Job Market Flashback Part 6

This is the latest installment of my reflections on my time on the academic job market.  You can find the rest in one ridiculously long blog post here: Job Market Flashback

A couple of days after my interview at the small liberal arts college (SLAC) in Ohio, I received a phone call from the VP offering me the position and detailing its salary package.  I would be paid $40k if I finished my PhD before starting in August and about $37k if not (want to put a price on a PhD? It’s worth about $3K…). I would also receive benefits (not great ones, but benefits), an office (which I would share), and about $1k of research/travel support (which is pretty reasonable for a small college).  The position was not tenure-track, but I was assured that renewal was all but certain—aside from being one of only a handful of Ph.D.s on faculty, I was told not to “kill or sleep with a student or anything like that.”  The offer was underwhelming, but it was everything I expected it to be.

After chatting with the department chair a bit, I was able to get a sense of what I’d be teaching—in addition to public speaking, I wound up with seminars in Film Studies, TV & Radio, Mass Communication, and Intercultural Communication—for my first year in the department.  Pleased that I’d have an opportunity to build my CV and teach a few classes that I would enjoy, particularly Film Studies and Intercultural, I set to work figuring out how to make the salary figure and precarity of a short-term contract work.  

A brief interjection for aspiring job candidates: notice, please, that none of these courses falls into my areas of expertise—Rhetoric and Cultural Studies.  In fact, this particular SLAC didn’t offer any courses in those areas.  The closest I could come to actually teaching a Rhetoric seminar was the senior level Communication Theory course.  This is quite common in smaller departments where longstanding faculty tailor the curriculum around their interests (teaching and research).  Apparently, I was replacing a PR scholar who spent a few years redesigning the curriculum as a mostly Strategic Communication curriculum and then left quite abruptly.  You might be wondering why, then, a rhetorician would be hired as the replacement for a PR prof.  The answer, is because the search committee included no Communication scholars—not one.  How were they to know that I wouldn’t be qualified to teach those courses in departments that knew better?  Regardless, the benefit, for me, was about how I could use those new course preps to tell a more compelling story about my teaching experience and to put lines on my CV that said something other than “public speaking.”

At this point, I had two offers in hand—non-tenure-track Assistant Professor at SLAC in Ohio and post-doc at Big State University—neither was especially appealing, but both were better than not being employed.  I was torn about which to take, but I was relieved to have both offers in hand after declining the tenure-track position in the regional campus in the South.

Here was my predicament. I wanted a job, but I didn’t actually want either of the jobs I’d been offered.  Unlike the job in the South that I was offered and declined, I was willing to take both of them, but I didn’t really want them.  In either case, I also knew that I’d be on the market again the next year and looking for a better situation (I was and I found one). 

I was disappointed.  I’d been working my ass off in graduate school.  I was one of two dissertation fellows at the top of my class in my graduate program.  I had great letters of recommendation from people that I and, perhaps more importantly, other people respect.  I’d sent out nearly seventy applications.  All that, and I came up short.  I didn’t get that cushy tenure-track job at a Big State University and I worried that I never would.  I worried that I’d found my ceiling.  

My imposter syndrome was on fire.  That seems ridiculous, because I was literally just handed two job offers, but it was as real as anything.  From my position, I’d applied to a bunch of jobs I wanted, really wanted, and ended up with a choice between two jobs I’d accept because paying the rent and student loans seemed prudent.  These two jobs that represented the extent of my potential. The ones I really wanted were out of my league.

Stuck, I called my people—advisors from Ph.D. and M.A., colleagues, non-academic friends—and talked things through with anyone who would listen to me prattle on about my impending decision between two decidedly less-than-ideal versions of my immediate future.  I imagined idealistic futures that would never come to pass.  I shuttered at the thought of getting stuck in either gig.  None of that mattered.  I had to make a decision.

Eventually, I made a trusty, old pro/con list for each offer.  Here’s how those broke down: 

Big State U had a few things going for over and against SLAC.  It paid better for the same teaching load—around $44k.  It offered an absurdly good travel fund (but they had to because travel out of that place is particularly tricky and, as a result, expensive)—around $3k.  It was in a department with a bunch of people I respect and would like to get to know better—meaning, I’d have a chance to cultivate a pretty good reference.  It was in a very well-established department in my field, so the letterhead on my applications the next year would be getting a serious upgrade (if you think this doesn’t matter, you’re wrong).  It was, generally, the better networking opportunity of the two because I’d be working alongside other post-docs (mostly from the doc program at Big State U), graduate students, and faculty.  It had drawbacks, too—I’d be teaching more public speaking/intro-level stuff, I’d have to move my family and interrupt my spouse’s career, it carried the rank of lecturer rather than professor,[1] and I’d be an outsider from a lesser university trying to ingratiate myself into an already established intellectual culture.  If I’m being honest (or leaning into my imposter syndrome), it felt a little like punching above my weight class.  

