The Job Market Flashback Extended Version

In my current context, I'm lucky enough to be the coordinator of our MA in Communication Studies program.  That means that I live in my email and burn away hours putting out little administrative fires.  It also means that I get to spend quite a bit of time mentoring graduate students and having career planning conversations.  This is one of the most rewarding aspects of being a professor.  At least, it is for me.

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.

Part 1

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.

The DC conference was also my first experience with the conference job fair/meat market.  Every year, a number of departments send representatives to sit awkwardly behind tables with position descriptions while eager graduate students and desperate job seekers mill about asking awkward questions like, “where the f@$% is XXX State University?” or exclaiming, “I didn’t even know XXX had a university!” All this while standing in line waiting to hand over business cards and CVs before exchanging smiles and handshakes in order to feel some small measure of control over their otherwise terrifyingly uncertain futures.  

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.

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

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.

Part 3

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). 

Part 4

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.

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.

---

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

Part 5

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.

Part 6

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 shuddered 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.

Part 7

 For what it’s worth, the timeline for all of the jobs to which I applied and interviewed in my first run at the market—six out of around seventy-five—was as follows: 

• TT Assistant Professor at Southern Public Tech: Phone Interview mid-October; Crickets…
• TT Assistant Professor at East Coast U: (pointless) Conference interview in November, Critickets…
• Assistant Professor at Midwest Private U: Phone Interview in late January; Written Supplement requested in early February; Notification of Search Cancellation late February.
• Assistant Professor at Midwest Small Liberal Arts College: Essay responses requested in early February; Crickets…
• TT Assistant Professor at Southern Regional Campus: Phone Interview in late January; Campus Interview in late March (after the preferred candidate declined the position); Offer received and declined a week later.
• Post-Doc at Big State U: Video conference Interview in late March; Offer mid April; Offer declined within a week.
• NTT Assistant Professor at the Ohio Small Liberal Arts College: Campus Interview mid April (a few days before BSU offer); Contract signed May 1.

In mid-May I was furiously pounding away at my dissertation—mostly between the hours of midnight and four A.M. because that’s when the baby slept—and beginning to dream about my future as a professor at the Small Liberal Arts College (SLAC) in Ohio.  I had, by this time, mostly stopped checking the job boards and sending out application materials.

That’s a lie.  

Well, it’s partly a lie. 

I hadn’t stopped checking the job boards.  I checked them less frequently, but I still checked up on the jobswiki to see how things were moving and the InsideHigherEd and HigherEdJobs pages to see if new (or better…) gigs popped up.  I did, however, actually stop applying to jobs—meaning that my poor letter writers were spared writing any more recommendations on my behalf for a few months.  What hadn’t stopped, however, were the search committees out there reviewing materials that I had sent out prior to signing my contract for 2014-2015.

Little did I know, after the semester ended there was yet another wave of search committee activity.  In the fifth wave, new jobs were still being posted—mostly temporary/replacement hires—and things moved very quickly.  In late May and early June, I received at least two more requests for interviews that I remember.  I had already signed my contract with the SLAC in Ohio, but the opportunities were still trickling in.  Honestly, the number was probably more like four or five, but I can only recall two specifically.

The very same day that I signed my contract for fall 2014 at a less-then-desirable SLAC in Ohio, I scored an interview request for another visiting professorship position at a much more prestigious SLAC in Ohio.  I declined because I had signed the contract.  I often regret not taking that interview.  That’s a lie.  I regret it All. The. Time.  In fact, I regretted it so much that I applied to the very same position the following year, but that’s a story for another blog.

The other interview that I declined was for a Regional Campus of a Mid-sized State U in Ohio.  It was, to be clear, a regional campus that I didn’t know even existed—which is saying something for a kid from Ohio, but it was a tenure-track position.  It was a pretty good job.  In hindsight, I should’ve taken this interview, too—and not just because the job that I had signed on for was less-than-awesome (it was, for reasons, but that’s a different story).  It was tenure track, it was connected to a State University and, therefore, provided access to some, though not all, of the resources associated with a large university.  It also created opportunities for connecting to a larger network of folks actually in my field rather than trying to sort everything out on my own.  On the other hand, it was a work horse job.  It was one of those jobs where the candidate will spend the entire time teaching core courses, gen-ed requirements, and pre-reqs for more interesting courses.  Not ideal for a forever-job, but a fine place to start a career.  

