Baking the Cake of Failure and Opportunity

Ingredients​

• 150g historic overachieving
• 300ml Little-Fish-Big-Pond 
• 1 tbsp. academic bullying
• 300g self-deprecation
• 200g golden opportunities squandered because of illness and/or parenting obligations
• 4 tbsp 'friendly' competition
• 1 tsp expected overwork
• ½ tsp student evaluations

For the buttercream

• 100g conference papers 
• 200g book proposals
• 400g peer reviews
• 5 tbsp abstracts
• 1 tbsp journal articles (can be substituted for book chapters)

To decorate

• tears, tantrums, rejections, painful memories

Method

1. Heat oven to 190C/170C fan/gas 5. Grease the base and sides of 2 x 20cm sandwich tins with dairy-free spread, then line the bases with baking parchment.
2. Put the Little-Fish-Big-Pond in a jug and add the bullying– it will split but don’t worry. Put all of the other cake ingredients into a large bowl, pour over the liquid mixture and beat well until your self-esteem has finally been integrated into your academic success. Divide the mixture between the prepared tins and bake for 25-30 mins or until a skewer inserted into the middle of your heart comes out cleanly. Leave to cool in the tins for 10mins then turn out onto wire racks to cool completely.
3. To make the buttercream, put the conference papers into a heatproof bowl and melt in the microwave, stirring every 30 seconds. Leave the papers to cool for 5 minutes. Beat the book proposals and peer review together with a wooden spoon then sift in the abstracts with a pinch of salt from dried tears. Pour in the conference papers and journal articles and keep mixing until smooth.
4. Sandwich the two cooled sponges together with half of the buttercream then pile the rest on top and down the sides. Decorate with your tears of pain and rejection.

To serve
You can serve this cake at any time, but it is best consumed alone in a dark room in the middle of the night when you are having a panic attack about facing the Person Who Is Bullying You the following day even though you have done nothing that person could possibly comment on. 

​Enjoy!

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Like a lot of early career academics, I've read a lot of quit lit, but I honestly never thought I'd be on the verge of writing my own. But things have changed a lot in the last (academic) year and I wanted to chronicle that in some way even though I'm not ready to write 'quit lit'.

And finally, the usual caveat: quit lit isn't ever about an academic quitting academia. Sometimes it's about realisations that academia isn't right for you - perhaps that's some of where my feelings are headed - and sometimes it's about a system that gives up on early career academics - that's definitely a part of my story. Sometimes, too, it's about the ways that personal circumstances create a cumulative effect on the work that a precarious academic can do. That's also a part of my story. And sometimes it's about the way that other people interject into one's academic career to derail it, whether purposefully or otherwise, and that's also part of my story. There isn't ever a single reason: 'I couldn't get a job' or 'academia wasn't right for me'. There's always a multitude of things that combine like ingredients to bake a cake of failure (or a cake of opportunity, or perhaps they are the same thing).