Time for a Little Pick-Me-Up

Last week, commenter Tree of Knowledge asked if I'd do a request on the "evidence of teaching excellence" thing, so I think that'll be next on the job search series, followed by a post on prepping for conference or phone interviews. Look for us to get back to that Monday.

In the meantime, something of perhaps more general interest. We're at a point in the semester when things can get difficult, whether we're grad students, lecturers, or proffies of whatever level. The shine of the new semester has long ago worn off, and it seems like we're drowning in a sea of work, barely keeping our heads above water, and sometimes not even that. Personally, this has been a craptacular discouraging week for me: a few rough things have come my way, and once I start down that road, it's hard for me to see anything but the negative side of things, and that's an ugly spiral to be in.

So, in an attempt to turn things around, I invite commenters to chime in, here at the end of a week: What's one thing you accomplished this week that you're proud of?

Here's mine: Over the course of the week, I finished grading three stacks of essays and two of midterms. These had been hanging over my head like a dark cloud. I just had more come in, but I got the old ones out in time, and if I work at this pace over the weekend, I should get the new batch out before the next ones come in on Tuesday. My goal is to buy myself 24 hours with no grading to do.

How about you?

In Which I Get Paid to Write

A number of academic bloggers have been posting lately about the New York Times article about writing for free: columnists and such being asked to write for "exposure," to the point where it seems like writing is almost never compensated. And, of course, there was the dust-up surrounding the editorial staffer who called scientist Danielle Lee an "urban whore" because she politely declined to write a column for free.

In general, we academics do a lot of writing more or less for "free", simply because it's how we get/keep/get promoted in our day jobs, which do pay. Or, as one senior colleague at another university put to to me when I noted that I wasn't going to see one red cent from my first book, "No, this book will make you more money than anything else you ever write... because this is the book that gets you tenure." Fair enough. But the bulk of informally kinda-sorta-compensated writing that we all do simply underscores why so many of us are not interested in taking on additional non-paying gigs.

All this is a long preface and prelude to saying that last week, something like three years after my book was published, I was notified of my first. royalties. ever.

How much? Well, let's just say that this amount plus seventy-nine cents would buy me one (1) full-priced copy of my own (hardcover) book. Still, that's more than I ever expected to make.

And it makes me think that I ought to start writing books about the knights templar.

Technology and the Job Search

[Sorta-update: I went back and read this after I posted it, and realized that the tone sounded a lot like "Say! Back in the day, we delivered our job applications via dirigible or telegraph, but it seems that the profession is really getting on board with these computing machines, so maybe you should, too!" Honestly, I am not 90 years old. But I'm kind of amazed how a ten-year gap can leave me sounding that way. If you find yourself rolling your eyes at the painfully obvious, then skip straight down to the part where I lecture you about controlling your online persona. Then you can roll your eyes because I'm a schoolmarm.  ::sigh:: ]

[AACK! Real edit! Ellen just mentioned Interfolio, which I had totally forgotten about, since it didn't even exist when I was applying. If anyone wants to chat about that in the comments, I'll just sit back and listen.]


Back when Mama Notorious was on the job market… Well, actually, it wasn’t all that long ago. Maybe a decade or so ago. And yet look at the difference a decade can make.

As I was saying: Back just past the turn of the millennium, the role of technology in the job search was generally limited to finding the job ads: disciplinary website (AHA, MLA, etc.), H-Net, and the Chronicle. But other than that, the search was almost entirely analog. I can recall having my home table covered with stacks of application packets: Cover letters and CVs went to everyone; in some cases the little stack would have a writing sample, a teaching portfolio, or some other supplementary material. And there was the stack of FedEx envelopes. A wing and a prayer: most schools did not acknowledge receipt of your application packet (though one or two did say you could enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope, and they'd mail you your acknowledgement). After that, it was on to the AHA, then waiting at home for the phone to ring or the e-mail to chime for that elusive campus visit, then more waiting.

My sophisticated in-home telecommunications setup looked something like this.

That, in short, is the job search that I know.

