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Five Rules That Might Save Your Career

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By Daniel Kowalsky

One of the more painful realizations since I started my current term appointment (i.e., non-tenure-track job), is that many of the regular hires I'm meeting here are quite a lot younger than I am. Some are five or six years younger. Why am I, a temporary instructor, teaching more classes at less pay than people who were still using training wheels back when I was already riding my bike to school? Obviously, I must have done something wrong along the way. So I compared notes with a number of colleagues, took stock of my own recent experiences, and have narrowed to five the reasons for my comparative lack of success. Here's hoping someone learns from my mistakes.

Rule 1: Seek not solace in time-wasting diversions.

Why does one often get distracted while writing a dissertation? During the research and write-up stage of a humanities Ph.D., the candidate is cast into the belly of the whale until the thesis is complete. During that period, which may drag on for five or six years, not a single milestone, rite, or ritual demarcates your progress. No pats on the back, no weekends off, no mid-dissertation breaks, and certainly no officially sanctioned end-of-chapter rewards. Put another way, you are on your own to write up the manuscript, while an Old Testament god stares down disapprovingly, often from a corner office.

I need hardly tell you that most people require daily affirmations of self-worth. Since you will not get these in your career as a graduate student, you will instead devote yourself to small or not-so-small endeavors that offer immediate gratification. Although at times no more than a welcome respite from the monotony of the A.B.D. life, these minor acts of procrastination quite often spiral into a series of expensive and self-destructive attempts to wrest gratification from an otherwise thankless existence.

Take my case, for example. I spent 10 years on my Ph.D. Let me put that into perspective for you. When I started graduate school, the Soviet Union still existed, and Bill Clinton was a little-known governor from Dixie. Why did I take so long to finish, you ask? The answer is all too clear. For fully half a decade, precisely when I should have been rapidly finishing the thesis and hitting the market, I took up some of the most grandiosely idiotic sidelines imaginable.

Let's go back to August 1997. As with all of my non-scholarly pursuits, I stumbled into this pet project very much unawares. The principal components of my new obsession coalesced randomly: A $3 stove-top canning kettle found at a thrift store, the discovery of hundreds of old Mason jars in my basement, and a hand-painted sign on a county road that read "U-Pick Tomatoes." Just like that, my entire investment in academe dissolved into the muggy Midwest air.

Who could have foretold the tremendous satisfaction that lay awaiting me in that dusty field? Never in all my years as a graduate student did I know such untethered pride as I did that afternoon. There I was, my eight boxes filled with ripe fruit, lined up perfectly by my truck. I hustled through the queue of fellow pickers and approached the farmer: "I've picked my row clean, sir," I announced, beaming. "Please assign me another!"

I took home 500 pounds of Wisconsin tomatoes, rolled up my sleeves, and took to my task with an enthusiasm and thoroughness that few doctoral candidates have ever known. Little did I know that I was really canning my dissertation.

That was hardly the end of it. Later that fall, the new obsession was scavenging firewood. I bought a used chainsaw, a splitting maul, and a wedge. For the better part of two months, I cut up felled trees, took out snags, and loaded scrap wood into my truck. All of this was hauled back to my apartment for winter burning. I made enormous fires, often tending them into the wee hours of the morning, then restarting them again at dawn.

Still, the worst was yet to come. In spring of 2000, I suddenly decided I had a green thumb, and planted an 800-square-foot garden. I also took a keen interest in bicycle repair, and amassed 10 or 12 broken bikes, found in the trash or at yard sales, and set up a "shop" on the front porch. In similar fashion, I wasted much of a funded semester dabbling with various musical instruments. In the space of a year, I took up the accordion, banjo, trombone, piano, and guitar. I didn't just fool around with these instruments in music shops; I put them on credit cards and took them home, checked instructional videos out of the public library, and tried to learn how to play them. And on and on it went, as I continued to seek a fleeting sense of accomplishment that had always eluded me while I was a dissertator. Anyway, take my advice and DON'T DO THIS!

Rule 2: Keep a safe distance from A.B.D. lifers and slacker T.A.'s.

Every department has a small cadre of grad students whose job it is to prevent you from racing through the program and getting a good job. They are the hall blockers, the partyers, and the cynics. They are a popular and at times irresistible bunch. Not only are they fun to drink with, they will make you feel smart and ambitious by comparison, even when you're no longer either. Avoiding them is no easy task.

