First Person

'So What Are You Working on Next?'

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By Peter S. Cahn

"Am I still allowed to give you advice?" my dissertation chairman asked me with a grin as he prepared to leave for the summer. Two weeks earlier he had hooded me in a ceremony with 15 fellow Ph.D.'s from the department of anthropology. When he returned from his trip, I would be settling into a postdoctoral fellowship in southern California and beginning to scour the ads for tenure-track jobs.

"Of course," I replied. "I'll need all the advice I can get."

"The most important thing search committees are looking for at this stage is not publications," he replied. "The most important thing is that you have a next project. Have you thought about that?"

A next project? I had just devoted five years to researching the emergence of evangelical Christianity in Latin America, including spending more than 14 months in a rural Mexican community. I had edited and re-edited my chapters with the help of a writing group. Now I had to act as if the culmination of my graduate-student life was really just the first step in a much larger scholarly agenda?

The problem was not that I felt my dissertation had exhausted all the potentially viable research topics, but that, in my mind, my academic career was synonymous with Mexican converts to Christianity. It was difficult to see myself engaged in something else.

I knew that whatever my next project was, it would have to fit coherently into a two-page cover letter to potential employers. Even with encouragement from my adviser, I still felt that the task of writing a cover letter that both summarized my accomplishments thus far and projected into the future was too abstract. I knew a classmate who had graduated with me and had successfully obtained interviews and ultimately a tenure-track job. She very kindly lent me a copy of a cover letter she had written for a position last year.

Beneath the fluid prose, I could detect the elemental structure of the letter: a concise discussion of her dissertation findings led into a paragraph on how she would parlay that experience into a related research program, which all supported her statement on teaching goals. Seeing it so plainly helped demystify the process of writing a cover letter and emboldened me to draft one of my own.

One idea I borrowed from her example was to banish the word "dissertation" from my vocabulary. When I discussed the written findings from my doctoral research, I referred to them as "my manuscript." This helped reduce some of the singular importance of my work with Mexican evangelicals and recast it as one node in a series of linked ideas. I described my fieldwork with converts and Catholics and how that connected with my broader interest in the role of religious identities. But coming to the paragraph that would explain the next step in my intellectual trajectory, I hesitated.

So, I followed my colleague's example once again. Instead of entering the trendiest theoretical debate and finding evidence to support one side, I let the data lead me to relevant questions. Turning to the fieldnotes I collected in Mexico, I reread the conversations that had piqued my curiosity, but never seemed to find an obvious place in the manuscript.

Alongside narratives of conversion and notes of worship services, I found several accounts of catalog saleswomen that drew my attention. At first, it was the improbable ubiquity of dozens of not only Avon ladies, but also Mary Kay ladies, Fuller ladies, Omnilife ladies, and Tupperware ladies in such a small community that intrigued me. Then, when I went to a meeting of sales representatives in one cosmetics company, I noticed several parallels to the female-dominated fundamentalist churches I had been studying. I wondered about voluntary associations of men, too. I remembered reading that the Freemasons had entered Mexico at the same time as Protestant churches, welcomed by the liberal government to oppose the power of the Roman Catholic Church.

I wrote the next paragraph of my letter, including a discussion of future research among Avon ladies and fraternal orders. My classmate had encouraged me to visit the Ph.D. counselor at the Career Center, so I dropped off a copy of my letter and made an appointment to hear his comments.

When I went in to see him, I could tell from the numerous marks on the draft that I would have to do serious rewriting. His first question zeroed in on the paragraph devoted to my future research. While I had stated what I would study for the next project, I had not spelled out its relevance to my "manuscript" or my larger intellectual interests. It was clear that just having a next project was not sufficient. I had to answer his question, "Why does knowing about Freemasons matter?"

Haltingly at first, then with more confidence, I answered that knowing about Freemasons will help clarify what role religion plays in a globalized world. Instead of seeing the erosion of community groups with increased urbanization and industrialization, I will show how religion remains vital in bringing people together.

"And what will that tell us that we don't already know?" he prodded.

Well, I continued, understanding who joins these groups and what their beliefs are will suggest to what extent members participate in the political arena and contribute to the consolidation of democracy. He liked it. That's what I needed to say in the cover letter to link the next project to a larger research plan. In defending myself to the counselor, I became convinced that this new idea was feasible. I just had to rewrite the cover letter to argue more persuasively for its relevance.

As he walked me out, the career counselor confided: "You know, I've always been fascinated by the Freemasons. Do you have any bibliography on their history?" Getting comfortable with the idea of myself as an expert on something beyond Mexican converts, I smiled and agreed to e-mail him some citations soon.