I did not realize this at the time.  In fact, I was convinced that the job I’d just signed on for was a better job than this TT Regional Campus gig.  It was not, but that’s how buyer’s remorse works isn’t it?  For better or worse, I had made a decision and spent the rest of the summer questioning it and justifying it to myself.  Given a time machine, I would have slapped 2014 me after declining the interview then gone back a day earlier and encouraged myself to take it.

I took for granted the difficulty of getting a tenure-track position.  I also gave too much power over to the contract that I had signed.  Although I do not condone making a habit of skipping out on jobs after signing contracts, it does happen.  This was, at the time, beyond my comprehension.  The contract was signed and I was committed.  The issue at hand was plain as day and the only course of action before me was to decline these otherwise attractive interview offers.  In hindsight, it would have been entirely reasonable—for me as an early career scholar and to the admin at my soon-to-be-very-short-term job—to consider and, if offered, take either position.  Terminating the signed contract would’ve been considered by some—well, to me—to be unforgivably unprofessional, but it also would have been in my best interest.  It’s worth remembering that the market and most of the norms of hiring in the academy give absolutely zero fucks about a job candidate’s best interest.  

Unsurprisingly, candidates are conditioned to act accordingly.

Now, I’m not advocating for job seekers to apply for all the positions in a job cycle and work through contracts until they get the best situation.  If a person doesn’t actually want to work somewhere, they shouldn’t sign a contract to do so—they probably shouldn’t even apply (I know, given my story so far, that’s rich).  Vacating positions before starting them isn’t a decision to be made lightly.  If, however, a better opportunity presents itself it is a decision that must be made and one that should be considered.  I don’t think anyone at the SLAC in Ohio would’ve begrudged my taking a TT position elsewhere.  I think they would’ve been disappointed that they had to find coverage for my classes, but—and I know this because of conversations after the fact—no one expected me to be there for more than a year or two.  

At the end of they day, the tenure-track is a pretty good reason to skip out on a temporary contract.  As far as employment history is concerned, it would be an easy story to sell in the moment and to potential future employers if they somehow got wind of the vacated contract—and if it was a dealbreaker then the fallback position would’ve been a tenure-track job, which is a pretty nice safety net.

As a faculty member, I’ve been on the other side of vacated contracts, too.  Sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for altogether unclear reasons.  It’s a pain in the ass, no doubt about it.  When a candidate accepts and then walks away from an offer, the department loses a ton of time and effort from the labor put into the search.  Individual faculty will feel slighted.  The department, or the chair, has to scramble to solve unexpected problems in the schedule.  It sucks.  But, at the end of the day, I have to really dig into my memory to remember who those candidates were because my job kept going on without them and I soon forgot about the failed search.  

Of course, in all cases, I’m talking about term positions being vacated. It’s something else altogether to vacate an accepted tenure-track offer.  Tenure lines are often hard for departments to come by.  Walking away from a signed tenure-track contract is a surefire way to really piss some people off.  But, at the same time, some people need to be pissed off.

In my case, I wasn’t confident enough to rock any boats.  I had mostly resigned myself to believing that the less-than-desirable SLAC was the best I could get.  So, I finished my dissertation, figured out the logistics of living and working in places that were a hundred-fifty miles apart, and prepped my fall classes.  Oh, and I sent out another essay for publication while updating my CV and application materials for another run at the job market—because the market never ends.

Part 8

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.

In fall 2014, I was teaching four classes, comprised of three different preparations (speech, intercultural communication, and TV/Radio), at a Small Liberal Arts College (SLAC) in Ohio.  I was working on a year-to-year contract and making a salary that was about ten thousand dollars less than the student loan debt I had accrued during my doc program (which was less than you might expect).  I was working in a city about 150 miles from my family and crashing with a family friend (who is a saint) Monday-Thursday.  Nothing about my situation was ideal, but I was, at least, a professor.  Given the brutality of the academic job market, I felt pretty good about that.

