I had really enjoyed my degree and very much wanted to go on to an academic career within the field but there was something major happening down in London.
I graduated in the late 80s, a few years after financial deregulation or “Big Bang”, and the financial district of London, the City, capital C, was abuzz and booming. Friends from years above were returning with stories about it that made me feel like this was the place to be. For brief periods in history there can be one clear geographical area that is the centre of all that is happening in the world and at that time, for me, that place was the City. And I didn’t want to be left out.
The City made good upon its promises, the work, excepting the first routine role to learn the ropes, was interesting and challenging, the colleagues clever and good company, and the rewards high.
Ten years on however that on-hold academic career began to become an itch that I could no longer ignore. If I was going to set the academic world alight then I had to start upon it whilst I was still young enough to have a decent career rather than leaving it to my sixties and retirement.
I applied for a one year postgrad degree with a big research element as a pre-PhD “loosener” to get me back into it and was on Cloud Nine for months. It was the unalloyed happiness of a child on their birthday or Christmas and the lyrics to Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill kept coming unrequested to mind: “I’ll tell them what the smile on my face meant”. And I was smiling. A lot.
However months, maybe even weeks, into the course it began to dawn on me that the glorious academic career I had envisaged was not the reality. A postgraduate degree brought me into daily social contact with academics and their work appeared to have an awful amount of dull grind for what I had viewed as a dream job. With the flame of motivation flickering I switched the degree to a two year part time course with the claim of wanting to make a better dissertation but the reality of wanting more time off.
When the two years ended I passed the degree, though without a credit, and was honest enough with myself to mark it a failure. In simple career terms I had wasted two years, lost two years’ salary, and had had to pay out the cost of the degree and living expenses. Back to the day job I went.
The longer term effects were however more unexpected. Having “followed the dream” and had it fail I had removed entirely from my mind the nagging, and demotivating, thought that there was something else that I should be doing. I was able to enjoy work for its own sake rather than viewing it as being a means to an end; and as a result did far better in my subsequent career than I would have done had I not “wasted” those two years.
Out of a life of striving to succeed my most sustained long term success was a direct consequence of two years of failure. Funny old world.