This clique tends to meet in a campus bar each week after the departmental colloquium or lecture series. After a few drinks, you may not be able to distinguish them from the undergrads loafing around the same bar. Lean forward a bit in your chair and you might notice that they are all in their 30s, mostly single or unhappily married. Their goal is to stay on campus as long as possible. They'd like to have you by their side.

Being drawn into their web of influence invariably begins in some innocuous, unassuming fashion, set in motion by this sort of invitation:

"Did you hear about that conference in Austin? We need someone with a car to drive. It's only 18 hours. Bruce has an aunt outside OK City. Unless she's moved, we can crash at her place. Anyway, it'll be fun. If we miss the conference, that's OK, too."

The road trip is a standard tactic to initiate new members. Be advised: if you go, you will have a very good time. There will be a hilarious incident at a HoJo's outside Tulsa. You will all be laughing about it for YEARS TO COME. Don't let it go that far! Otherwise you run a very real risk of waking up as a 40-year-old, shelving books in the library, and e-mailing credentialed classmates who are netting 45K as assistant professors.

Rule 3: Line up your three references as soon as possible.

Take this one on faith. All jobs in academe require three letters of recommendation. These letters need to be from associate or full professors, preferably well known in the field. It is an unstated rule of the business that a serious letter of reference must be two pages long. If you learn that one or more of your letters are single-page references, toss them out and go back to the drawing board. You can't use them.

Although you've got six or seven years to nail down your three references, good letters are harder to get than you might think. Sure, you take lots of classes with plenty of professors, and will probably work for a few others. But regular contact with a wide array of potential references will all but cease in the last couple years of the degree. Once your course work and research are done, the home stretch tends to be about you and your major adviser. A universe of two. Your earlier contacts will typically become less and less reliable with each passing semester: Some will be hired away to other programs, a couple may all but forget you, and at least one will die. Since your adviser knows your work and has a vested interest in your success, his or hers is the one reference you don't need to worry about. Your adviser is in the bag. But since just about anyone can come up with one good letter, the key to your file is letters Nos. 2 and 3. These are the letters that will set you apart -- or doom you to obscurity. You must target and nurture these two recommenders in the critical final years of your program.

Rule 4: Avoid gratuitous CV building while your dissertation sits idle.

Dissertation-avoidance comes in two forms: destructive and constructive. For my money, taking up the accordion is destructive. Even if you master the polka, you have lost precious time and allowed your career to flounder. That was rule number one. While it might seem less irresponsible to play hooky at academic conferences, the end result is the same. When I wasn't amusing myself with all those pathetic hobbies, I was volunteering for junior-league freelancing projects or flying across the country to present papers at conferences you've never heard of.

In fact, as I write this I'm staring at a volume on my bookshelf on horror cinema. The book was given to me as compensation for a published encyclopedia article on Ukrainian history. Researching and writing that piece took me around two weeks -- a block of time in which I might easily have knocked off 30 dissertation pages. Ready for the kicker? The only thing that interests me less than horror movies is Ukrainian history. Why did I agree to do the project? I thought I needed the line on my résumé. I didn't. Here's the hard and cold truth: The only line on your résumé that truly matters is the date of your completed degree.

Rule 5: Don't go on the job market before you're ready.

This may seem counterintuitive. What's wrong, you might ask, with a trial job search just to learn a little more about the process? My reply is the following: Be careful. Don't take this so lightly. A job search is not something you do higgledy-piggledy for the sake of experience. Don't underestimate what a soul-killer a failed job search can be.

My first time out, I had no expectation of getting a job. I had barely started writing the dissertation, and I couldn't have finished by summer even if I swore off canning vegetables. Knowing how low the stakes were, I was loose and easy and nonchalant about the job hunt. Then I got a few conference interviews and an invitation for a campus visit. I was soon devoting all of my time to the search. It became an obsession. Over the course of that first year, I rapidly became psychologically prepared for employment, forgetting that I didn't yet have the credentials. Of course, in the end I wasn't offered a job. But I was thoroughly devastated. I almost quit the program at Wisconsin and I then wasted an entire summer moping. My advice? Don't go on the job market until you have a reasonable chance of success.

And now for a final cautionary note: These five rules may be universal, but they are not the only ways to derail your career. One of the strange truths of the humanities is that -- to paraphrase Tolstoy -- while all successful grad students succeed in the same way, all jobless academics have a private recipe, meticulously tweaked and tailored, for failure.