A job candidate in English plans for jubilant success but prepares for complete and total rejection
"I've got a bad feeling about this," Han Solo laments to Luke, Leia, and Chewie as the great walls of the giant trash compactor begin closing in on his crew. That scene keeps replaying in my head now that fall has come and I am suffering through another year on the academic job market.
Star Wars offers an apt metaphor: I feel quite a bit like the walls are closing in as a monster slithers toward me just out of sight. I imagine that by now, many of my fellow job candidates are having the same uncontrollable impulse to hold off the hiring season from coming yet again.
I am a newly minted Ph.D. in an Ivy League English department. This is my third year on the job market, and I am in pretty good shape, all in all, aside from the fact that I am procrastinating right now by writing this. I have taught as a visiting assistant professor for six years, I have attended loads of conferences, I have written quite a bit journalistically, and I have some academic publications under my belt, too (if not as many as I had hoped). I have new templates for all of my application materials prepared.
And I come from a department whose placement seminar for graduate students is part writer's workshop, part group therapy, and part job-market boot camp. Our devoted placement officer, like Yoda, provides many of us with more support than our own advisers do. Perhaps most crucially, we have each other. Never underestimate the importance of going on the market with smart, supportive, encouraging peers — as well as the imperative of avoiding the ones who, like Chewbacca, scream or moan so much that they only add more stress to the situation.
A new hiring season brings with it memories of the old ones. I remember how obsessive we all become about checking the job ads and how very time-consuming it is trying to fit myself into the descriptions of faculty openings. ("Well, I kind of do Ottoman literature.")
I have already spent one Christmas Day on my own, preparing for that crucial interview at the Modern Language Association convention — the only interview out of more than 30 applications I sent out that year. I have received rejections as recently as July, as if I hadn't figured out by then that the department and I were not going to sit down and talk course descriptions. And I have endured at least six months of friends and family asking, "Whatever happened with that job in ...?"
But while this year the trash compactor — and its attendant shame and self-hatred — may be familiar territory, old anxieties still arise.
What I was unprepared for, before I ever entered the market, was that its major stress would not be the time it takes to write, rewrite, revise, and compile documents, or the fear of, and preparation for, the MLA interview. What I found most exhausting was the self-interrogation: It is finally time to ask yourself what kind of life you want to live. Hiding inside a graduate-student existence is no longer tenable, personally or financially. What are you willing to sacrifice for this career? Where are you willing to move to have it?
Some Ph.D.'s are willing to move anywhere for the job, and finding a job in an English department infamously demands such flexibility. Other people are limited by family or external obligations.
I found myself limited by lack of family: Do I really want to move somewhere on my own, where the only new people I might meet would be other academics? Most of whom are married? I have spent more than 10 years now away from my family and oldest friends, and I am missing the big moments of their lives. That mattered little to me when I started graduate school. But as my parents age and my friends have children, I've started to wonder: Is it worth it to spend another stretch of precious time so far away, all for an uncertain future and a rather pathetic sum of money?
My answer to that question has depended heavily on the place. Most job candidates find that if they apply to as many departments as possible, they will have some acceptances they dread as much as the ones they hope for. As a visiting assistant professor, I have already taught at some fantastic institutions. I have seen favorite students straight through from year one to year four. I've advised, I've tested, I've been tested. And like many in my position, I would rather stay where I am, but with full benefits, a proper title, a livable wage, and a research leave.
I have learned in this process that I am not interested in living just anywhere. I am young and curious. Rather than settle on some uninspiring place, I would prefer either to seize the opportunity to go live somewhere wonderful or focus on getting closer to home. That's why overseas locations have become more interesting to me than small college towns, and little-known institutions in my home state have won out over top universities in isolated areas.
I will apply to the spectrum, of course; one can never predict the ways in which a place can pleasantly surprise, and, fundamentally, I am not in this career merely for adventure.
At the same time, English departments need to take tremendous responsibility for the truly absurd state of market affairs. There is much they can do to improve the hiring situation, in addition to mobilizing to enhance the use and value of a dissertation, creating better retirement plans to rotate in new faculty members, and structuring adjunct positions to make them more like postdoctoral appointments and less like exploitation.
How about simple good manners?
One candidate I know watched his interviewers read the next candidate's CV as he painstakingly answered their questions. Another had an interviewer show up halfway through the meeting. I sat on a conference panel with a committee chair from a department at which I hoped to interview. In spite of our lovely chat about the position and our subsequent e-mail exchanges, my late rejection was one sentence, without a period. The market is stressful for committees as well as for applicants, but there is really no excuse for the disorganization and disrespect so rampant in recent years.
In spite of it all, I'm back, and we all know that the third time's the charm. This year I am planning for jubilant success and preparing for complete and total rejection. I look forward to the pathetic (but seductive) wiki confessionals. I have even begun to list — and relish — all of my "second choice" career possibilities.
So to all of you undertaking similar missions this year, think carefully about your destination. Plan your operation methodically. Go over your letter again. And again. And again. Choose your crew wisely. Listen to your Yoda. And may the force be with you.
