Job Market Zen

Ok, if you're in the mood for anger and bile and general job-market ranting, stop reading now. I'm going in a slightly different direction today.

The other day I went to this Thing. And at this Thing, we discussed being on the job market. As women. 'Cause it was a wimmenz-type Thing. (I was planning on not going, but Cool Scientist Friend called me up and wondered if I'd walk over with her and hang out. Between being at my least-caffeinated level of the day and wanting to support someone who really is practically the only woman in her dept., I changed my mind.)

It was great. It was actually fun, what can I say? I don't know how much it was useful, and how much it was just that I had escaped from the library and the actual process of applying for jobs and instead was socializing with real human beings, but, either way, I had fun. It was also not women-specific in a woman-ly-type way, unless you count the larger point that, hey, maybe women on the market need job advice too, and when you consider that women are socialized to not make a fuss or push hard for stuff like mentoring or advice and that there is still an "old boy's network" in many disciplines, this simple fact is extremely important.

But really, most of it was a basic overview of the process of applying and some tips. Points about how you need to be organized, how you should make specific applications tailored to specific schools (no telling little liberal arts college how much you want to teach grad students), and there were lists of potential interview questions for both you and your search committee, along with a compendium of useful websites. Maybe I'll go put some up later. But note that I am lazy and I do not personally need to check out all those women in science web sites, so I probably will not.

What I will mention here are the points that I found especially true and comforting. That's right, I only take notes on what I already know and agree with. Consider me like your undergrads.

The Presenting Prof (PP) and Visiting Prof (VP) had some great explanations of what you can and can't control in the process. You can send out a solid writing sample, finish your dissertation, bust your butt to get out another article before you send out your applications. You can't control how these materials ---- or anything about you ---- are going to be interpreted on the other side. VP stressed the point that you are not applying to a new, tabula rasa situation. That department has a history, and you are trying to insert yourself in it. But you cannot know the ins and outs of that history before you get there, so don't worry about tripping yourself up. Your candidacy can be sunk by the crazy, unpopular person championing you. Your assumptions about what and how to teach can conflict with those in that department. Your methodology or specialty can overlap too closely with someone else, or not fill a gaping hole that they really must deal with. But the important thing about this is that you are not a mind reader and will never be able to suss out every secret little detail of "fit." So this lack of fit says nothing about you and your qualities as a scholar, and everything about them and their past history.

PP added that beyond history, there can be projection. This also totally made sense to me (I take back many --- well, not all --- of the nasty things I've said about Freud in the past). Depending on the experiences of those search committee members, they may read things into your application that are not really there. To take myself as an example, because of my past history with creepy, touchy, pompous practitioners of a certain Freudian ilk, I might project those past experiences onto potential candidates, were I on a search committee, and I might toss those applications out, not because of their value, but because of my generalizing or projecting onto them. I could do the same with a name, or a university, or a word in the dissertation title. The point is, you will never know what might set off one person and what another person might love, so it's pointless to try and anticipate it. To lapse into cliche for a moment, it's better to just be yourself, and present your own work and interests as accurately and truthfully as you can.

Some people might find this extremely depressing but I found it quite calming and liberating. Can't anticipate it, can't change it; you should just deal with it. So I'm trying to be Zen about the whole thing. (You may have to remind me of this a lot later in the process. Do not be alarmed if I shower you with profanity at that point.) I will work on the things I have control over, and I will not worry about the things I have no control over ---- which includes how many jobs are out there, who else is applying to them, and whether my other committee people ever turn in their letters.

And at the risk of making a long post incredibly long, the other info I found really useful was about after the job talk. I may return to this idea in a later post. But I have never understood how to answer questions after the job talk. This is mostly because our dept. asks very strange questions ---- usually long self-absorbed monologues about their own research with seemingly no point until the tone suddenly swerves up into a question at the end. Leaving me in the audience thinking, "fuck, that's a question? How the hell is the candidate supposed to answer that?" People, I'll need more advice on how to deal with that soon.

