Headhunted

Sometimes events unfold in a way that reassures you that you are doing the right thing.

One reason I have been getting serious about going to grad school for my PhD is that given my experience and credentials, I could easily spend the next 35 years of my career climbing the ladder of market research project, client, and personnel management. I am quite good at these things, but that’s not where my real strengths or interests lie, and I’m not eager to spend the rest of my life doing that. Even my current position is getting dangerously close to being too project management oriented, partly due to my own success in managing so many big projects at once. (Note to self: Don't be so good.) I’ve decided that in order to break free of that kind of career and do the kind of theoretical work that I like, I have to have a PhD and the knowledge it takes.

It's not like I have never considered getting a PhD before, obviously. That was my plan all through college and if I hadn't confused myself by adding an economics major to my degree during my last year, I could have finished my PhD in 2000 or so and probably would now be an assistant adjunct visiting professor of psychology at University of Southeast Tennessee State College, holding office hours and conducting social cognition studies out of my primer brown '89 Toyota Corolla. But the economics thing really did throw me for a loop and opened up too many other sort-of feasible grad school opportunities that my professors loved to encourage me about. At one point, even a joint JD/PhD in law and economics was being thrown into the mix. Then after I graduated without having anything lined up, and 6 months later got over the weird illness that plagued me while I lived in my grandmother's basement apartment, I somehow managed to get the like one job in the entire country where someone with a BA in psychology could get hired on to do research. We had all heard rumors that these jobs existed somewhere out there in extremely small numbers, but no one had ever seen one before. So after securing this job of Ivory-Billed Woodpecker rarity, which came with an actual paycheck, grad school seemed a little less desirable. And once you get used to having a job and money and some time that is totally your own, you get spoiled by it, and the unappealing idea of living like a starving college student kind of shuts down further thinking along those lines.

Today I heard from a work friend named M. from my previous job at a market research firm that several of my other old colleagues want me to apply for a job opening they have at this other local market research firm they now work at because I would be “amazing” at it. When M. told them about my current job situation, his boss responded “But would she leave for more money?” I was sufficiently curious about, if not truly interested in, the job that I had M. send me the information.

Let’s review the fundamentals of this job:

Title: Market Research Manager

Description: oversee research projects, ensure that projects meet client needs, manage a team of analysts, ensure that projects are completed on time and on budget

Essential duties: proposal writing and business development, managing all aspects of projects (the standard humongous list of tasks associated with that, most of which you will have to delegate to your staff, while retaining ultimate responsibility, even if they’re not totally competent because you will have so many projects going at a given time, you couldn’t possibly keep up), day to day client interface, managing relationships with vendors, managing resources… and they do not say it but it is implicit in all of this - managing expectations, especially of your own chain of command because your VP will always, always, always attempt to over-commit your team and constant vigilance is required just to keep things at the level of borderline too crazy and not over the edge into the territory of totally fucked up.

Job requirements: all your standard things and “SPSS experience preferred but not required”

It is not true that there is no situation under which I would take this job. If I didn’t have a job right now, I’d have to consider this one because I am qualified for it and it will pay reasonably well. (I am as certain that they would pay me more than the state agency I work for now as I am about anything.) But I really can’t see myself ever taking a job at this point where even mere experience with a stat package is not required. Get real.

Basically, to the degree that I want a job that is interesting (I won’t go so far as to say “fun” because holding that particular mental image can easily result in every single possible job in the world being not good enough to meet your standard, which is a terrible place to be; I think it’s better to look for work that overall interests and satisfies you and not get caught up in this childish fantasy that your ideal job would never have any boring, mundane, or tedious elements to it), pays well, and doesn’t require a huge amount of work or generate a large amount of stress, I need to be able to differentiate myself in some way, to have some combination of knowledge and credentials that lets me find a niche. And that’s the project I am currently dedicating myself to.