If you're preparing to go on the job market in the fall, you should probably spend some time this summer doing a little reading about the hiring process. Of course you can always start out with our book, The Academic Job Search Handbook (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), which is a start-to-finish guide to finding a faculty job, but plenty of other good options are out there.
We've compiled a handy summer reading list for you. It's a mix of books and Web sites that offer information on a variety of jobs and job searches. We've also included selected works of fiction about academe, because it's summer and why not? Each of these resources is useful or fun, and some are both.
Nonfiction
*Career Renewal: Tools for Scientists and Technical Professionals, by Stephen Rosen and Celia Paul (Academic Press, 1998): An extremely detailed guide to making a career change, this book includes in-depth, first-person accounts. While all the examples come from people with backgrounds in scientific and technical fields, most of the exercises and advice are useful in almost any field.
*The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve, edited by Constance Coiner and Diana Hume George (University of Illinois Press, 1998): Faculty members from various institutions and disciplines contributed personal histories to this book, as well as articles on being a mentor, facing your biological clock, doing adjunct work, and caring for children with disabilities and for elderly relatives, among other topics.
*Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning a Master's or a Ph.D., by Robert L. Peters, (Noonday Press, 1997 revised edition): First published in 1992, this book came about because its author found that most graduate students did not understand how graduate education worked and received only minimal information from their advisers and institutions.
In painstaking detail, Peters explains the entire process, from selecting and applying to a graduate program to obtaining a teaching position. While the tone is occasionally cynical, it is more often supportive and realistic, whether Peters is discussing oral presentations or faculty-student relationships. He cites the work of other writers as well as providing quotations from individual graduate students. Peters, a biologist, revised the book to accommodate a job market that has become more difficult and stressful for candidates.
*So What Are you Going to Do With That? A Guide to Career-Changing for M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s, by Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001): Written by two recent humanities Ph.D.'s, each of whom has found rewarding professional employment outside the academy, this is an upbeat guide to identifying and starting a nonacademic career. It's based on interviews with Ph.D.'s who have successfully made the transition.
*This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics From the Working Class, edited by C.L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law, (Temple University Press, 1995): A collection of essays by faculty members and graduate students from working-class backgrounds, this book eloquently describe some of the hidden costs and struggles of "upward mobility."
*Tomorrow's Professor: Preparing for Academic Careers in Science and Engineering, by Richard M. Reis (IEEE Press, 1997): An extremely thorough guide, this book offers good advice from the first years of graduate study up through successfully completing the tenure process. It's enlivened by case studies. Reis also runs an e-mail discussion group that touches on a variety of issues related to faculty development.
Web Sites
*PhinisheD bills itself as "a discussion and support group for people who cannot seem to finish their dissertations or theses." For A.B.D.'s this can be a painful topic, but the site addresses it with humor and with a great deal of good advice that could be useful to anybody procrastinating about any academic project. Its "Hall of Phame" includes the names of those users who successfully completed their Ph.D.'s. ("If they could it, so can you.") Its collection of links is wonderful and wide-ranging.
*Science's Next Wave is a career-development Web site published by Science magazine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It offers science-related articles on the job market, career transitions, postdocs, and faculty life. Most of Next Wave is accessible by subscription only, but readers can check on the site whether their institutions are subscribers.
*Sellout calls itself a "resource of Ph.D.'s considering careers beyond the university. Produced by Mark Johnson, an English Ph.D. who works in the software industry, the site offers brief biographies of Ph.D.'s (as well as A.B.D.'s and B.A.'s) who are working in a variety of fields. His site also offers links to "articles about selling out."
Fiction
*Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers (1935; reissued Harper, 1995): From the Lord Peter Wimsey series, this mystery is set in a women's college at Oxford.
*Death in a Tenured Position (Dutton, 1981) and other books by Amanda Cross: Amanda Cross is the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, a retired English professor at Columbia University. Her heroine, Kate Fansler, is a tenured professor of English who investigates crimes of the academy.
*Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (Random House, 1987): The last full-length novel by a writer whose Stanford students became many of America's foremost writers, this story follows the long relationship of two couples who meet when the men are new assistant professors at the University of Wisconsin.
*Moo by Jane Smiley (Random House, 1995): An academic farce, this book pokes fun at life at a Midwestern agricultural university.
*Straight Man by Richard Russo (Random House, 1997): Here's a humorous tale of an interim English department chairman at a fictional Pennsylvania university during budget season.
This list could go on, but we'll end it here with a few final titles: Small World: An Academic Romance by David Lodge (Penguin, 1995); Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror by James Hynes (Picador USA, 1997); and Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (Doubleday, 1954).
Cartoons
*Piled Higher and Deeper: A Graduate Student Comic Strip Collection by Jorge Cham (Piled Higher and Deeper Publishing, 2002): The author of this hilarious book is a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford University's mechanical-engineering department. The book is collection of the first five years of Piled Higher and Deeper, a comic strip about life (or lack thereof) in graduate school that originally appeared in Stanford University's student newspaper and is now online.
We hope you'll supplement this list with things you've been meaning to read for pure enjoyment. Academics tend to work all the time, but like everyone else, they work best when they take a break once in a while. Happy reading, and don't forget the sunscreen!
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