Help, I'm trapped in an ivory tower! Or "what the fuck am i getting myself into with this academia stuff"

i only managed to get a few applications done this year so i'm not quite at the level of resignation of those friends who did 15-20 with no success

I was sending out 30-40 applications a year for the last few years, in addition to applying for sessional jobs, private teaching, temping etc.

Merdeyeux, you are in a field that is related to musicology iirc?

Rejection really did start losing its sting after I while, I found.

my phd (and all the rest of my academic training) is in philosophy but most of my work has been music-related, so yeah i'm also angling around music departments hoping i never have to tell them i can barely read sheet music

As soon as my qualifying exams are over and no longer producing nights of sleep-disrupting anxiety, this thread will be the thing that keeps me up nights. What the fuck am I getting myself into, indeed!

I used to go out with one of the music dept. peeps with philosophical tendencies that you might be angling to, Merdeyeux. He's at Brun3l. I no longer know what makes him tick really but get in touch if you ever plan to go and see him!

will do!

this is my partner's 2nd year on the job market. she's had over a dozen interviews and two campus visits, but no dice. we're trying to figure out when/if to give up.

if you can

yeah thinking up a feasible Plan B is very urgent. however, it sounds like she's made some headway--certainly more than I have in 4+ years--so if she can make some subtantial additions to her CV between now and when the job market picks up again in the fall it wouldnt be a total waste of time to give it another shot. so much is dependent on the seemingly random whims of search committees that if you identify yourself as a *strong* (define how you will) candidate you never know when the lottery of the job market will go your way.

basically that old saw: hope for the best, plan for the worst.

What Ryan said +

It varies by discipline but, at least in mine, two years on the market is not considered a long time. I would say she's doing pretty well if she's had two campus visits in this time.

at a certain point though, i feel like if you lose a major university affiliation and are clearly underemployed, you begin to have the stink of failure about you -- in other words i feel like it will only get harder.

supposedly your best chances are in the first year and it drops precipitously after that.

but, again, she's getting way more positive reaction from the market than most!

ime some search committee members who are "keyed into" who's coming up prefer the new classes. I never know what's going on, have only been on one committee in my area (despite being on like 7? committees? & chairing several). so I just read the work etc. fuck letters of recommendation obv, letter writers (incl me) are scoundrels. but yeah some faculty are "into" the job market, it's like a sports draft for them, and if someone doesn't get drafted the first time, they're tainted. only r1 exp here though.

at a certain point though, i feel like if you lose a major university affiliation and are clearly underemployed, you begin to have the stink of failure about you -- in other words i feel like it will only get harder.

I think it's unlikely that you'll get a position in your first year on the job market unless you're a rock star (very high-ranking alma mater, list of v prestigious publications or grants the equivalent [e.g. major awards and orchestral premieres in music composition]). If you're really only interested in a research position at a top school, you may never get a position unless you're a rock star. If your scope is broader than that, I'd say: if you can support yourself while maintaining some uni affiliation (teaching at least one class) and building your CV, I'd give it more time, at least 4-5 years. Having a Plan B is definitely a good idea.

See if there's an academic job wiki for the discipline in which you're searching. This is the page for music composition and theory. You can see who is getting the jobs and when and where they graduated. As you can see, several 2011 graduates were hired for this fall, even at decent schools (v good in the case of Northwestern). (No one graduated earlier than that, though, so that doesn't bode well for me if I have to go back on the job market at some point.) When I was searching intently, I would try to look up the CVs of the people who were getting jobs, or at least their academic bio pages to get a sense of what committees are looking for.

taking a look at the CVs of some of the people on philjobs.org's appointments list maybe not the most fun way to spend my night - jfc how did these people find the time to write their PhDs while producing a dozen publications and being on the editorial board for a half dozen journals and winning grants and awards from everywhere imaginable and having a handful of professional memberships and having taught everything there is to teach

appointments*, dunno what happened there

but yeah like if www . anthonyvfernandez . com / cv . html this is the kind of person i'm competing with in the job market then i believe it is time for me to pack up and go home

I don't know the SPEP job market but that cv is padded with the equivalent of blog posts (=invited pubs). He's got one real pub, in Synthese. He's been taken under the wings of his committee which is a) how it's done & b) what the Americans are good at. It's not the same as evidence of phil quality or depth. Still, search committees like to see candidates whose committees are behind them bc that usually means a candidate who'll stay active and have the support to help their own students make it.

i got to meet a rather prominent academic last week, and at one point she bemoaned the hyper-professionalism and CV grubbing of so many graduate students. I was sitting next to her and she turned to me and jokingly said she wasn't referring to me (har har), but then my senior colleagues proceeded to inform her that that is in no way a "problem" I have. :-/

lol

Was she blaming grad students themselves for this? That seems oblivious if so.

it is important that we continue to fight the brave fight against the relentless professionalisation of academia, ryan

i think given the context of the discussion and her work (its W*ndy Br*wn) she was bemoaning it as part of lager societal trends. I think the grad students who behave that way are certainly behaving "rationally"--but what kind of monster gets into academia for "rational" reasons?

it is important that we continue to fight the brave fight against the relentless professionalisation of academia, ryan

i think my current max weber obsession is a barely-sublimated attempt to come to terms with that particular devil!

merdeyeux that dude has also repeated the same course like seven times already, and most of his papers are subtitled 'how' or 'the role' i.e. 'there's a thing and my esoteric thing is relevant to it see??'

