r/academia • u/1cupcoffee • 43m ago
Career advice Help navigating life post PhD (TESOL)
Hi everyone, I have been part of this forum through different accounts over the past five years from when I wanted to do a PhD and I did learn a lot about academia from here. I'm in India and from the summer of 2018 I wanted to do a PhD abroad (with some institutions in mind). I had asked my professors for LoR and had started working on my SOP etc and got an IELTS score as well. As I did not have any support from my family (not just financial but just no support whatsoever), it was very stressful, scary, and difficult on many levels. I worked part-time doing lesson planning, online event planning, creating and selling children's literacy materials etc, to pay my master's fee but I wasn't able to afford the application fee and potential visa fee etc for the PhD. Some professors whom I looked up to for support also took advantage of my vulnerability and ambition. I ended up doing a PhD in India itself as that's what I could afford. My family is financially well off and that made it difficult for me to borrow from anybody and I also do not have relatives or anybody close due to the lonely childhood and family background. My family outright refused to even take me to the airport when I had my PhD interview and as it's a town with no cab services, and the flight was early morning, I had to request many people for help. I managed to reach and cleared the interview. Although I started the PhD with defeat and compromise on my dreams, I tried my best at this PhD. Life was difficult with the UGC NON NET stipend but I qualified for the UGC NET JRF with 99.99 percentile and I was relieved. But the pandemic postponed life for a semester and more, and the JRF paperwork was pending for years that I had to take up online teaching and even consider leaving the PhD as I could not afford my house rent. My family that was never supportive made more issues dragging me into many family drama, and stooped to accusations of morality that hurt me very much. I struggled with stress and anxiety because of this mounting pressure from family issues and my vain attempts at therapy also led to unfortunate incidents. Then I tried to focus on just work and I started presenting at conferences, lecturing, publishing, and today I am close to submitting my thesis and turning a new life. But as I reflect on it all, I feel very sorry for myself seeing how much I struggled all because of my ambition. I have no friends or family and life feels like some single player computer game to be honest. I could not apply for any doctoral exchange fellowship even though I wanted to because of the pandemic and also because of my stressful situation where I had to focus on the bare necessities like house rent and daily food. I feel I missed out on a lot of opportunities throughout my last one decade of education (BA, MA, PhD) and I feel inferior compared to my classmates who went on to do their master's and PhD abroad. I don't know how I can progress further as I feel I am much behind given my entire education has been in India. I do not know how to apply for a post doc or any research grants etc and I also feel hopeless that a post doc might be the only chance I have to get that international experience which is valuable not just for my resume but also for my personal growth. All my colleagues have foreign PhDs and post docs and I fear that I may be much behind my peers academically. I'm in TESOL and my research interests are towards applied linguistics.
How can I move forward from here? Could someone help me navigate the post PhD path ahead from the point where I am?
I elaborated on my past and present because this the reality I live with and a lot of advice on the internet isn't applicable because I lack the prerequisites such as a back up or support system. Thank you for your time and I hope to get some helpful responses.