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How I Got My Job

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By James M. Lang

As we sat over our lunches in the Old N'Awlin's Cookery -- Josh over a shrimp po'boy, me over chicken in Creole mustard sauce -- we ticked off the numbers of the fallen on our fingers.

We were at the Modern Language Association convention in New Orleans, the major job-hunting and academic conference for professors of English literature, writing, and the modern languages, held every year at the end of December.

Josh, a former colleague at my graduate institution, Northwestern University, had invited me to lunch the next day. I was delivering a paper, but not searching for jobs this year; Josh was doing both. We met and headed to a little dive in the French Quarter.

We had been discussing mutual friends and what sort of careers they had pursued. From there, the conversation had devolved into a morbid accounting of those among our former colleagues who had either dropped out of the Ph.D. program, or who had finished but decided to work outside of academe.

As I recounted the fates of each of the eight members of my entering Ph.D. class, I was surprised to realize that just three of us had ended up maintaining our sights on the goal we had all entered the program in pursuit of -- the tenure-track professorship. Another classmate and I had tenure-track positions; a third was on the market this year and -- with a book contract in hand and 10 MLA interviews -- a sure bet to end up with one himself next year.

That meant five had either dropped out of the program or out of academic life. One had left after her first year in the program. Another had drifted off into Web editing in his third or fourth year. Two had finished, but had taken other positions: one as a bibliographer, and the other in Web publishing. A final one was still technically in the program, but -- thanks to a small child and a baby on the way, as well as a complete change of dissertation topics -- seemed to be sliding further and further from the degree.

Josh had entered with an extremely large class, about a dozen graduate students, and only a handful of those remained in tenure-track positions or in search of one. For our two years, we calculated the rate of attrition at 60 to 65 percent.

I would never have guessed that rate to be so high. I found the figure especially jarring in light of my experience speaking to graduate students about the job-search process earlier that morning.

My meal ticket at the MLA was a paper I was presenting on a panel titled, "How I Got My Job," a Friday morning session aimed at graduate students seeking to improve their job-seeking skills. Five of us, hired within the past two years, tried to distill some essential lesson from our successful job searches that we could convey to those who would follow in our footsteps.

Of course we all had unique stories to tell, and different pieces of advice to give, but, to my surprise, we ended up offering lots of similar kinds of advice to the audience, with few contradictions. During the question-and-answer session, I found myself happily dispensing more specific kinds of advice to individual audience members.

I felt gratified to see so many graduate students earnestly pursuing their dreams of entering the professoriate, so eager in their job searches that they dragged themselves out of bed to get to an 8:30 a.m. panel on a Friday morning in New Orleans.

Later, I couldn't help but wonder what separated those single-minded job-seekers in the audience that morning from the ones that had taken different paths. What separated Josh and I, for that matter, from so many of our colleagues who had abandoned their search for faculty positions? Over the break, I asked several colleagues about this, and I heard one especially interesting theory.

"All of the normal people drop out," one of my senior colleagues ventured, a woman who had done her graduate work in the late '70s and calculated the attrition rates at her institution as comparable to the ones I had worked out. "The farther my husband and I got through graduate school, the fewer and fewer friends we had left in the program."

I found that a tempting explanation, but of course it implied that both she and I, along with the rest of our profession, fell out of the bounds of the "normal."

I prefer another explanation, a one-word description of the quality that joins all of us in this profession together: stubbornness. For reasons that are too varied to encapsulate in a paragraph, we all became blinkered mules who refused to see any other career path as a viable opportunity, and we became so single-minded that we were willing to butt our heads against the wall until it killed us, or until -- wonder of wonders -- the door cracked open and we jammed our foot in.

The stories I heard on the MLA panel may have provided the best proof of this. Most of the panelists had not traveled the path we all envision in graduate school -- an easy step from finished degree to the tenure track. Instead, we had all spent time biding our time and making money as best we could while we launched multiple sallies at the market: I had worked in the administration, someone else had worked as an architect, another had worked at the Gap, another had bounced around in one-year and visiting professorships for several years.

So not only did we single-mindedly pursue our sole professional ambition, but we were willing to postpone indefinitely some larger objectives: long-term stability in a job, a city, and a profession. We were willing to spend years working in what we knew were essentially temporary jobs, in temporary locations, keeping our minds focused in another place.

The people who weren't willing to postpone those life objectives usually end up leaving: They want to settle into a particular city, or secure a stable income, or start their families, or have a clear picture of the career path they will follow.

And who doesn't want these things? Their desire to stabilize their lives is no act of cowardice; our desire to remain in the profession at all (or most) costs is no heroic deed. These are simply the choices that define who we are.

As I gaze down the long road that I still have to travel to tenure, it seems like I am still making this choice: I might spend six years in this coveted role, and then find myself jobless on the other side of my tenure bid.

But if that should happen, I doubt I would leave the profession even then. I would find another way back in.

I can be pretty stubborn.