And it is…
…hang on there…
…I’m just about to tell you…
Waiting!
In fairness, this isn’t a skill. It just happens. I was going to say ‘patience’, which suggests being able to wait with some grace and calmness.
But how you wait doesn’t matter. You can wait while contemplating birdsong or wait while tearing out your greying hair and smashing furniture. You’re still waiting.
One cause of all the waiting is that opportunities are rare and competitive. You must wait for one to find you. Ten years and five months passed between my PhD viva and getting a permanent post. Basically, I got a job because I was able to hang around long enough and remain alive.
‘David, can you tell us what you feel your proudest achievement is?’
‘Well, Professor, for ten years now, I haven’t been squashed by a falling grand piano.’
‘You’re hired!’
At my current rate of advancement, I should be a full Professor in the early years of the twenty-third century.
Another reason for perpetual waiting is that the things that academics do take a long time. Write something one decade, see it in print the next. If you apply for funding for a two-year project that starts a year from now, you may be committing yourself to running an end-of-project conference, say, on a Friday in May, in THREE YEARS’ TIME. I struggle to make plans at the weekend in case I’m not in the mood.
Most frustrating of all, a lot of waiting seems to be avoidable. Right now, I have a couple of articles under review for seven months. My record is just under two years.
Peer reviewing must be hard and time consuming, you say? Not really. It takes hours, half a day maybe. You must be forced to do it? Not at all. You can decline literally at the touch of a button. So why can it take so long? Not a clue.
But while you’re freaking out about the fate of your intellectual baby (which you struggled, and waited, for months to complete), it is sitting in an email inbox or submission system in suspended animation for week after week, doing absolutely nothing.
In the meantime, you’re in the dark as to whether your work is genius, nonsense, mediocre – or, the only thing that matters – publishable. You might suspect your stuff is good, but you don’t know (and how wrong you’ve been before!). You don’t know if you wasted all that time, or if you are even competent.
I am having a moan here; I enjoy my job and am eternally grateful to have it. This business has few real hardships. But the waiting is serious if you’re an early career scholar and your ability to pay the rent depends on your submissions and applications. God bless all the speedy reviewers and the journal editors who manage things quickly, and who may put you out of your misery with the savagely-named but ultimately merciful ‘desk reject’.
Given all this waiting[i], it’s no wonder we leap with childlike excitement when a journalist phones for a comment, or we get the chance to write for something fast and friendly like The Conversation. We’ll see our work out there before the earth has entered a new geological era.
So, perhaps alongside research skills training in SPSS and literature reviewing and the rest, we need sessions like ‘Living Well in Limbo’ or ‘How Not to Compulsively Check Journal Submission Portals’.
Which reminds me…
i To anyone I have kept waiting, please forgive me.
David Mitchell 