The Dark Side of the Moon

By Dexter Coisson

When I used to play hearts with my family, I learned the two opposite strategies you can use: play conservatively or shoot the moon.

When you play conservatively you aim to take as few tricks containing hearts, or the killer queen of spades, as possible. Shooting the moon, by contrast, is extremely difficult, and you need to have a lucky hand to do it. You have to take every trick with hearts as well as the queen of spades, while all the other players try to stop you. If you succeed, you excel far beyond the other players. If you fail, the other players will bury you.

A graduate career in the humanities is the same, only in reverse. The wise course is to play conservatively by picking up as many tricks as possible: Do good research, and publish some of your results. Teach a wide range of courses. And, most of all, remember that most graduate students do not get tenure-track jobs, and so you should try to accumulate other skills: editing, administration, Web design, freelance writing, museum work, consulting, anything that might make a CV look good beyond the ivory tower.

Granted, the pursuit of such skills can stretch your resources a little thin. You might end up with a dissertation with modest aims or modest results, and by the time you're ready to go on the job market you'll say, "Well, the most important thing is to get it finished." When it comes time to apply for jobs, though, you'll have a wide range of options, especially if you're smart (and conservative) enough to look beyond the dozen or so tenure-track jobs in your field that year.

The foolish course for a Ph.D. in the humanities is to shoot the moon: to learn only one trick, and gamble all of your job prospects on that one trick. You'll probably excel in whatever trick you choose, but you'll be limited to a narrow slice of job prospects, and there's a good chance you'll be buried.

I was foolish. I shot the moon, because really, that's what almost everyone tries to do in graduate school.

I couldn't say to myself, "I'm going to write a modest dissertation." I can't imagine anyone does. So I put all of my eggs in one basket, with the goal of becoming a tenure-track faculty member at a major research university. I accumulated only one skill in graduate school, or rather two: writing publishable research and milking grant institutions for money so I would be free to do nothing but write publishable research.

As a result, I have publications and fellowships on my CV, but minimal teaching experience, and no obvious prospects for a career outside of academe. I am void in too many suits, and in this reverse-hearts game, that's not a good thing.

I went on the job market during my final year of graduate school in 2003, and came very close to getting buried. I applied for about 40 jobs and postdoctoral fellowships, landed several conference interviews, and even got three on-campus interviews.

I endured all of the agony of applying, interviewing, hoping, and getting rejected. At the end of the year, I put on my robe and mortarboard, and my parents smiled at their jobless Dr. Son. I was on the brink of accepting a one-year position with a crushing teaching load for dismal pay. It would be another year of instability and job searching, and it gave me a soul-crushing glimpse of the fate of many Ph.D.'s. The Queen of Spades was clutching her shovel in readiness.

Then in the summer of 2004, fate stepped in with the equivalent of a tenure-track job at a major research university. I'm not kidding.

I probably shouldn't even tell this story to other academic job-seekers, because it's like telling a budding actress that Natalie Portman was discovered at a pizza parlor at age 11, and so maybe you too can be a movie star.

Ah, but what shall it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

It's a year later and I've succeeded too well. I want out. It's not that I don't enjoy the light teaching load at my new university, the generous sabbatical opportunities, and the large, stimulating faculty of fellow historians. Did I mention that the place is located in a world-class city filled with museums and theaters?

That's why I get no sympathy. I've got it made, or so it seems. No, the problem is that I'm thousands of miles and an ocean away from everyone I love. I'm normally great at making new friends, but I have found my new job cold and alienating. And people like my significant other and my close family aren't quite so easily replaced.

In a twisted reversal of telecommuting, I all but live in my office while trying to have a long-distance home life. Needless to say, the distance isn't ideal for intimacy, shared meals, and keeping costs down -- things I'd love to take for granted.

Instead, I spent much of the past year trudging home to an empty apartment, sending long-distance e-mails, and nursing a beer by myself. I shot the moon, and now all I can do is howl at it mournfully. Hearts have been broken, my friends, but now somehow the game has morphed into solitaire. How am I supposed to get back to family and friends, now that I've priced myself out of the market?

My mentors won't say it outright, but I get the feeling they'll shoot me if I take a job that they consider mediocre. And leaving the academic profession? Well, everyone knows that's like trying to leave La Cosa Nostra.

When I graduated from college as an undergraduate, I had a world of choices open to me. I could have become an investment banker or a lawyer, but I chose academe because I loved it.

Years later, there is now only one path open to me, and it's a pretty narrow one. There's a good chance I'll end up facing a single choice, the worst one possible -- the choice between having a life and having a career. Or, at least, having the career I've been dreaming of for a decade. Meanwhile, my college buddies who did become bankers and lawyers are now entering marriages, starting mortgages, and buying baby carriages in a way I can't yet hope to emulate.

At my worst moments of doubt, I start to wonder whether academe is just an errant pursuit for a single-minded subset of people who were too foolish to know when to cut class in college. Get A's in all your courses, and you might wind up as one of the teachers. Write a laudable, original dissertation and get showered with fellowship money, and you might earn a tenure-track job at a major research university. But only if you're very, very lucky. Or very, very willing to sacrifice.

So I'm about to sit at the table again for another round of hearts, throwing myself back into the teeth of an arbitrary and capricious job market. I'm looking for a roughly equivalent job to the one I have, but closer to home. In the meantime, I've accumulated conference invitations, journal articles, and even a book contract.

I have the potential to become the success story I envied in my predecessors, and yet the idea of quitting the profession constantly lingers in the back of my mind. The lesson here reflects what the wisest voices at The Chronicle and beyond will tell you: Accumulate a wide swath of skills, and stay flexible in case the search for a tenure-track job isn't in the cards.

When you make the choice to shoot the moon, you have an outside chance to soar ahead to a game-winning victory. Yet you also set yourself up for a failure that will bury you. All I can do now is wait for the job announcements and see what hand I'm dealt.