**Also? My process isn't actually done. So there are no fireworks at the end of this.**
In part because I got my first job so easily, I was very curious about this "job market" people spoke of. Initially, I thought I'd only apply for a few gigs that looked amazing, and otherwise rely on my (fingers-crossed) backup plan of staying at Carolina for another year.
But in the end I applied for about seventy positions. I don't know the exact amount, because I stopped counting. I put no effort into tracking anything after I'd submitted to it, putting 100% of my energy into the next prospect. But I think n~70, and there is certainly a spreadsheet I could dig through to verify this.
I had a hard time narrowing my list down, because well... my work is interdisciplinary. So, if a job was a health-related, it was a good fit. If it was gender-related, that too. If it was science and technology studies, another slam dunk. Ditto if it was a communication gig, because I do doctor-patient communication work. This meant I was eligible to apply to public health programs, sociology departments, communications program and various departments of medicine, but also gender studies and STS programs.
I made a choice early on to focus on these four major areas: health, gender, STS, communications. (STS included something like two postings, so some of these categories were far less active than others). However, I made a conscious choice to not apply for education-based positions (even though I had a history of research in medical education, and a currently funded grant in that area). I also decided not to apply for positions that listed criminology/deviance as their focus. My work is not about criminology. My work is very intensely about deviance. There were so many of those positions that I decided that I couldn't apply for them systematically, and I felt like I was a more tangential candidate in that area. (On the other hand, this is the most active area for hiring, so I expect I would have had some success). If I had endless time, I could have tailored a set of materials for each of those additional categories, but ultimately I decided to focus more narrowly.
"Wait, but still, why are you applying so widely?"
Well... I was told by several people that hiring committees don't always know what they want, and ads are often written in group sessions that don't always clearly indicate what they actually want. That means they might choose an interesting candidate over a predictable one, or someone who meets one part of what was in the ad. Furthermore, when hundreds of people are applying to any given position, there is a clear numbers-game happening. Some percentage of the time, your application is just not going to make it to the top of the pile, no matter how great of a fit you are. And some percentage of the time, it will somehow end near the top, even though someone else looks much more like the square peg they advertised for.
So, I took that advice at face-value and applied for anything that it looked like I was a 70% or better fit with. How did that work out?
I made it past the first round for the following types of positions (bolded schools invited me through to the final round & made an offer):
-Research-based position at a private R1-affiliated VA for qualitative mental health research
-Public Health position in organizational behavior at a midwestern R1 (TT)
-Department of Sociology position at a SLAC in the Northeast (TT)
-Postdoc position at a private R1 in mental health research
-Postdoc position at public R1 in complementary and alternative health research
-Department of Sociology/Public Health position at a SLAC in the Northeast (TT)
-(I was offered the chance to stay at Carolina in a slightly different capacity at the last minute as well)
The main reason I'm sharing this list is to illustrate that most of the positions have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. Two SLACS. A handful of R1s. A couple of post-docs. A few TT gigs. My compensation and job duties at each of the positions would have been dramatically different. In half of the positions, I would have done no teaching at all. A liberal arts college is looking for someone with a great teaching record, whereas a VA is looking for someone with a strong research record. All of this goes to show that no one type of position or school consistently thought I was a good fit. Instead, my application was treated like some kind of academic Rorschach test. (Of course my materials varied for each type of job, but still).
My thoughts? Yeah, do good work, but know that good work and your personal network only gets you so far. Because a lot of what is happening isn't a lot better than random. My success rate for getting to some kind of short list was around 10%, which is probably the lowest success rate I've ever had in applying for jobs. (Why do we get Ph.D.s again?) But seeing the variation in who thought I was awesome made me realize that the next time I'm on the market, I'd probably cast a wide net again. Because you just don't know. This is a numbers game for most of us. (If you are one of this year's rock stars, ignore everything I'm saying. I have no idea about anything that applies to you).
A note about professional networks:
I did have more than one situation where I had an application facilitated by a high-ranking person who was close with the people hiring in a given position. Twice, this seemed to impact the outcome, but only when my actual letter-writers were known to the hiring committee and they were like "Oh yeah, he/she is great!" The times someone AWESOME tried to directly intervene on my behalf by making a call or sending an email... didn't... really... get... me... anywhere. I mean, sometimes it got them or me a warm and encouraging email, but it didn't get me jobs. Of course networks matter, but, in terms of job-getting, I found that weak ties mattered more. My sense? You can have the most famous researcher in your area as a mentor/behind the scenes phone-caller on your behalf, and maybe there is a situation without 300 other applicants where that gets you some kind of free pass through the first round, but I didn't find that to be true. Submitting more applications was more effective for me than having a famous person make phone calls, though I had both strategies in operation (for some jobs).
I also want to say that one day in January, I just decided to stop applying. There were some great opportunities coming up, but I had a serious heart-to-heart with myself about what I wanted in my life and how much of my own actual work I was getting done, and I decided to drop out of the application side of the job market. There continued to be postings in areas I was interested in, but I think after January 5th, I probably I applied for three jobs total.
I know other people who stopped sooner, and others who went longer. I'm pretty sure your success rate goes up when you're the last person left applying, because everyone else has curled up in a fetal position and given up.
Understandably.
Applying is grueling.
The timing of it all has no clear rhyme or reason either.
