Taspon Gonggiatgul Week3 SS1

          After reading "How to Leave Academia" by Rani Neutill I am both saddened and angry upon hearing about her experience working in academia and how she had to eventually leave academia to start a new life because of the different prejudices and oppressions that she had faced or experienced in her university. At the same time, her experience also made me realize that academia is an unjust and corrupted system that is created to enslave scholars by telling them lies and making them into temporary workers without giving them the merits that they deserve. In the end, I am glad that she eventually made the decision to break up with academia, but I am also sad to see that in the end, she has to throw away her character/identity as a scholar, an identity which she has worked very hard and earnestly for, to find a new life outside of academia. While Neutill mainly talks about her life after academia, the author of the article "An Offering" discusses more about her life as a graduate student in her university and how academia as a pernicious and fickle system is impacting both her mental and physical well-being. According to Huynh, her voice was constantly silenced in meetings and she was also pressured into doing research that she does not want to conduct, and her colleagues are not there to support her when she needs them. All these issues that she faced overshadow that statement that Neutill has made in her article about academia being a toxic and corrupt place. All the issues mentioned above accompanied by her heavy academical workload eventually caused her to have health problems and made her life in academia unbearable. However, being a strong woman of color she was able to make the decision to adjust her lifestyle by taking out more time in school to take care of herself and focus less time on research/school work, and I am happy that everything worked out for her in the end. This just goes to show that through self-care and we can essentially find ways to fight off and resist the current pernicious academic culture.

Question: What are some of the jobs available outside of academia for people who have a master/PhD in ethnic studies?

Citation:

P. (n.d.). Self Care [Digital image]. Retrieved from https://projecthelping.org/self-care-2/