The Small College gig had some benefits.  The primary benefit was location. I could work there without moving.  At more than two hours from my home, it wasn’t convenient—I crashed with a family friend a few nights a week and was, therefore, away from my spouse and child—but it meant that my spouse could keep her position, which she liked, and not have to push reset on her career for a job that, in my case, we both hoped would be temporary.  The Small College gig also carried Assistant Professor rank and clear expectation for renewal—meaning, I’d be putting Assistant Professor in my signature line on next year’s job applications and that I wouldn’t have to worry quite so much about being unemployed if the next year’s job market didn’t bear fruit.  The Assistant Professor gig also had clear opportunities to expand my teaching experience even though none of that experience would be in my area of expertise.  Further down the negative side of the ledger, the position paid like crap and the college was so small that it garnered almost no name recognition—I’m from Ohio and I literally didn’t know that it existed until I saw the job ad.   

There are, of course, no objective measures in weighing the pros and cons between two otherwise very different positions and arguments could be made for either position (literally, two of my faculty mentors were diametrically opposed in their recommendations… and both for good reasons).  For me, it came down to being able to keep my spouse’s career on track, rank, and teaching opportunities.  

The idea of having to ask my spouse to move and then, potentially move again in a year was a tough pill to swallow.  The small college meant not having to do that.  Similarly, being able to tell stories about being an assistant professor seemed—even at a small college—seemed like a better frame than continuing to narrativize myself as a graduate student/Post-Doc.  Service to the college takes time away from research, but it also grants perspective otherwise hard to come by and I wasn’t going to have serious research time in either position. Finally, I’d been teaching public speaking for seven years at that point and I desperately wanted to do something else.  Also, having been mostly ignored by the research jobs to which I’d applied, I figured loading up on my teaching credentials would pay off next year (it did) because, as my M.A. advisor reminded me, “they’re all teaching jobs.”

At the end of the spring 2014 semester, I signed a contract to teach a 4/4 load for $40K with the SLAC in Ohio.  I hadn’t finished my dissertation yet, but I had employment.   And, because I didn’t want to stay there, I was still on the job market.

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[1] Academic rank usually proceeds as follows: Instructor, Lecturer, Professor.  Within each category, additional ranking is common such as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Full Professor (or just Professor) or Lecturer/Senior Lecturer.  There are also some oddities out there like Clinical Professor, Teaching Professor, and Professor of Practice all of which usually carry more weight than Lecturer, but less that Professor and follow the same additional ranking metrics (Assistant, Associate, Full).

Job Market Flashback Part 5

This post is a continuation of my reflection on my experiences on the academic job market.  I write under the false notion that these short essays are to help my students navigate their own experiences.  In reality, I'm just trying to make sense of the unnecessarily traumatic hazing rituals that we put people through.  If you haven’t already read parts 1-4, click here, here, here, or... here to check them out.  

After returning back to Ohio from my awkwardly successful visit in the South, I sent around a few more application packets to the jobs that had popped up in the fourth wave of job cycle (around mid-March to May).  The jobs had changed quite a lot from the first three waves.  Gone were the cushy tenure-track jobs at well-known universities.  They’d all be swept away by a rush of short term, one-year positions at WhoTheFknowswhereU and a few post-doc type jobs at bigger universities. My total applications neared 70 at this point and I’d only had a handful of phone interviews and a single on-campus.  The academic life is about rejection and being ghosted by search committees.

Anyways, about that job in the South.  A couple of days after I returned, I was offered the position.  It was a 4-4 teaching load (meaning four classes per semester, typically the highest required teaching load for a four-year University), minimal research expectations, and 43K per year salary with an okay benefits package.  

The offer was less compelling than the job and I wasn’t in a strong position to negotiate.  I didn’t have any other interviews lined up.  I was assured by the graduate coordinator in my PhD program that a fifth year of funding was, in no uncertain terms, impossible.  Oh, and we’d just had a baby.  

I turned it down anyway.

It was terrifying in the moment, but I don’t regret that decision for a minute.  My graduate school colleagues thought I was crazy.  Here, I’d been offered a tenure-track assistant professorship at a public university and I said, “no thanks.”  Hell, I thought I was a kind of crazy.  At the end of the day, my gut said it was bad news.  I was afraid that I’d get stuck there and I really, really did not want to get stuck there.  

