At the onset of my career as a graduate student in sociology, I heard some horrifying tales of how bad things can get during the period when you are writing and defending a dissertation, going on the job market, and trying to begin a teaching career.
Now I have some absurdities of my own to relay. These include completing an admittedly unusual dissertation about punk subculture and American society since the 1970's, withstanding another year of rejection on the job market, and finding myself in massive debt without a penny to my name -- all in the same quarter.
It all started last September, just like it always does. I was almost out of money, and I needed a job. I had won a dissertation fellowship the previous year from the University of California that came with a 12-month stipend. But the stipend was only $1,000 a month -- a fraction of a living wage in this land of constantly escalating rents and bloodsucking utility companies -- and the fellowship prevents you from taking a teaching appointment of any kind. Fortunately, I had saved some money and used that reserve to supplement my income during that year, but the checks stopped coming last July, and I was going to be flat broke sometime in mid-October.
I told people my dissertation was finished, but in truth it was almost finished. I was quite proud that it had turned out to be exactly the sort of dissertation I imagined myself writing back when I started graduate school. I hadn't taken any shortcuts. But I was also really annoyed with myself because it wasn't done, and although in retrospect the changes and additions I needed to make were relatively minor, they seemed incredibly daunting as I staggered into a new academic year.
Being on the job market was therefore the least of my worries, but that didn't stop me from completely freaking out from time to time. I had a total meltdown while trying to master a computer program for printing address labels. There were a lot of jobs in sociology and American studies that I knew I probably wouldn't get but should apply for anyway, and there were also a handful of jobs that presented realistic and exciting possibilities.
In the meantime, I wanted a temporary job. A couple of friends tried to talk me into going to a temp agency, promising better money, less stress, and the possibility of health insurance. I thought long and hard about it but in the end I opted for a teaching assistantship at the University of California at San Diego. For me, a T.A. job is the equivalent of fast food at McDonalds -- it might be damaging to my health and well-being but at least I knew exactly what I was getting myself into, and it would be over in a short time.
I started to panic, however, when a couple of T.A. positions that I'd had my eye on were filled at the last minute by returning students with more seniority than me. There was one position available, but it was in a freshman writing program where I had never worked and about which I had heard insane stories of overwork from other T.A.'s during my years as a union organizer. But during my interview, the directors of the writing program assured me that the fall quarter wasn't quite so intense. The bad news was that I would have to endure 16 hours of orientation, workshops, group discussions, role playing, and all the other silliness required by these college bureaucracies.
Although my new job really wasn't very demanding, I quickly discovered that I knew almost nothing about the content of the course (anthropology and world history), so I had to work fairly hard simply to convince my panic-stricken freshmen that I was a vaguely competent T.A.
In the meantime, I had a dissertation to polish, and only three days in the week to work on it. I finally got the thing photocopied and turned into my committee, paying my enormous Kinko's bill (420 pages x 5 committee members + costs of binding) with a credit card, because I only had $94 in my checking account. I loved how ominous and futuristic my dissertation looked with its title, Anarchy in the U.S.A.: Capitalism, Postmodernity, and Punk Subculture Since the 1970s, and its cover page dated 10/10/2000. I took a moment to celebrate, and then prepared to teach the next day by reading up on the Netsilik Eskimos.
By early November, I had managed to mail off applications for a total of 45 positions. I got the big e-mail about a week later. A sociology department at a major public university in a very livable area of the country wanted more material. The search was for someone doing culture and theory, which are my two main areas of specialization. In fact, I had identified this job from the beginning as perhaps my best shot at landing a major tenure-track position. I looked at the research of the search committee chairman and quickly concluded that he would be familiar with my advisers and might be interested in my work. I scurried back to Kinko's and sent the committee a package.
I was excited, and so was my fiancée, Sarah, who is herself currently writing a dissertation in U.S. history. We agreed that we could live there for at least a few years, and that in a large college town she wouldn't have much trouble finding work as an adjunct instructor or in local museums. The more I thought I about it, the more I was convinced I would get this job, because how many other sociologists could there be whose work combines culture and theory?
And then ... nothing. With each passing day, I became increasingly bitter. It not only looked like I hadn't gotten the job but that I hadn't even been short listed. I imagined that they gazed at my file and simply said, "There's no way we're going to hire this cultural-studies guy from California who writes about punk rock."
Meanwhile, my own department was conducting a search for an assistant professor, and I decided to check it out by going to a couple of the talks and picking up a copy of each candidate's C.V. All five of the applicants who had been invited for job talks were either from an Ivy League campus or Berkeley, three of them had already published books or secured book contracts, and all of them had received their Ph.D.'s between 1997 and 1999. My department obviously has a bad case of "Ivy envy." I knew that I had no chance if this was the standard for assistant-professor positions.
In this frame of mind, my Ph.D. defense was somewhat anticlimactic, but came as a tremendous relief nonetheless. I had lots of friends there to support me, and thankfully the nightmare scenarios I concocted in my imagination did not come to pass. The news of my rejection from the big job became official 11 days later, when I heard that another former student from our department had been short listed for the same position. It made sense, because she was another culture person who had better publications and more teaching experience than I had. But I hadn't considered her as potential competition because she finished her Ph.D. at least three or four years ago, and I assumed that she already had a job. Apparently not.
I didn't have time to feel sorry for myself, because there were a few more bureaucratic hurdles to surmount between defending my dissertation and completing a Ph.D. The head of my committee demanded further revisions, which occupied me until the first week of December. These weren't major changes by any means, but at the time I thought they might just push me over the edge. Soon after, however, I had collected all the necessary signatures and sent the dissertation to the library to be bound and filed. I knew I wouldn't get out of graduate school without one final hit to the pocketbook: $120 for two laser-printed copies of my dissertation on 100 percent cotton paper, and $84 to the U.C. Regents for some bogus "filing fee."
December and January came and went, and I received no further "nibbles" -- the annoying word that professors use to describe initial expressions of interest from search committees.
I know that anything can happen, but mentally I packed it in when I wasn't even short listed for a job in my two primary areas of expertise. I've gotten only a few rejection letters from the other 45 jobs I applied for, so maybe everyone's just waiting to see if they can get themselves an Ivy Leaguer and, if not, they'll get around to the rest of us later in the year.
Realistically I expect to be Dr. Temp Slave for a few more years, commuting between multiple campuses in Southern California to teach the classes no tenured professor in his right mind would touch, praying that I don't get sick or injured because I have no health insurance.
Things could be worse, because I like to teach and my students generally seem to like me. But I need to make some real money real soon. I've accumulated some huge credit-card debts during the past year, and the bills for the student loans are just starting to arrive. The Dr. Temp Slave phase of my life started this winter, when I began to teach "The Sociology of Youth" to a class of 150 students and signed on as a teaching assistant for two sections of introductory sociology. Wish me luck!
