Academic Job Market Retrospective, Part 3

If you’ve read all the way through my last two posts, you might find yourself wondering if I simply gave up on academia because I had a crappy experience on the job market last year. You wouldn’t be the first to ask that question, and I suspect you won’t be the last.

Several years ago, another grad student in my department left the program with a master’s and took a position teaching at a local independent secondary school. I took comprehensive exams that spring myself, and it was also a particularly rough spring – I miscarried nearly 20 weeks into my first pregnancy, which is a topic for another time altogether. I was disappointed that this grad student was leaving, but very intrigued in her new position. I told myself that I’d have to remember the independent school teaching option for down the road.* So when the same person alerted me to an opening at her school for the 2011-2012 school year, I was DEFINITELY interested in applying.

While I kept my other application efforts going, I poured everything I had into this job possibility – for several reasons. First and foremost, I was very, very attracted to the idea that I could get a job teaching in my two favorite subjects (history and English). Secondly, I really liked the idea of independent schools as communities – and the possibility that I could be part of such a community environment, contributing not just as a teacher, but as an advisor, coach, etc. Finally, I admit that practicalities played into it a little bit – and by that I mean geography.

The Spouse has lived his entire life in the St. Louis region – with the exception of his time at college (which was still in the state of Missouri). If you don’t know any native St. Louisans, all you need to know is that they tend to be very connected to this area. You’ll meet exceptions, but most St. Louisans I know are utterly attached at the hip to this place (and frankly, they have good reason to be). The Spouse and I spent years discussing my pending job market experience, and I it wasn’t always harmonious discussions. There were places he simply didn’t want to move, and he was seriously worried about transitioning his career. He knew his company had offices in nearly every state, but he had very real concerns about getting a transfer – and I don’t blame him.

People write about and talk about the dual-career academic couple, but I’ve not frequently encountered pieces that focus on the dual-career couple like my family. At the end of the day, if you’re in a long-term committed relationship, there may be choices you have to make when it comes to your career.

What this all meant for me is that I wasn’t really interested in one-year positions or 1- to 2-year postdocs. They weren’t practical for us as a couple. I could’ve commuted, and we thought about it and talked about it – but as those types of positions increasingly became the only ones emerging in the spring job ads, I couldn’t bring myself to apply to many of them. I came to the realization that if I wasn’t willing to adjunct full-time just to stay in academia, I wasn’t really willing to leave my home for a year or two just to go on the academic job market again and/or hope that the short-term position became permanent.

So yes, I loved the idea that I found an attractive job that was already close to home.** But I really loved that I could teach my two academic loves. I gave that job application everything I had. Upper School Humanities Teacher became the job I wanted more than anything else. I networked, I went to an independent school job fair (in part so I could try to connect with the people managing the job search, and in part so I could explore other local possibilities, too), and when I got the interview, I put my heart and soul into preparing.

I accepted the position two days before I defended my dissertation, and I spent the next month encountering questions from colleagues and professors about whether I would go on the academic job market again. Many people wondered if this would simply be a short-term thing, something to tide me over.

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that I have no interest in going back into an already-saturated market just to go through the same stresses again. Maybe I’d do better this year, but why bother? Why should I invest the time and the money (because folks, sending out materials is not cheap, fyi) – particularly when I have the job I want?

Choosing a career outside of academia has not been necessarily the most popular choice – meaning that I didn’t exactly get a lot of kudos from people in my department. Three of us who went on the academic job market last year (from my department) got jobs: one is about to start a postdoc, one is a new assistant professor, and I’m teaching high school. I won’t lie: it took some time to get over the feelings I came away with from the department as a whole. The further out I’ve gotten from the university, the more confident I’ve felt in my decision. It’s not easy when people are second-guessing your choices or asking why you won’t at least keep your eyes open on the market this next year.

But I’m really, really happy with the way things turned out. Every new job – whether in academia or not – is a bit of a gamble and a hell of a transition. I spent the past few years in a place where I had an established (good) reputation, and I’m making the move to a place where I get to start over and have to learn how to fit myself in. I’m excited about this, and I’m confident that in two weeks, two months, two years, or even two decades from now, I’ll still look back and say that this was the right path to take.***

*Ironically, this isn’t the first time I’ve done something like that: my first job in the St. Louis area came about from similar circumstances, when one of my friends told me about her job and how it entailed lots of writing and research – things that were right up my alley.

