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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Career Options

The Long Road Home

19 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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"Thriving as a Freelance Academic", Academia, Academic Writing, Bruce Anthony Jones, Career, Career Decisions, Career Development, Career Options, CMU, Disillusionment, Joe William Trotter Jr., Katie Rose Guest Pryal, Peter Stearns, Politics of Academia, Politics of the Foundation World, Self-Awareness, Self-Determination, Self-Discovery, Social Justice, Teaching and Learning, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Troublemaker, Writing


My stressed-out PhD walk photo, Carnegie Mellon University, May 18, 1997. (Angelia N. Levy).

My stressed-out PhD walk photo, Carnegie Mellon University, May 18, 1997. (Angelia N. Levy).

It’s been eighteen years and nearly a day since I had to shake then Carnegie Mellon Dean Peter Stearns’ hand on stage as part of the PhD portion of the 100th commencement ceremony for graduates, that third sweltering Sunday in May ’97. I’ve talked about the ceremony, my Mom’s jealousy and issues about my degree, Peter Stearns, Joe Trotter, Bruce Anthony Jones, and what happened before and after the degree ceremonies on that fateful day.

But time and enlightenment — especially the latter — has allowed me to take a step back from the events leading to a new wave of disillusionment in my life. If I really think about it, my struggles with where I wanted to go with my career go as far back as ’81, in the months after my first accolades as a writer, to the time when at eleven, I already had an encyclopedic knowledge of history, basic science, and technology. Heck, I already knew some of the historiography around World War II, the Cold War, American slavery and civil rights, long before I ever knew the definition for historiography. Not to mention, I was already living what we now call migration studies, thanks to my Mom and dad.

But my Boy @ The Window years did their damage to me. By the time I turned twenty at the end of the ’80s, I wasn’t fully clear of the array of choices I had for a career or set of careers. I knew I could write, and often write well. Yet I had stopped seeing myself as a writer by the time I went through my summer of abuse in ’82. I knew that I was a historian, because I asked the kinds of questions about history that only trained historians would. Yet I hated the idea that I was supposed to write only one way, using words like synergistic and interstitial (at an esoteric minimum) along the way. I toyed with the idea of going to law school in ’90, even going so far as to take the LSAT, scoring a then-50th percentile 31 on the exam in my one-and-only try.

Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), The Long Road--Argilla Road, Ipswich, circa 1898, April 28, 2010. (BrooklynMuseumBot via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), The Long Road–Argilla Road, Ipswich, circa 1898, April 28, 2010. (BrooklynMuseumBot via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I struggled for years with my fundamental question: “Am I an academic historian who’s also a writer? Am I a writer who’s also a historian? Can I be both?” I realized about a decade ago the question was moot. I am both. The real question really has been, will the working world allow me to operate as both without giving me grief and a hard way to go? (By the way, if I ever were to do a second, post-Boy @ The Window memoir, this would be one of that book’s big themes.)

I can safely say as a mildly successful freelance writer that the answer for many in this world of singularities is no. The working world puts up a fight, has and will continue to try to force me and others with multiple talents to choose one path, to do one thing, and one thing only, ideally for all time.

Academicians only think about each other via teaching duties or well-placed articles and books in scholarly journals and scholarly publishing houses. Higher education administrators believe that the only way to understand their work is through the lens of their specific university, as if universities and colleges aren’t similar from a management standpoint. Nonprofit organizations

A male mallard duck, a bird's triple threat (can walk, swim under water and fly), Saint-Eustache, Quebec, Canada, November 19, 2007. (Acarpentier via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

A male mallard duck, a bird’s triple threat (can walk, swim under water and fly), Saint-Eustache, Quebec, Canada, November 19, 2007. (Acarpentier via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

discount teaching and higher education administrator positions because finding money or managing students isn’t exactly the same as managing staff. Foundations who use your salary history instead of your scope of programs developed, people reached, and money raised as a barometer for even granting you an interview. All would prefer that you be quiet about injustices, especially ones in which their institution, organization, or foundation might well be complicit.