I felt less good about my long term prospects at the SLAC since the college didn’t have tenure but did have paltry pay the pay and no hope of getting a raise—on my first day, a long-time faculty member related the story of his promotion a few years prior that included an $800/year raise… and a pen.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, I updated my CV, burned the midnight oil revising articles and book proposals, and scoured the job boards in search of an escape route.  

Welcome to job market run number 2.

My second run at the job market was remarkably better than my first.  It ended with me landing a tenure-track position where I would eventually earn tenure and promotion, direct a graduate program, and work alongside a cohort of stellar colleagues who became even better friends—proving at once that there is some truth to the adage that it’s easier to get a job if you have a job and also that the brass ring can be pretty great if you’re fortunate enough to hang onto it.  The outcome was better than I could’ve hoped for, but even then, the process was horrible.  I won the game, but I hated playing it.

Having applied to around 75 jobs in my first run at the market, I was in no hurry to redouble that effort.  The second time around, I made it a point to apply only to positions that were equal to or better than the job I had—which was, frankly, most of them.  Unlike my first, desperate attempt to secure employment, I was also much more selective in terms of required specialty and geography.  I applied to jobs in far flung places, but only the ones that were really good fits for my specialty and career.  Otherwise, I focused my search on universities closer to family (Ohio and Indiana).  Even though I wasn’t thrilled about my employment situation, I was fairly secure in my position at the SLAC—as one of only a handful of fully credentialed professors at the entire college—so my desperation wasn’t quite to the same level as it was the year prior.

In all, I submitted twenty-three applications in my second run at the market.  More than two-thirds were for rhetoric, speech, or argumentation positions and the remaining few were generalists with rhetoric as an optional specialty.  The positions were skewed toward SLACs, but included a fair number of mid-sized or large regional comprehensive universities and a couple of big research one-type gigs.  All but one of those positions was for an Assistant Professor and most were tenure-track.  Even so, the the cycle was every bit as disheartening the previous year.  Out of twenty-three apps, I landed three screening interviews. Batting .130 isn’t very good in any league, but it was at least a slight improvement over my .120 the previous year.

As I look back through my notes from 2014-2015, I remember being really, really excited about two positions—one a SLAC in Ohio and another a Big State University (BSU) nearish to family.  Neither was the position that I ended up getting (more on that in another post).

The SLAC that caught my early in the cycle is about an hour from where I grew up and has an established program in rhetoric with an excellent reputation.  I was a great fit in terms of teaching and research.  I was living and working in Ohio and I was as familiar with the region as anyone could be.  Hell, before the football coach landed at the university, he was my middle school gym teacher (seriously). Even better, the job posting came up in August with an early September deadline—the first wave—so the process would be wrapped by the end of fall semester.  I couldn’t wait to tell my story on the interview that I would surely get, land this gig, and jump off the job market carousel by the holidays.

I didn’t even get a phone call.

  

I’m not sure I can adequately relate how devastated I was at not even having a chance at this one.  I got over it—and myself—as time passed, but I had convinced myself that it was perfect for me.  It was near my family.  It was in my area.  It was a SLAC not unlike where I did my undergraduate work.  Frankly, it was perfect.  Unfortunately, it was more perfect for someone else.  That said, I’d send my materials their way if they opened up again… and I did.

The second position that I let myself dream about was a BSU that is ideally located almost equidistant from our families.  They were hiring for a rhetoric-type scholar on the tenure-track.  They have a graduate program.  They tend to be more under-the-radar in the field—not a heavy hitting grad program (and certainly not in rhetoric) but their name carries enough weight to be instantly recognizable. 

Honestly, I didn’t think I had a legitimate shot at this job until the big annual conference.  In fact, because I hadn’t secured a single conference interview in my second job cycle, this BSU included, I had given into the assumption that the opening—like all of the others in waves one and two—was already filled.

At the conference that November, I trudged down to the meat market that is the job fair and, to my surprise, found BSU holding down booth advertising the search with literally no one in their queue.  I did a double take.  I walked past twice just to be sure it wasn’t a mirage.  I couldn’t believe it.  But, I wasn’t about to throw away my shot.

