It was another day on Reddit. I was doom scrolling (as I often do even though I shouldn’t), when I came across a post in a subreddit for academics (yes, I’m part of an academics Subreddit like a nerd). The Redditor was interested in pursuing an academic career in language and literature and asked Reddit to dissuade them from that pursuit. I cannot recall if the Redditor ever specified why exactly he wanted to be dissuaded, but as someone who hails from a similar academic background in language and applied linguistics, I thought I might as well pitch in.
I mean, I was obligated to, as a good samaritan Redditor.
“Don’t do it,” I wrote. “As an academic in literature, you will live your life passionately teaching lessons that very few students would actually appreciate or love. They’ll be too focused on figuring out how to pass your subject to get the degree and not on whether they should explore with you certain topics out of curiosity or interest. You’ll spend hours reading AI-generated essays that are neither thoughtful nor intelligent, but are actually repetitions of the past three semesters. And you’ll be forced to write proposals for research grants that promise commercialization and money, not for the purpose of diving into your craft or for the deeper pursuit of knowledge.”
I finished typing, clicked Submit, and considered I had done my duty.
A few Redditors liked that comment, which meant it resonated with at least a few individuals.
Several days passed, and I found myself thinking back to that comment I posted.
It didn’t help that I often joke with my husband that if it weren’t for tenure, I’d have quit my career as an academic long ago to pursue other passions.
But as the days passed, I began to question myself. Did I specifically feel the way I had written in that comment? Was my comment just doing my duty to a needful Redditor, or was it actually a reflection of my own inner sentiments, of how I personally viewed the career I was in?
And if let’s say the post really WAS how I felt about this career, considering I’d probably do this for the next TWENTY-SEVEN years (as of the writing of this post), shouldn’t I be… doing something about it?
So, lo’ and behold, dear readers, here you are today.
This post was written as a way to counter my own comment dissuading that anonymous Redditor from pursuing this career path that I had chosen for myself.
Why did I even bother writing this, you may ask? If I’m being honest, the more I thought about what I had written, the more I realized that while some of my points struck true, there were many many more upsides to being a language academic. So, rather than wallow in self-pity, I might as well bring to the surface the myriad of benefits that come with this job. If people can post YouTube videos romanticizing their life as a parent, content creator, and so on, then I can definitely romanticize my life as a language academic, to get me through tough days where I’d tell my husband that “this year is the year that I will quit”.
So here you are. Five romantic realities, romanticizing this life I live as a language academic.
Romantic Reality #1: In Showing Off Expertise
I like to hang around people whose areas of expertise are vastly different from mine. People from the hard sciences are especially fun to be with in my opinion, whether it be pure sciences, technology, IT, and so on. Unlike the romantics of people in the humanities, I find people from sciences to be more transparent, straightforward, and uncomplicated. They’re easier to be friends with, in that regard, or at least I think so.
From time to time, however, I get very envious of the “hard” expertise that they have. One of my closest colleagues have the nickname of “Professor Glass”, for goodness’ sake. I want a name like that. I can’t call myself “Professor Language” or “Professor Communication”, like it’s too unoriginal and frankly horrifying. But they, they can be experts of a particular material, coding language, or technology, and I envy that. When they talk about their research and innovation, people understand its significance and what it can do to make the world a better place.
Meanwhile, if I try to explain the ideas of utilizing anaphora or metonymy in speech writing, as an example, I’d lose them completely.
All it takes is for me to say something like, “A metonymy is when we substitute the name of an attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant” and they’d give me polite nods and change the subject, like which coffee I’d like to order or whether the sun was shining a bit brighter today. “It’s beautiful, the sun, isn’t it?” they’d say to me, knowing I can only nod politely in return.
I mean, bless their hearts and cotton socks, some of them do try to understand. They’d ask me, “What exactly do you teach? It’s just language. Grammar and stuff.” and I try to appreciate the effort.
