wondering if you could chat a little bit about what adjuncting is and maybe some of your experiences with
Lindsay: it.
Lindsay: Yeah, so with adjunct teaching, it basically, I think adjunct semantically means in addition to or, I don't know, complementary, complementing an existing thing. So it's basically a part time teaching position at a university or college. A lot of adjuncts are people like me who are still finishing their dissertation, but they need teaching experience.
Lindsay: They know the subject matter really well because we're actually in it, being immersed in whatever it is that we're teaching actively. So we know it really well. We need these jobs. Me, personally, I had come from only being a student and doing research assisting and stuff within the lab at my grad school for years.
Lindsay: So, any sort of job was very exciting, but with our program specifically, we have to have at least one semester of teaching experience and our portfolio is a checkbox to move along to the next step in candidacy. So with teaching, it was, it was, you have to do it to, to move to the next level. So that's how I got started, but I also grew up wanting to be a professor.
Lindsay: I had this like idealized. of what that life would be like. And I always loved research and I like talking to people and I like explaining things and teaching. So that seemed like the most perfect fit and getting a PhD, going through academia, doing all the research was the roadmap there. So it was just a step to fulfilling my lifelong dream.
Matt: And so you, did you. Question, did you get paid for the first class you taught?
Lindsay: Yeah.
Matt: Oh, God, I didn't.
Lindsay: So, a lot of people, and I didn't, I didn't realize this, but talking to other people who were teaching as well, or other friends I have in different programs, they would teach at the university that they're a grad student as part of the program.
Lindsay: We didn't have that. There were teaching assistant positions, but The actual adjuncting was completely at a different university. So we had to apply and do interviews and talk to people and get the job. And it was paid through. I'm in California. It was a California state university, Cal Poly Pomona. So it's through the California government, our paychecks would come.
Lindsay: And then my grad school is a private university. So it was two completely different life buckets that the subject matter and everything, and the academia essence of it overlapped, but two completely different universities and programs. Which, I don't know.
Matt: So what was your experience like adjuncting?
Lindsay: It was, so in the beginning, and I started, I started teaching back in 2016.
Lindsay: And it was, at the time, I was so excited. It was, I felt so purposeful, especially coming from being just a grad student with an advisor who had us on call 24 7 constantly. Doing whatever reading paper is doing like turnarounds on edits and all of the stuff that grad students have to do And getting no money.
Lindsay: We didn't have stipends in our program. So it was It's basically student loans and savings and help from parents or anything to exist. So getting a paycheck was great. I remember the first time I actually was walking on campus as a professor feeling so purposeful and just having this sense of like, wow, I'm actually making an impact in other people's lives.
Lindsay: I feel like I'm doing something. So that was super motivating and this huge incentive to keep doing it. And I loved it. And every single day I would teach, I would think to myself, like, I don't understand how all of these, like, the whole, like, cranky old professor archetype, and, like, it's just so fulfilling and it's so great.
Lindsay: How can people be, like, so salty all the time? All the, like, the long time professors. I came to realize that years later, but in the beginning it was great. It was also something that I was warned about from other people in the program. Basically don't get stuck in the adjuncting vortex or the cycle where you're never going to finish your dissertation.
Lindsay: I'm like, no, no, not me. I'll get, I'll get out of it. I'll be fine. But it lasted for six years.
Matt: Yeah. How, when did you start to feel like maybe adjuncting wasn't as great as you thought it was originally? It
Lindsay: was probably, man, it was, it was probably after the, the worst of it was when pandemic hit and everything was on zoom prior to that.
Lindsay: It was. It wasn't great. I didn't love, I didn't love the, the system of academia when I started, and I started noticing that pretty soon within the first year maybe. Just the insanely non stop hours. You're just alone. At our program, I remember seeing this sheet of all of the faculty in the department. It was in a psychology department, and on the, on the sheet, all of the adjuncts names were in red, and then the full time professors were in black.