The job simply had too many marks against it.  There wasn’t an existing department so there’d be no mentorship from a disciplinary colleague—the importance of which should not be understated for a junior faculty member to be.  There wasn’t a clear path toward teaching upper level courses and, therefore, building my CV beyond public speaking (read: this is how you get stuck).  The salary wasn’t great—although it did surpass, barely, the student loan debt I’d accrued while attaining my PhD.  Oh, and the whole having to drive an hour between two campuses everyday was a huge time suck that would’ve eaten away at my soul and, more importantly, my writing time (read: this is also how you get stuck).  Literally, the only thing going for it was that it was a tenure-track job in my discipline.  Which, for what it’s worth, ain’t nothing…

I took a day or two to chew on the offer and pumped the dean about my potential teaching schedule (which was all public speaking) before declining.  It was the right decision, but I was a mess—I was convinced I’d neve
r get another interview, let along another offer.  I was certain that my unfinished dissertation was garbage and would never be completed.  I was pretty sure I’d be back to working in restaurants (my CV includes Wendy’s, a bar/arcade monstrosity called Gameworks, and Red Robin) and scrounging up pro-audio gigs by the end of the Summer.

My anxiety was acute, but short-lived.  The fourth wave of the job cycle moves a lot more quickly than the first three and by mid-April I had a phone interview for a post-doc at a Big State University (BSU) and one for a professorship small college in Ohio.  Before the semester ended, those two interviews became two offers.

In the case of the post-doc at BSU, there was only one interview—a video chat with the basic course director and her graduate assistant.  The conversation was professional and courteous and they were clear that their timeline was condensed.  I was offered the job (presumably one of many such offers) the following week via email by the Department Head—whom I had met at a summer doctoral seminar (read: it’s important to network, people).  The post-doc position was a 3-3 lecturer post at a very well-respected university in my discipline with a solid benefits package (including $2.5k for travel and research expenses—which is, frankly, a ridiculously high number compared to what other universities offer tenured or tenure-track folks) and a ~$33k salary.  After a little push back, the Chair bumped the position up to a 4-4 teaching load and $44k.  And just like that, my concerns about declining the crappy tenure-track job were a distant memory because even though the post-doc wasn’t tenure-track, it was, by all other measures, a better job.

At the same time, literally the same week as the post-doc interview, I was interviewed for an assistant professorship at a small liberal arts college (aka SLAC) in Ohio.  In a rather strange occurrence, the search chair called me before the interview was scheduled to warn me that the pay was low—only around $40k (RED FLAG).  Nevertheless, the difference between $40k and $0K was more than clear in my mind at the time, so I was not deterred.  

I was invited to campus the week after my phone interview.  I’m not certain, but I suspect I was the only person invited to campus.  As searches get more desperate to hire before the end of the term, the conventional practice of bringing a slate of candidates to campus and selecting the best sometimes goes by the wayside.  

The campus visit was pretty standard.  I stayed in a hotel near campus the night before the interview—although this part of the visit was in question because they weren’t sure they had the budget to put me up for a night (RED FLAG).  When I arrived on campus, the search chair welcomed me and led me to a meeting with the Vice-President for Academic Affairs.  The college was undergoing a search for a new president, so this meeting was as far up the administrative food chain as it could be.  This is also the kind of thing that only happens at SLACs.  You’ll never find a BSU vice-president interviewing faculty—ever.  Our conversation was cordial, but it was mostly driven by the VP trying to spin the obvious limitations of the college into positives (RED FLAG).  For reference, whenever an administrator brings up cost-of-living it’s to attempt to curtail your shock when they talk salary.  Also, whenever they emphasize the “the university’s mission” they’re talking about unpaid service expectations.  He was nice, but too apologetic.  I actually wanted to work there—like for realz—and the conversation kept digressing into discussions of the college’s complete lack of resources.

After my chat with the VP, I met individually with all of the members of the search committee. The committee was comprised of the entire department of Communication and English—three English PhDs, an actor, and a Communication MA with a foot out the door.  I was surprised to see that none of them were Communication scholars.  In fact, my academic ambition was met with a fair amount of skepticism by the non-PhDs in the bunch—the folks who would be my colleagues, and, as it turns out, by most of the college’s faculty because there were only a handful of PhDs on staff at the entire college (RED FLAG).  The Communication faculty were great interpersonally, but it was clear almost immediately that we had difference perspectives and priorities in the classroom—and in the academy.  

The interview also included the strangest teaching demonstration I’ve ever given.  Rather than teaching a class to demonstrate my pedagogical skills, I was invited to join a speech class on a presentation day.  After the students gave presentations, I was asked to prepare an informative speech myself and then lead a Q&A with the class about my topic.  It was bizarre.  My teaching demo lasted all of twenty minutes and instantly revealed some stark differences in how I taught public speaking compared to what the current faculty expected of their students.  It went okay, but it remains one of the most awkward experiences I’ve ever had in the classroom (and I’ve been in a lot of classrooms… and I’m awkward).

After the teaching demo, I was taken to a deli for lunch with the committee.  As before, the conversation at lunch was fairly routine.  I chuckled a bit, though, when I ordered a whitefish sandwich after the entire group ordered pastrami.  Momentarily, they looked at me like I was some young contrarian set on bucking their experience and wisdom (I was not, the pastrami at that deli, as I would later discover, was LEGIT).  Their concerns were short lived, though, when they realized that it was a Friday during Lent and that most of them (as I) were Catholic and expected to abstain from eating meat.  With some awkward chuckles, they changed their orders.  All of this during an interview for a job at a Catholic college where a nun—one of the English professors—sat on the search committee.  I’ll be honest, it felt like a test until I saw the genuine disappointment in their faces as they changed their orders and realized that they would have to watch the lone non-Catholic in the bunch enjoy her pastrami sandwich.