As you can see, several 2011 graduates were hired for this fall, even at decent schools (v good in the case of Northwestern). (No one graduated earlier than that, though, so that doesn't bode well for me if I have to go back on the job market at some point.)

I misspoke. The Cornell job went to someone who graduated in 2008 and is over 40.

a taxonomy of the exceptions in the otherwise heartfelt egalitarianism of 'successful' professional american academics could never get published in one of the journals they edit

another grad school peer tenured : /

:-/

more or less why i don't keep in touch with my cohort.

meanwhile....

http://www.journalgazette.net/news/local/IPFW-restructuring--Geology--philosophy--women-s-studies-to-be-eliminated-15839023

geology???

getting harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that going to graduate school was a catastrophic life decision for me. not so much that i blame my naive 25 year old self entirely for that decision but i wish i had seen the writing on the wall much earlier.

my projected means of coping with that conclusion is that it's not really like any other career path i could have taken would have been wonderful (though financially better? no doubt), so let's be pleased that i at least managed to drop out of the rat-race for a few years and pursue something i am perversely and pointlessly interested in.

also having a book is something to be proud of, and feels like the kind of thing ppl eventually look back on and are glad they did.

i think that's the right attitude. i was listening to some alan watts lecture (lol at me, don't judge) and he was talking about advising students and the old question: "what would you do with your life if money was no object?" and i thought "well, i was able to do it!" it just looks like it won't be for my whole life. and while there's undeniably been some sacrifices entailed i can't regret it entirely.

perhaps it is interesting to compare your life decision with that of a person who decided to be an artist. if they make it through their 30s with some successes but never really the kind that let them 'be artists', need they regard themselves as having failed 'at life' in the same ways as academics do?

that's a helpful way to look at it--and really i always did look at it that way, as if the phd was just some accreditation or rubber stamp that allowed me to do what i thought was really important. meanwhile i grew up and discovered my dismal career prospects. but yes to recall the ~thing itself~ that drew you in the first place is the best antidote to the internal monologue of failure.

i mean there is a real difference. artists can generally look to audiences, performances, sales, even if they're modest, to sit alongside whatever personal value the doing of their art has for them. academic work at its least accessible end doesn't seem to have the same outlets, and the analogues all seem to put you in kind of an advisorial/conferential role, if not that of a retailer of your knowledge (writing blog posts, academic journalism, etc.). maybe it has to do with the effect hoped for in each case.

oh i see. a big part of it (at least for me) is that you can more or less call yourself an artist for the rest of your life and continue to do art, but to call yourself a scholar while not being a professor of some kind seems wrong. i try to imagine if i'll ever have the will to try to write another book but doing it outside the institutional support of academia seems somehow pointless (not to mention that the odds of it getting published are then greatly diminished). particularly since the kind of work i want to do is only gonna find an academic audience...

what's the best way to track the work of scholars that you like? can you create like a 'favorites' list on google scholar or something?

you can!

lots of them use academia.edu lately, which is a (for-profit, trying to find a way to turn a profit on it per usual these days for website startups) social network that academics use to follow each other, share papers (often in versions that are easier to access than paywalled journal content), etc.

you don't have to be affiliated with a university to start an account.

Researchgate.net is similar as well - I guess also for-profit, not sure.

and ssrn for social science, and arxiv for mathematical sciences and physics

I recently got an email from academia.edu notifying me that someone had cited my research (presumably my master's thesis, or maybe some stuff i RA'd?), but I had never made an account before

creepy!

yeah that's one of the ways they're trying to monetize it, you pay to access information about that kind of 'mention'. they also have search result logs for individual pages and hosted papers that sometime in the past year or two started blocking out host information from academic visitors, so that you pay to unlock that too, and either gather information from it or, more likely, just stoke/stroke your ego.

Depends on your field, but ResearchGate allows following others' output - I think it's mostly biomed but maybe that's just the part I see.

'Best practices' docs are so much better than academic papers.

low bar

needs placement on trenchant / challop quad diagram

the writing center info page for faculty at my university provides 'workshops' in the form of… videos… by writing center staff

Got to sit on the other side of the interview table today, which was interesting.

Without giving too much away, my role was obv minor but it was a little nerve-wracking to be reminded that within a year or two, after my appointment runs out, I'll probably be lucky to be in their shoes at an interview (if I stay in this mill). Felt empathetic. Also notable to get a sense of what it's like when a committee has to deliberate between frankly overqualified candidates in a pinch.