**Note: this was certainly not the first job in this region – I’d applied to two community colleges and another private college, all hiring for someone in my field on a full-time basis. I heard nothing from any of them.

***All of this has been to say, I suppose, that I think it’s a good thing to be flexible about your career plans. There’s more out there for you than you might initially think.

Academic Job Market Retrospective, Part 2

I’m not going to sit here and go on and on about how I approached the job market. I’ve already done that, so if you’re interested in logistics of how to manage being on the market, go read this or this.

The logistics and mechanics are one thing, but the feeling of being On the Market is completely separate. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m an incredibly organized individual, so the fact that I could create and follow a strategy for approaching the job search and finishing my dissertation was not surprising to anyone who knows me, I’m sure. And I don’t care if you don’t think you’re an organized person – you can totally approach these two monumental tasks the same way.

But I can’t give you advice on how to approach the emotional aspects of being on the job market.

For me, being on the academic job market was one part enthusiasm, one part possibility, and two parts anxiety and – well, not worthlessness, but the feeling that it was impossible to get it right by some point.

I loved the process of creating my application packet, of trying to express why I would be perfect for a job I’d begun dreaming about. Advisors will tell you not to apply for jobs you don’t want, and this is spot-on. For me, I would’ve been happy to move practically anywhere, and with every opening I found I’d experience this combination of elation over “ooh, they would want me to teach THAT subject?” and “oooh, look at that campus!” and “wow, how fun would it be to live in THAT part of the country???”*

And all that gives way to silence. Sure, there might be a confirmation that “we have received your application,” but mostly you spend your time waiting for some sort of news – and the closer you get to the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in January, the more nail-biting things get. And of course, you stay on top of The Academic Job Search Wiki because it’s better than nothing. It can be demoralizing and you have to take EVERYTHING on there with a mammoth grain of salt, but it can also be helpful when a school simultaneously rejects all applicants with an auto-message 12 hours after the application deadline. (Without the wiki, I wouldn’t have known immediately that it must’ve been an error.)

One of my advisors likens the academic job market to the lottery. You can do EVERYTHING right, he says, and still get nowhere on the academic job market. This past year, I lost that lottery. And in the middle of it, it was devastating. As people I knew slowly got AHA interviews and I became the only job seeker in the department withOUT an AHA interview come January, well, it sucked. I’m sure there were plenty of people whispering about it behind my back.

And you know, it utterly and completely sucks to put yourself out there and get nothing. One of the rumors going through at the AHA was that a lot of schools hiring in American history were simply throwing out the applications of anyone who didn’t have a PhD in hand (not entirely true, as two of my colleagues got interviews at the AHA). I suspect, though, that this WAS a common occurrence this past year, and I also suspect that my interdisciplinary position – an American history dissertation topic, but one focused on women’s history and straddling military history – might also have been a difficulty.

Look, if you’re going on the job market for the first time or approaching it in another year, I don’t say all of this to freak you out and demoralize you. I was gung-ho, I was as positive as anyone could be. I still think I did everything within my power to position myself to the best of my ability.

At the end of the day, I know and my advisors know that it wasn’t me, per se. Of course, it’s awfully hard to really wrap your head around it when you’ve been rejected (explicitly or implicitly) by 50+ schools. (You’ll hear back from some schools. Others won’t ever acknowledge your existence.)**

Going all-out on the academic job market was an experience I wanted to try, but I never, ever planned to spend multiple years straining for an academic position. I told The Spouse and my advisor and other professors flat out that I had no intention of adjuncting full-time just so I could be in academia – it wasn’t something I ever had an interest in doing, nor do I think I have it in me.

For me, pursuing “academia at any cost” has never, ever been worth it. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how I came about my new job and my move away from academia.

*I have things to say about being a married person on the academic job market, but that is for the next post. For the time being, I’ll just say that The Spouse and I mostly worked through which jobs/locations he’d be okay with. If I had gotten offers, theoretically they were all at places where he would’ve been willing to go.

**I suspect that if you have a killer year and get interviews by the dozens, then the job market experience looks a lot different.