After lunch, I was escorted to a few more meetings and interviews.  During my last appointment, I was interrupted by the search chair and whisked into the hallway to meet the rest of the committee who were crowded together a few doors down.  They offered me the position then and there.  They had no contract, but assured me that I’d be seeing one soon.

Things weren’t great, but they were looking up.

Job Market Flashback Part 4

This post is a continuation of my reflection on my experiences on the academic job market.  If you haven’t already read Parts 1, 2, or 3 about the first three waves of the job cycle, feel free to check them out. I started writing these as a means of sorting through my advice for my graduate students, but they're really probably just a means of dealing with the emotional trauma of being on the market. It's worth mentioning that my story has a happy ending--I landed a great job at a well-established university and expect to earn tenure and promotion in the Spring. I'm lucky.  None of that changes how horrible the academic job market is or the emotional distress we perpetuate through our hiring practices.

Although I was disappointed to see the search at the Midwestern University close after killing the phone interview, my post-phone interview experience with the University in the South was a little better.  About a month (that felt like a year) after the screening interview, I was invited to campus in mid-March.  My first campus interview!  Winning!

For the interview, I flew into a smallish airport about 70 miles from the campuses (more on that in a minute).  The airport was in the next state, which struck me as odd, but I was assured that it was the better choice even though it was about 30 miles further from the town than the closest airport (read: it was cheaper for the university).  After arriving at the airport, I rented a car and drove myself the 70 miles from the airport to the bed and breakfast where they put me up.  Although I can appreciate that it’s super inconvenient to schlep 150 miles each trip to pick up an interview candidate, I was surprised to be left more or less on my own for the travel portion of my campus visit.  I was also really happy that my rental car included a GPS because I was still living the pre-smart phone life and I was driving to a small-ass town in the rural South.

The bed and breakfast I stayed in was nice—good food, nice hosts, easy access.  Dear Search Committees, if you can get your candidates into a B&B instead of a hotel for this sort of thing, it’s worth doing.  It added a nice welcoming touch to the trip.  Maybe some people like staying in hotels, but I’m going for the human connection every time if I can get it.  Arguably, the accommodations were the highlight of the trip. Okay, it’s not really an argument—the B&B was the only good thing about the trip.  Dear Search Committees, if the accommodations outshine the visit, you’re doing it wrong.

After I arrived at the B&B and dumped my suitcase (I always check a bag on professional trips so that my shit—I mean, suit—doesn’t get wrinkled), I was picked up by a member of the search committee for an earlyish dinner at the local hotspot: Ruby Tuesdays.  There were a few jokes made at the university’s expense about budgets and locations and the fact that Ruby Tuesday’s was probably actually the best restaurant in town, but this was not going to be the fancy wine-and-dine affair you find at other on-campus interviews.  I picked at a cheeseburger while chatting with the search committee member and the department secretary while trying to get a feel for the people, the place, and the job.

Once the check had been paid and the burgers choked down, I was escorted back to the B&B and given a little more context about the search process.  I was told that I was not the committee’s first choice.  In fact, I was told that two weeks prior the committee’s top candidate visited and was offered the position, which she declined because, they alleged, she was displeased with the nightlife in the rural, blue-collar, small town.  

On the one hand, I was grateful to have a clearer picture of the search process.  On the other hand, learning that I was only offered the interview because someone else declined the job sent my imposter syndrome into hyperdrive.  Note—if you’re ever on a search committee, do your level best to make every candidate feel like your top choice.  After all, one of them will likely be your colleague in the not so distant future.

I spent the evening alternating between prepping for my teaching demo (which was a lesson I’d taught dozens of times), mindlessly watching the Stanley Cup Playoffs on the little TV in my room, and google-sleuthing the other finalists.  I had three pieces of important information guiding my investigation.  First, I knew that the candidate who turned down the position—the real top choice—was female.  They let it slip at dinner that “she” wasn’t into the town.  Second, the search committee member who I dined with also let slip what the candidate who they really wanted researched (with incredible specificity).  And third, I had email addresses for all of the candidates screened by the search committee before campus visits.  How did I get that, you ask?  The search committee cc’d us all on the same email.  I internet stalked everyone on the list and since only two of the candidates were female and their research interests were drastically different, I had a pretty good idea of the preferred candidate’s identity.  Note to search committees: the seems obvious, but don’t ever send an email to more than one candidate, copy that shit into a new message and keep clean email threads… amateurs. 

