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The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living

Taking on extra jobs to make ends meet becomes something of an obsession for one doctoral candidate

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By MELISSA MULLINS

Long gone are the days when a job candidate with a master's degree could get a tenure-track job in English literature at a four-year university. In those good ole days, as my favorite former professor recalls, departmental meetings often included a stiff drink and possibly a joint or two afterward. Those were the days when assessment was not yet a nauseatingly frequent buzzword and committees actually accomplished something (I take that back — few committees have ever accomplished anything).

Maybe those days are more mythical than my professor makes out. But at least this much is true: Gone are the days when, Ph.D. in hand, you were sure to find a tenure-track job straight away.

Instead, those of us who are doctoral students in English are caught in a limbo between desperately needing to finish our programs because our stipends are barely enough to keep us eating a balanced diet (Top Ramen does not constitute a balanced diet, my friends) and wanting to stay in those very programs because the job market is so frighteningly competitive that even our meager stipends offer some employment security. God forbid we finish and, unable to find a tenure-track job, wind up in "adjunct purgatory."

So we linger in our doctoral programs. And in our lingering, we supplement our income in strange ways. At least I do.

Taking on extra jobs has become something of an obsession for me. What better way to stave off that pesky dissertation than to create all kinds of deadlines more concrete and pressing than working on that chapter you've been rewriting for the last 10 months?

My most recent means of income supplementation? A gourmet campfire cooking competition.

Using the one activity (cooking) that manages to keep me sane in a sea of Butler, Adorno, and Kant, I managed to win — in two days — the equivalent of more than half of my full year's salary as a university writing instructor. And the folks responsible had the decency and true dedication to award my winnings in the form of TWO GIANT NOVELTY CHECKS.

What could be better than that? I think I'd be a whole lot more excited about endlessly teaching the difference between "it's" and "its" if my compensation always came in GIANT NOVELTY CHECKS.

As it turns out, I'm more financially successful making blackberry hand pies with lavender jar-whipped cream over a campfire than laboring for hours grading undergraduate essays on capital punishment, or the time a student won the big senior-year football game, or on the pregnancy of Britney Spears' sister. Who knew?

To think, my parents were so excited and proud at the prospect that I would become an English professor. (That was before they realized that, at the age of 30, I would still be borrowing money from them.) Even my switch freshman year from premed to English didn't faze them. If only I'd known then what I know now, I'd have made an early start in the culinary competition circuit.

Those two checks I won couldn't have come at a better time. If there's one thing that keeps us graduate students on the path to finishing our dissertations, it's those three seemingly innocuous months in the summer when, left to fend for ourselves with few job options in our fields of expertise, we often end up working the types of jobs that employers offer for the summertime traffic: retail, poorly paid internships, the odd nanny job, and, yes, more retail. Graduate school doesn't exactly prepare you for standing on sore feet for 10 hours a day, taking direction from a manager at least five years younger than you, and dealing with the dreaded, the unthinkable, the public.

My quest to stay employed and off the retail floor has led me to explore more unconventional types of employment. It's become such a central aspect of my summertime life that I now strive to apply for the strangest, most unlikely jobs possible. I figure if I compile enough bizarre stories, there might be a book in it. A book that will probably get finished before my dissertation.

To date, I've met with shady casting directors looking for people to work as extras. I've applied, and been interviewed, to appear on a style reality show (I figured, at the very least, I could pawn the clothes I got for some cash). I've sent in applications to countless inquiries for a personal assistant (including one from a soap-opera celeb on Passions). I've been a seat filler at awards events (well, almost; they kept us in a holding pen for five hours waiting to fill seats). I've tutored the child of a One Life to Live star, and, finally, entered and won a gourmet campfire cooking competition.

Maybe it would be better to push ahead with my real work — go back to the library, spend some time carefully cross-referencing bibliographies, bury my nose in it, be a good graduate student.

But for me, I'd rather whip you up some pies and cream, hand you a fork, and continue to dread the end of what I want desperately to be done with.