I guess they attribute my subject area to the same things that they had learned in high school. And while my heart would love to dispute that, even I cannot deny that a lot of our surface-level Bachelor’s degree level courses are things that have been learned in high school (unless I’m talking to actual language graduates who need to take pure language and linguistics courses).
While hard sciences can have their list of accolades and published papers and research grants, I believe we as language academics may find it easier to show off our expertise. Explaining my subject area in words is like explaining a joke—it would fall flat and it wouldn’t be impressive. So, I’d like to think that we language academics can “show off” in more subtler ways.
As language academics, we show off in the way we can construct effective questions that go directly to the heart of the matter. And how we know a sentence is wrong (and can explain why), or why we should substitute a word with another. It’s the way we know how to communicate without stuttering, or use and manipulate stage control to speak to an audience. We understand the science behind pacing, behind emphasis and silence, and we use it to our advantage. Our knowledge is also in how we can help improve their writing, how we’d use things like chiasmus and epistrophe and antithesis to make their speeches sound better. And then they’ll be like, “I can never write like this!” which makes the heart flutter, just a bit, because well, that’s because it’s within my expertise.
Romantic Reality #2: Having Students to Torture
I have lived several years of my life as a non-academic before coming into this career path. I’ve worked as an editor, and as a content creator for websites. I’ve done copywriting, and I’ve done marketing and sales. All which require knowledge and the application of language skills, but which does not require the teaching of language itself.
The first time I started “teaching” was for corporate training. It was only for two days, and I was one of the facilitators of a training program for PETRONAS Dagangan non-executives, on effective communication skills for customer service. I absolutely loved it. Because for those two days, I had a room of students, and I could do with them what I wanted (within reasonable limit).
I love having students. I love designing activities and torturing them with application of knowledge that makes their head hurt. In fact, I realised this only a few weeks after I posted that Reddit comment. One day, it dawned on me that the only way for me to enjoy what I teach and what happens in my classes is to make the classes enjoyable by design. It doesn’t necessarily have to be enjoyable for my students (of course it would be good if it does), but it does have to be enjoyable for me.
So that’s why I did. By the fourth week of the semester this year, my students already knew that at the end of each lesson, they’ll be randomly divided into groups and be subjected to yet another one of my tailored activities. I’d scour the internet for fun articles that we could dive into, and I’d listen to them present their ideas and my goodness, I love that. I love seeing them grow as thinkers, and become really critical and petty towards how other people write and communicate, because it meant their skills and awareness were growing.
If I had not enjoyed my classes in the past, I had nobody to blame but myself.
The good news is that I am truly enjoying my classes now, and that is my responsibility.
Romantic Reality #3: Flexible Schedules
I am fortunate (or unfortunate?) to have had the experience of working very long hours for the first few years of my career, with brutal commutes which had pretty much desensitized me to the idea of a “high workload”. Whether the workload can be considered as high or low, I have worked in numerous places that required me to commute on an hour or more one-way (without traffic), which meant leaving at pre-dawn and arriving well at night. It didn’t matter if there was a lot of work or a little. For the first few years of my colorful career, I needed to leave early and come home late regardless.
When I was pregnant with my first child, and during the first year of his life, I commuted to work via train. My husband would send me to the train station at 6.30AM, where I’d ride the train for one hour, disembark at KL Sentral, and then take the LRT to my office building.
I’ve also had work schedules that required me to travel every two or three days for meetings, usually an hour away from the office. So I’d commute an hour to work. Drive another hour to the meeting place. Drive the hour back to my office. Then drive back home. That’s four hours on the road. At least. In a day.
Multiply that with several times a week, for several months.
I am not lamenting that reality at all. It’s a normal part of daily life for a lot of working adults, and I am by no means unique in that regard. But once I stepped into academic life, the one thing I immediately noticed was how flexible the job was. If I didn’t have class at 8AM, I could come in a bit later. I could also go back a bit earlier, if I have a late class the following day. And so on.