For me in the past couple of decades, though, I’ve worked in and with academicians, higher education administrators, nonprofit organizations, and private foundations. I’ve helped raise $3 million over the years, managed as many as twenty-five staff members, organized four-day conferences with a couple hundred attendees, worked with as many as 500 students at any given time, and taught undergraduate and graduate courses. I’ve written scholarly articles, published in scholarly journals, presented at a couple dozen conferences, and consulted for nonprofit organizations and foundations. To think of myself as only one thing is beyond ridiculous given my by-necessity-and-neglect careers so far.

Yesterday, The Chronicle of Higher Education posted the article “Thriving as a Freelance Academic” by Katie Rose Guest Pryal. In it, Pryal interviewed three White women about their experiences freelancing in the academic world. The women interviewed found a singular niche, found steady work through that niche, and otherwise didn’t question the idea of freelancing in a world in which freelancing is a rare career choice.

A square peg hammered into a round hole, May 2014. (http://joshbrahm.com/).

A square peg hammered into a round hole, May 2014. (http://joshbrahm.com/).

All that is fine. Except there was little soul-searching in Pryal’s piece. The women interviewed might as well have decided to go on a global trek or rock climbing, given their lack of ambivalence about academia or deliberate lack of specifics and dryness about the work they actually do. I don’t doubt that one can freelance in academia. I doubt, though, that one can do it without personal relationships with a specific university or alma mater, or with a specific higher education administrator or prominent professor. Why pick on this piece? Because there are far more people like me in and out of academia, who’ve consulted and freelanced and worked and stitched together a career, then there are the people represented in Pryal’s boutique article.

There is a lesson here besides the reality that life is a journey, and to get it right, we need to understand that it can and will be a roller-coaster-ride of a journey. The lesson, for me at least, is that while being true to myself has sometimes had consequences in terms of immediate victories and easy financial gains, it does mean I get to have success, and sometimes, even lasting success.

The “Are You Sure’s” and Doubting Sylvias

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work

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"Are You Sure?", Advising, Career Options, Cigarette Smoke, Doubters, Doubting Thomas, Doubts, Elitism, JD, MD, Mentoring, MVHS, PhD, Racism, Sylvia Fasulo, Tiki Barber, Vassar College


The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, by Caravaggio, c. 1601-02, uploaded April 13, 2005. (Dante Alighieri via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, by Caravaggio, c. 1601-02, uploaded April 13, 2005. (Dante Alighieri via Wikipedia). In public domain.

We all have doubters in our lives. Even if the only doubters turn out to be ourselves. As someone without much of a roadmap for any success, doubt has been a constant companion, one that I often had to ignore to experience any victories in my life. To have those with influence pretend to be on my side but add to those doubts, though. As a twenty-year-old, it was somewhere between bewildering and rage inducing. As a forty-five year-old who regularly advises students, love ones, friends and others about their futures, looking back at those doubters, it’s almost unforgivable the seeds they attempted to plant.

Of all the non-relatives in positions to advise me, few were worse than my high school guidance counselor Sylvia Fasulo. For four years, Fasulo forced me to listen to her “Are you sure…?” questions about difficult classes, the colleges I wanted to attend, the career paths I thought about taking. Her patrician Vassar arrogance toward me as the poor Black kid drove me up a wall every time I walked into her cigarette-filled office.

"Raleigh's First Pipe in England," an illustration in Frederick William Fairholt's Tobacco (1859), June 8, 2014. (Materialscientist via Wikipedia). In public domain.

“Raleigh’s First Pipe in England,” an illustration in Frederick William Fairholt’s Tobacco (1859), June 8, 2014. (Materialscientist via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I hated having Fasulo as my counselor especially once it was time for me to apply for college. She was condescending, demeaning and chain-smoked up my clothes for my troubles. Most of all, I hated having to reveal things about myself to her that I otherwise wouldn’t have shared. Like my family’s financial situation. Fasulo became only the second person I would tell that we were on welfare, that my father and mother had divorced and that he hadn’t made a child support payment since ’78. I had to talk to her about my role in my family as acting first-born child and my responsibilities. It was necessary and humiliating at the same time.

