This is a guest post written by Julie Doner, Part 1 of 2.

Life After the PhD

It took me six years and eleven months to finish my PhD, and come this June, it will have been six years and eleven months since I graduated. But those two periods of time do not feel like the same length, like that optical illusion of two parallel lines of equal length with opposite arrowheads on the ends. My years in grad school were such a significant part of my life and I grew a lot as a person through them. I suppose I’ve grown about the same amount in the years since, but it was not linear and there was no committee ticking off requirements, so it is not as obvious. I feel like I’ve been in a holding pattern of dead-end contracts, waiting for my real life and my proper career to start. There have been milestones, to be sure; I started my first full-time job! I moved to a new city! But I also lost my first full-time job, and now I’m looking to start over in a whole new direction.

I graduated with a PhD in linguistics in 2019, launching onto the academic job market during the pandemic. During my first few years post-graduation, I worked as an adjunct across multiple institutions and was also part of a team that developed an online multimedia open access introductory linguistics textbook. This was not sustainable long term, and by 2022, my plan was to let my various part-time contracts expire and go on Employment Insurance to explore non-academic careers—unless something fell in my lap. Then a friend, who had been a few years ahead of me in the PhD program, messaged me to suggest that I apply for a one-year position at the University of Manitoba. I was hired, and the position was extended twice, each time for another year.

I loved working at UM, but it was still not stable employment. Every year, the wait to find out whether I would have another contract the following year was torturous. But it also started to feel routine, even silly to worry about it. My boss was looking for ways to keep me on. A new dean was hired, who was more teaching-oriented and less business-oriented. I was feeling hopeful. I nearly had enough money saved up for a down payment on a cheap house in Winnipeg prices.

My contract at UM was not renewed a third time because of a hiring freeze in the Faculty of Arts. The Faculty Association had signed a new collective agreement with significant raises, the trade war with the US had started, and the Canadian government had decided to severely limit the number of student visas, cutting off the cash cow of international student tuition.

I had really settled in and loved teaching, so I was quite upset. I registered for EI and planned to take a short two-week break—which turned into a four-month break. My therapist told me I was grieving the loss of my job. I worried that I would never feel like getting off the couch. Finally, I signed up for career counseling at a local non-profit. My career counselor also identified that I was grieving and asked me if I was even ready to start looking for a job. I said that finding something else to be excited about would help.

A New Hope

While browsing some career counseling websites with my career counselor, we came across Maclean’s 2018 list of top twenty-five jobs in Canada. Speech-Language Pathology was number fifteen. I had known since my undergrad that SLP was a possible career path for linguists. In my undergrad, I was more interested in big picture theoretical questions, cross-linguistic typology, and abstract models. When I was first looking for a job after my PhD, I was dissuaded by the requirement to go back to school. Once I was settled in Winnipeg, I was even further dissuaded by the fact that there is no SLP program here. I would have to move. But when SLP popped up on that list of jobs, I considered it anew.

Since finishing my PhD, I have been burnt out from research and I am much more interested now in a job that helps people in concrete ways. One of my favourite things about teaching was developing relationships with and mentoring my students. I also, more than anything, wanted a stable career path. SLP is decently well-paid, in high demand, and involves helping people. Three more years of school suddenly seemed a worthwhile investment, and SLP was interesting enough that I finally wanted to get off the couch.

Exploring SLP

Before expending the time, money, and upheaval that going back to school would require, I wanted to know if I would even like it. Since some SLP programs require volunteer experience anyhow, I decided to do some volunteer work as soon as possible to see if it was a good fit for me. Through my network of contacts, I arranged to job shadow an SLP in a local school division. So far, I have spent six days with her at two different schools. It has been interesting and I have learned a lot. I think I like it, but I’m not yet sure if I love it. It’s only been six days, and I’ve discovered that spending the whole time asking yourself if you love it is actually not a great way to figure it out. However, I have definitely become emotionally invested in these kids already.

There are some things that I was already well prepared for by my linguistic training and able to do from day one. There was one student who had collapsed multiple phonemes into one in an unusual way. I brainstormed minimal sets to be used in their therapy sessions, since the ready-made materials didn’t have the exact set that the student had collapsed. I observed an assessment and I spotted some patterns in the student’s speech, even before the SLP I was shadowing figured it out.

But there were also many things that were entirely new. We did some classroom observations, and I didn’t even know what we were watching for. We visited many children who were using alternative communication devices and I felt awkward and unsure of how to talk with someone who would not talk back. I am not hearing all of the non-target speech sounds that the SLP is identifying (such as an interdental lisp) and I realized I might need to break my categorical perception a little bit. But still, even after only six days, I am beginning to learn these things.

So far, it seems interesting and varied. I did an informational interview with an SLP who was a classmate in my undergraduate, and after over a decade in the field, she says she still encounters new things every year.

I also feel like it involves helping people and making a difference. Teachers are overworked, EAs may be undertrained, and the autistic children in the back of the class doing their own thing sometimes look like they have been forgotten. Spending time with them giving them one-on-one attention feels like it makes a difference.

What’s next?

I’m still not 100% sure I want this. I am moving forward because it is more exciting to me than anything else I’ve considered, and moving forward feels better than doing nothing. By moving forward, I’m meeting new people and creating networks and learning about different kinds of opportunities, too.

Almost all of the downsides and real obstacles to doing SLP I have encountered so far have to do with jumping through hoops to get the formal training required, including relocating to a place with a program, university bureaucracy, and taking out new student loans in my late 30s. The unexpected hurdles I have had to navigate in the university bureaucracy will be the subject of my next post.

 

This is a guest post written by Julie Doner. Stay tuned for Part 2!