I should also say, props to the real top choice (and, eventually, me) for landing a better—much better—job later in the cycle.

My day on campus began with a member of search committee arriving fifteen minutes early while I was eating an awesome homemade breakfast in the B&B’s beautiful formal dining room.  I slammed down one last bite, ran upstairs, strapped on my tie, brushed my teeth, and locked in for the day-long interview.  I still wish I had more time to enjoy that breakfast.  

The search member and I walked over to the dilapidated campus, which was across the street from the B&B, and into the chancellor’s office for my first thirty-minute interview of the day.  Even though the search chair had warned me before my interview that the chancellor was a “real steel magnolia,”[1] our conversation was pretty superficial.  A few questions about my background, my teaching interests, and why I wanted to work in the middle of goddamn nowhere (note, the “why do you want to work here” question is the question that really matters with administrators) and I was off and running.  

I took a brief campus tour.  I feigned interest as the poor search committee member explained that the campus had both classrooms and offices.  They even had a library!  I’ve been on stunning campuses and blasé campuses, the tour is basically the same everywhere you go unless you are a researcher who needs a lab or any special equipment—which I’m not.  The tour ended with a short conversation with my tour guide in his office during which I learned that most of the faculty live about an hour away from campus and that the sign on his door that said “What Have You Done to Leave This Place Today?” was really a personal mantra and not a commentary on the shitty job for which I was being interviewed.  

After our chat about why the search committee member really did like his job, he led me to the newly installed Dean’s office for the next phase of my interview.  The conversation with the Dean was more nuts and bolts than the conversation with the chancellor.  He was mostly concerned with how many sections of public speaking I could teach and when I could teach them than anything else.  My primary question (for the duration of the interview) was how I could teach literally anything else.  I’d been teaching public speaking for nearly a decade and wanted to be sure that I could build my teaching portfolio for the next run at the market.  Pretty much everyone I asked, the dean included, evaded the question like it was the harbinger of the zombie apocalypse.  

By midday, I was pretty sure that they were really only interested in hiring someone to teach public speaking. This was a service burden hire, and, as I found out later, the only fulltime Communication professorship on campus.  In hindsight, this should have been clear, because the search committee was comprised of two historians, one literature scholar, and a guy from business.  

The next big event on the campus interview was my teaching demonstration.  The search committee tour-guide led me to a classroom and gave me a few minutes to get set for my hour-long display of pedagogical prestidigitation.  As I set up, it became abundantly clear that my audience would be meager.  When the teaching demo began, there were three students and three members of the search committee in attendance.  Note to Search Committees: make sure your candidates have audiences; give extra credit to your students and, most importantly, get your ass to the talk.  Nothing makes reveals the campus complete lack of investment in the hiring process more than giving a painstakingly prepared talk to an empty room.  

I’d taught the lesson in my teaching demo dozens of times, so I was confident in my mastery of the material and the examples.  It went well enough.

Things got weird(er) after the teaching demo.  The three members of the search committee escorted me across campus to a university owned sedan and let me know that we’d be traveling to another campus for the remainder of the interview.  We piled into the car and drove, for more than an hour, as we made awkward small talk about how great it was to get to drive yourself and your colleagues across the state everyday so that you could teach on both campuses (read: this was an unstated job requirement). 

When we arrived at the extension campus, I was scooped up by another associate vice something or other taken to lunch at a roadside BBQ joint.  If not for the awesome B&B, the lunch would’ve been the highlight of the visit (and it wasn’t even good BBQ…).  After lunch, I was given another tour of buildings and classrooms and deposited back in the search chair’s office.  We chatted for a bit before piling back into the car to return to my accommodations for a little downtime before dinner.

Unlike my previous meals, I drove myself to dinner at the Greek restaurant in town.  The dinner included three of the four search committee members (all the men) and was a pretty relaxed affair.  A beer and a plateful of moussaka—everyone ordered literally the same thing—ensured that we were all in good spirits as the interview drew to a close.  The dinner was awkward insider conversation about office politics and small town life in the rural South, but otherwise ordinary.

As with any meeting though, things got interesting right before we parted ways.  After settling up, we made our way to the parking lot and the search chair pulled me aside.  

In our brief, and exceptionally awkward conversation, he indicated that “we’d like to get this done quickly” and made clear that I would be getting a job offer soon after returning to Ohio.  He also pressed me more than I was comfortable to ensure him that I would accept the offer.  He didn’t come out and say, “if we offer the position, will you take it?” (which I’ve heard on interviews before), but he did his level best to talk me out of negotiating.  I smiled and did my best to deflect.  I didn’t think I wanted the job by about midday… and as soon as it became clear to me that I would be getting the offer, I knew I didn’t want it.  Interviewees are interviewing campuses, too, and desperation doesn’t look good on anyone.

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[1] I’m still not sure what this means, other than that the search chair is more than a little sexist.

