Many people might consider it, well, unwise to spend tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention untold hours of unpaid labor, on a graduate degree in the humanities during one of the longest periods of economic growth in our country's history.
Could a catastrophic economic collapse coincide almost exactly with the granting of my doctoral degree?
I'm not worried though. This thing's gonna work out. I'm smart and I'm able and I'm true, and the suckers can't keep me down. At least, that's what I tell myself on a good day.
After college in the East, I returned home to Albuquerque in the early '90s and entered a master's program in history at the University of New Mexico. Through specs tinted "land of enchantment" red, I imagined Albuquerque was Seattle -- only sunnier and with more hippies. Turns out, I had completely misjudged my hometown.
I soon realized that the city was hopelessly spread out and that the grad students generally lived miles and miles from the university. As a result, the social life was, um, lacking. I liked the professors a lot though, and would have happily stayed if I could have worked with someone in Chicano history. Unfortunately, there was no one there, so I eventually made my way to the University of Michigan for the Ph.D.
Now I'm a doctoral candidate, trained mostly in Chicano history and U.S. social history. I also "do," as they say, the history of sexuality, Latino history, and some bits of the history of the American West. My dissertation takes a shot at describing the changing racial and sexual dynamics in New Mexico after the railroad, and lots of Anglos, arrived in 1880.
On the whole, I'm not too disgruntled with my decision to seek a career in academe. I like to write, the research aspects aren't so bad, if at times eye-straining, allergy-inducing (the dust, the dust!), and lower-back-inflaming (the microfilm, the microfilm!), and I kinda dig sitting around coffee shops and moldy offices yapping about professional minutiae.
The teaching, however, makes me really nervous. Some people -- and I gaze at them with wonder -- can stand in front of large groups and just hold forth. Sometimes they don't even make sense, or they tend to stumble into lengthy and tedious asides, but still they talk. I have stage fright, so I worry quite a bit about a 45-minute or hour-long U.S. history survey course and the inevitable blank stares.
Frankly, I'm not so good at interviews either. My experience with interviews is limited mostly to service-industry summer jobs at home in New Mexico, where the main theme was usually why I decided to go the college in the faraway, high-priced East when I had the perfectly good University of New Mexico right there in my back yard.
Now, years later, I tend to get nervous and start waving my hands and babbling and generally making a fool of myself. Maybe I should take a public-speaking course or set up practice interviews with friends. Provided I do get an interview, what weaker way to go out than by being a nervous twit and blowing the whole thing.
At the same time that I'll be trolling the academic waters from my home in Pittsburgh, my wife, Beth, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, will be applying for residency programs. The biggest issue Beth and I face is somehow trying to coordinate our lives so that we can live together without completely torpedoing one or both of our careers. I think we're willing to be apart for as long as a year, but beyond that just seems ridiculous.
We lived apart for various stretches in the past, and I always reassured myself that at least I'll get a lot of work done in my isolation. Of course, exactly the opposite happens. I sleep late, watch way too much TV, and generally revert to life as a dissolute undergrad. Not really the lifestyle best suited for an assistant professor (or lecturer) trying simultaneously to finish a manuscript and prepare for three entirely new courses. So, we'll be applying to lots of East and West Coast positions and hoping it works out.
An added complication for me in the job search is my mixed ancestry. As a "coyote," a term used in New Mexico mostly to describe people of mixed Anglo-Latino background, I've navigated, at times poorly, my mother's Latina and my father's Anglo cultures, never feeling entirely comfortable in either. I check myself off as both when possible and tell people I'm mixed when they ask.
So I'm unsure about applying to some of the jobs in Chicano and Latino history. Is it right for someone like me to take those jobs? Will I constantly be put on the spot as not Latino enough? Am I buying into the cult of authenticity that demands its people of color come in acceptable packaging and with a perfectly calibrated, reassuring hum? Or am I just being too precious and navel-gazy about the whole freakin' thing? That's still up in the air.
That said, having finished drafts of every chapter of the dissertation and completed a month-long research trip to New Mexico in September, I've spent October revising the dissertation and sending out letters of application for a variety of jobs. I also trudged through more onerous errands like ordering business cards, arranging letters of recommendation and buying a proper overcoat.
Convinced I need to Spread My Net Wide if I want to get a job, I'm also going to make use of whatever meager, non-academic contacts I have. Washington, D.C., is the closest to our Pittsburgh home and so the logical first, Greyhound step. I'm sure my desperately cultivated veneer of smooth respectability will peel away like wet wallpaper at the slightest inspection, but I figure a decent looking business card and a well-groomed appearance can at least forestall the inevitable.
But how to go about appearing respectable and professional? Who knows these kinds of things? Is there a course on presenting oneself as promising, scholarly, and collegial when one has spent the past two or three years squirreled away in archives and dim computer centers? If so, sign me up.
As I write, I've just received an invitation for an on-campus interview at a small Midwestern college. It looks like a grueling two days, lots of meals and questions and tours, not to mention the old job-talk standby.
To be continued ...