Work itself was also flexible. I could choose when to grade my students’ work within the semester. I could choose when I wanted to attend conferences, or submit papers for publication, or when to do community work. As long as I checked all those boxes in the stipulated time, nobody cared about when I did the work.
Sometimes, and I’m not kidding—sometimes, I’d romanticise my life by brewing a cup of coffee and working on a paper late into the night. Light a candle while I’m at it, to pretend I’m some medieval scholar. I lament that we no longer use ink and vellum, but well. Perhaps my future self might consider using that while drafting papers to romanticize things a bit more.
It’s very liberating, and for colleagues of mine who had never worked in the private or corporate sector before…they have no idea how good they have it. Because I would never (if possible) want to go into a non-flexible corporate job as I had been in before.
Romantic Reality #4: Everything Can Be Scrutinized
One beautiful reality of being a language academic—or an expert in languages in general—is that everything is up to scrutiny. In other, pithier, more felicitous words: I can become a grammar Nazi whenever I want.
Friends from non-language backgrounds would sometimes send me pictures of typos and mistakes that they see on billboards, notices, and emails. The elitist in me would glance at such errors and elicit that slight titter of amusement.
I remember when I was a student—it was the first semester, and we were learning advanced syntax. My lecturer had taught us grammar trees and said that someday, once we really internalized what we were learning, we would never be able to read properly without constructing grammar trees in our head. While I had never gone off the rails into that particular extreme, it is true that the language academic in me would scrutinize everything.
I have a love of rhetorical devices, of identifying fallacies and structure and word choice and…it can be tiring, but it’s also fascinating (I am very nerdy, yes). I read a line from a famous speech like, “…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” and my heart melts at such beautiful, poignant, expressive language.
Don’t get me started with other media. I can watch movies and listen to songs and play games and have really meaningful, deep, fruitful discussions with people about the storytelling aspects, about foreshadowing, about the use of linguistics and phraseology to create fictional worlds and cultures, and like I said—it’s all language, and it’s all fascinating.
(I feel the need to give this disclaimer: I’m not weird by default. I can watch a movie perfectly fine without going into the linguistic and rhetorical analysis of it, I promise. Someone might say, ‘if you have to say the thing, you’re not the thing’, but shush).
Romantic Reality #5: Learning Never Ends
Above all, this is the part about being an academic that I romanticize the most. I get paid to learn. I get paid to do research and read books and derive lessons for me to teach my students. And that is just so, so, so rewarding. I have worked in jobs before, where my nine to five was filled with meetings and cold calls, and by the time I come home I am far, far too exhausted to consume anything else except mindless videos. I have gone years, YEARS without reading a book. So I am forever thankful that this is a job where, the more I read and study, the more I do well in it—because not all jobs require that kind of mental stimulation and rewards you for it.
Within the first few months of joining PETRONAS, I was given a copy of Strengthfinders 2.0 by Tom Rath—you can access this test from Gallup, even until today. In the book was a key to take his personality test to uncover one’s Top 5 strengths. “Learner” and “Intellection” were the third and fourth strengths the test revealed about me. I am, by personality, a person who loves learning and who enjoy thinking, reflecting, and exploring ideas. So for me, there is nothing more perfect than the ability to work a job where it’s part of the job description to constantly be learning and innovating.
In the end, the life of an academic is what you make of it, and that’s where its beauty lies. I can choose to be an academic who goes to work, teaches classes using the same notes from ten years ago, grades students’ work at face value, and goes home.
Or I can be the weird, eccentric academic who gives students scenes from Disney movies to break down the cultural dimensions based on Hofstede or identify fallacies in speeches presented at United Nations events.
In order to fully enjoy and romanticize my life as a language academic, I choose the latter.
There is so much nuance and beauty in language. We can study speech and phonetics, structure and rhetoric, syntax and semantics, pragmatics and discourse. Arguably, we will never be as popular as our science and technology counterparts, though we can definitely be as weird and nerdy as them—but if I ever meet that original Redditor in person, I would absolutely tell him/her to consider pursuing this career path, even with all its modern pitfalls.