Now, let us count the changes, from start to finish:

• Job ads: Still online. No real change there. In fact, most of the job sites look exactly like they did back in my day -- which, when you think of it, is kind of weird.
• Submitting the application: A pretty substantial set of changes here. I’m not sure if anybody asks for paper applications anymore. PDF/e-mail submissions are the most common, followed by schools where you upload to an HR website. Sadly, none of these systems can prevent you from sending the wrong letter to the wrong school. In my book, this is a huge improvement. Graduate students are an impoverished lot, generally speaking, and they don’t make enough to make itemizing those shipping fees make any financial sense, so the grad student in question is just plain stuck with the cost. It also eliminates the “Did it arrive in time?” anxiety, and no more messing about with “receipt date” versus “postmark date”. Same goes for faculty letters: they just type ‘em up and send ‘em in. Unless, of course, there’s one of those odious forms to fill out that goes with them. Can we please stop having those? In any case, about the only thing that I’d miss is the satisfaction of taking yet another giant physical stack of fat application envelopes and waving bye-bye to them at the post office. But I think the benefits outweigh the losses.
• Preliminary interviews: This was by far the biggest complaint among grad students back in my day, and I think it remains so. There is no good way to do a preliminary interview; it’s a matter of finding the best of bad choices. The conference interview — running around, finding your location, practicing your 90-second pitch in a corner behind a potted plant, trying not to throw up — is a rite of passage, but one that can leave the person in question bloody and broken. If you want a shot at a conference interview, you need to book well in advance of knowing whether you have any interested parties. So that’s $1000 expense right there, if you’re lucky, and no one is reimbursing you for that. Couple that with the weirdness of a suite interview, or the awkwardness of the “pit” interviews, and it’s just a nasty experience. And I’ve even heard of some cash-strapped schools insisting on the conference interview, but conducting them in the hotel’s public spaces. But back in my day, the alternative was the phone interview, which everyone agreed was much, much worse. Skype is beginning to emerge as a truly viable alternative. Of course, it disadvantages the technologically clumsy, and I’m giggling trying to imagine implementing something similar in the days of dial-up (again: a decade makes a difference!) but younger grad students may actually be more comfortable operating this way in some cases. Of course, many interviews are still at the big conferences. But as budgets shrink, I think that the Skype interview is going to become more important. And honestly, if someone gave me the choice, as a job-seeker, between having my preliminary interview in a suite, the pit, by phone, or over Skype, factoring in both awkwardness and expense, I’d choose Skype in a heartbeat.
• Waiting for the call: I think this one’s more or less a wash: waiting for a phone call vs. waiting for an e-mail (and most of this was done by e-mail in my day as well) is pretty much the same thing. The only real difference here is…
• The Wiki. Yes, I think that it deserves to be capitalized. Way back in… what was it? 2005? Something like that. Anyway, someone noticed that there were a ton of threads in a section of the Chronicle forums called “Have you heard?” Basically, anxious job-seekers wanted to know whether other people had heard anything at stage X from school Z, so they could know whether a particular search was moving on without them, or whether there was still hope that that call would come. So someone built a wiki, and it’s been running ever since. Of course, this wiki is like all others in that its content is user-generated, with all the problems that implies. It’s a largely self-regulating community, but the occasional troll does sneak in: “They made me a job offer!” when no such thing ever happened. Still, some info is better than none… or is it? The wiki can tell you when to stop hoping, but is that a good thing?
• The presentation: Back in my ABD and job-seeking days, few people in my field (medieval) had Powerpoints to go with their presentations. I, personally, came armed with handouts with a brief outline, some key texts, and a map. And I was in the majority, by far. Now, I can’t recall the last time that I saw a job talk without a visual presentation. But not all Powerpoints are created equal, so this is yet another skill that you need to make sure you’ve got down cold before the campus visit… as well as knowing what to do if the tech goes belly-up.

On the whole, I think that the way that technology has been integrated into the job search has been a very good thing, and most of it has the potential to make things much easier on the grad student pocketbook. But new technologies have also added a new worry that we didn't have back in the day, one that could be the subject of a whole 'nother post (though it won't, at least not by me) called "It's 10 p.m. -- Do you know what your online persona is doing?" Seriously: google yourself. In fact, Have a friendly faculty member at your institution google you so you aren't deceived by the you-specific results that the algorithm will give you in particular; you want an outsider's search results. You should start monitoring and controlling your online presence to whatever degree possible as far in advance as possible. Delete embarrassing pictures -- better yet, don't allow embarrassing pictures to be taken of you. You might also consider actively augmenting the professional you that appears online by building and maintaining a profile at a site like Academia.edu. Get it up there several months in advance and it will be one of the first hits when someone googles your name and the school, and you get to control that presentation.

So that is my longish chunk of unsolicited and semi-informed advice. But I’ve really only experienced most of this at one remove. Thoughts from job seekers who have experienced this? What about hiring committees? Any issues with reluctant adopters among the faculty? And for those of you in grad programs that mentor you through the process (for example, with interviewing workshops), are you getting mentoring/advice that incorporates these methods? Anything else that I'm missing here?