Lindsay: It was probably 75 percent red, so it was, the whole department was primarily adjuncts like me. Actually a number of people from my grad school, and then just various others who were adjuncts there. And it, it started getting frustrating because there's There's no continuity really between teachers, instructors, subject matter, there's the learning objectives overall, but we had free reign as far as what textbook we use, as long as it fits within the realm of achieving the learning outcomes with the students and everything.
Lindsay: But I noticed along the way that there was, the students were very frustrated because they won. We're constantly having new professors all the time because the adjuncts would cycle in and cycle out. There was only a handful of students who actually got to know their professors in any sort of working capacity or like establish a working relationship.
Lindsay: So they would end up at the end with no one really to write letters of recommendation for jobs or for grad school. And there was so much variation in their foundational knowledge or what they knew. Because there was so much variation in the people who taught and cycled through as adjuncts. And no one really communicated.
Lindsay: We don't go to faculty meetings. We aren't really involved in any of the, the full time or tenured professors. We show up a few days a week, whatever days our classes are that we teach. Hold an office hour, however many office hours, but it's a shared office. It's not a dedicated space. Most of us had multiple jobs or are grad students, so we're not on campus all the time.
Lindsay: So we didn't see the other people in the department much. So there wasn't much communication. And that's, everyone, everyone's busy, everyone's doing their best, it's not any fault of the faculty, it's just the system in itself, how it is. So, the, the instructors, all the adjuncts aren't really communicating about like, learning objectives and how this course should be like the stepping stone for the next course up, and these students should be prepared in this way.
Lindsay: And I, all of the courses I taught were upper division, uh, so juniors and seniors. Two of them were larger lecture classes that fulfilled upper division general ed social science requirement. So, a lot of different majors. Those ones weren't as big of an issue because it was just meant to be a very diverse audience.
Lindsay: But I also taught a lot of sections of experimental psychology, which is It's one of the advanced methods and stats for the, the undergrads. It's basically experimental research methods. So hypothesis testing, different conditions, IB, DB, all of that stuff, which eight. You'd have to have a baseline understanding of, uh, basic stats to get to that level.
Lindsay: And after a while, it was difficult because half the class had never even conducted a t test, which is the, the central, the basic thing for any sort of experimental design or comparing groups. And for ours, we had to just, uh, the course requirement learning outcomes, they had to do their, an individual project.
Lindsay: on their own, which was fun and great for me because I like doing research and helping and teaching, but they, the requirement was to do a two by two. So they had to know interactions. With that, we have to use an ANOVA, and most of them didn't even know the different types of variables. Um, just the basic level stuff that they should have known.
Lindsay: So I'd spend, like, weeks having to try to get everybody up to speed, and then everything else would be crammed in, and I would be, like, making all of these additional handouts, or just Teaching stuff that was not within my purview just to get them up to speed. So everything was just sort of nothing. Well, I don't know.
Lindsay: That was frustrating because so many students had no idea, or like, I never learned this and they, a lot of them had different instructors when they did take stats who use different textbooks and who prioritize different things or. Maybe left out certain things here and there to make up time or whatever.
Lindsay: It was just so There there were so many different backgrounds. And so that was that was a little frustrating yeah, and it just again lends to the system of academia and in the high turnover and the lack of consistency with teaching teaching styles and Student frustration and a whole slew of things.
Lindsay: Yeah.
Matt: How many courses would you teach at one time when you're an adjunct?
Lindsay: Normally I would, every semester I would tell myself I'm just going to teach one class as just to have something going on and then I'll have more time to work on my dissertation. But then I would end up taking extra courses because there are always courses that needed to be filled.
Lindsay: So usually it was There's two sections of the experimental psych, and that one was the lecture section was just 24 students, and then there were lab sections with 12 students each lab. So it would be four days a week of teaching the lecture, lecture section, and then also the four days of lab sections.
Lindsay: But for every lecture, there were two corresponding lab sections. So it was, that was a lot. Some semesters I would teach one section of experimental psych and one section of health psych. Which is a larger, it was like 115 students lecture. So that one was less hands on, but it was a lot of students and a lot of grading and emails and feedback.
Lindsay: And it was quite a bit. So hour wise, even when I was teaching just one section, so there were semesters that. I would plan on, okay, I'm not going to teach this semester. When they ask me to teach, I'm going to, to be firm and say that I have to focus on my dissertation, and I'm not going to teach this semester.
