A journal of applications and rejections: February 2019 — November 2020
With the exception of a short research grant that was terminated due to COVID-19 (read or listen to the article I wrote about this experience), I have been out of work since February 2019. That doesn’t mean I have not been working: it means I have not been paid.
This is not an uncommon situation for an academic researcher: you love what you do and you keep doing it during the interims between one contract and (hopefully) the next. You keep publishing, reading, lecturing, and all that comes with the territory.
I have always done my best work during those in-between times. Because I can organize my own time and prioritize without distractions. I love those times, but of course they can’t last for too long.
Besides my research work, I have been investing a lot of time in my interviews. My podcast (Technoculture), launched in 2018, slowly developed into a series of video interviews hosted on my YouTube channel. And it took a long time, but finally I started calling this old and new passion with its name: journalism. My dream job, if you ask me today, is being a journalist.
Old and new because I had worked as a print journalist between 2003 and 2015. While I was trying to make it as a musician. Then came the PhD and that marked the beginning of a decade in academia, leaving both journalism and music behind. Everything converges in life!
This is a necessary preamble to explain why and how I have conducted my job search. From February to October 2019, I have exclusively invested in academic jobs, like postdoc and professor positions. I applied all over the world, from China to New Zealand to the UK. I have only had one job interview, in Maynooth, Ireland. Which was unsuccessful. But a nice experience.
Between November 2019 and February 2020, I set my mind to starting a second PhD (this time in Philosophy) in the US or Canada. I passed the TOEFL exam (in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania) and the infamous GRE (in Lisbon, Portugal). The exams were $205 each; plus $20 and $27 (for TOEFL and GRE respectively) to attach the official results to each application. I submitted a total of 24 applications. All together I spent about $5,000. The whole machination has been very demanding. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, for example, I was sitting at my computer, finalizing a payment to Duke University. That’s how 2020 started for me.
As you can see in Fig. 1, I was accepted in five different universities. One in the US and four in Canada. Bad news: none offered a scholarship, except one, but it was too small to live on. Stubborn as I am, I still accepted UdeM’s offer and enrolled as a full time doctoral student (oui, in French). I started following the first course in June 2020 (in Chinese Bouddhism), but dropped out shortly after. No regrets.
From July to September 2020, I got a bit desperate and started applying for any job. I just wanted to work. I sent away a fair share of applications as a receptionist, night concierge, call center operator, information desk, driver, tech support, translator. Nothing came back. The Summer and COVID didn’t help, but I didn’t expect such a disaster. There was nothing I could do.
The first time I heard the word #overqualified was during a job interview at a warehouse in Lot, south of Brussels, in Belgium. We had just completed the tour through the warehouse. Interesting experience: I felt like Luigi Nono visiting a factory in the 1960s. A truly alienating job (scanning bar codes for hours while being monitored for performance), but I would have taken it gladly. Believe it or not, after ten years in research — too much computer, too much intellectual work — I would have been glad to switch my brain off and scan beep-beep. For two or three months, that is.
No! I was too smart to beep-beep. Even if they didn’t know I had a PhD, I probably looked smart, I don’t know… I certainly tried to look dumb, but they told me I didn’t match their “typical profile” and yes, they used the word “overqualified” and sent me home. I mopped for the rest of the day. If I can’t work in a warehouse, what can I do?
I know I am overqualified to work in a warehouse, but if I need a job, can't I be a dishwasher or sweep up some hair just because I have a degree? I don’t feel “too good” for any job. Why does the job market consider me “too good” for certain jobs?
Since October 2020, I have exclusively focused on jobs in communication. I applied for every flavour of multimedia journalist, multi-skilled journalist (?), digital reporter, video journalist, tv anchor, content editor, social media manager, writer, author, podcast producer. One application came back positive: since November, I have been a tech journalist for the 4i-mag.com, contributing three articles each month. (Read my first article.)
I have recently been through a selection process for three full time jobs: in Amsterdam, Budapest, and Rome. After some demanding practical tests, which made me wonder if this is a new way to get free labour, I have received the famous “we regret” letter, and that was it. Two had the decency to tell me what was missing in my profile, the third served me the “overqualified” slap in the face.