The Job Market Flashback Part 3

This post is a continuation of my reflection on my experiences on the academic job market.  If you haven’t already read Part 1 and Part 2 about the first two waves of the job cycle, feel free to check them out.  

As Winter break gave way to the start of Spring semester, my job market luck took a turn for the better. I did two screening interviews for assistant professor positions—one at a private University in the Midwest and one at an extension campus of a public university in the South. Both interviews were remarkably unremarkable—although I did awkwardly refer to myself as “just your average straight white guy” in a joke that went over like a lead balloon in one of them—and I hoped to hear back about campus invitations soon after they ended.  In the former case, I was actually very confident that I’d be invited because one of the search committee members was a former colleague and he emailed me to share how well the committee responded to my interview.  It's good to have friends.

Of course, what I expected to happen and what happened were not the same.

After my screening interview with the search committee at the private university, the Dean sent me a list of questions, mostly about how I fit the university’s mission, and requested that I respond to them in writing.  Although my writing time was dedicated to finishing my dissertation, I complied (because… job).  The resulting document was probably three or four pages and a couple of days of writing momentum lost.

During this time, another small college in the Midwest requested a similar essay/letter response to a series of prompts about the institutional mission and position before interviewing me.  I, of course, provided the essay a few days later.  It didn’t matter, not only did they not interview me, they didn’t correspond with me at all.  

Intellectually, I recognize the value of having additional screening tools in the interviewing process, but this was really part of the application, not the interview.  If it’s an interviewing tool, then it should come with some reciprocity (interviewees are interviewing institutions, too).  As it was, this particular college extended the period of time during which an applicant has the least amount of agency for even longer than the normally agonizing period between application and interview. Requesting additional materials makes it seem, at least for this job seeker, that the college is interested in the candidate.  I saw the request as a rare step of positive reinforcement in the otherwise brutal silence-rejection cycle that we call the job market.  Unfortunately, it was more like job fair 2.0, this time with less job fair, artificially inflated expectations, and more wasted time.  Probably better not to have landed that gig, but that’s hard to see when you’re worried about how you’re going to pay for groceries in a few months.

I digress.  After finishing my post-interview writing assignment for the private university in the Midwest, I sent off my essay and expected to hear back from the Dean in a day or two with notification that not only had my brilliant responses landed me the job without need for a campus interview, but that s/he would be hiring me as a tenured Full Professor rather than as an Assistant Professor and that the university would be offering a Mike Trout-esque signing bonus to secure my services.  Because I’m a really good writer, y’all.

I waited confidently for the next few days.  No response from the dean.  My confidence waned a bit as the days became a week, and then more as one became two. At the start of week three, I was convinced that my responses must’ve landed in a spam folder.  I mean, if s/he had them and had read them the overwhelming force of my sheer awesomeness would demand a response, right?  Since there was no reply, the only logical conclusion was that my response essay got delivered to the wrong digital doorstep.  I emailed the Dean to make sure that s/he had my responses.  

About a week later, the Dean replied.  Two short sentences.  The search was cancelled.  Funding for the position was no longer available.

Searches get cancelled every year.  This is a reality of the job market.  It’s also bullshit.  Here, I thought I’d landed a sure thing.  This was a job for which I was a good fit and I had nailed the interview.  Turns out, that and a cup of coffee will get you a cup of coffee (and a little more debt because you probably paid for the coffee with a credit card since you don’t have a job).

By the end of February, my job prospects were less promising than I’d hoped.  The Midwest sure thing turned out to be a big pile of nothing. I’d wasted a few writing days responding to bullshit pseudo-interviews.  And, I hadn’t heard back from the university in South after my mostly positive phone interview.  And I was behind on all of my dissertation deadlines.  Oh, and we had just had a baby.  The job search, new parent, sleep deprived, I’m-never-going-to-be-PHinisheD anxiety was in full fucking swing.

This time seemed to stretch on forever even though it was only about a month.  Things move slowly through committees and bureaucracies.  The academic hire requires three phases of screening—application, screening interview (phone, video chat, conference, etc.), and the campus visit.  Each phase typically includes some deliberation, either by a committee, department, or administration.  That stuff takes time (and the time doesn’t decrease because you keep refreshing the jobswiki… which I did… frequently). 

I’d sent out around fifty applications and the stream of new job ads that began flowing at the end of January seemed to have dried up.  The third “wave” of job market activity (early Spring semester), hadn’t panned out.  Heading into the middle of Spring semester, I was seriously starting to actually worry that not only would I not find work for the coming year, but that I was, in fact, unemployable.  Of course, I wasn’t unemployable and I did find a job for the following year (and the one after that), but we’ll get to that in another post... eventually.

The Job Market Flashback Part 2

This post is a continuation of my reflection on my time on the job market.  If you haven’t already read Part 1, I encourage you to do so before tackling this rant.

