"The application letter is a very specific literary form," a colleague who was about to go on the job market for the second time explained to a group of us over drinks. "It's like a sonnet. It starts off with a two- or three-sentence introduction that explains how you fit the description in the advertisement. And then there's the dissertation paragraph, the research paragraph, the teaching paragraph, and the academic service paragraph."
"In my case," muttered one of the first-time candidates seated at the table, "it's more like the 'wishful thinking' paragraph, the 'I haven't done squat' paragraph, the 'I'm a loser' paragraph, and the 'Dear God, please give me a job' paragraph."
I felt the same way. A year ago, in preparation for my first year on the market, I had collected some sample cover letters from other graduate students in English. Although they were undoubtedly fine examples of the genre, I did not find them altogether comforting: Everybody in my department seemed to have discovered a new manuscript or invented a new literary theory, while I was struggling to articulate why anyone other than me would be interested in my dissertation. Their course evaluations were invariably brilliant, too. I wondered what it would be like to teach a class without a single disgruntled or disengaged student, and how one achieved such a miracle.
When did everybody else get so brilliant and accomplished?
I felt as if I had spent the last seven years drinking beer and perfecting my Trivial Pursuit strategy. Of course that notion was silly. I had plenty of teaching experience under my belt and a dissertation that might plausibly be finished soon. But I had not, as far as I could tell, accomplished anything particularly noteworthy or extraordinary, and being ordinary no longer seemed good enough.
"Um," I said desperately. "I let one of the prospective students crash on my couch once. Would it look really pathetic if I listed that under 'departmental service'?"
"Yes."
I didn't know it at the time, but I had fallen victim to one of the grand delusions of the academic job search: the belief that one is the sole impostor in a world of serious-minded overachievers who have never stumbled or slacked off in their lives.
I was, in fact, a reasonable candidate for a position at the sort of institution where I actually wanted to work -- a small to medium-sized college that took undergraduate teaching and the liberal-arts tradition seriously.
But perhaps it is as well that I went into a blind panic, because I work best under pressure. The soothing, slow-paced process of teaching freshman comp and writing the dissertation had not brought out the best in me; the job market did. In between sending off application packets, I wrote another dissertation chapter, sent half a dozen abstracts off to conferences, and volunteered for every committee in sight.
And then, in the last week of November 2005, I got an e-mail message from the heard of a search committee asking to arrange an interview at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. After that the calls and e-mails from various departments came thick and fast -- seven first-round interviews in all.
I promptly slipped into the other grand delusion of the job search. Clearly, I wasn't a loser at all. I was one of the Elect, a young scholar with brilliant prospects. My good fortune was obviously the result of some special virtue on my part.
I went to MLA in a haze of euphoria and overconfidence that lasted into the first week of January, when I received my first post-interview rejection. As the month dragged by without a single offer of a campus visit, I found myself replaying every word of every interview in my head, trying to pinpoint when and how I had shot myself in the foot.
The trouble with assuming that success is the reward of virtue is that failure, by the same logic, must be one's own fault.
Consolation came in an unexpected form. One of the committees on which I had impulsively volunteered to serve met to select a new textbook for the freshman composition program. The proceedings turned out to be a bizarre mirror of the hiring process, as if academics knew of only one way to make decisions. The composition director selected a shortlist of 12 candidates from all of the available first-year writing handbooks, based on the titles and only the briefest of glances at the table of contents.
The committee members spent an intense three days skimming those 12, a process as hectic and superficial as a round of MLA interviews, and then drew up a brief report recommending three favorites. Then, at our first staff meeting, all the composition instructors received a copy of the report and voted for one of the three.
Throughout the process, we were told to look for "fit." It didn't matter if one of the candidates was the most brilliant textbook ever written; it only mattered whether it matched what we did in our program. There was one "inside candidate" in the running -- the book we had been using for the last three years -- and despite its many flaws, it won handily once we turned the vote over to the whole department.
I found the process oddly comforting, both in its initial randomness -- a book could be eliminated simply because it didn't have the right buzzword in its title -- and its final determinism. I had no way of knowing exactly why the search committees hadn't called me back for campus interviews, but I realized that it might not mean I had blundered horribly, after all.
My first year on the market taught me how easy it is to be misled by egoism. Even in my initial conviction that nobody would ever hire a nonentity like me, there was an element of wishful thinking.
People like to believe that the universe will arrange itself to reward our virtues and punish our vices; we also like to believe that we control our futures. The academic job market gives the lie to both presumptions.
We're not in control, and there is no ruling principle ensuring justice -- only a great many search committees composed of human beings with too many choices and not enough time, all looking for that elusive quality called "fit."
I never did make it to the campus-interview stage, so I deferred my dissertation defense until this fall. I had financial support for another year, and it seemed better to approach my second job search with a strong and polished final product. I like to think that I will also approach it with a clearer head and less self-absorption, though that may be wishful thinking as well. At any rate, the first job search taught me a great deal about what I want and what I can reasonably expect.