VP made the point that you are supposed to engage with the question in a serious way, and to think along with them, regardless of whether you "know" the answer or disagree with their point. It's about showing you are a colleague, she said, and not a graduate student any more who will need to be taught by them. You should never be dismissive of their point, but not be bullied by them, either. "That basically means" I whispered to Cool Scientist Friend, "you have to stand your ground but not be an asshole." "Mmm --- that is way harder than it may seem" she responded.

So, tips, advice? How does one walk the fine line between standing one's ground and not being an asshole? Because unlike the Zen, this is not going to come easy for me.

Timing the Job Market: The “trial run” and the “gap year”

Over at Dean Dad’s is an interesting discussion about making a “trial run” on the job market. This person doesn’t say what discipline s/he is in, but for English literature jobs, the job “season” goes something like this: in the end of the summer, job candidates start preparing their materials. Jobs are posted throughout the fall, with the vast majority of searches doing interviews right after Christmas at the MLA convention. In Jan/Feb, schools fly out their top few candidates for a tour and extended interview, complete with giving a talk and possibly a teaching demonstration. Then the candidates wait anxiously, sometimes even a month or two, while schools debate their choices. There is then a second, less intense “season” in spring, which largely consists of visiting positions and community college jobs (the CC tenure track searches are like Australia to the universities’ Europe; the weather is off by a season. Readers are left to ponder on their own whether the analogy can be carried further.)

Now, this season is important when you start pondering timelines for finishing the dissertation. Dean Dad’s comment that at his previous school they simply chucked all the ABD applications matches up (depressingly) with anecdotal evidence I have heard elsewhere. Does this really mean that a candidate should have the PhD in hand at the start of this long job season, rather than finishing in spring and filing it with all the corrections in August? I’ll note that of the many job listings I have pulled of the JIL this year, almost all of them state “PhD in hand by start of appointment” and then list the appointment start date as August. Or September, if they do quarters. I only have one that states the PhD must be in hand at the time of application. Which means that either this pattern is not true or search committees are not being honest on their job descriptions.

I know people who have gotten jobs, then finished; I know people who have finished and then gotten jobs. Both kinds have come from my department, so it’s hard to tell definitively which way would be best. In fact, I have gotten vehement advice advocating for each way. If one goes on the market while ABD, getting a job is a wonderful incentive to finish up everything. In fact, this is the preferred method of our grads ---- and yes, you can write a chapter and a half between March when you get the job offer and June when you walk in the graduation ceremonies. And our profs do not allow people to run off to a new job without having completely revised and filed their dissertations, despite our frequent attempts to weasel away. (I hope the profs put this in our letters of recommendation, as we don’t do a dissertation defense. Those references to defense dates in Dean Dad’s post comments worry me.) The most important advantage of this route is that you go straight from one job to another, and you start a “real” salary before the student loans kick in. I know people who are pretty much finished, but didn’t get any jobs, so they are not filing and still trying to pick up TAships for this year to have health insurance and not pay back loans yet. “Don’t file!” They tell me. “Try to publish something rather than finish up the diss, and do another run next year.” This is probably fucking up our graduation and retention statistics, but hey, why give up the tenuous advantages of our grad school positions and no longer have access to the library or a university email account, just to be a Dr.?

Of course, the other side has the argument that any finished dissertation is superior to the best mostly-finished dissertation. Just push through and file, these advocates say. Then you can go on the market with the advantage of a completed PhD and work on publications to be stronger. Focusing on cranking out the diss by working as hard as possible is a lot easier when one is not also going on the market. And some of my cohort members tell me that the feeling of accomplishment is a wonderful ego-booster that really helps protect one during the frustrations of job hunting. However.

