Laura explains how she managed to move into a permanent academic contract. She underlines the importance of tenacity; in being prepared to hold out in short-term contracts until the permanent job comes up. She describes the interview process and her surprise at getting the job.

What about the selection process, was that rigorous? 

Yeah. It was awful. I'd written a lot of job applications and I was short listed for another job when I got offered the interview but that was a temporary job. I was torn. It was a temporary job in the States which would have been great, but there was no contest between a permanent job and a temporary job even in the States. And I was really surprised to get my job. I hadn't been very successful, I'd only had a couple of interviews but then I got the book contract and I think that is what swung it and I'd been teaching for I think three years as associate tutor or temporary partial teaching contract, and it's not a way to build a career. And increasingly universities are not going to have it. They are going to keep Associate Tutors, but hourly paid teaching was part of the PhD experience. It's not useful to universities to have a whole load of quite expensive staff on their books, people hanging around demanding to be treated like employees. It doesn't help the university at management level, it doesn't really help them.

And I guess it's also that we need some flexibility, people to step in but actually they don't need hoards and hoards of people like that. So you never actually knew if you were going to have any teaching the next year and sometimes it was really very short notice as to whether or not you'd have any teaching at all or enough teaching to live on, or perhaps too much teaching to be able to realistically cope. It was all up in the air. Not because of any problem with the way in which individuals treated us, but just because we were used at the last minute to plug up any holes.

The job that came up was a replacement post for someone who had wanted to retire, take an early retirement but was still attached to the university and I felt it would be quite hard for me to ask for teaching next year again if there had been a job here that I hadn't even applied for. That really wasn't going to do me any good. It would be quite hard to justify why they should keep me on these rolling contracts, if when there was a proper contract, I didn't apply for it. My whole reaction was that I really didn't want to do it, and that it would be – this sounds ridiculous – it would be embarrassing. I thought I'd make a fool of myself. I know that's a ridiculous reason to make career decisions. I just felt very strongly that I wasn't a strong enough candidate to get it. They weren't necessarily looking for somebody junior. It was a Professorial replacement. And really the worst was that I wouldn't get it and then I'd have to come back and teach on this other contract. I wasn't to make a fuss if I didn't get it because that's not fair on anybody, and it's not fair on anybody. A bit of me was wanting someone really good appointed. I also thought that I couldn't put on an interview persona, I can't exaggerate because they know me. But, actually, of course, most of your colleagues don't know what you work on at all and especially not if you're an Associate Tutor.

So I did the presentation which was really useful because I hadn't really thought through what I was going to do next as a research project. I'd written a few post doc applications that I hadn't got anywhere but they were only for one year projects and I needed a real project. I wrote something really ballsy and quite ambitious that I was going to write a complete political cultural history of the 1980s in two and a half years or something and get loans of research grant to do it. At the interview what I was saying to them was really 'Okay you say you're interested in contemporary history. When I say contemporary history I mean history that ended yesterday. So come on then, let's see if you're hard enough, let's do it! How are we going to use text messages and the internet as historical sources? How are we going to use You Tube and Blue Tooth and the things that some of the old professors didn't even know what they were. So I gave a presentation and then came back to my office which was quite weird, because I was only up the corridor, listened to music really loud in my office in a slightly petulant teenage way, thinking 'I don't care if I don't get the job'. And then I had to go to the interview which was really hard because there were people that I knew. However, they did a really brilliant job of being absolutely professional and the most useful piece of advice that I had from anybody was to walk into this as though you've never met anybody there before. What often happens is that internal candidates under sell themselves. They don't think to say the things that they should be saying and so that was a really, really useful tip. And because I was an internal candidate no-one could give me any advice really. So I kept having conversations with people in corridors saying 'What are you going to wear?' It was the thing that they could say. I had a very nice conversation with the head of department about cheap suit or expensive dress. I went for cheap suit in the end.

So the interviewing process was really frightening. It was frightening but it should be and I'm glad it was, because now I know that I nailed that interview – particularly in terms of being able to talk about teaching, and think about teaching intelligently. And the kind of things that we would expect our students to do in essays – why do you do it that way? Why is it that shape? Why do those ideas come out in that shape or in that language? – that we would expect our students to talk about all the time when we're looking at sources. That's how we should think about our teaching, why do we do it in the way that we do? How do we teach someone to write an essay? And I think the fact that I'd really thought about some of the teaching issues helped and the fact I had a book contract.

But in the interview one of the panel, the head of department who had been the most incredibly supportive head of department I could have possibly imagined, really came in hard in the interview. I'm sure he must know that I'm no good on numbers but it was about particular ways in which unemployment's calculated in the post war period and in the 1980s. I can do that stuff and I can teach it, but it was the worst question. He didn't like my answer and he came back at me and back again, which I think is probably just what he does actually.

So I felt like it was a proper interview. I knew I'd done alright. I didn't expect to get the job but I knew that I hadn't humiliated myself so much that I wasn't able to go into work the next week. I knew I hadn't got the job to the extent that I'd arranged to go out for a drink with one of the other candidates that night. And actually I just felt really knackered and had rung up and arranged to do it another time. We both assumed we wouldn't get it. Then I got the phone call at home and I just knew that I shouldn't swear down the phone to my new head of school. And so I turned into Dorothy Gale from the Wizard of Oz, and just repeated 'oh my – oh my'. My husband was looking at me and thinking someone must have died because she looks really weird. And I forgot to say yes, that I would take the job. So any semblance of competence that I had conjured up in the presentation and interview had completely gone. Totally forgot to even accept the job. And put the phone down and had to tell my husband that I'd got a job which was a relief to him because I'd been scrounging off him since we got together. (laughingly)

I don't know how useful that example is, it's not a transferable example. It's quite an odd situation to be in, to be an internal candidate and to be a mature student and not have got a post-doc, post doctoral, the randomness is quite useful I think.

It's about hanging on in there, and doing short-term contracts isn't it?

I know that's true, but you could end up doing that forever and at what point do you stop?

I had just accepted a job co running a shop, though not signed a contract. I was really happy to do it, and I would have loved it actually. I used to run shops and I always really enjoyed it. I think I had got to the point where I knew it was a bit make or break. There is something about not humiliating yourself in academia because it's such personal thing. I think I hated the idea that I could be 20 years down the road saying 'oh yeah I nearly had a no.1 in the 80s'. I know that I would have got out of the university that year, and probably that's why I pushed it and decided to get the book done because if I don't I'll never know if I can. If the book had not done well or I hadn't got a contract, I would have left the university and I would have been fine. (laughs)

It would have been fine and I think I do think we need to be really honest with PhDs that this is not a romantic sit in the office. There are great things about it. When I first started the first day of my MA we all went out for a drink and there was one guy there who wanted to be an academic, and then my friend Mike who I'm now supervising his PhD (which is such a lovely feeling), was sitting there going 'well we don't want to be academics, no' and this guy just said 'yeah but you don't have to wear a suit and you can smoke in your office' and at that point you could still smoke in your office. And I thought yeah that's true actually, you don't have to wear a suit and you can smoke in your office. They've banned smoking now. But I think there were lovely, lovely things about it But other people are alright if they choose not to become academics.