Despite and not because of Fasulo, things worked out for me in the end. Going to Pitt, meeting the people and the professors I’d become friends and colleagues with, was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. Still, I had one parting shot from her in the middle of my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh. It was the holiday season in ’89, and I took time while home in Mount Vernon to visit my favorite teacher, the late Harold Meltzer. I had just missed him, but bumped into Fasulo. It was about as fortuitous as having diarrhea and being nowhere near a toilet with toilet paper.

She asked me where I was in school, and I told her about my considerations for graduate school, law school and the world of work. It was a toss-off sentence, my attempt to end a conversation, not begin one. “Being a lawyer’s hard work,” Fasulo said in response. She then went on to tell me about 70-hour work weeks and billable hours and the bar exam, as if any of this was supposed to be surprising or would somehow scare me. I cut her off, saying “You know, you’re not my counselor anymore, so thanks but no thanks for your advice,” and left her office while she tried to explain her idiotic perspective.

Tiki Barber, the personification of a doubter, at the American Museum of Natural History, October 16, 2008. (Jamie McCarthy/WireImage.com via http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/).

Tiki Barber, the personification of a doubter, at the American Museum of Natural History, October 16, 2008. (Jamie McCarthy/WireImage.com via http://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/).

A quarter-century later, and though I am more than content with the fact that I opted for a PhD over a JD thirteen out of every fourteen days (people with law degrees do make more money on average), I sometimes question if the PhD in history was worth it. After all, a JD is far more portable. A JD would’ve served me better in my nonprofit and consulting careers than having to explain a doctorate. I wouldn’t want to think that I went in the direction of a graduate program for five and a half years simply because I had a conversation with a racial elitist.

It’s probably more likely that I didn’t go to medical school to earn an MD because my Mom and my idiot late-ex-stepfather both told me I couldn’t be a surgeon because I had “ten thumbs.” By more likely, I mean highly unlikely on both counts. I ultimately did what I wanted to do educationally speaking, despite own my doubts, despite the doubts of those who believed it was their job to advise me. But constantly asking, “Are you sure, Donald…?” isn’t exactly the best way to advise or mentor anyone, especially someone in their teens or a literal twenty-year-old. You lay out options, you ascertain what’s going on in their heart as well as their mind. You introduce them to other people who could provide better advice, based on direct expertise or experiences. Otherwise, you’re a doubter, not an advisor or a mentor.

The Audacity of Youth, Grad School Style

06 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Youth

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Audacity, Black Washington, Bruce Anthony Jones, Calling, Career, Career Options, Carnegie Mellon University, Certfication, Dan Resnick, Dissertation, Doctoral Thesis, Experience, Fudging Data, History, Joe Trotter, Joe William Trotter Jr., Multiculturalism, Naivete, Pittsburgh, Proletarianization Thesis, Teacher Education, Thesis, Wisdom, Youth


Me as Naruto, the ultimate hollerer, Noah's 7th birthday, July 30, 2010. (Source/Donald Earl Collins)

This weekend should be of significance to me. Actually it should be of more significance than anything else I’ve done professionally in the fifteen years since. For this was the weekend that I decided I was “Dr. Collins,” three and a half months before actually becoming Dr. Collins.

I was in the middle of a tumultuous time, caught between Joe Trotter and five years of graduate school, the last three of which had been at Carnegie Mellon. I had just finished revising my first draft of my dissertation, adding thirty pages to an already hefty 475-page manuscript. Me and Trotter hadn’t been getting along for four months, and after two months with my first draft, I’d received a response in mid-July that was disheartening.

