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On the Market: Signs of Life the Third Time Out

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By Aaron Leonard

When was the last time that you had a cab driver feel sorry for you? I had that dubious pleasure recently, while racing from one interview to another in a taxi at the Modern Language Association convention in Washington.

As I was explaining to my curious driver my purpose amid the assembled hordes of English and foreign-language professors (readily identifiable anywhere in the nation's capital by their bulky, closely clutched M.L.A. programs), he happened to inquire about the starting salary for such an esteemed position. When I replied that a starting assistant professor in the humanities could expect to make, according to my knowledge, from the mid-thirties to the low-forties, the driver -- a recent immigrant from Ethiopia -- could at first respond only with a gasp, followed by the question, "Do you mean per month?"

While I wanted to laugh out loud at the thought of an English professor making more than $400,000 a year, I think I sheepishly muttered something about the salaries improving once you made full professor. The old joke used to be about underemployed Ph.D.'s forced to drive taxis for a living; perhaps the new joke should be that those postdocs might be better off financially driving a cab, after all.

The incident was just a blip in a busy three days for me, but it crystallizes a certain kind of ambivalence that hovered over me throughout the M.L.A. convention this year. I was, on the one hand, riding on the adrenaline of having collected seven interviews, more than double my previous year's tally. A number of them were at schools I had marked as long shots when I sent out my applications. On the other hand, I found myself constantly engaged in a kind of internal dialogue, seemingly even as the interviews were taking place: Do I really want this job, this career? Would I be happy living in this place, working alongside these people? Am I just going through the motions here? It was as though the prospect of an actual teaching post -- long cherished, longer doubted -- was summoning up all kinds of anxieties and misgivings.

If nothing else, I felt vindicated in my approach to the job market this year. I had decided that if this was going to be my last year on the market, I would make my pursuit as aggressive as possible. That meant going after a wide range of positions, including small colleges and big ones, rural institutions and urban ones, teaching colleges and research universities, specialist and generalist openings, and even a few non-tenure-track positions for teaching fellowships and writing programs that looked appealing. I set some geographical limits, both for family reasons and personal preference, but even then I stretched the boundaries when I thought a job looked appealing enough. I rationalized that you'll never truly know how much you'll like a given school or location until you encounter it up close. In the end, I sent out nearly 40 applications, which led to a grueling autumn for me, between working my full-time day job, teaching at night, and preparing job letters and writing samples.

My task was made more difficult by my decision to tailor letters as much as possible to the individual schools and the type of institution each represented. I've heard conflicting advice on this, with one mentor telling me to have one letter ready to whip out to 50 places, but I sought whatever small edge I might gain in an overcrowded field. I also altered my old letter template and C.V. significantly, in an effort to personalize my voice and give full play to the teaching experience and research interests I had developed in the two years since receiving my Ph.D. Considering that I had garnered exactly zero job offers up to this point, I figured it was a fairly low-risk investment of my time.

The momentum and compressed pace of the activity carried me along, but job searches inevitably have peaks and valleys, and I hit one low point about midway through the fall. A potential complication of job applications in the computer age is the risk of repeating your mistakes -- copying incorrect college names, job titles, and other assorted errors from one file to the next, since one rarely writes from scratch. Such a mishap befell me one week when I discovered that I'd sent out a spate of letters containing the same egregious typo, and in some cases two. I was furious with myself, because I knew how important it was to proofread every page vigilantly, but with the pressure of deadlines I had let my standards slip. In short order I fixed all the tainted documents, so as to prevent further replication of the typo, like a virus run amok, and soldiered on to the next batch of letters. The affected schools I basically wrote off in my mind, but in the end I even scored an interview from one of the places on the receiving end of my typos.

And when the interview appointments finally did begin to come, most of them in the week to two weeks before the convention, it left little time for the kind of preparation I'd have ideally liked to undertake. My application strategy resulted in just what I might have expected (if I had expected to get any interviews in the first place): a mixed bag that included research universities, teaching-oriented colleges, and writing programs offering only non-tenure-track positions.

I knew the interviews for each type of position would be dramatically different, which meant I'd have less time to meditate on the particularities of each. Most of my prep work was done the weekend before the conference and on the plane to Washington, consisting mainly of about 25 potential questions for which I both wrote out answers and practiced oral responses.

I'm not really sure whether this kind of work ultimately helps one in an interview situation; I tend to be of the mind that in the end, you simply have to know who you are and be yourself. But I was certainly more confident than I had been in previous years at the convention, and I seldom felt caught off guard by a question. Having been through the madness of the M.L.A. convention several times before, I knew to set certain guidelines for myself. I more or less ignore the conference panels altogether, except for a few where the topics or contacts are vital to me. I stay away from parties, departmental or otherwise, limiting my socializing to hallway conversations with friends and colleagues. In any event, I had little choice in the matter -- my interviews would consume most of my waking time.

Once I got past the nervousness of walking into my first hotel interview suite, I entered a zone of calmness that sustained me through all the encounters. Word on the street in recent years has held that a grossly out-of-whack buyer's market has created search committees that are cavalier, disdainful, or just plain rude. Yes, I've had my share of unpleasant experiences -- there's the interview last year with a dream department whose committee members kept jumping up in the middle of my responses to answer the phone or the doorbell -- but in general I've found my interviewers to be polite and gracious, aware of the anxiety produced by both the immediate context and the wider job-market disarray.

This time out, I even had a couple of those interviews you fantasize about: Your interlocutors lavish compliments on you, engage you in serious, substantive conversation about your work, tell you you'll be able to teach whatever courses you like, mention their university's generous leave policy. Granted, others did not go as swimmingly. In one, I decided in the first five minutes that if other faculty members at the school were anything like the person conducting my interview, I'd go nowhere near the place. In another, the questions about my research were skeptical bordering on hostile. But I left Washington confident that I had represented myself about as well as I could have hoped.

Still, that ambivalent streak I mentioned earlier troubled me. Yes, my cab driver was right -- English professors are absurdly underpaid, but it's not as though this news arrived as a big shock to me. Or could it be that despite my good fortune in making it to the interview stage out of the hundreds of initial applicants, I knew realistically that the odds were still stacked heavily against me? Or might the problem, in fact, be that on some level I truly did not want to be in the profession, a feeling brought into sharp relief against the pervasive background of the literature-and-theory-saturated conference?

My speculations would not have long to remain abstract. A short two weeks after the convention, to my great surprise, I received a job offer. It was by no means my ideal position, but it was a job nonetheless. In my next column, I'll tell you how I've dealt with this unexpected development.