Confidential to the grad school applicant who just e-mailed me...

...and to any others who are thinking of doing so.

First of all, thanks for reading! This blog is a combination of open diary, unsolicited advice, half-baked and vaguely presented thoughts on my new research project, and the occasional random thing that comes flying through my brain. I take long leaves from blogging, but when I come back, I find that people are still around, and it sort of amazes me.

Second, I'm glad you appreciated the post on what not to do in your grad school application. I meant for that to be a semi-humorous, semi-venting piece, but with a bit  of a serious overtone. Historiann's piece is even better, but I assume you've seen it already -- in fact, it's the major source of traffic to my own piece. She actually attempts to be helpful (she's excellent like that), where I'm just sort of banging my head on the desk.

Third, I'm flattered that you think enough of me, not even knowing anything about me, that you would ask for advice on how you should pitch the specifics of your proposal. But here's where we come to the issue: I don't know anything about you, and almost nothing about your field. Yes, I offer unsolicited advice all the time, but it's in a general vein. So here's one piece of that: Your best bet is to look at what you wrote to me, and use it to draft a statement of application, then take it to one of your undergraduate professors in your field. They know the genre, they know your field, they know your work. That is where your best help will come from.

And best of luck with your application process.

The Mid-Career Search, part 2: Dos and Don'ts (a commenter bleg)

Hi All!

So, after the very long post last time, I promised a part 2 in which I made suggestions as to what to do if you decided you wanted to do this mid-career search thing. Only later did it occur to me that I have no earthly idea.

BUT: in the comments to the previous post, a couple of people who made a midcareer move, and so I thought I'd ask my commenters to weigh in. Have you done a mid-career search? Have you been on a search committee with mid-career applicants? What's your advice?

I've only got one piece, and it's based not on my experience, but my observation of others: Be professional. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Don't trumpet the fact of your search all over the department, especially in a way that lets your colleagues know that you don't value them or your institution.
• Don't approach the search as if it's in your pocket just because you've got an impressive CV.
• If you get a campus visit, let your chair know -- even if you don't think you'll want a counter offer. Chairs need to plan, and announcing in March that you won't be there in August can make things a bit difficult. (The exception to this would be if you were leaving a truly toxic situation: then, for your own protection, you might want to wait until you had a signed contract in hand.)
• Do things to stay engaged in your own department. If you wanted to develop a syllabus for a new course, do that. If you want to take on a mentoring commitment, do that. Maybe don't run for chair, but otherwise, remember that with the job market being what it is, there is every chance that you'll be where you are come next year. Keep yourself grounded, and stay engaged where you are.
• Approach the search committee with confidence that your experience brings, but not with arrogance.
• If you take another job offer, be gracious to your colleagues at your current institution. Even if you're not particularly feeling all warm and fuzzy, remember that they gave you your first opportunity and supported you to the point where you could actually make a move. It costs you nothing to be nice (I had one colleague who even wrote a long note of appreciation to the department as a whole, as well as telling those of us personally close to her how much s/he'd miss us).

So, based on my (lack of) relevant experience, that's all I've got. But PLEASE, if you've ever experienced this kind of search, either as an applicant, hiring department/search committee member, or colleague watching from the sidelines, will you jump in in the comments? From the reactions I've gotten, there's a lot of interest in this topic, yet it's something that no one really talks about much.


Next up: Technology and the academic job search.

The Mid-Career Search part 1: Do you want to do this?

I’ve often preceded my posts with an enormous “Your Mileage May Vary” — that is to say, that this blog, like every other blog, represents my experience and what lessons I’ve gleaned from it. But here we go with a post where I haven’t got much experience at all: the mid-career search. So, consider this less “advice” and more “thoughts and musings.”  And I invite anyone who’s actually done one of these (whether or not you’ve been successful) to jump in on the comments.

When I speak of the mid-career search, I’m talking about perhaps the most difficult search out there. This isn’t the regular moving around (or seeking to move around) that goes on pre-tenure. I myself applied for two jobs between my hire at Grit City U. and my tenure and promotion.[1]  Nor am I talking about those rare instances where a university with some deep pockets and/or an endowed chair goes looking to poach a superstar or an up-and-comer. (pause here to daydream…) The mid-career search that I’m talking about is where a tenured professor decides to dive back into the open market, applying for jobs right along with the grad students, lecturers, and untenured junior faculty seeking to make a move. These positions might be open-rank, or the extremely rare (at least in humanities fields) associate professor hires, or they might be advertised as “tenure track.” But they almost always mean leaving behind relative job security for the unknown.