I spent probably ten or fifteen minutes chatting with the search committee folks at the booth. I let slide that I had applied to the position, gave them an extended version of my elevator speech, and prodded for information about their timeline.  It was great.  They were warm, they were gracious, and, more importantly, they were receptive to my teaching and research.  My confidence was growing by the minute. 

And then, quite unexpectedly, one of them mentioned being a BGSU grad—just like me.  Oh, how the networking gods smiled.  BGSU isn't a very big program and it produces scholars with a wide range of academic expertise, but most of us land at primarily teaching institutions.  It’s not everyday that I run into someone I don’t already know who passed through those halls, and certainly not someone in or adjacent to my area of expertise.  This was my in.  And even better, I had an ace in the hole.  At the time, BGSU was still in the habit of hosting an open house at the convention, so I used the opening to invite the search committee to the open house.  “Did you get an invitation?  No?  Here, take mine.  I hope you get a chance to catch up with some folks from BG.  Take care.” 

Even though the rest of the job fair was the typical carnival of dehumanization, I walked out buzzing.  I wanted this gig. I had an in. And, I nailed the job fair.  Nailed it.

Under normal circumstances, I treat conference open houses like most conference goers—a chance to catch up with friends, float around, and awkwardly network while trying to score free drinks and remain sober enough avoid being referenced on the discipline’s listserv (NCA New Orleans was a real doozy for CRTNET shade… it’s archived, too, so you should look it up).  If BGSU has an open house, I always try to drop by, but I usually only stay for a little while before heading back out into the swirling confusion that is conference networking.  Imagine my surprise when I bought a round of drinks for some underemployed friends at BGSU’s open house and saw the search committee from BSU stroll in.  The networking gods smiled again!

Not only was I now certain that I had scored points at the job fair, but I was about to get some free airtime.  It’s pretty common for job seekers to drop by open houses to press the flesh—been there, done that, didn’t get that job either—but I never expected, not in a million years, that the search committee would to come find me.

After they’d had a chance to grab some snacks and a drink, I wandered over to thank them for dropping by and to see if I could help them catch up with any old colleagues.  We talked for probably half an hour.  We laughed.  We cried.  We exchanged cards.  It was beautiful.  I felt more in control of my job market future than I ever had during my first run.  I made this meeting happen and I was positively on fire.  I left the conference bursting with confidence and with a spring in my step.  My escape plan from my SLACker job was coming together and my career was about to get big boost.

And then… crickets.

I didn’t even get a phone call.

In hindsight, I can understand why the committee moved my application to the “no” pile.  I know who they picked up, and they’re doing just fine without me.  Nevertheless, my ego really wanted this gig.  I wanted it so much that when I didn’t get it, I applied again five years later (and didn’t get an interview then either).  My ego still kind of wants this gig, but I’m not bitter.  

Eh, who am I kidding?  I’m a little bitter.  Isn’t that kind of the point of blogging?

Part 9

 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… 

---

[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).

Part 10

The alarm came earlier than I’d prefer, but I wasn’t sleeping soundly anyway. I was in a strange town and nervously excited for my final interview with Mid-Sized Regional University (MRU). Without snoozing the alarm, I rolled out of bed and readied myself for the day-long gauntlet otherwise known as the campus visit.  

At 7:30AM, I made my way down to the lobby to meet the faculty member tasked with making sure I ate something and got to campus.  We had breakfast at a cool little diner a short walk from the hotel that covered its basic diner bones with a chic facade of pop art and off-beat menu items—andouille sausage gravy, anyone?  My chaperone and I chatted about the department and curriculum between bites of omelet—the interview starts early, even if you haven’t had a proper cup of coffee yet.  After about an hour, we gathered our things to head to campus.