Most of my dissertation, examining how multiculturalism was lived intellectually, educationally and culturally in Black Washington, DC, received no comment whatsoever. The chapters on the development of

Trotter comments, back of page 43 of first dissertation draft, July 15, 1996. Pic taken August 6, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins)

the Black community in DC, particularly in the period immediately before the 1930-1960 period, had received lots of snarky comments. Like “I told you to change this already,” or “This is the third time I commented on this section,” or “Make these suggested revisions on…already,” handwritten in pencil, big, bold and rushed, as if he wanted to stab me in the neck with the pencil. Comments on writing, evidence, to sharpen analysis of my multiculturalism argument, I expected. What I, naive little me, didn’t expect was a series of comments about data and information that, quite frankly, was irrelevant.

After talking with a couple of professors who weren’t on my dissertation committee — including one whom himself had been Trotter’s advisor back in the ’70s — I finally figured out what had been eating at the man ever since I began handing him chapters. It wasn’t as if Trotter’s comments were transparent in what he wanted me to revise. He wanted me to put together a proletarianization argument for DC. Bottom line was, he was pissed with me because I had written that the Great Migration period (1910-1930) of Blacks leaving the rural South for the industrial, urban North had little effect on DC, a truly Southern city at the time.

I was incensed when I finally figured out why Trotter had been giving me a hard time since last fall and especially since April. It made me think that maybe earning a doctorate in history — especially with him as the head of my committee, along with Dan Resnick and an increasingly distant Bruce Anthony Jones — wasn’t worth it. I thought that if I had to go through another year of this, that I’d drop out of the program.

But I’d only do that after giving the revisions one more shot. I addressed every — and I mean every — comment I had from Trotter by email or written out across a page, and then documented every change in a six-page memo of my revisions. I even went so far as to rhetorically fudge the Great Migration period data, just to see how Trotter would respond. On page 100 of my dissertation, I wrote, “For Washington, a slight acceleration in black migration occurred between 1915 and 1930.” That was an obfuscation, for Blacks migration didn’t “accelerate” until the 1930s, after a twenty-year period of limited migration that only added 20,000 to a Black population of more than a 100,000. Trotter actually praised this revision.

I made a deal with myself to quit after another year if this revision didn’t work out. After receiving a response that only required four minor revisions, Trotter made an attempt to remove the one professor I did have in my corner from my committee in Bruce Jones, using Jones’ recent acceptance of a position at the University of Missouri as an excuse. From that weekend in August ’96 until the week before Thanksgiving, everything about my doctorate became a battle with Trotter.

In a way, I guess I was lucky it did work out. But now, as I did then, I wonder if it was really worth it, to fight as hard as I did for that degree. Would I be a better writer, a better educator, if I had dropped out of the program, gone back to school, and become a high school history or social studies teacher? At least my employment status would’ve been much more stable between ’96 and ’99 if I had, and I’d have an additional career option now.

PhD Graduation - CMU Diploma, May 21, 1997. (Source/Donald Earl Collins)

Even now, thinking about what happened a decade and a half ago makes me clench my teeth, not with anger, but more with a sense of dread and latent rage. What I and at least two other male students went through (as I’d learn later on) was patently unfair. Still, I realize that while I’ve long since forgiven Trotter for his misdeeds, I can’t help but think that professionally, he aged me in my last year in graduate school. The sense of security I felt about my professional future back then was gone, and I don’t think I’ve felt that certain, that youthful, since.

I do know this. That that youthful, if somewhat naive, twenty-six year-old still resides in me. But with the mind of a forty-one year-old man, I can use both wisdom and experience to say that I wouldn’t go through that again. I’d either would’ve gone to law school or a school of education, maybe even with a focus on ed foundations and ed policy. As it is, between Boy @ The Window and my recent articles, that’s really what I’m most intellectually passionate about these days anyway.

I may be Dr. Collins or  Professor Collins, maybe for the rest of my life. But really, I’d be happiest as Donald Earl Collins, the author, educator and troublemaker I believe with all my heart I am and I will always be.

Living in the Land of “No!”