I literally almost cried on Zoom. At this point, “overqualified” is a trigger word for me. I wish someone told me what job suits me. Because I don’t know anymore. I applied for an Assistant Editor position with a scientific publisher in Toronto and I was rejected because I am overqualified. I applied for a Senior Editor position somewhere else and I was rejected because I don’t have enough experience. Which one is it?
This is now, November 2020. I am still out of work. I spend my waking hours working on my podcast, my video interviews, or writing non-academic stuff. I am studying for a mini-documentary, rehearsing for some videos on COVID, and on Thursday Amazon delivers my first green screen (quite excited about it!)
Earlier today, I spoke to an audience of PhD students at the Technical University of Denmark on the topic: “How to deal with rejections.” When the organizers invited me, they put it very nicely, but basically they were saying: “You’re an expert in failing! Nobody we know has applied five times for a Marie Curie grant!”
And little did they know I have a database with all my rejections! I’m such a pro. In February 2019, I set up a database to record every application, rejection, job interview, and relevant event to the management of my unemployment.
This is what my database shows today — not an Excel file, an actual MariaDB database, thank you very much. Data entry is performed via a shell script, a general overview is accessible via a PHP web page, all the rest is done in the terminal or with Workbench.
The database’s first entry was created on February 8, 2019. As of today (November 22, 2020) there are 452 entries. And they grow by the hour, because believe it or not, the rejection from Amsterdam came in as I was writing this.
Each record contains: the entry date, a keyword (like application, rejection, job interview), a short description (for example, what position I applied for and where), and a longer description including details on how to retrieve relevant messages in my mail archive.
Since February 2019, I have submitted a total of 161 applications and received 60 rejections. Since only a handful of applications came back positive, it follows that almost 100 potential employers did not send any feedback.
Fig. 2 shows the ratio between applications and (recorded) rejections.
You may notice that during 2019 I have only sent a few applications each month. They were all academic positions. You can only send so many of those.
Between December 2019 and February 2020, I have worked on the PhD applications in the US and Canada (orange bars), followed by the wave of rejections (grey bars between February and April 2020).
There is a new increase in applications starting in mid-Summer 2020. That’s when I was applying for the jobs as receptionist, call center agent, etc. August is when I visited the warehouse in Lot.
September slowed down because, besides feeling discouraged from too many rejections, I left new applications aside to focus on the Marie Curie project which I submitted on September 9th. Days and days (and nights) of work. I promised myself this would be the fifth and last one! Results will be out in February 2021. Don’t hold your breath.
During the last two months (October and November 2020), there is a clear spike in applications. That’s when I decided to start bombarding the world with applications for jobs in communication and journalism. These are much easier than academic applications. Normally you only need a cover letter and a CV. Without fear of exaggerating, I’d say that one Marie Curie submission is worth 100 of these. Yet, besides some job interviews, nothing came of it.
Of the 161 total applications, only 33 were sent in 2019. The rest was sent in 2020, especially after the Summer (59 in October and November alone).
The month with the most applications is October 2020 (30 applications). But November follows with 29, and the month is not over yet.
The month with the most (recorded) rejections is November 2020 with 9 rejections (and it is not over yet), followed by March 2020 with 7.
The database also informs me that I have had 16 job interviews, I have been to 7 conferences, and I participated in 36 training activities between February 2019 and November 2020.
To use an expression dear to my colleagues in science, “the data shows” that I have not been sitting on my laurels during the past 22 months. These are uncertain times, and not being able to land a job all this time is frustrating. Especially considering my qualifications. There is so much I can do. So much I want to do! Fortunately, I am already doing it, thanks to the fact that my passion is in journalism, communication, multimedia, reporting, storytelling… and all of this can be done independently today.
Money is a different issue. I’ll keep it for another article. Suffice to say, I am slowly using up my savings, but thank God for those. I am a happy person and I win every day I wake up and do what I love. I don’t fully understand this “overqualification” mantra that keeps me out of work, but I know I have my freedom, I am the master of my time, and eventually something will come up. As it always does.
