I should say that it's also unusual to complete the three year programme in three years. The fourth year is usually used for writing up (the completed thesis will be a maximum of 100 000 words), the viva (an oral defense in front of your supervisors, an external examiner who is an expert in the field) which can be held up to three months after you submit your thesis, and, assuming you pass the viva, corrections which take two or three months. So really, a fourth year could actually drift into a fifth depending on how slow the school is to organise your viva and the extent of the minor corrections. And yet funding runs out after three years (which is only relevant to those lucky people like myself who have funding, that is), and us overseas students are faced with our UK visas running out in January of the fourth year (2012 for me), so there is extra pressure to complete, defend and correct by halfway through the fourth year. In fact, it looks like the school has finally admitted that most students will take four years to complete, and the new visas issued to students who started last September now last a full four years.
Then comes applying for post-doc and lectureship positions. This takes time. A number of the major UK postdoctorate schemes have a deadline of April, and you have to have at least submitted your thesis if not defended it, so it makes it highly unlikely that someone could apply in the spring of their third year and have a position secured for the fourth. This can then mean no income beyond tutoring for the entire fourth year -- a scary thought. Postdocs vary greatly. The Leverhulme Fellowship is the major one here, and is ridiculously hard to get, but it is a great start to a career in academia. It allows you two years of paid research at a UK university to pursue research on a new topic, thereby giving you time to put together the basis for what will become your second book (as your thesis is assumed to be your first). The pay is good, and your teaching time limited so that the school you're working at can't take advantage of your newness too much.
I can't count how many dire warnings we've received from staff, upper-year PhDs and postdocs about the bleak job outlook we're all facing. I suppose it's just like any other field right now, except maybe discount stores. We're told that the trick to getting a job is to have a book (likely an adaptation of your thesis) and, hopefully, a postdoctoral fellowship under your belt. To get a book you need to find the right academic publisher, create an exciting and convincing book proposal, and spend a lot of time re-working your thesis, because the thesis can be so technical in its referencing, definitions, methodology, historiographic examination... see? I bet I'm boring some of you already, and thus it needs to be reworked to become publishable.
Lectureships are also hard to come by. Tenure doesn't really happen in UK universities (so I've been told by profs here, anyway), so it's not like jobs are held for life here, but when professors retire or move to a new school, a lot of their positions just disappear for cost-cutting reasons. I've noticed that a number of major slavery historians have retired recently, so I do have a bit of hope, but to be honest I'm not sure that I want to be a 'slavery historian' for the rest of my life. There's so many different aspects of British history that interest me that I wouldn't want to be limited in that way, although I would be very happy to teach courses on it, and then aim my own research elsewhere, so that could be the way forward.
I was very surprised when I first came here and starting working as a tutor running three tutorials a week that I was the only grad student tutor on my course. The rest were all postdocs. I think this happens because a) postdocs can be assigned menial jobs by the school that's housing them, b) Edinburgh doesn't officially teach postgrads to teach or even want them teaching as the programme is so short, and yet provided a bunch of us with teaching awards to get us teaching... c) teaching just isn't as important when job hunting here compared to in North America, or perhaps d) postdocs nearing the end of their funded fellowship might not find work right away and need something to tide them over. Some teaching and admin. experience is important when job hunting in the academic arena, although teaching isn't as important when assessing applicants in UK universities as it is in the US or Canada. Luckily I now have three years of teaching tutorials under my belt so I should be okay on either side of the Atlantic on that front, and I gained a ton of admin. experience this year by organising and chairing a couple postgraduate workshops and sitting on a number of committees as a student rep. A fellow PhD-2 and I are also in the early stages of organising a one-day academic conference for the fall, so stay tuned.
I suppose the final complicating factor when looking towards the future is knowing that we really have to be willing to go where the work is, because work is so hard to come by. This could mean a lectureship in England, a postdoc in Canada or the US, or maybe we'll head farther afield to Europe. Universities in a number of countries in Europe, including in Scandinavia, teach first and second year courses in English, and give their academic staff several years to learn the native language. That's pretty exciting stuff. And I'm all for looking beyond academia towards government or private positions with national heritage bodies or in museums, but the nature of my degree and my qualifications will steer me towards the academic environment.
The uncertain nature of the next few years is a little bit daunting for someone like myself who likes to be organised and have a plan. With regards to the near future, we've made an educated guess that we'll be here in Scotland until at least late fall, 2011, to allow me to complete my writing up and probably my viva and corrections, although if I found a position elsewhere I could fly back for the viva and likely make any corrections at home. If Derek was working then I would probably tutor in my fourth year and we'd stay until April 2012 (we should both have British passports by then and therefore not need our visas anymore, but that's another blog). With Derek still job hunting our future's more flexible at the moment then we'd expected, but we're on a very tight budget. A postdoctoral fellowship (which is what I really want) or a first-year lectureship, and time to work on my book proposal and maybe write an article or two, will hopefully be how I spend 2012-2013, and that sounds pretty good to me.
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