My first official meeting that day was with the department chair.  He was warm and welcoming and although he had my CV in his hand, it wasn’t clear to me that he’d read past the line with my name on it.  Even so, his job was to sell the department and university—and sell it he did.  Although this was, technically, an interview, he spent more time extolling the virtues of MRU than asking questions about my teaching, research, and service.  Having been on the other side things now, I know that this is a really, really important part of the process.  Just as the department wants to select the best candidate, they need to make sure that the candidate is sufficiently smitten to accept an offer.  I wish, in hindsight, that I’d spent more time poking and prodding at some of the issues that were clearly hang-ups for the department—such as the extension campus that was assured I “would not be compelled” to teach at and the status of the basic course in the general education curriculum.  Even so, I felt like I left a pretty good impression and ended the meeting with quite a bit more information about MRU and the department than I scrounged from the website.

From there I bounced around faculty offices for 15 minute meetings with one or two members of the department.  These conversations were cordial, get-to-know-you-type affairs and mostly focused on a combination of the “what will you teach here” question and folks hyping the university and the town/region.  All good.  By mid-morning, I’d pinballed around almost all of faculty offices and found myself settling in nicely.

The day’s major event, the teaching demonstration, came next.  I had thirty minutes or so to prep—in the department chair’s office—before teaching.  Or at least, I was scheduled to have thirty minutes to prep.  As it turned out, a faculty member with whom I was not scheduled to meet because of teaching conflicts opted to use my prep time as their own personal impromptu meeting.  The chat was friendly, but it took almost the entire block of prep time that was on my schedule—and lasted longer than any of my scheduled meetings with the other faculty members.  In all, I ended up with a couple minutes to click through my slides and make sure my media worked before the search chair came to escort me to the classroom to set up.  You can’t count on down time, even when it’s on the official itinerary.

The teaching demonstration at MRU was a combination research talk and teaching demo.  My task was to teach something, anything really, about my research.  My audience was a lower-level Small Group Communication class, about ten faculty members, and the department chair.  My plan was to teach the concept of “persona” using a few examples of George Carlin’s progression from suit-and-tie jokester to counter-culture comedy icon from my dissertation.  I had more compelling examples from Richard Pryor’s comedy, but couldn’t justify bringing the n-word into conversations with a cold audience on an interview.  Discretion, I’m told, is the better part of valor.  The Carlin jokes did the job.

George Carlin

NOT George Carlin

A couple things stand out in my memory of this teaching demonstration.  First, as I introduced my examples, I asked “does anyone know who George Carlin is?”  Nowadays, students are less and less likely to recognize the George, but I figured I had enough faculty in the audience that someone would hit that softball into the bleachers.  After an awkwardly long pause, a faculty member, the only member of the search committee I’d yet to meet, answered, “he’s the comedian who smashes watermelons.”  I waited a beat.  And then another.  “Um, that’s Gallagher, not George Carlin,” I corrected, gently, deferentially, almost apologetically.  I eyed the class with caution as the faculty member’s face reddened with embarrassment with each passing heartbeat.  Thankfully, another faculty member raised his hand before things got any more awkward, “Carlin is the guy who did the seven words you can’t say on TV.”  Tension broken.  Teaching demo saved.  I was ready (able) to move on.  In a public setting—like a research talk or teaching demo—everyone, even the department faculty, are in the pressure cooker with you.

Once we got past the awkward embarrassing Gallagher/Carlin gaffe and watched a little comedy (two different performances of Carlin’s “hippy dippy weatherman”), the discussion really took off.  The lesson worked well enough and the handful of students participating in the conversation were really engaged.  Not bad for coming off the bench cold.  Discussion has long been my preferred teaching method and, as a result, I’m pretty good at getting and keeping the conversation going.  

After the demo, I gathered my stuff and offered my thanks to the students and faculty shuffling out of the room afterward.  None of this is remarkable.  As I followed the crowd of people from the classroom to lunch, however, I overheard a few variations on the following: “did you notice that he learned all of their names?” This I did not expect.  I’m as good at learning names as the next person, but I’m not especially good—a friend of mine literally gets all of her students names on day 1… she’s good.  I do, however, make a conscious effort to ask for and then use students’ names until I know them.  This behavior is so engrained in my teaching that I do it almost by reflex—“that’s right! What your name, again? Thanks, Anna.”  This little tic, as I learned on my way to lunch, is apparently impressive.  At lunch—with a bunch of faculty, many of whom attended my teaching demo—no one asked me about the content of my class, but more than one person asked me directly, almost defensively, if was “good with names.” The lesson, how you interact with the students during a teaching demo is always more important than whatever you teach them--as long as you teach them something. 