23 Wednesday Mar 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, race, Youth

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Academia, Academic Writing, Ageism, Bias, Bigotry, Career Options, Forbes Quadrangle, Historical Dictionary of American Education, History of Education Quarterly, Multiculturalism, No!, Passion, Pitt, Race, Richard J. Altenbaugh, The Second Plate, University of Pittsburgh, Wesley Posvar Hall, Writing, Yes


People forming a "NO" to London's Heathrow Airport Expansion, May 31, 2008. Source: The Daily Mail http://bit.ly/hc0KSP

There was a time in my career and life when I was desperate to publish an article in a scholarly journal. Right after finishing grad school at Carnegie Mellon at the end of ’96, I set out to write a literature review essay on how folks in education foundations and education policy had covered multiculturalism and connected it — or, in most cases, not connected it — to the politics around this controversial topic during the 1980s and 1990s. Of all the things I’d written up to this point in my career, this was a bit ambitious.

I had submitted an article for publication with the History of Education Quarterly in March ’97 and had made several revisions at Richard Altenbaugh’s request. He was the new senior editor of the journal, as it had recently moved from Indiana University to Slippery Rock to be under his direction. Altenbaugh had also been my professor for my education foundations graduate class in the spring of ’92, and I’d done entries for his Historical Dictionary of American Education, which was published in ’99.

Historical Dictionary of American Education Cover, March 23, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

At Altenbaugh’s behest, I met him and a wildly bearded co-editor at an informal meeting in March ’98. We met at The Second Plate, an eating place on the second floor of Forbes Quadrangle at Pitt, where I’d spent my homeless days in ’88, my history major days, and my first two years of grad school. Over the course of a two-hour lunch that had little to do with the food, Altenbaugh and his assistant grilled me about the contents of my article, my writing in general, and about the publishing business. Now I knew that this essay would need more revisions, but a two-hour inquisition on why a twenty-eight-year-old was too young to make bold conclusions based on existing studies was just a ridiculous argument.

For Altenbaugh and the other editor, I was simply too young to write an essay that reviewed previous scholarly work. Their logic: “even a senior scholar with fifteen years in the field would have trouble pulling this off.” The editors also insisted that the only road to academic Nirvana regarding my work would be through publishing academic articles and books that met the approval of an exclusive scholarly community. Translation: “write something that is interesting to a few other professors — but not so exciting that it would catch the public’s attention — and by all means do not work on something as controversial as multiculturalism.” Oh yeah, they also recommended that get approval for my essay draft from two elderly, nearly-dead White historians before resubmitting to the journal.

Bottom line: my essay was rejected, given a “No!” Not because it didn’t have potential, or because the early drafts weren’t any good. But because I was working on a topic too cutting edge as a Black male who even now at forty-one would be too young — according to these guys — to work on a state of the profession essay on multiculturalism, much less thirteen years ago.

Did their “No!” matter? In one sense it really did. I knew that the topic itself was too controversial for most conservative-thinking (in a topical, not political, sense) editors in scholarly publishing. That there were few venues for me to address multiculturalism in an academic sense. I also knew that their “No!” was about much more than my topic. My age and my race also played a role in their decision to not publish my essay — they said as much by implication. Funny thing is, that in these weird times, I’d probably have a much better shot at publishing this essay now than I did when multiculturalism seemed more relevant.

But in the end, it didn’t matter at all. I was already in the middle of a five-year period of questioning whether I was an academic historian first and a writer second, or was it really the other way around? If the latter was true — and it’s turned out to be — then what did it matter that I pushed to publish on a topic that I cared about, but I was already beginning to lose passion for?

What I learned from that “No!” is that there are times to force a “Yes!” out of the land of “No!” And that there are other times when I should choose to take that “No!” and evaluate my own motives for wanting a “Yes!” In the case of my growth as a writer — both in academic writing and in other kinds of writing — there couldn’t have been a better, more bigoted “No!” than the one I received thirteen years ago.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

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