Some people were getting fly outs while I was still submitting my first ten applications. There was no "typical" amount of time schools took to contact me. One time I got a phone call the day after submitting my application with a rolling deadline. On the other hand, one of the best positions I interviewed for didn't contact me for nearly three months after I'd applied with nary a word in between. Both of those people offered me jobs.
My advice is to apply for anything you can make a case for for that is located in a place you would seriously consider living. I categorically did not apply for positions any farther South than my current location. I categorically did not apply for positions with a 3-4 teaching load or higher. I couldn't see myself making either of those choices if offered to me, but otherwise, I tried to keep an open mind.
I mostly got rejected. I mean, if I were getting graded, I got an A in rejections.
It's going to happen.
And considering how many schools fail to send out timely emails or letters, I didn't even keep track of the rejections. I figured the people who wanted me would be sure to let me know. And they did. And this way I saved my psychic energy for things I had some control over.
Along those lines, I also had to let go of any insecurities or concerns about not being the best candidate I could be. The reality was that I graduated from grad school with Zero publications, and got my first job based 100% on potential.
Failed potential?
The subsequent reality was that I lost pretty much the entire first year of my postdoc while I was grieving, and that actually meant I went on the job market in virtually identical shape to where I was in grad school. I had one group article under review and a book chapter in press. ---A book chapter the editors held my hand through finishing, because I was simply unable to read or write or think. (In fact, I offered them co-authorship, but they refused).
In my head, it felt like my applications had this stamped on them:
FAILED POTENTIAL
So, I kind of didn't expect anyone to notice me. I was acutely aware of my inadequacies. I was this big investment everyone was making who was totally failing to pull her ish together. My letter writers had conversations about how to broach the subject of my inadequacy with potential jobs. In the end, most of them decided to go with "play to your strengths," but at one point, one felt like he should say that I'd been through a lot, but that I was still pretty awesome. I still don't know what the best strategy would have been. I just know that everyone had expected me to do better than I did, and then I hadn't, and then we wrung our hands together. And frankly, that wasn't productive.
Whoever you are, you're not going to have won every award, or gotten every grant, or have the most publications. But that weirdly somehow doesn't end up being the only thing that matters. (I know a guy who was on the market last year with 16 articles, including in ASR, and a major national grant, and he had to go on the market two years to get a job). Academic jobs are strangely not merit-based in any linear sense. I think part of that is that we're being judged across many variables, and all of our CV's are so different, that they are forever comparing apples to oranges to bananas, and we never know if they just feel like citrus that day, or if the dean feels like citrus or if they've just had it with oranges. Potential, which can't be measured, but might be anticipated, is also weighted heavily. But since it's can't be measured, it's only something you can hint at or suggest, and not everyone is going to buy what you're selling. And part of that is that there are almost always too many applications to consider rationally and evenly.
My philosophy was to take as much of that as non-personally as possible, so that I'd be able to spend my energy complaining about tailoring one more cover letter.
But for me, all of this remained an exploration into the experience of the job market. In no small part this was because I harbored doubts about if academia was right for me, and I was pretty in love with my dream backup plans (cabin. woods. writing. you know: typical Sandy stuff).
I feel like we're conditioned to not talk about this job market stuff. If you get a job, you have survivor's guilt. If you don't, you're a failure. And it's like how rich people don't ever want to talk about money because it's tacky or something. Well, this is my academic bank account. This is what I did, and how I did it, and what worked out and what didn't. I don't think the people who get offers are intrinsically worth any more or less than the people who don't. I don't think this stuff is about how smart you are or how hard you work. I think it's all really complicated and messy. Look at me. I totally messed up for a year and some people still wanted to hire me anyway. Other people do everything "right," and come up empty. The whole system is messed up, so if you're going to play in the academic sandbox, I feel like you have to leave your socks and shoes on the grass, or they're going to get dirty. We all need something clean to go back to. And honestly, the fact that posting this makes me come up with a bunch of paranoid thoughts in my head makes me realize how important it is to talk about it. "oh, what if someone important sees this and I regret it all later?" or "what if this makes me sound like a jerk for getting a job?" or "maybe there are clever reasons I just haven't thought of about why people are so intensely secretive!"
Maybe there are. But I'm a person and you're a person. And if anything about my process helps you, great. If not, that's ok. This blog has always been self-absorbed. But I feel it's important to acknowledge how scary it feels to post this information, for reasons I can't even properly name. I just feel like it's something I'm not supposed to do.
That makes me think it's extra-worthy of discussion.
Ultimately, I ended my application season telling people I was pretty sure I wanted to spend the next year traveling the world and writing. And I meant it. I mean, I actually met with faculty and talked with them about how to do that. I told important people that I wanted to take a break and I was serious and I mapped out a plan.
I may not end up doing that.
But you know? It really wouldn't be the worst 30th birthday present to myself either.
And I honestly can't tell you if I felt that way because that's what I needed after applying to 70 jobs (which is terribly exhausting), or if that's what the real me, the bigger me, the deeper me, had been asking for all along.
That is a question I'm still looking to answer.
To test the theory, in the meantime, I went to Ireland.
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| The beach in Dingle according to my friend's camera. |
Because sometimes the universe laughs with you. And sometimes it laughs at you.
Namaste.
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