Are you a scanner?

Finding a job is one thing — and an important thing, to be sure. But unless we spend the time and energy to figure out what we really want to be doing, we’re going to land right back where we are now: frustrated, restless, lost, and unhappy. This is where we talk about how we can uncover the things we most want to do with our lives. It’s also where I test out tools so you don’t have to. Click here for past posts.

Let me tell you a brief story

There are lots of reasons I left academia. But one I don’t talk about as much is this: I was bored out of my everloving mind.

Sure, I could turn my dissertation into a manuscript. I was told that after you leave it alone for a while, it becomes interesting again. Um, fail.

Sure, I could research something sort of related but sort of different – it’s taking something in a new direction! Fail.

Sure, I could throw myself into my teaching. Fail, fail, fail.

And I can’t tell you that departmental politics, committee meetings, or advising were altogether diverting.

It really wasn’t them. It was me.

It wasn’t that my situation was unusual. Turning your dissertation into a book? Normal. Taking your research in a new direction? Normal. Engaging teaching as an intellectually rich endeavor (because it is)? Normal.

I, however, was apparently not normal.

And I suspect that many of you may be more like me than like my graduate student friends who are happily tenured and writing and teaching.

I see it again and again

Many of my clients – you could even say most of my clients – have something in common besides academia. They love learning for the sake of learning. Left to their own devices (and with sufficient money to make it happen), they’d probably just keep taking class after class, just because.

It’s how we all landed in academia in the first place. Where else does someone who loves learning go but on to more schooling?

The problem with that, of course, schooling has an end-point, and with that end-point comes the presumption that all of your schooling has been aimed at a career.

But what if it wasn’t?

Many of us went to graduate school because we loved the idea of being a professor. Few of us really knew what that meant, though. Sure, we knew professors taught students, but most of the rest of their job – advising, serving on committees, participating in shared governance, publishing or perishing – was invisible to us.

What we thought they did, in addition to all of that teaching, was read. Think. Learn. Of course those of us who love to learn things would think it was a great idea.

Breadth vs. depth

But one of the realities of academia is that you are, to a large extent, limited in what you can dive into. Jobs are disciplinary. Contracts are disciplinary. Teaching is disciplinary.

My friends who love academia look at me a little strangely, because they did go on to learn other things. The difference was that they looked at a different 19^th century educator, or dipped in to Burke, or wrote about bodies in the same era of rhetoric they’d been writing me.

Me, I wanted to go learn about geography. (There is such a thing as cultural geography! Feminist geography! How cool is that?) I wanted to learn color theory. I wanted to learn whale speech. I wanted to learn psychology.

English is an admittedly baggy field, but it wasn’t baggy enough for me. And my department and my teaching requirements were definitely not baggy enough for me.

If I had paid any attention to my own patterns, I would have been able to predict this. See, my particular strength is not depth, it’s breadth. I know lots and lots about many different things, things that don’t, on first glance, seem to go together.

I’m what Barbara Sher calls a scanner. And many of the people I talk to who are unhappy with academia are scanners too.

Scanners are the Renaissance people of our times

There are lots of types of scanners, scanners who return to the same four beloved but disparate topics, scanners who are always finding new projects, scanners who love to become masters at things, and scanners whose intellectual CV looks a lot like the Energizer Bunny took a run through the encyclopedia at high speed.

We’re the people who really like learning about personality types, and transition theory, and how to build houses, and how paint colors came to be discovered and invented and created, and the history of ballet, and mind/body theory, and how investigative police work happens, and how proto-humans ate. All at the same time, probably while building a bike and learning how to take photographic portraits and teaching the dog to behave.

It used to be that people like us were beloved, but in the last few decades, specialization has taken over from the fascinated generalist. And nowhere more than in academia.

Scanners and academia don’t get along

Academia is predicated on depth of knowledge. By its very structure, it’s predicated on everyone staying within the confines of the discipline.

You can see where things might get hairy for those of us who thrive on dipping our toes into new topics all the time.

Because of this mismatch, it’s easy to think we’ve failed, that there’s something wrong with us. But there’s nothing wrong with us. We don’t thrive in this environment, is all. We need a different climate in which to truly flourish – one that has our particular version of scanner-ness built in somehow.

If you love to learn and yet are finding yourself struggling in academia, chances are, nothing is wrong with you.

Want to read more about scanners? Click here to go to an affiliate link to Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose on Amazon.

If you’d like some help figuring out what else you might be able to do, Jo Van Every and I are running a 6-week course designed to help the academically inclined expand their sense of career possibility. You can learn more here.