So, why might you want to do this? I've got a few friends who have done this, and many, many more who have actively considered it. In some ways, it seems to be the same set of factors that influence the pre-tenure search:

• Location: The job might be close to family, or something else that says “home” to you. You might be dying to live in a big city, or a college town, or near a coast or the mountains or that research library that you travel to twice a year anyway. Maybe you're fine, but your spouse or partner is desperately unhappy. Whatever. Location is not the number one thing that matters in any job, but it does matter. Dr. Crazy once got some serious snarky blowback (the infamous Gumdrop Unicorn controversy) about this several years ago at a certain Website that Shall Not Be Named. But I am willing to defend the proposition that living near friends and/or family and/or in a place you find nurturing is something we all factor in to our decisions. And for the record, that website folded in 2010, and its successor folded shortly thereafter... and Dr. Crazy's still going strong. Take that, snarkmeisters.
• Money/Resources: The job you’re in might be short on resources. Maybe you haven’t had a raise in five years. Maybe you don’t get money to present at conferences. Maybe all the books in your library are from 1976 or earlier. If you see a job where you’d be doing more or less the same thing but with better salary, benefits, or campus resources, it’s tempting.
• New career opportunities and challenges: This one tends to be more about the mid-career person than the early mover: now that you’ve got your feet under you, you may realize that you have ambitions to build your teaching and/or research program in directions that you can’t take it where you’re at. Midcareer’s main challenge is the fight against stagnation and inertia. A new set of challenges can be a tonic to the sluggish academic soul.
• Partner concerns: are you part of an academic couple where one partner is the trailing spouse, subsisting on whatever courses the university tosses your way? That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but for many couples, career inequity can put a strain on a relationship. Likewise, if your partner is a non-academic who can only work in a handful of areas in the country, and your current job is not in one of those, a career move may be worth considering.
• Toxic work environment where you’re at: here I’m talking about something beyond “They’re not paying me what I’m worth” or “80% of my course load is the survey.” Sure, these might be reasons you think about moving, but here I’m talking about “I’m facing systematic discrimination” or “I’ve been bullied by a senior colleague and nobody will do anything about it” or “I’m dealing with a sexual harassment issue that won’t go away,” or “I don’t feel safe here.” There’s also — and this is the flip side of the “partner concerns” section above — the possibility that you’re dealing with an ugly divorce/breakup from a colleague that is making your work life unbearable, and being somewhere else — anywhere else — seems preferable than facing the next 3 years or so it will take for all the trauma and drama to blow over.
• The Dream Job: Either institution type or actual institution. That place that you can’t not apply to.
• You're ready and positioned to move up: Maybe you were middle-of-the-pack back when you got your current job, or it was just a thin year on the market. Maybe it's a good job, but you now think you're qualified to step up. Humility is important for the job you're in (that is, don't go being an ass to your current colleagues, no mater what), but there's nothing wrong with ambition, if that's your bent.

Okay, so you’ve asked yourself “Why might I want to do this?” The next question is: “Do I really want to do this?”

