The theory of the “shadow resume”: A tip for grad students

There are a few facts that every graduate student must come to terms with:

• Adjunct teaching is exploitative.
• There’s a very real possibility that one will ultimately be unable to find a suitable academic position.
• Having a PhD can seriously hurt one’s “civilian” employment prospects.

I developed a strategy to address all these problems simultaneously, which I called the “shadow resume.”

Rejection letters for dummies

While we see a lot of advice for people on the job market, it is much more rare to see tips for people on the other side of the process. This is a shame, as poor execution on the side of the hiring institution can cause significant unnecessary emotional distress. While there is a lot that could be changed, I’d like to start by providing tips for one of the most common documents produced by academic departments: rejection letters. It’s a delicate moment, to be sure, but I think many common practices, even well-intended ones, make the situation worse. As such, here is my advice:

Class and Academia: On cultivating a sense of entitlement

David Brooks’s column today is, like all his columns, cynical and manipulative — in this case, because he dismisses concerns about Mitt Romney’s experience as CEO as irrelevant to his likely performance as a president, but then lists desiderata that clearly lead one to conclude that Romney is the man for the job (as opposed to Obama, the insecure social climber). Nevertheless, he does manage to get at something true here:

First, successful presidents tend to be emotionally secure. They have none of the social resentments and desperate needs that plagued men like Richard Nixon. Instead they were raised, often in an aristocratic family, with a sense that they were the natural leaders of the nation. They were infused, often at an elite prep school, with a sense of obligation and responsibility to perform public service.

While the last sentence is probably a little over-optimistic, I do think he’s pointing toward a little-discussed consequence of class division, namely, the “emotional overhead” of being lower class. And I think this is particularly relevant in academia, where many young academics are making a shift in class status.

Here I can draw on my own experience. I was a first-generation college graduate.

No one expects the Academic Job Market

My Twitter feed is replete with complaints about preparing academic job applications, and it occurred to me that I could provide a valuable public service by opening up a forum to discuss the common yet vague requirements for such job applications. Possible topics for discussion include the following:

• What should go in my cover letter?
• What counts as “evidence of teaching effectiveness”?
• How do I go about writing an effective teaching statement or research agenda?
• How can I tell whether a job listing is a sincerely open search or an empty formality that will end in an inside hire?
• Why in the world does every postdoc application process require slightly different materials such that I need to rewrite everything every single time?
• How can I best balance my desire to save money with my need to cling to some shred of hope when weighing whether to just go ahead and sign up for three years of Interfolio up front?
• Why does God hate young academics so much?

Advice columns I’d like to see

Job market advice columns are a mainstay at Inside Higher Ed. Today’s contribution to the genre discusses the ways you can make yourself stand out by responding specifically to the job ad rather than sending out a generic letter to every school. I was actually surprised to learn that a lot of people really do send out generic application packets to every school — though I understand the motivations behind it, it strikes me as unlikely to be a successful technique. For my part, I customized every cover letter I’ve sent out (nearly 100!). The results speak for themselves: over the course of three years, I got a couple preliminary interviews and one job offer. Go and do likewise, young academics!

What I’d like to see is an advice column for shaping job postings. We have more than enough supply-side advice — it’s time to work on the demand side as well.

It beginneth

Tomorrow is my first day of classes at Shimer College. It still stuns me how good an outcome this is, and more broadly how well things have turned out despite my graduating in the midst of the financial crisis. In fact, even though the job market caused me a great deal of distress, my path — a visiting position right after graduation, followed by a permanent position — was, in the end, remarkably “normal” and smooth.

I wish it could be so for all of us, but the world is poorly made. I wish all of you good luck in this coming year, wherever you have wound up for now — and if you’re on the job market, I raise a toast: “Next year on the tenure track!”

Prediction Thread: Dominant fields and desiderata

As those of us who have been in “the game” for a while know, each year there is a field in the AAR job listings that has an inexplicable number of listings. In addition, there are often mysterious “also desired” fields that tend to pop up frequently. Last year, for instance, it seems clear that Catholic moral theology was the winner, while “global Christianity” was the miscellaneous desideratum. (I leave non-Christian fields out of consideration here, as they all seem to be pretty robust every year.)

What do you think will capture the imagination of search committees this year? I’ve detected some momentum in “practical theology” for the past few years, so maybe it’s time for it to break through to the big time. In addition, I’d be surprised if we didn’t start seeing references to “digital humanities” in the miscellaneous desiderata, though I’m expecting global Christianity to make another strong showing — so I’m not sure what to predict there.

An elegantly evil idea

One can easily find suggestions for how to change the academic job market for the better. Only seldom, however, does someone come up with an idea guaranteed to make the situation worse.

My job search record

I was on the job market for three years, starting in the fall of 2008. This is how things went.

Semi-open thread: Giving up?

While I have been extremely fortunate this year, I am very aware that this time of year is often a very distressing one for those on the academic job market — a time of giving up hope for anything “real” and trying to piece together something to get you through the next year. That in turn can lead to even more distressing thoughts: is it time to give up? What would I do if so?