Between the convention in November and the start of Spring semester in January, the already bad taste left in my mouth about the job market turned rancid.  The month of December means departments rushing about to finalize grades and prepare for a well-deserved break from classes and students while figuring out Winter writing schedules, prepping courses for Spring, and holiday travel plans.  In short, it means hiring takes a back seat for a while because other stuff has to get done first. 

Intellectually, I understand this.  I too was slogging through grades, writing projects, and holiday plans.  Nevertheless, I habitually checked the job boards only to be disappointed that there once again hadn’t been a rush of new job postings in the last hour (or, you know, the last fifteen minutes…). Before navigating away from one job board to the next, I’d always click refresh just in case I missed the update window by a few seconds.  There were only a handful of new positions posted between the end of Fall semester and the start of Spring, but without the distraction of courses to teach and papers to grade, my attention to the boards was never more acute. This was not good for my mental well-being.  Not one bit.

Near the end of Winter break and the beginning of Spring semester, I attended a small conference with a bunch of rhetoric-type folks in all stages of still-in-graduate school. It was great.  To this day, it was one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended even though I’m fairly certain I pissed off a senior scholar in a panel session—which, as a job seeker was probably not the best move.  

I remember a few things from the conference about research methods, publishing, and so on, but what sticks out most visibly in my memory was a handful of conversations with folks from other universities who were also on the job market. Folks whom I’d met on the various conference circuits.  Folks with whom I’d shared meals and hoisted glasses.  Folks who were, and in most cases still are, my friends.  Folks who were pretty sure they’d be getting the jobs I’d also applied for—and some of them did.

Realizing that most of the folks at the conference hadn’t caught the brass ring yet was a strange mix of terrifying and terrifying.  On the one hand, I was reminded that my small time Ph.D. and silly dissertation project (about stand-up comedy… who cares about comedy?) meant that I had to wait at least until those folks—who were all in better programs and had probably thirty or forty thousand times the publications that I had—had their fill of the available positions before tossing the scraps to the rest of us.  

On the other hand, I was reminded that success in the field is never guaranteed and the elements of a job application that can be controlled are few.  A big name university on a degree or a letter of recommendation from an important scholar doesn’t magically create opportunities. It doesn’t hurt, to be sure, but it isn’t the only factor—or even the most important in the hiring decision.  At that conference, I realized that we were all in the same situation.  Nobody had a job yet (mostly because the typical timeline for hiring cycles means that offers get made in Spring, not Fall).  Everybody was staring into the void of unemployment and fighting off the crushing anxiety of uncertainty—just like me.  This was strangely comforting.

At the conference, I also got a glimpse at how different graduate school experiences affect how people approach and endure the job market.  Typically, we talk about grad school and the market with a kind of universality that elides some unique, and important, sources of anxiety for students and job seekers alike.  The conference gave me some perspective on the difference between my experience as a job seeker from a small program—where I was a comparatively big fish in a small pond (I literally won BGSU’s award for “outstanding graduate student”… the university’s not the department’s)—and my friends who were grinding out their degrees as bigger universities in better programs.

I was one of only a few rhetorical scholars in my program.  That meant that I wasn’t often competing with colleagues in my graduate cohort for placements.  Apart from the cohort level competition for fourth-year funding, we were pretty much all doing our own thing.  

That’s not true at other programs.  

In other programs, folks compete with three or four or more other people from their own cohort—people with whom they’ve survived dreaded Prof. EFG’s unnecessary-but-stupidly-hard seminar, endured a number of too small hotel rooms packed with too many conference goers, occupied less than habitable student housing, or, in some cases, a shared vision of their future—or even a bed.  For those people, I imagine the competition of the job market was less abstract than it was for me.  They knew who had applied for which positions and who was already being interviewed for jobs they desperately wanted.  

This small conference was one of the most powerful reminders that the academic job market involved other people.  It’s not just CVs and impressive letters of recommendation.  It’s people.  People who are every bit as committed to the profession as I am.  People who will miss out on an opportunity if I get one. People who also sit and scream at the jobs wiki when yet another good job posts an update and they didn’t get an interview. 

The conference was strangely cathartic, but also troubling for me as a job seeker.  I sat in panels with smart people who were good scholars from great programs and realized that we were all in the same position.  We were all bearing the weight of the job market. At the same time, I worried that I wouldn’t measure up because I had a much clearer sense of my direct competition. Imposter syndrome is real and the job market amplifies it exponentially. This is also true of Imposter syndrome’s fraternal twin, the envy-fueled resentment that pervades the academy (“What do you mean XYZ got a job a Big State U?  I’m WAY better/smarter/more [self]important than that idiot.  They didn’t even interview me!  S/he must have slept with a committee member.”).  Nevertheless, it helped to see my anxieties reflected back in my peers. I wasn’t crazy.  Or at least, I wasn’t any crazier than anyone else on the market.

Being with other people in the same shitty situation may not have reduced my anxieties about the job market, but recognizing my struggles in their experiences gave me hope that we could all get through it together... as long as there's enough coffee.

