It was relatively easy to write about the first stages of the job search that my husband Ben and I are conducting for two tenure-track positions in English. But now that we have actually interviewed at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association, gone on campus visits, and suffered the sting of rejection -- as well as a few twinges of renewed hope -- it has become a lot more difficult to describe our experiences in pithy fashion.
But I'll give it a try. For starters, we don't have jobs -- yet. We have gone through an excruciatingly slow process of elimination, like being on the world's longest episode of the dating show elimiDATE. Each of us applied to 30 or 40 jobs, landed several interviews at the MLA, and ultimately got invited to one campus visit apiece.
My big interview was at an institution that had some pluses but wasn't exactly my dream job. Ben's, on the other hand, was precisely that, which made the fact that he ultimately came in second both "a great sign" (in the words of our advisers) for his future prospects and a bitter pill to swallow in the here and now. We each waited weeks beyond the designated time to hear back from the search committee, only to find out within a 24-hour period that neither of us had gotten a job.
Suddenly the decisions we had to make shifted rather drastically. If things had gone well for us careerwise, we might have been struggling over whether to live apart in different locations. Instead, we are faced with the bleaker prospect of deciding whether to stay in graduate school for another year or apply for non-tenure-track positions. And herein lies what I have found to be one of the hardest things about searching for an academic job, whether alone or as a couple: the constant adjusting of horizons and (if you'll excuse the academic jargon) paradigms for decision making.
The simple fact is that (most) people like to feel that they're in control. We feel like we're singularly out of control right now, and it makes us squirm. We were sailing high when we received news that we had gotten interviews and campus visits -- it's hard not to react like Sally Field at the Oscars.
Then, almost inevitably, we were brought low. Why didn't that college even ask for a writing sample? How come my acquaintance/nemesis/close friend got an interview at that university and I didn't? And most crushing, why didn't I get picked in the end? We know, because we've been told countless times, that it's a mistake to personalize this process. It's about fit, it's about the fact that we don't have our Ph.D.'s in hand quite yet, it's about who knows what.
But in the end, isn't that depersonalization what's most discomfiting about the academic job market? You put all your intellect, emotion, and energy into writing your application or preparing for an interview or campus visit, and more often than not, you get back ... nothing. My relationship with the institution where I had a campus visit ended without a personal response from the department, just a skeleton of a rejection letter and a check reimbursing me for expenses I had incurred.
It's kind of pointless to blame individual search committees or department faculties without knowing the combination of factors that causes them to act the way they do. What I'm trying to say is that the process, as a whole, can have a numbing effect on job applicants. To be strong candidates, we have to build up our egos and polish our skills of self-presentation, but often, it's as if all those efforts disappear into some great void. In that context, personalizing the rejection becomes our only consolation.
To escape unscathed from the vicissitudes of the job market is to presuppose a level of equanimity and detachment that I think is impossible for most of us to maintain. But it's true that it doesn't pay to get too up, or too down, because the market will "correct" you either way. Just when Ben and I had accepted that we would have to wait another year to try and land tenure-track jobs, I got another invitation for a campus visit, from an institution that I assumed had written me off long ago.
It's a good job, a better fit than the first place I interviewed. I'm getting ready for the visit -- ready to show my enthusiasm for the campus and for my prospective colleagues and duties. I want to demonstrate that I will fit in there, and to do that I have to picture myself there.
But I am also trying to keep a small piece of myself separate, in the entirely likely possibility that I don't get the job and we go back to other plans we've been discussing for some time now. In a sense, going on the market means learning to juggle a series of contradictions, branches of a tree that sprawl in many different directions. A friend reports that he and his wife have started making flow charts to plot out their choices. Our brains are filled with such charts, too, sprouting hypotheticals galore.
The truth is that our search for tenure-track jobs is not likely to be completed in a year's worth of Chronicle columns. We're trying to prepare for the long term, and to become the flexible, supple candidates that this job market requires. Before we began applying for jobs, we knew there would be moments when we would be in suspense. Several months later, we've grown accustomed to the unexpectedly long duration of those moments.