Think about the job market season again. If you walk in spring and file in August, you are perfectly placed to go on the market for fall. Except for the pesky details of paying rent and eating. And your student loans will start to come due with crushing force (and if you took out loans as an undergrad too? Those’ll be some big loans.) This is the “gap year,” which Dean Dad has in the past criticized but acknowledged as a regrettable necessity. My department doesn’t really have anything in place for our PhDs; there are sometimes some lectureship positions open but these are subject to the vicissitudes of profs’ sabbaticals and unstable funding. It’s possible to try and grab some composition adjuncting at the local community college, but it, too, sometimes fills up (with the “eternal grad students” who are out of funding from a variety of humanities departments) and there are no guarantees that it will have a job open when you need it. It also pays less than I currently make as a TA, with my loan deferments.

Furthermore, some of us have heard that schools want “newly minted” scholars rather than the penny with the shine worn off that adjuncts seem to be. Therefore we are wary of finishing and becoming locked into an adjunct trap where we are slowly suffocated on our loan payments and never actually get a tt job. I hear that Fancypants McPantserson U, my envy and arch nemesis, has set up a lectureship program where they guarantee all of their grads one year of post-defense teaching in their exact field, thus removing the desire to procrastinate endlessly in school while allowing them to build a couple courses in their area of expertise. I covet that for my grad program. (yessss, my precious!)

Ok, so that’s the gap year of my title. How the hell does this long post deal with the idea of a “trial run”? Well, my fellow grads are anxious. (me too.) The UC has been putting the screws to our teaching eligibility and slashing fellowship money, meanwhile being much more punitive against students who exceed the standard amount of time (when I first got here, we were all assured that it was no problem to take 10 years and that there were always comp sections to pick up once you ran out of “official” funding). And we see fellow grads go on the job market while ABD and pick up jobs. This combination of normative time pressure, lack of extended funding, and fear of being “tainted” as a permanent adjunct, has led us to go on our “trial run” of the job market earlier and earlier in our careers. My “trial run” last year, which I actually thought was a “real run” but didn’t get anything, was with three chapters under my belt. I’m late. Most of us are going out with two, sometimes “two,” meaning they have not been revised and accepted by their committees yet. In the last job meeting the Job Placement Advisor just kicked out a couple people with one chapter and one who has just defended the prospectus (“you can listen in,” he told them, “but you are not going out this year.”) More and more of us are worriedly saying we will “just apply to a few places this year” even though we have hardly anything done.

Thing is, going on the market is incredibly time consuming, frustrating, and emotionally draining. I bet it’s especially hard to write a dissertation abstract when you haven’t really gotten the chapter-writing format down quite yet. It is certainly difficult to sum up the “through-line” of your dissertation for your cover letter if you aren’t really sure what that through line is. (I still don’t know. It might not be there.) Plus there is a lot of running around, getting your letters in, copying, pulling together material, and general freaking out. And I can assure you that even if you aren’t the emotional drama type, not getting any interviews or not making any flybacks can be crushing. I was depressed all winter break last year. My friend took her rejections really personally as a sign that she was a fraud and not meant to be a professor, and was too depressed to work on her diss for several months afterwards. You could be using that time to actually make progress on your chapters and to prep stuff for publication ---- turning in chapters and sending off articles will pump up your confidence, while going on the market extremely early and not getting a job will only bring you down.

So, to conclude: hire me. Oh wait, that’s not it. Uh, no more of this “early hunting” and “trial run” business. To most effectively support their students, departments should discourage early job hunts and force grads to focus on writing their diss and publishing things instead. And have a guaranteed year of lectureship post-graduation to help them go on the market with the PhD and without the gap year. Now someone please put all this in place in time for me to benefit from it. Oh, wait.

Writing the Statement of Teaching Philosophy

What the hell is a statement of teaching philosophy? These make no sense to me. And don’t point me to the sample ones on the web … I’ve seen 'em; I get, in theory, what they are supposed to do. What I want to know is: how seriously do places take them when they ask for them? How does one write one that is not vague, general, and dorky-sounding? Because, really, the sample ones I have seen sound either incredibly empty and inane (“I run a student-centered classroom” --- no shit, Sherlock, isn’t pretty much everybody’s class centered on, um, teaching the students?) or sound like ass-kissing pedagogy robots. And you know I like teaching, and I even like talking about pedagogy, but I really dislike those grad students who manage to sound incredibly formulaic and unnaturally enthusiastic when spouting off pedagogical jargon. (“In my class we leverage our dialogue to facilitate the acquisition of life-long learning skill sets!” ---- Couldn’t you just say, “I had a great breakthrough getting my students to understand me in class today”? Probably not, eh.)

