Dr. Nandi Sims graduated from the department in 2021 and currently works as a post-doc at Florida International University. She agreed to share what she's been up to since graduation and to give some advice to current students.
Tell us about your job. Where are you working, and what's your job title?
I am a distinguished post-doctoral scholar in the College of Arts, Sciences, and Education at Florida International University. I am one in a cohort of three scholars chosen from a general search aimed at placing post docs in various positions throughout the college. The other two are in Chemistry, but our work is all different enough that we likely would not cross paths otherwise.
I am mentored by Dr. Phillip M. Carter who is the director of the Center for the Humanities in an Urban Environment and an associate professor in the English department (where the linguistics program is housed) and Dr. Maria K. Lovett who is a Clinical Associate Professor of Social Foundations and Urban Education in the School of Education and Human Development.
My post-doc is not the same as the post-docs you tend to see around the linguistics department at OSU. I am not sponsored by a particular grant and there is no work I am necessarily required to do. I have mentors, but they aren’t my bosses in the way that, I don’t know, Marie is your boss if you get a post-doc from her NSF grant. It’s a bit unclear how the university and my mentors assess success in a post-doc in this type of position. It’s not like a dissertation which can be passed or failed. When I ask the question “What am I supposed to be doing right now?” the answer is “You do you, boo.” Now that I’m more used to this type of position, I am a lot more comfortable taking this opportunity to do all the stuff I need and want to do without the pressure of needing to do anything in particular.
What was your job search process like?
Last year it was sort of up in the air when I would graduate. Covid had stopped my dissertation fieldwork just as it started to pick up, and I wasn’t sure yet if I would have enough data to finish what I’d planned to do. I applied for a number of jobs that sort of fit what I did, primarily cluster hires, post-docs, and visiting professor positions, but if I didn’t get a job, I was planning to just continue as a student a little while longer. I didn’t get any interviews in December/January (typical timing for short list interviews) for the cluster hire positions so I’d assumed I didn’t get a job. After getting the call about this position in April, I realized I needed to actually finish and had about 400 pages of a dissertation to write by June to defend in summer. I don’t recommend that strategy, but it ended up working out!
What do you do daily for your job?
Honestly, my daily schedule is very similar to daily schedule I had during the last couple of semesters of graduate school. I split my time between publications, grant applications, networking, and all the other skills you develop and “master” in grad-school (but I get paid more so it’s better).
This is a fellowship, so I do not need to teach although I was given the option to teach a class or two in the English Department for a bit extra money. I decided to focus on my own projects at least this first semester because I didn’t know how overwhelming the transition would be. I might teach an Introduction to Linguistics class in the spring, but I’m still on the fence. I also considered taking some classes since I get a tuition waver, but again, decided I should aim to stay focused.
What do you most enjoy about your job?
I enjoy that I get to focus on my own work without a tremendous amount of pressure.
One of my issues in graduate school was starting new things before finishing old things. I graduated with only one publication this was out of about 10 possible publications from my Master’s work at FIU and my PhD work at OSU. I would do the fun part then say “well that’s cool” and avoid the stressful part of actually submitting anything. I’ve matured since the beginning of graduate school and have become less stressed out by publishing, but this backlog of work made my last few years of graduate school stressful. I felt like I needed to focus all of my attention on the dissertation, but I had all of the older work hovering in the background. This post doc thus far has allowed me to clear out some of this older work without the pressure of delivering new work, developing innovative teaching methods, mentoring students, or any of the other pressures that were present in graduate school and will be present in a tenure-track academic position.
I’ve also been able to use some of this time to think creatively about future projects, again without the pressure of needing to immediately deliver like there is with projects in graduate school or the pressure of developing a coherent research program like there is as an early career professor. I’ve been able to begin a good number of short-term side projects and meet with friends and colleagues about the possibility of long-term projects.
This year thus far has not been a break in terms of workload, but the lack of external pressure has allowed me to re-discover my love of academia, which had waned a teeny bit at the end of graduate school. By the end of this school year, I will be in a comfortable position (emotionally and workwise) to begin a position as an assistant professor.
Of the skills you acquired in graduate school, which skill is the most important or helpful for your job?
This question is difficult to answer since I feel like I generally do the same things. Perhaps the most important skill has been the ability to self-motivate. In academia you do have deadlines, but those deadlines are often very flexible (evidenced by, for example, how many semesters from beginning to end it took me to finish QP2). Depending on your advisor, year, or subfield, you might have someone pushing you to meet those deadlines, but it is generally expected that by the time you graduate you have figured out how to juggle everything and push yourself to do those things in a timely manner. Towards the end of graduate school, I became incredibly nervous that I lacked the skillset to be an academic. I couldn’t seem to finish anything. I couldn’t seem to begin the things that stressed me out. Turns out I didn’t lack the ability to self-motivate, I was just over stressed and stuck. Now that the stress has dissipated, turns out I do have this skill, and it’s been critical for getting work done as a post-doc.
Do you have any advice for students who are interested in post-docs?
Nope. Lol. Um. I do have advice for students who are not interested in post-docs, though.
I was perhaps a bit “bitter” to have a post-doc not a professor position. Was I not good enough for a “real job?” I was not looking forward to being on the job market still/again and a year-long post-doc meant the job search process would be never ending. I was jealous of those who got professor jobs straight out of graduate school. I wasn’t aware of how burnt out I actually was with the expectations of academia. It was a feeling I had learned to just push through after X decades as a student. Nearly everyone around me felt the same way, so it was just how life was supposed to be. Turns out that’s not true and it took getting into this postdoctoral fellowship to realize that academia doesn’t have to suck. There is of course still stress and there is the pressure I put on myself for perfection, but there aren’t grades or other students in your cohort turning in QP1 on time or finishing the PhD with 6 papers. If you are nearing the end of your PhD and have forgotten why you started it in the first place, a post-doc fellowship is great for remembering the love of language variation, or whatever you do, that got you into the PhD program in the first place.
Email: nrsims@fiu.edu
Professional website: https://nandisims.github.io