Having somehow managed to continue getting renewed through my probationary period as a tenure-track faculty member, I've reached a point in my career where my former students--many of whom have gone on to pursue PhDs at great universities--are preparing to face the pain and suffering of the academic job market. As a result, I've been retelling my experiences as a job seeker and reflecting on the brutality of the job market quite a bit recently with a little more critical (and emotional) distance than I've ever been afforded.
In this series of job market flashbacks, I'll be recounting my two cycles as a job candidate in hopes of providing a little perspective on the experience. These posts are probably more for me--as a way of working through the psychological trauma of the market--as they are for anyone else, but I like to tell myself that they're helping refine the stories and glean some lessons that I can pass on to my students.
These posts are not lists of practical advice. Those exist elsewhere. I love me some www.theprofessorisin.com (Dr. Kelsky's book by the same name is also really good), and there's always an article or two in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the market for advice seekers. I encourage you to seek them out.In this post, I reflect on the "first wave" of the job market cycle--from around August 1 until the National Communication Association annual convention in November--from my first run at the market.
During my first run at the market, I deftly avoided writing a dissertation (a skill I would later lament), helped my spouse discern an important shift in her career, moved into a new house, lived, for a time, in a chicken coop (seriously), and faced the very real concern that I would not be employed the following year and would have to start paying off my student loans with IOUs and book reviews (that’s a joke, see, because book reviews are basically worthless even as academic currency). Oh, and we welcomed our daughter into the family without any real sense of how much money it costs to raise a child.
Much to the chagrin of my letter writers and references, I sent out more than sixty applications in my first year on the job market. I applied for anything and everything that I was remotely qualified for and somethings for which I was remarkably unqualified. Research positions, teaching positions, fetal positions, you name it, I sent them my CV. The result of my effort was a handful of phone interviews, a smaller handful of campus invitations, and three job offers.
In the first “wave” of activity, I conducted one pre-conference phone interview with a small public university in the South for a position that was a tenure-track teaching position loosely categorized as “speech communication.” The interview was mostly okay from my standpoint, but was nothing to write home about. We probably spent more time talking about how one of the interviewers was a home brewer because the university was in a dry county than we did talking about my teaching experiences and philosophies. I was not invited to campus. Fun fact: one of the search committee members was also on the job market and scooped up one of the better jobs on the West Coast. I don’t know who they hired or what criteria they used, but it wasn’t me (and given the number of Visiting Professorships in that department, I’m thankful to have dodged that bullet).
That year’s National Communication Association Convention was particularly challenging for me. I remember feeling the oppressive weight of the job market in full effect while I prepped my presentations, endured the meat market otherwise known as the job fair, and gritted my teeth through the always awkward performance of “academic” that the conference entails. It was at this convention that I started responding to over-the-top academic posturing--people trying really hard to be really smart... you know it when you see it--with my best Hulk Hogan double bicep flex pose (no t-shirts were harmed in the making of this ridicule). I usually, though not always, do this out of the sightline of the guilty party. To this day, one of my favorite conference memories is dishing about the conference at a pizza shop with my friends only to occasionally break out the “gun show” as we mocked the trite performances of the really smart people that we’d witnessed earlier that day. We were in stitches all night. As the night wore on, it got to the point where the stories were so predictable that we were laughing about the idea of "posturing" before the mock-flexing even began. In my memory, there was also a spit take or two. In hindsight, I wasn't the only one there on the job market. We were probably just laughing to keep from crying.
(Doesn't he look smart???)
I was invited for only one interview at that convention. In fact, I’ve only been interviewed once at our annual academic fête. My interview experience at the NCA in DC was, to this day, the worst interview I’ve ever endured. The actual conversation was pretty standard, but the context of the interview was soul-crushing. I learned during my fifteen-minute window that I hadn’t earned the interview by making anyone’s shortlist. The interview wasn’t about me at all. Instead, the guy across the table from me had driven down to DC from his university up the East Coast to interview literally everyone who had applied for the position. When it came time for me to ask questions in the interview, I asked—having completely given up on getting the gig—how many interviews he was doing at the convention. He confessed that he’d spent two days conducting a series of fifteen-minute “interviews” like the one I’d just suffered though.
I never had a shot at that job—which was another generalist tenure-track teaching position at a public university. In hindsight, I should have seen the signs for what they were. When I arrived a few minutes before my interview—which was to be held at a table outside of the coffee shop in the convention lobby—I noted that another candidate was still finishing up her chat with the interviewer. About two questions into my interview, I caught the interviewer looking over my shoulder. Stealing a glance behind me, I saw the next sucker sitting on the floor against the wall waiting to take the seat I was keeping warm. The conversation may have been hollow and disappointing, but the interview itself was inhumane. I arrived for the interview feeling as though I’d accomplished something—making the shortlist—and left realizing that I’d sunk even more time into another failed application that went nowhere. I learned in the interview that even though the position was advertised for a “Communication” professor, the department was really looking for a “Journalism” professor. Surprising as this may be to the uninitiated, these are not the same thing. What a waste of everyone’s time.
At the job fair, I chatted with maybe four or five departments, but mostly only to verify that no one was looking for a worthless scholar like me (the imposter syndrome is real). I also patiently waited to talk with a department representative from a small liberal arts college in my home state for nearly 30 minutes as the job fair was closing because the job seeker who’d arrived a step or two ahead of me held court at the table while I stood to the side imagining what would happen if he were suddenly and inexplicably crushed by an Acme anvil falling from the sky.
I felt a strange mixture of pity and rage as this clearly desperate job seeker regaled the poor woman behind the table with a litany of excuses about an extensive gap in his employment history. Apparently, before he blocked my chances of having any kind of meaningful conversation with the department representative at the job fair, he’d been an asshole in China or Russia or France or somewhere else overseas and felt the need to talk about it until the people around him couldn’t hear anything else through the haze of pretention. When he finally recognized that the job fair had ended and the other exhibitors were closing up shop, my time at the table was about thirty seconds. It went something like this:
“Oh, you study rhetoric? That’s cool. I study rhetoric! We’re not hiring a rhetorician.”
Good times.
“Oh, you study rhetoric? That’s cool. I study rhetoric! We’re not hiring a rhetorician.”
Good times.
I was never so jaded about the academy as I was in those few moments after I walked out of the job fair.
Part 2 of this flashback will find its way to a blog near you soon... like this one. This blog right here.