The teaching philosophy is one of the places (oh, I could make a list of the places, honey) where my department falls down on the job in prepping us for the market. We are given no models, no examples, no list of what to do and not to do in the teaching philosophy. Last year whenever I mentioned I needed to write one and was having trouble, the job market advisor, my advisor, all the profs I talked to, just cocked their heads in that Aroo?-confused-dog look and then changed the subject. In one of the meetings I piped up to tack on “and sometimes a teaching philosophy” to a list of required materials and the job market advisor paused for a sec, then said, “Oh yeah, some places will want that sort of stuff.” Now, people very rarely out-and-out tell us that we have to get Research 1, tenure-track, fancy-pants jobs if we want to live up to the program’s standards but incidents like this get the point across pretty plainly. (although at times they do tell us straight out, usually when we’ve had a bad market year and we tell them about our only offer, which may be a VAP, a CC job, or state-school-out-in-the-middle of nowhere. Some of us were told that we were letting them down. I didn’t get anything at all though, and luckily nobody pulled any “letting us down” shit on me. I might have killed.)

Now I had to write a couple of them for last year’s job search, for different departments and types of jobs even. But I just went back and looked at them and they sound quite stupid. Unlike my job letter and diss abstract, which still sound intelligible a year later and I think just need lots of tweaking and smoothing. But no matter what I write, it sounds either un-teaching-philosophy-ish or vapid and stupid and not really like me.

I think it’s because it’s a “philosophy.” You’d think with my love of all things theory I’d be good at philosophizing my teaching. But nope. And what I do with theory is basically figure out what other people are theorizing. So heck, maybe I’m a brilliant writer of other peoples’ teaching philosophies, culled out of a suitcase of their strange and abstruse aphorisms. (If you think there is any money in this line of work I’d be willing to try it.) But my problem is that I can come up with laundry lists of what I like to do in the classroom and descriptions of exercises that are very concrete and specific and good, but that’s not a philosophy. And when I try to abstract a philosophy out of these activities I either get empty jargon that doesn’t sound like my teaching style, or a completely contradictory mess. (Cause honestly? I’m a pragmatist in the classroom ---- I’ll try anything once and see if it sticks. Which leaves me with a wide range of catchall tricks and “teaching recipes” that don’t make any sense when lined up next to each other.)

Furthermore, what I tried to do with the teaching philosophies last year, since I only had to do about three or four, was tailor them to the department asking for them. I poked around on the departments’ websites and tried to figure out what they were interested in, I matched my examples to the types of classes or surveys or authors they favored, etc. But what matched one department is reeeeaally off for the departments asking for statements this year. So, (gah!) I’ll have to do them all over again.

Thinking about it, I’m coming to hate teaching philosophies even more. I see that search committees are trying to find committed and thoughtful teachers who will work on improving their pedagogical strategies. But their means of assessing (heh, yeah, I know their lingo) teaching commitment and self-awareness is actually guaranteed to produce lies and game-playing, as it’s pretty much impossible to write something true to yourself and honest and get a job. (Though, what do I know? I didn’t get any jobs last year with my “earnest” teaching statements either.) For example, the following statements are all fairly accurate readings of aspects of my teaching style, but would never fit the format of a teaching philosophy:

- In my classes I model my own writing style to them, which involves endless whining and procrastinatory blog reading while nursing a beer and futzing over a badly-written draft...

- I am a hardass who believes in grinding down students’ young spirits through hard work and disciplinary structures. None of that “nurturing, accessible” shit from me --- I push students to do their reading and revise their drafts --- or I push them all the way out of the classroom. My evaluation comments are fairly evenly divided between the cliché “tough but fair” and “evil bitch-spawn from hell.” Besides, most of them come to love the beatings after a while.