• Job searches take time: Think you’re tired and overworked now? If you haven’t been on the market for a decade, you’ve probably forgotten (or blocked out) how much time and effort applying for a job — even one job! — takes: secure letters from recommenders; write a good cover letter that reflects what you bring to the position, rewrite that letter about a zillion times; research the institution and the faculty; find the perfect writing sample; maybe even write a statement of teaching philosophy (and rewrite that a zillion times, too). A semi-successful search takes even more time than that: you’ll be doing even more research on the institution, prepping for an interview (When’s the last time you had to boil your current research down to 90 seconds? Do you think the process will be any less hateful now? Especially if you're in the early stages of that second- or third-book project, rather than just wrapping one up?); thinking about a job talk; figuring out how to schedule a campus visit around a full-time teaching and service commitments. Do all of this while maintaining your work load and all the grading and meetings and stuff.  I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
• The market is much worse than it was a dozen years ago: Seriously. We midcareer folk blog about this, but it’s BAD out there.
• Finding letters is in some ways harder than it was when you were a grad student: Yeah, you’ve got a broader reputation in the field (and I don’t have to tell you that dissertation committee members are not good choices at this point, right?[2]), but these hotshot faculty who will tell everybody that you’re the bees knees might become a bit more reticent to set you up as competition to their own grad students on the market.
• You have significant anchors where you're at: Your spouse/partner may not want to move. Your children may be in excellent schools. Your aging parents may live nearby. You may have purchased a home or put down deep roots in other significant ways. The longer you're in one place, the more likely this all is to happen. Remember that a different job may contribute to your happiness in some ways, but detract from it in others. And you might not be the only one who has a say.
• Expect the stinkeye from all those grad students and lecturers who are desperately trying to land their first job. I recall how irritated I was as a first-time job seeker to realize that some of my competition were people who had perfectly good jobs already. Couldn't they just stay put so I could have a shot at a job, too? On the other hand...
• The search committee may only want to (or only be able to) do a junior hire: There are lots of reasons that this might be true. But know that this is entirely out of your control. Last year (and yes, this is the inspiration for this post), Fellowship University, where I was so happy for a year, advertised to fill a long-vacant position in my field. So I wrote to the search committee chair, who I had met and lunched with a couple of times while there, and s/he told me, off the record, that while s/he would love to have me as a colleague, the way the search was structured meant that a mid-career person wouldn't even be shortlisted. 
• More stinkeye, this time from colleagues: If word gets out that you’re on the market, you may be in for some unpleasant reactions from the people you work with, ranging from isolation to hostility to retaliation. I devoutly hope that all my readers are in nurturing, supportive environments where colleagues understand and respect that everyone has their own career calculus and no one takes it personally. But that’s not always the case. This, of course, will be exacerbated if you have a history of being a department malcontent, slacker, or prima donna — though chances are that, in this case, your colleagues will do everything they can to support your attempts to go elsewhere.
• Things are rough everywhere: Granted, life at a well-funded private research university is different than at a mid-tier regional comprehensive. But most career moves aren’t these huge jumps. If you’re moving from, say, one state system to another, the issues are going to be different, but they’ll still be there. Even if you’re moving from public to private (or vice-versa) there are going to be resource challenges. If you approach the search committee as if you were Cinderella and they were your fairy godmother, waving the wand and making matieral and fiscal issues vanish, you’ll be disappointed. Likewise…
• They call it a “Dream Job” for a reason: Dreams are not reality. And along with this, remember that if we’re talking about top-tier colleges and universities, your dream job is likely the dream job of dozens if not hundreds of other applicants out there, which means that the applicant pool will be much larger.
• A geographic cure does not cure all ills: Or, to put it more crudely: If an asshole gets on a plane in L.A., it’s that same asshole who gets off the plane in New York. As noted above, there are toxic work environments that one simply must escape. Agreed. But as with any fight with a spouse, sometimes it's hard to tell what's them and what's you. If you want to leave to escape drama, is it drama that you had a big part in creating (say, by flirting with your grad students or being condescending with your colleagues)? If you’re unable to be happy in your job, is it because of the job, or because you just find it difficult to be happy in anything less than your ideal? Answer that question honestly — to yourself, if to no one else.[3]
• You may have to give up a lot: If the search is advertised as tenure-track or Assistant Professor, you may be able to negotiate a bit, but there are always constraints. Would you give up your rank? How about tenure? How about take a pay cut? Teach more survey courses and fewer in your area of expertise? Undergraduate courses only?
• Can you face starting over? Likely you’ve spent the last ten-plus years building a professional reputation among your colleagues. A move means proving yourself all over again. You’ll need to build new professional networks. If you’re not married or partnered, then you’ll need to build entirely new personal networks as well: everything from your friends to your gym to your favorite coffee shop or breakfast joint. That stuff gets much harder as we get older. Are you willing to risk a period of loneliness and isolation? 

Right. So there are some of the questions and considerations. Please expand, contribute, and even contradict in the comments. And, if the craziness of my own job doesn’t interfere, then sometime in the upcoming week I’ll post a "part two" dealing with things to focus on if you do indeed decide to do this thing.

---

[1] One of these was for a location closer to family; another was because the type and caliber of institution was really appealing to me. Neither one resulted in even an on-campus interview, much less an offer. But that’s a story for another day.

[2] The exception here, of course, is if you’ve built entirely new professional relationships with them, post-grad school.

[3] Yes, I just asked you to think about whether you were an asshole. Don’t confuse that with me asserting that you are an asshole. It’s a good question for all of us to periodically ask ourselves, even if we’re not looking for a job at the time.

With apologies for the delay...

...but life has intervened. Temporarily. This weekend, I try to clear my desk, more or less. Back to the job search series soon...