Job Market Flashback: Part 9

Welcome back to my semi-regular attempt to wrestle with what it has been like to be on the academic job market.  If you want to read the whole saga, you can treat yourself to a few thousand words of distraction here.

My second run at the job market wasn’t all a tale of doom and gloom.  I did manage to land interviews with three different universities and, most importantly, snagged a great job.  

In my previous post, I mentioned not having any conference interviews and that’s a little misleading.  A Mid-sized Regional University (MRU) that I had applied to in the middle of October contacted me prior to the conference with a request to meet during a 30 minute window.  Unfortunately, it was a 30 minute window during which I was scheduled to present a paper.  Apparently busy for the remainder of the conference, the search chair offered to set up a post-NCA video call interview in early December.  This practice is now very typical, but at the time, it was only just starting to become a thing.  I didn’t have any conference interviews, but I found myself constantly looking over my shoulder to see if I ran into anyone from MRU.  

After sitting interviewless until the end of November, I was grateful for the opportunity to brush up on my elevator speech and practice my pitches in the video call.  I had no way of handicapping my shot at getting the gig and I wasn’t especially excited about MRU—in fact, I didn’t know that it existed until I applied for it.  I applied to the job based almost entirely on the fact that I was well-qualified and the location wasn’t as horrible as some of the other places I had been looking.  The call was for a tenure-track professor to teach a 4/4 load of public speaking and additional courses in the department’s programs—which, importantly for me, included undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric.  The curriculum was appealing, but I still had no idea where the place was.  That changed pretty quickly after the interview was on my calendar and I went to school on all things MRU website.

The video chat interview—on either Skype or FaceTime, I can’t remember which—happened during the first week of December in 2014.  During the interview, I met with two faculty members at MRU for a good conversation about the program and department.  I don’t remember much about the interview other than the two interviewers were pretty punchy (their words) and that they were interrupted by a number of folks in the department—including the chair—on at least three different occasions during the call.  It went well, lots of back and forth conversation and, importantly for me, lots of laughter.

This was, to my knowledge, one of the only times that I’ve ever competed with a friend for the same job.  I’m sure there were other times where applications overlapped, but this is the only time that I recall both of us actually interviewing for the same gig.  It was weird, but I shared the questions that the interviewers asked—a good reminder to take notes—and talked a bit about how the tech worked—bear in mind that this was before the COVID-19 transition to Zoom University, so we were still getting used to the idea of video chatting for high stakes, potentially life-changing interactions.  I have no idea how my friend’s interview went (he said, “pretty good,” which is what he says about almost everything), but I still felt really good about my chances of landing a campus interview.  

I didn’t expect to hear back from MRU until after the start of spring term since I knew that they were conducting screening interviews right up until the end of fall term, and that faculty (myself included) are pretty protective of those few weeks in December and January without teaching and service responsibilities.  Nevertheless, I stewed over the search chair’s radio silence, just not quite to the extent that I had the year prior.  I was lucky. I was working a crappy but full-time job so I kept myself plenty busy until after the holidays.  Even during winter break, I had two new courses to prep, another course to revise, and syllabi to get together with hard deadlines in the not so distant future.  I also had a handful of applications to get together for the next wave.

On January 10, before the start of spring term, I received the campus invitation. I was one of four finalists for the position and I was scheduled to visit on January 27 (a Tuesday).  Over the following two weeks I purchased airline tickets, built a “workshop day” into my syllabi for all four of my classes, and got my job talk together.  

I was as prepared as I could be, but the visit on January 27 never took place.  The weekend before I was due to arrive, a nor’easter slammed the East Coast and my flight was cancelled leaving me to sit on my hands and watching the weather channel hoping for a thaw.  The day before I was supposed to be on campus, I instead worked with the search chair, who was attempting to fit my visit in around two other searches that were happening simultaneously, and rescheduled for the following week.  

The next day—the day I was supposed to be on campus— I got a rejection letter from another job.  You can always count on the job market to kick you while you’re down.

The Job Market & Me (not pictured).

The East Coast cleaned itself up, but travel to campus, now delayed a week, was still in question.  I didn’t teach on Mondays, so I planned on driving myself straight to the airport rather than heading to campus to unload my stuff for the week.  At the time, I lived about two hours from my SLAC job and the airport from which I’d be departing for my visit to MRU.  I left my house on a bright February afternoon and headed East into gathering clouds, rain that became snow, and general lake-effect nastiness.  When I got to the airport, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to leave.  It was desolate and folks were already queued up asking about accommodations for their soon-to-be-canceled flights.  I was scheduled to depart in the early evening and, by then, the snow had been falling for a few hours.  Sitting by the gate, I watched, exasperated, as the snow just kept falling.  When the time came to board the plane, I still wasn’t sure we’d get in the air.

As it turns out, I caught the last plane out of Cleveland that day.

At every talk about the job market that I’ve ever heard, the presenter eventually says something like “the interview begins the moment you step off the plane.”  Sometimes that’s more true than others.  In this case, the interview started the moment I collected my suitcase from the baggage claim carousel.  My flight arrived around 7:30PM and I met the search chair outside of baggage claim for the final leg of the journey.  MRU is anywhere between thirty minutes and ninety years from the airport depending on traffic—because East Coast—so we had a nice long chat as we rolled into town.  The chair was cordial, talkative, and clearly relieved to have cleared the biggest logistical obstacle for the visit.

We arrived at the hotel around 8:45PM. I checked in, dropped my bag off in my room, cleaned myself up as best I could in thirty seconds, and went back to the lobby to meet the search chair and head to dinner.  Thankfully, the brewpub where we were meeting two of the remaining three search committee members was right next door to the hotel.  It was Monday night, so the pub was pretty slow and the other two folks joining us for dinner had already ordered a few appetizers and a round of drinks.

The search chair and I settled into the booth across from the other two committee members and we set to chatting about MRU, the department, curriculum, and the awesome little town in which it was situated.  The conversation went very well.  It didn’t feel as much like an interview as it should have.  After the first few awkward minutes, we got on like old friends.  The folks on the committee seemed to get along with each other pretty well and they seemed like my kind of people.  I felt good about how I handled their questions and even better about how they answered mine.  Our conversation went so well that I ended the evening feeling the job was mine to lose.

I’ve done enough of these interviews from both sides to know that the social situations of the process—meals and meet and greets—are my long suit.  I’m competent enough in the classroom and in my scholarship to make a good impression, but I’ve always been my best self at a dinner party.  It’s the reason why I’ve committed a fair amount of time, money, and energy learning to BBQ—I like to hang out with people.  In this case, the interview schedule, revised because of my travel delays, played into my hand.  Instead of having a series of meetings with chairs, deans, and faculty before my first informal interaction with the committee—as originally scheduled—I started with a couple of meals with smaller groups.  I can’t say one way or another if I made a good impression on the folks I met with during those interactions, but I can say for certain that those informal meetings gave my confidence a serious shot in the arm for the rest of the visit.

The first day was a whirlwind.  I left my house around 1PM that day, white knuckled a drive across the state, prayed to all the gods that my flight would get out on time, had an hour long pre-interview car ride with the search chair, closed down the restaurant with the committee, fretted over my teaching presentation for an hour or so, and then collapsed in my hotel room bed around 1:00 A.M.  All that, and I only had two more days to go…