Summer Vacation! (Ha!)

Like so many faculty, I’m grading my Spring semester final exams, preparing to submit final grades, and looking forward to Summer.  The uninitiated often refer to this upcoming time as “vacation,” but Summer at the university is only a vacation if you’re a student.  

The professor hustle doesn’t end because May rolls around.  It just changes.  This is particularly true for an untenured professor—which I am.  Sure, I'll travel a bit, go to some conferences, and see family, but there’s shit to do every day, all summer.  Every. Day. All. Summer. 

As an assistant professor working the four class per semester teaching load typical of a teaching university (as compared to research universities where the teaching load could be half or even less), the Summer is the time of year where I can really make some headway into my research and writing.  

During the Fall and Spring semesters, I try like hell to work and write through the semester so that I can maintain a consistent level of productivity, but I usually fall back into incredibly condensed and predictable writing bursts around conference/publication deadlines (like mid-October [ECA] and mid-March [NCA]). I know this is a bad habit—and one that makes me resent writing more than I actually do—and I know that I should write all the time. Every semester, I promise myself that I’m going to finally get it together and work out a healthy writing plan.  I succeed less than I’d like to admit.  Which is to say, I have never succeeded.  Like the student in the back of lecture swiping through Tinder, I fail every semester.  

I have a whiteboard in my office with checklists of things that have to get done.  At the end of this term, it had three columns: grading, writing, and administrative.  Each column has around ten things on it.  The whole damn board is full.  By the end of Spring, the grading was almost done, the administrative stuff was about half done, and one of the writing goals was crossed off.  One.  Because I can’t get my through-the-semester writing shit together, I start every summer already behind.  

Today is the first day of my Summer.  Today is the day I make my writing plan, the day I look at my now mostly open calendar and dream about crossing items off the writing section of the white board, the day I lie to myself about how long it takes to write well (or even how long it takes to write crap).

My writing goals for the summer include an essay revision for a major journal, a book chapter revision for an edited collection, finishing the manuscript of my own book, and revising two essays for journal submission.  Oh, and I need to generate some new writing that will sustain me for the next few years.  No big deal. I figure I’ll knock those out by the end of the month and then have a nice relaxing Summer vacation.

The reality is that I’m probably good for two, maybe three, of those projects.  Last Summer, I kept a record of how often and how much I wrote (professor/grad student friends, this is worth doing).  The contrast between what I did then and what I hope to do now is telling.

My goals this summer will probably require the following writing (in words)

1.     Essay Revision: 3K

2.    Chapter Revision: 4K (current draft is really shitty; Like Cleveland Browns first round picks shitty)

3.    Book Revision: 25K

4.   Submission: 5K

5.    Submission 2: 5K

6.   New stuff: 5K

Total Writing Goal: 47K

Last Summer (June, July, and August), I wrote ~22k words.  If I’m generous and give myself credit for 6K for May (I wasn’t tracking yet) that means I generated ~28K words last summer (May-August).  The difference between my actual productivity last Summer and my goals this Summer is 19K words.  That’s almost an entire extra Summer of writing.  To get caught up on my writing projects, I just need to kick ass all Summer and then kick more ass during a bonus Summer (a pre-tenure sabbatical would nice right about now).

When I look at what I actually wrote—projects worked on/completed (or not) rather than words on pages—the comparison is even more troubling.  I worked on four different research projects last summer: I revised—quite heavily—an essay for submission to a journal, I revised one chapter in my book,  I wrote a chapter for somebody else’s book, and I wrote a book review.  

I submitted the essay revision after working on it for about two months.  I revised, but never really finished the book chapter for about two months. I wrote the chapter for the edited collection in about a month—admittedly, it was based on an essay I wrote in grad school and conferenced but hadn’t gotten around to cleaning up yet so I wasn’t starting from scratch. I finished reading the book to review and drafted my review by the end of summer, but didn’t submit the actual review until September.

I worked on four projects for four months and submitted two of them.  I made progress on the other projects—and I had no illusions that I’d finish my book—but I only actually submitted two things.  

And it’s not like I wasn’t writing last Summer.  I wrote almost every day.  I felt like I was hellaproductive.  Still, I only managed to finish half of the projects I worked on.  Four months of mostly uninterrupted writing time and all I came out with was two measly submissions.  Two. 15k of those 28k words actually went out to reviewers (and onto my CV).  The notion that I’m somehow going to turn out six project this year is ridiculous.

Writing is hard, y’all.

To my fellow academic-writers heading into Summer vacation:  if your goal is to catch up, change it. The reality of Summer is that you never catch up.  Instead, make it your goal to find ways to keep up with your writing.  Take whatever you’re working on, make a list, and then cross out two (or, if your list looks like mine, cross out four).  Find ways to live with your writing.  And, more importantly, find ways to write every day, all summer.