Academic Job Market Retrospective, Part I

I grew up thinking that everyone went to grad school, but this position is probably no surprise when you realize that I spent preschool and kindergarten as a resident of Oklahoma State University’s married student housing apartments. I formed some of my earliest lasting memories there as my parents finished their master’s degrees (my dad’s second master’s, my mother’s first).

I also grew up with parents who fully endorsed the idea that I could be anything I wanted, and I ran through ideas constantly. Archaeologist! Teacher! Martial Arts Instructor! International Business Professional! Neurosurgeon! Plastic surgeon! (I was really in to the medical profession as a high schooler, for a number of reasons.) I changed majors in college about half a dozen times, becoming officially “undecided” by the end of my freshman year when I decided to leave school for awhile.

When I returned a year and a half later, I knew I wanted a PhD. I knew I wanted to major in English. In the end, I added a second major in history, got in (but no funding) to the MA in English, and ultimately found success in a PhD program in history. I wanted the PhD – but it took time for me to discover where my real interests lay. I wanted the PhD – but I can’t say I was specifically focused on “I want to be a tenured professor in XX.” (Not that I didn’t think about being a professor, of course.)

I was working for a relocation/career transition assistance company when I got my acceptance to Washington University in St. Louis’s PhD in history program. Basically, I spent my time consulting individuals who were job searching because of relocation or outplacement. I knew a lot about resume writing strategies, job search strategies, the importance of networking, and things like that. In short: I felt like I came into the PhD program with my eyes wide open about the realities of the academic job market, how to best position myself to be a strong candidate in the end, and how to proactively prepare for the job market over my time in grad school.*

During my six years in grad school, I did everything possible to position myself as an excellent candidate for the academic job market. At the same time, I never saw academia as the end-all, be-all. Rather, I saw the academic job market as the most intensive and potentially  most time-consuming arenas of my future job search. More importantly, it was simply ONE FACET of my ultimate post-grad-school job search plans.

Think about it this way: in academia, departments post jobs as far as a year in advance of when the position starts. In summer 2010, for example, Texas A&M University posted an ad for a position designed to begin in August 2011. This means you spend basically an academic year on the job market (assuming you get a job at the end of that year).

In contrast: government jobs can sometimes have long lead times as well – I know people who waited more than 6 months to hear back on government job applications – but that’s still shorter, in general, than the academic timeframe. In private industry, things can move much, much more quickly.**

All of this is to tell you that when I started the job search process a year ago, I came at it with a multi-tiered strategy (which I outlined to my advisors in writing).

Tier 1: Keep abreast of and apply to academic jobs (prep began in spring/summer 2010 and process ran through March 2011)

Tier 2: Identify and apply to government jobs (began keeping an eye out in October/November 2010, but submitted no real applications until early 2011)

Tier 3: Seek out teaching opportunities in private schools and possibly public schools (in Missouri, a PhD makes it possible to get teacher certification to teach public school). (I knew none of these jobs would be posted until the spring.)

Tier 4: Look for opportunities in the private sector (kept my eyes open beginning in January/February, since lead time is so much shorter).

I want to end by noting that I didn’t rank these in order of preference, but simply by logistics of when I should be looking for jobs in each of these arenas. And mostly, I tell you all of this so that you understand that when I went on the academic job market last year, I sure as hell had a Plan B (and C, and D…).

I also had a dissertation that was guaranteed to be defended by the end of the school year (since my advisor had seen every chapter and got a full draft in her hands – intro through conclusion – by October 1). I had a prestigious fellowship from the American Association of University Women, I had a strong record of leadership in my institution (and service in general). I was also, on the other hand, a historian of US and women’s history (who dabbles in military history).

In short: I was a strong candidate in many, many ways – but so were the other five million Americanists on the market last year. In my next post I’ll say more about the academic job market itself, then round out this series later this week with thoughts on why I decided not to keep trying for an academic job.

*Those academics out there might be thinking that private industry is different than academia, so how could I have known what I was doing? Trust me, there’s a ton of overlap. I learned very quickly how to take my skills from the corporate world to academia, partially by paying attention to those how-to-succeed-in-grad-school books.

**Sure, there are employers anywhere who will drag their feet with applications over a two- or three-month period, but they’re not looking for people who can’t start for six months.