- As both a graduate student and a teacher, I believe my role is to assist in the coming global revolution by boring from within. To that end, I combine a rigorous analysis of the corruptive nature of global capitalism with pragmatic activist organizing strategies, direct action, and group work. The writings of Paulo Freire and Franz Fanon, as well as Peter Elbow’s Writers Without Teachers, have been extraordinarily helpful to me. As an organic intellectual I look forward to the day when I can tell my teaching has been effective in overthrowing the university system because I am stood up against the wall and shot.

- Due to the keenly competitive structure of T&P and the rigorous demands of my active research and publishing schedule, I strive to cut corners and maximize effectiveness in my teaching wherever possible rather than have teaching eat my life. Luckily, my eminence in the field has attracted many grad students to our program, and I make working with me contingent on them doing most of my undergraduate teaching scut work. I believe the best student is the self-motivated student and that assigning drafts, reminding them of deadlines, and showing up regularly to the large lectures coddles them. College is meant to be preparation for the real world and as such the training wheels should be taken off as soon as possible.
(ok that one’s more my advisor and some of my profs than me --- but they are trying to mold me in their image, aren’t they?)

- Official university assessment methods like finals and evaluations are useless for actually figuring out what students’ real opinions are. That is why I have trained a network of spies, who resemble regular undergrads, to infiltrate other classrooms and public campus spaces. They listen in on my students’ conversations and ascertain which pedagogical aspects of my class worked and which confused the students. I also have extensive hourly breakdowns of who did the reading, how long it took them, and when they took a bathroom break. Plagiarism has been almost completely eliminated in my system, and my special STudent-Initiated Secret Inquisitions (Stasi) team tests how well the students have mastered the material by breaking into their dorms in the middle of the night, shining flashlights in their eyes, and asking them the exam questions. Students with excellent test results are often recruited into the team, while the Ds and Fs are never heard from again.

Your homework? To give me advice on a real teaching philosophy (some of you have got to be at teaching schools, right? If your SCs ask for statements, why? And what are they supposed to be like?) or, alternately, to amuse me by producing better parodies. Or heck, why not both?

To be sung to the tune of a major Broadway musical

I feel crappy
So unhappy
Like I'm banging my head on the wallllllllll!
Students nap-y
And they aren't doing their reading at all.

I feel shitty
Full of pity
My job prospects are practically nilllllllll!
And so shitty
For a job I just might have to kill

See that disgruntled cog in that mirror there!
(what mirror where?)
Who can that disaffected girl be?
(she's got no sense of rhythm, yo)
She's still gotta grade,
She's still gotta write,
She's still gotta update
Her CV!
(her CV her CV)

I feel lousy
grump and grous-y
Feel like hiding at home in my bed!
For I've been teaching*
until I feel half dead!

*that line should read teaching/grading/trying to get my advisor to update my letter/prep for job market/scramble to put my chapter together/ freak out about job market/ have unbecoming hate-filled waves of envy towards friends who are more market prepared or closer to done than me, but it didn't scan.

There are some things money can't buy. For everything else...

The 2006 Job Search Revisited

Not getting a single flyback or job offer: Pr ---- hey, what the fuck?

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I sent out 57 applications last year, by the way. I’m sure I forgot some expenses; I was keeping track of them for a while last year but as things got crazy I stopped, needing those brain cells for something else. For a cost breakdown of a full job search, complete with job offer, someone published an account of her final dissertation year here.

There’s a small patch of good news this year: our school's dossier service will now let us charge it to our credit card rather than pay cash on the barrel or with a check. That’s a big deal if you’re trying to send out applications in fall before getting your first paycheck or loan.

I’ll also commend our department: it allows us to use for free: the Job Information List, the copier, dept. letterhead, paper and printing; it also provides envelopes and mails your applications as long as you don’t want it sent in a rush (which sometimes you have to as you get avalanched by the craziness).