Lindsay: And every single time they would need something, I would say yes and I would do it. Even if it was just one class, uh, like a health psychology lecture that was one night a week for three hours. I would still end up working basically as much as when I was teaching four days a week just because of all the prep work and grading and, and emails and student concerns and office hours.
Lindsay: It was pretty much nonstop and it's, it's mentally exhausting work because you're constantly thinking about. I have to grade, I have to prep the next lecture, I have to make sure this assignment's up, I have to make sure it's something that the students are going to understand so that they can even do the assignment correctly, and then always In the back of your mind worrying about student evaluations, because the student evaluations are so important in academia.
Lindsay: And a lot of times they're just based on whether the student is happy with you that day or not. Not, not so much like your overall teaching picture. So there are a lot of things that were just like constantly running in the background. So, like, all the CPUs were being used up all the time.
Matt: I bet. I bet. Do you recall, if you don't mind sharing, how much you were making per class?
Matt: I
Lindsay: don't remember per class, I should have checked on this, but the most I ever made when I was teaching two sections of Experimental Psych with the corresponding lab so that counted as more units than just a normal lecture class. And a lecture class on top of that. The most I ever was paid as an adjunct was it was close to maybe like 40 grand a year.
Lindsay: I think monthly I would get. After taxes, my monthly paycheck was 3, 400, which is not much, like, the rent and just bills, it still was barely scraping by, which is insane, but when, I had, I had not yet opened my eyes to the rest of industry or other jobs or other sectors of anything in life, so I just figured this was Normal and three grand, or even when I was just teaching one class 1, 500 a month was a lot compared to the 0 a month I've made as a grad student.
Lindsay: So it was still something and I think that has a lot to do with the sort of the the adjunct trap how you just get stuck in this cycle of teaching because you're you're not making money they pay adjuncts very low wages basically poverty level most adjuncts have multiple side hustles just to pay their basic living expenses so you get caught in this cycle and you're working so much and your brain is like fried and There's always something to do or something to worry about on top of the just constant financial stress of how am I going to pay my bills this month or next month and you can't get to the next level of You can't get a raise or that next level of of teaching contract until you finish your phd But you're so caught up teaching for basically Peanuts that you have no mental energy or time to finish the phd so You keep working for low money But then you still can't finish the PhD to get more money.
Lindsay: So you have to keep working for a little money. And it's just this, this whole, uh, Ouroboros that, that symbol of the snake eating its own tail or whatever. That's essentially what it is. It's like Ouroboros of adjuncting poverty that you just have to get out of, take the leap out of it, finish the PhD.
Matt: Hey folks, I want to take just a second to interrupt my conversation with Lindsey to let you know that if you are not completely sold on an academic career for yourself after you finish your graduate degree, then I encourage you to think about what You're already taking a great first step by listening to the podcast and learning about different roles that PhDs and other graduate degree holders are getting in industry.
Matt: And if you're ready to take this to the next step, then I encourage you to download my six week checklist. It is a one page checklist, a free PDF. That lays out all of the tasks that I believe graduate students and PhDs need to complete in order to be competitive on the industry job market. If you would like to download it, you can get it at sixweekchecklist.
Matt: com or click the link in the description of this episode. Alright, back to our conversation. And so now you're finishing up your dissertation. You're looking towards the future. So what are you thinking employment wise in the future?
Lindsay: A lot of people from our program end up working for the government, federal departments, or state departments, in health.
Lindsay: So, our program, it's applied social psychology, which encompasses a lot of stuff, but the specific research lab that I work with is health psychology and prevention science. So, there's a, a health focus to it, along with a huge battery of research methodology and advanced statistics and all this, this research know how.
Lindsay: So, a lot of people from the program end up in applied positions doing, being social scientists, health scientists, statisticians for the FDA or California Department of Health. government roles and getting out of academia since at this point most academic jobs even available are adjuncting jobs because Universities don't really want to spend the money to pay for full time.