After lunch, it was time to pinball to a few more faculty meetings—which included an incredibly helpful fifteen minute crash course on the union contract at MRU—and then a meeting with the Dean.  Well, not with the Dean, but with an Associate Dean who apologized for having to stand in for the Dean.  Where I was pretty sure that the chair hadn’t read my CV, I was certain that the Associate Dean had printed it moments before I walked in.  And that makes sense.  Unless the administrator—Dean, Provost, VP, Chancellor, whomever—interviewing you is from the department for which you are interviewing, they assume that the department did its homework on your scholarship and teaching bona fides.  Their role is to figure out what draws you to the University, the area, or the department and to make sure you won’t be an obvious liability to the University.  

In this case, my interest was all about the curriculum—which I discussed at length—and that it was a better job than the one I had—but, of course, I left that bit out.  That response went over well enough, but it did slow our conversation a bit because the Associate Dean wasn’t prepared to address the department’s curriculum in anything other than broadest strokes.  Nevertheless, apart from mixing up some Greek satirists with some Roman satirists, which like four people on the planet would catch let alone call me on, the administrative portion of my interview went just fine. 

By this time, it was mid-afternoon and I was starting to feel the wear and tear of a full day of being “switched on” in interview mode.  Thankfully, there was only one more item on my dance card.  Of course, other than the teaching demonstration, it was probably the most important meeting of the day: the official interview with the search committee.

Honestly, I don’t remember much about how this conversation went down.  It was later in the afternoon, maybe 4PM, and my brain was mush.  I remember being at a total loss for an answer to the question “which theories do you emphasize when teaching public speaking?” I answered, but my answer was not good. It was so not good that one committee member supplied the example of “like, Monroe’s Motivated Sequence”—which I teach on the regular—and I said something articulate like, “Oh, yeah.  I do that.”  Not my best moment.  Otherwise, I used my time at the end of the interview to compliment the committee for organizing my visit and extolling the virtue’s of MRU based on what I’d learned that day—it seemed like a good place to work and, contrary to some of the other places I’d interviewed, it wasn’t riddled with red flags.  Of course it helps that it was a massive step up from the gig I had, but let’s not sweat those details…

The campus visit came to close around 5PM and I was shuttled back to my hotel to relax a bit before dinner.  A couple of hours later, two of the search committee members, including the one who mixed up George Carlin & Gallagher, picked me up to get some dinner at a swanky restaurant in town.  I was totally exhausted, so I spent most of the time trying not to put my foot in my mouth—which I often fail at—and staying attentive enough to track the conversation.  The food was great—although I’ll never understand why folks insist on serving a beautiful piece of fish with mashed potatoes (soft on soft… ugh)—and the conversation was easy.  After a good meal, glass of wine, and a complimentary digestif from the bar (which I slugged down like a shot because I’m classy like that…), I was ready to call home and crash.

My visit technically extended to the next day, but my agenda was open—no meals, meetings, or demonstrations.  Instead, I used the time to grab a nice breakfast at place recommended by one of the committee members and explored the town (on foot) while searching for an ATM so that I’d have some cash to tip the car service for my ride back to the airport.  

Pro-tip: Always tip the car service.  Always.  In some cases, the driver might have driven all of the finalists back and forth from the airport.  They’re a great source of information for candidates—and search chairs.

The town was great, but its East Coast claustrophobia was quite a bit different from the spread out Midwest open spaces that I was used to.  I remember calling my spouse at least once while traversing the little town saying things like, “all the houses are connected” and “the houses are all tall and narrow.”  After walking a few miles and taking in as much of the town and campus (I walked back down there, too) as I could on my own, I packed up and met the car service at the hotel for a shuttle back to the airport for my midday flight home.

I arrived back in Ohio that evening exhausted and also stoked.  I wanted this job, and I wanted it bad.