Pay Dirt is Slate’s money advice column. Have a question? Send it to Athena and Elizabeth here. (It’s anonymous!)
Dear Pay Dirt,
I am smart, but my husband is brilliant. We met during my postdoctoral when he was wrapping up an MD/PhD program in a different field.
He was offered an incredible job at a high-profile university, and as the trailing spouse, I was also offered a position. The university isn’t as prestigious for my field as it is for his, but it’s still significantly better and more secure than a job I would have been able to get on my own. Several years in, I’m happy here, with amazing research opportunities and a reasonable amount of service work that actually lets me research without being swamped in committees. I’m enjoying my professional collaborators and my amazing health insurance. If everything keeps going this way, we might be in the position to actually have a family and both stay in academia. But I feel so guilty because I know I’m not qualified to be here on my own, and only got this job through my more qualified spouse. Many of my PhD and postdoc cohort friends are struggling right now and would be more qualified for this job than I am, including ones who were pushed out of academia for the industry job market. I think about it constantly, even though no one in my department has said anything. I try to give back by putting effort into teaching, which tends not to be a priority in research schools, but I think about it all the time and feel like I can’t share it with my husband. Is there anything I can do? I don’t want to quit my job but it feels like I’m a fraud here.
—Trailing Spouse
Dear Trailing Spouse,
Even truly talented people have imposter syndrome, and it sounds like that might be true in your case. Even if we take for granted that you got the job in part because of your husband, you would not have gotten it if you were completely unqualified, and since I’m assuming you don’t have tenure, you wouldn’t keep it if you were underperforming.
What you bring to the job is up to you. If you’re concerned that you had a little bit of an advantage vis-à-vis some of your colleagues, I assure you that some of your colleagues also have advantages you don’t have and no amount of beating yourself up will remedy those inequalities. I don’t think you’re as under-qualified as you state or you’d be struggling right now, so you need to examine whether your guilt is really about distrusting your own fortunes. You should be able to talk about this to your spouse, who would probably understand better than anyone why you’re feeling the way you do.
Lastly, if you are putting effort into teaching, that’s to be celebrated by itself. It’s not rewarded in any way in research universities and sometimes faculty are punished for being too involved in teaching if they’re not producing enough on the research front. But what you do in the classroom influences future generations of people in your profession and that is incredibly valuable and important by itself.
—Elizabeth
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