Lindsay: Yeah professors which is It's awful, but yeah, the FDA, California, the health, the government agencies pay livable wages. All of my friends who work there are super happy and talk about how it's like a healing journey because they actively do not want you working when you're not on the clock. They want you to take your weekends, take your evenings.
Lindsay: So that's, that's one thing. And then also just looking at different industry jobs outside of government sector, a lot of stuff that I've learned through following you on social media and your journey with industry. It's, I don't know, there's so many possibilities now that my eyes are finally open and I'm outside of that, like, toxic bubble of academia.
Lindsay: Yeah. So, hopefully something. I remember getting my first paycheck, or seeing my first contract, and I was gonna be making 20, 444 pre tax. For a semester and I thought that was so much money Like I called my my partner at the time and was like, oh my god I think it must be a typo because I wasn't expecting to make this much but 20 grand Like thinking I was somehow like scamming the system and getting paid all like mega bucks What in hindsight like no, that's literally poverty
Matt: Yeah, well, I look forward to seeing you go on that healing journey with whatever job you get next Washing away the past, getting used to like weekends, evenings, regular income.
Matt: Yeah.
Lindsay: Yeah. Yeah. I am
Matt: too. So I just have one last question for you, Lindsay. So I know a ton of people listening. Just statistically, there's going to be a handful that may be looking at adjuncting, either when they're a grad student while they're dissertating, or right after they graduate, and maybe they're trying to get that tenure track job, and so they're going to adjunct while they maybe wait another year before they apply.
Matt: If we haven't hammered the point home enough, What do you think? Should they adjunct, or what do you think they should consider if they are gonna adjunct?
Lindsay: If it's a requirement for your graduate program, like it was for mine, and you have to have at least a semester of teaching to check the box, just teach one semester and be done with it.
Lindsay: It's not worth the Complete soul draining, poverty level, mental effort and energy sucking time away from actually finishing your PhD. I don't know. That's basically it. Do the least you can and get out of there. Unless The only caveat I think would be If you have if you don't need the money if you are literally if you have a partner with a good income or whatever Situation and you literally are not reliant on this as a source of income and you love teaching passionately then that may be the only situation I can see where it would be worthwhile.
Lindsay: Because, it used to anyway. I get it would depend on the students. I used to genuinely enjoy it. I felt purposeful, and I felt like I was really making an impact, which is something that is so much better than the feeling I had. writing and in dissertating and waiting for feedback and edits on a paper and nothing really Fulfilling and purposeful, but it's not worth it.
Lindsay: You will find purpose outside of it Yeah, do what you have to do if you have to teach if not Stay away from adjuncting. Yeah
Matt: Yeah. Yeah. We'll join you. All right, Lindsay. Well, I appreciate you sharing your journey with that. I think, I think many people just don't understand the, the cycle that you can get trapped in with adjuncting and frankly how universities are well aware of it and it benefits the university system.
Matt: And so they will let people just continue to sign up for a raw deal because it's great for them. And then when those people end up leaving because they're fed up, there's tons more PhDs or, or ABDs that are, that are ready to take their next spot. Yeah. Unfortunately. Well, if folks want to reach out to you again, Instagram and LinkedIn, I'll have those links in the description.
Matt: I'm
Lindsay: happy to connect. I've just started growing my LinkedIn network and academia. We don't really use that. So now that I'm finally getting outside of that and making moves. I'm finally growing my network and connections and I'm very happy to connect.
Matt: Yeah. Well, great. Thank you so much, Lindsay. It was great chatting with you.
Matt: Hey folks, that was my conversation with Lindsay on adjuncting. I hope you got a lot out of that and it illuminated a little bit of what an adjuncting experience might be like for you and might negatively affect you. Do you want to connect with Lindsay on Instagram and LinkedIn, or you want to start your journey to industry by downloading my six week checklist.
Matt: You can find links for all of that in the description below. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving me a rating or review on Apple podcasts and Spotify. It really does impact. My ability to reach new listeners, and I greatly appreciate it. And if you're on YouTube, feel free to give me a thumbs up and a comment.
Matt: Thank you all for listening, and I will see you all next week.