Call me the whiz-bang kid of the mid-tier academic sector. My bachelor's degree is from a top public research university, but my credentials go downhill from there: master's from a regional state teacher's college, Ph.D. from one of the smallest members of a distinguished state university system.
I wasn't accepted at any of the top-five doctoral programs to which I dutifully applied, but everything has come more easily in the realm of second-tier institutions.
At every step of my doctoral career in English I've been courted, feted, and generously supported financially. I've prospered intellectually and professionally, I've been able to have an academic life and a family without incurring much debt, and I've completed my Ph.D. in less than five years.
Nonetheless, I often swam uneasily in my little pond because I knew that I'd eventually have to compete nationally against all of those morose Ivy-League whiz kids who are now graduating with their prestigious degrees and sardonic wits. From reading past First Person columns written by such Ph.D.'s, it seems as though their greatest disappointment would be to end up at the type of institution that I hope to take by storm: a mid-tier university just like the one where I've done my graduate work.
Since being advanced to candidacy, I've tried to prepare myself for the job market by thinking and acting as though I were no longer a student. I knew that if I were fortunate my professional life would look much like my A.B.D. years, with varying mixtures of three constants: teaching, research, and service.
From that perspective, my last two years as a student have looked very much like those of a faculty member at a prestigious research university. I've taught only one or two classes a year while earning enough so that my wife could stay home with our two kids. I've completed a book-length research project and have a few journal publications to show for it. I served for two years as president of the campus-wide Graduate Student Association, sat on several important campus committees, and even had a hand in selecting my institution's new chief executive.
For the most part, I've been extremely happy in graduate school. If life as a professor is anything like the past two years, I can't wait to begin.
There were, however, challenges associated with graduate school that my game of Pollyanna-pretend couldn't entirely assuage -- the lack of money and physical space being foremost among them.
Fortunately, life before graduate school taught us that money is not the source of our family's happiness. Although my family's financial situation during graduate school was stressful at times, it didn't result in a negative outlook on our social status or quality of life -- which is not to say that we enjoyed having to depend on state and federal programs to feed, doctor, and house ourselves and our kids.
A lack of physical space in our living quarters made the growth in our family particularly challenging. My 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter were both born during my graduate-school years. Were it not for a month-long house-sitting job and daytime use of my mother-in-law's apartment during the rest of the year, I never would have been able to muster the intellectual focus to write my dissertation.
Since graduating into the ranks of the unemployed was not an option for me, I took my first stab at the job-market monster last year. In defiance of the normal rules governing the time/space continuum, I added 60 applications to my full load of dissertation writing and part-time teaching.
To my great surprise, the God of Employment favored me with an interview at the Modern Language Association convention and three post-convention interviews and campus visits. For reasons that I'll get to later, I ended up declining the three jobs that I was offered, two of which were tenure-track positions.
At the end of April, I was very satisfied with the results of my job hunt, despite the fact that turning down the offers I had received meant having to scramble for adjunct work in the coming year. As an A.B.D. candidate, I'd faced the market beast and wrested from it a modest acknowledgement that my accomplishments at mid-tier state institution were not beneath notice.
To this point, I've emphasized the sunny side of my disposition, and rightly so, because it is my dominant mode of being. However, a reptilian brain also lurks beneath these tranquil waters. It's calculating and committed to success at any ethical cost.
Medical anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille uses the concept of the triune brain (the "reptilian" portion is responsible for basic survival; the limbic" houses our emotions; and the "neocortex" controls language and rational thinking) to explain how seemingly incompatible impulses can be contained within the same person. Reptilian-me has known all along that the odds are stacked against my obtaining a tenure-track job at any state university, much less one with graduate students. Coasting on my privileged status as the whiz-bang kid of the mid-tier has never been an option.
Now that my mid-tier victory tour has ended, I'm glad that I heeded most of my reptilian urgings. I am as ready as I can be to compete with the Ivy Leaguers who, despite their alienated sense of irony, are smart, hardworking, and odds-on favorites to snap up MLA interviews like my 3-year-old consumes Cheerios.
Years ago, my reptilian side took heart at the following remark from a department chairman: "At my institution, candidates from prestigious institutions have no advantage over others with stronger records of publication. I must confess to preferring frightened, self-conscious workaholics from lesser schools whose need to prove themselves borders on monomania."
Monomaniacs, reptilian-me points out, have always favored the long-term view, and that is what led me to decline the first round of job offers I received as an A.B.D. candidate last spring.
Getting interviews, let alone job offers, was deemed a promising sign by members of my dissertation committee. I was less reassured by my good fortune because all but one of those interviews and offers came from religiously affiliated institutions who were as much impressed by my nonacademic work experiences and commitments as my academic ones.
That would not be a problem if any of those colleges had had graduate students or research expectations commensurate with those of the mid-tier state institutions I idolized, but they did not. Reptilian-me was not pleased.
I found much to like about the institutions and their offers, but no part of me was ready to make a long-term commitment before I'd attempted the broader market with my degree in hand. Although several advisers assured me that there was nothing unethical about accepting a tenure-track job that I didn't intend to keep, I decided that I couldn't live with the tension of looking for a job while everyone around me was trying to help me settle in for the long haul. I declined each offer as it came in and began to line up adjunct work for the following year.
In the end, my mid-tier mojo came through for me one last time: A job that I had declined in April was offered to me again in May as a one-year appointment on all of the same terms as the permanent job. My wife and I accepted it with very little hesitation. Now I'll earn more than twice the income we've lived on over the past two years, while enjoying a teaching load of three courses a semester, an office, a title of visiting assistant professor, and a professional-activities fund.
What's more, I have the promise of the tenure-track position offered before if I don't find what I'm looking for on the market this year. Once again, I find myself embarrassed by the riches that the mid-tier can afford.
I've already moved with my family to the coastal city where my new institution is located, and the attractions of the place are becoming clear. Nonetheless, reptilian-me is still calculating, and I've begun updating my job materials in preparation for the fall hunt.
Will my freshly-minted degree result in more interest from mid-tier state universities this time around? Will my visiting position at a religiously-affiliated university cause potential employers to look more skeptically at my academic qualifications? Will I learn to package my nonacademic professional skills and experiences so that they will interest traditional academic employers as much as religiously affiliated ones? Or will I fall in love with my new institution and belatedly accept its tenure-track offer when faced with the possibility of leaving it for a less desirable institution and location?
Those are the questions that will occupy me in the coming months. However they are answered, I will be having a smashing good time.
