Surviving the Academic Job Market

I've been lucky enough to have been off the job market for the last several years, but the debut of each year's MLA job list somehow still produces a thrill of anxiety, like the sound of the alarm clock that woke me up for school as a child. I spent 5 years "on the market," and I've watched many of the people I care about go multiple rounds with the academic beast. As a result, when the list comes out I feel bad to be part of a profession that makes its promising new members suffer through a process whose mechanisms are often mysterious and whose rewards often seem to be doled out at random. The systemic problems with the academic job market are myriad and well worth our concern, but the larger questions of how to "fix" the market don't offer much to the individuals who are trying to find academic jobs at present. So, for what it's worth, I've assembled here a few pieces of advice, based on my experience searching for jobs, talking to people searching for jobs, and participating on search committees, for surviving the process as it currently exists.

Remember that it's not personal. Not getting a request for more materials, or not getting an interview, always feels like a gut-punch, but the fact is that, a lot of the time, the reasons search committees don't pursue specific applications have little to do with the worth of the candidate. I have seen job applications thrown out for a lot of reasons, and only rarely has the reason been that the committee members felt the work was sub-par. Sometimes, people are thrown out because they are ABD and there's already a large pool of candidates with a degree in-hand. Sometimes, applications get tossed simply because the work of the candidate is too close to the work of someone already working the department. I've also seen candidates passed over because the work was too different from what was being done in the department (as in, "This person is too theoretical for this department"). On the more sinister side, I've seen applications thrown out because of ideological commitments and petty internal politics. As a graduate student serving on a search committee, I saw (what I thought was) a promising application scrapped with only the comment, "Ugh, a real formalist!" In that same search, I saw Committee Member A argue (successfully) against the candidate preferred by Committee Member B simply because Committee Member B had successfully argued against the candidate preferred by Committee Member A. This isn't to say that all search committees are insane: but even healthy search committees generally find themselves with more qualified, interesting candidates than they do opportunities to interview them, and so, even in well-meaning, self-aware search committees decisions get made not so much based on the individual worth of the candidate, but for more nebulous reasons of "fit." Everyone who goes on the job market gets more rejections than interviews, and so, while rejections are never easy to take (particularly when that school you'd give your right index finger to work at doesn't even ask to see your writing sample), it's important to remember that rejections have a lot more to do with the state of the job market than they do with your worth as an academic. Given that fact, it's important that you...

Focus on what you can control; try to ignore what you can't. This bit of advice applies to all areas of life, but I think it's particularly tricky on the job market, where the line between what can be controlled and what can't sometimes seems a little blurry. It's easy to get drawn into trying to anticipate what a search committee is looking for, whether at the application stage or the interview stage. I've seen people work themselves into fits trying to personalize job letters for specific schools, trying to word everything just right to please this member of the department or to avoid pissing off that other member. But the fact is that, even if you know who is in the department, you don't know (at least at the application stage) who is on the committee. You also usually don't know the internal politics of the situation, which, as I mentioned above, can have an unfortunate impact on the choices that get made. You cannot read minds, and you cannot be all things to all people. What you can do is put together application materials that present the main ideas of your project clearly, that explain why these ideas are interesting, and that demonstrate your commitment to your classroom. In other words, to adapt a phrase from Jersey Shore, you do you, and search committees do them. In the job market process, the only thing you have control over is your work and your presentation of that work, so focus on doing that well, and, as much as possible, try to avoid imagining what the search committees can be thinking. That way madness lies.

Have a plan B. Everything I've just said points to one of the biggest problems with the academic job market for those who are suffering through it: candidates have very little control over their fates. To a large extent, I think maintaining some measure of sanity on the academic job market requires finding ways to get a bit more control over your own future. And the more I think about it, I believe one of the best ways to do this is to actively search out other possible career paths that would make you happy. On a campus visit my second year on the market (for a job I did not get), I was exchanging job market stories with a junior faculty member, and he told me about how close he'd come simply to leaving the academic game altogether. After a few years of searching without a tenure-track offer, he'd made up his mind: if he didn't get a job on the next cycle, he was going to become a substance abuse counselor. Of course, in the next cycle, he got his job, but what struck me about his story was how much more relaxed he said he'd felt that last year on the market. It wasn't just that he'd decided, "It's this year or nothing"--that, I think, would have been more anxiety-producing that anything else, since it would have put all the eggs in one basket and then set that basket on explosives set to a timer. Instead, he'd come up with a concrete, alternate career path, and started looking into what it would take to follow that career path, even while he was continuing his search for academic jobs. One of the most disempowering aspects of the academic job search is the extent to which we feel trapped by it. Our fates are held hostage to a year-long search process during which we have no control over what the "gate keepers" of the profession will do, and for a lot of people on the market, it feels like there's no choice--or at least no good choice--but to subject ourselves to this mysterious machine. But the fact is that we are all talented individuals capable of doing many different kinds of jobs with our academic training: we shouldn't have to be held hostage to the dehumanizing process of the academic job search. Thinking about what else you can do--and what else you'd want to do--is a good way to take back some measure of control because it allows you to decide when enough is enough. Looking into alternate career paths does not mean giving up your dreams of being a college professor: it's simply a way (1) to remind yourself that you have worth regardless of whether the academic job market recognizes it, (2) to give yourself options in a situation where choice is power. The ability to choose to go another round on the job market, rather than feeling forced to do so, makes a big difference for your mental and emotional well-being. It also, I think, makes a big difference to your self-presentation, which can sometimes improve your chances on the academic job market.