Search committees also seem to have moved towards asking for less stuff in the first pass, which helps those of us who aren’t getting assistance from our departments (although many of those places where I sent out just a letter and CV never contacted me for more stuff, sniff.) I would really urge departments to not ask for transcripts until at least the second pass or preferably as part of flybacks, cause it’s just silly for all 600 million of us applicants to enrich our schools by another 5 bucks.

To Postdoc or not to Postdoc?

I swore that I was Not Dealing With the job market or even thinking about it until I finished teaching my summer class. I lied.

Having caught up on my bloglines, I was left with the choice of either reading random internet sites or grading student essays. I guess I could prep tomorrow’s class along with the grading. Obviously, I chose option c) blogging on my non-random blog, about the above interdicted topic.

The Job List is not out yet (tho’ jobs are starting to appear in the chronicle and inside higher ed for affiliated departments I could possibly cross-apply to) but Famous Postdoc Positions in the humanities have permanent websites, and many have been updated with the “theme” or “topic” for the year. I can peruse them right now, all the while wondering: would it be worth it?

Let me immediately make clear that I am not turning up my nose at the pay or even teaching loads (50k would be unimaginable riches compared to a full teaching year here for grad students. Even the ones that offer 30k are the UC equivalent of two grad students.). I can handle teaching multiple sections or even multiple courses because of all the teaching I did here --- though I have heard that certain postdocs are really exploitative adjunct positions in disguise and have met several people now who went back on the market after teaching a 3-3 or even 4-4 load of business and technical writing at a certain place only to get another postdoc or nothing. (So I fear that some of these positions are a ladder downward, not upward onto the tenure track.)

No, what really concerns me is the draining nature of the application process. Postdoc applications are more specialized and resemble fellowship apps. (You may need a special type of letter and additional statement of how your work intersects with the theme in addition to a standard statement of research, for example.) The ones at the Big Ivies and Elite SLACs also charge an application fee (usually $20 or $30) to scare off the hordes. And the UC system has a postdoc system, but you need to find a sponsor at another UC to mentor you, as well as prove that your work enhances diversity in some way. Mine arguably might, but I don’t, and I think I’d get put at the bottom of the pile because of that.

Most worrisome are the letters of recommendation, which I presume would have to be different from job letters and specially tailored to each postdoc position. I try not to unduly piss off any committee members and asking them for 8 million different hassles of postdoc recommendations would seem to needlessly use up my store of social capital. (Advisor capital? Grad-schoolian capital? Help: my Bourdieu is across the room and I can’t get up.)

So, considering that applying for postdocs would be more time-consuming and committee-pissing-off than the usual job application, I thought I would ask you, the blogosphere, and whoever else might listen, if going for these postdocs would be worth it.

I should add one more thing: I’m not sure you’ve heard of my school, or my department. Seriously, do the Big Ivies only consider grads from the other Big Ivies? (I just read an article citing Lacan and his use of “the Big Other,” which my phrase reminds me of, and so I’m keeping it for amusement and appropriateness.) I should go see if any have lists of previous awardees. If they only take students from Cambridge and Harvard, then I shouldn’t even bother.

Last year I applied to one postdoc, because the topic was quite close to my own, and it was at a committee member’s alma mater. (Connections, you know? I can hope.) I made it to the second cut and they asked for another writing sample. They also sent the request as a list to the 24 other people from the second cut, rather than blind-carbon-copying it. That’s how I know there were 25, and that me and the other person here who worked with said committee member were the only people from a public school; the rest were grads at Big Ivies.

Finally, while some postdocs are due on D-day (November 1 seems to be the deadline for job applications) and some are due in early December, quite a lot are due almost immediately. So I need to make this decision right away or else it will be made for me by the passing of time.

Gah. On the one hand, I'm all "maximize your time investments!" and on the other, "desperation is staring you in the face! Apply to everything! Now! Go, go go! I don't care if you're not in an economics department; apply to that job too --- apply, apply, apply!" It's amazing that I actually get any teaching prep or writing done over all this mental shouting. But listening to this inner fight has exhausted me and so I'm going to put the decision making all in your hands. Heads or tails? Up or down? Stay or go?