Job Searching

The Southern Association for Women Historians has put together a Mentoring Toolkit. While it is obviously aimed at historians, there are many bits of practical advice for any job seeker, but especially the female academic.

“Higher Education Teaching Venues and Cultures” was an interesting read, though I knew much of it already. However, I may pass it on to my graduate students when I am teaching them.

“Just Say No, How to Manage Your Life Outside of the Classroom” was recommended on the Chronicle of Higher Ed fora.

Another work I will recommend is “Publishing in Peer-Reviewed Journals.”

Publication in peer-reviewed journals is a critical component of job-market vitae and tenure applications. Similar to presentations at regional, national, and international conferences, journal articles demonstrate ongoing research and aid scholars in honing their arguments for later publication in monographs. Despite the ubiquity of journal publication, many young scholars find the process complex and difficult to negotiate. They are unsure of their obligations as authors and have little information about the steps from submission to publication. While individual journals may impose variations in style and format, the following outline is designed to make the process more comprehensible for graduate students and new Ph.D.s.

Young scholars often submit articles derived from their work in graduate school: seminar papers, theses, or dissertations. Praise from their professors and peers provides encouragement to submit the material for publication. However, before submitting the manuscript, authors should evaluate and rework the material to meet the publication demands of the specific journal; the requirements for publication are usually different from the expectations of the classroom or the graduate committee.

Taken from a tweet msg.

The following message is about the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) mentoring and jobs activities at DH2011 at Stanford.

The ACH is committed to promoting the growth and strength of the digital humanities community. We are especially keen to provide guidance and opportunities to newer members of the community. In particular, we have the following three initiatives during DH2011 that are open to all members of ADHO associations (ACH, ALLC, SDH/SEMI):

1) ACH MENTORING PROGRAMME (ongoing)

Are you on the job market? Are you looking for general career advice in the Digital Humanities? Do you have valuable career advice to give? If so, we hope you’ll consider participating in one of our mentoring initiatives. Here are some of the objectives of the mentoring programme.

* have new-comers to digital humanities meet more established professionals
* allow broader networking between digital humanists
* provide professional guidance about jobs and careers
* provide additional discipline-specific advice

If you’d like to participate in the mentoring programme as a potential mentor or mentee, please send the following information to the email address at the end of this message:

- are you a potential mentor or mentee?
- what are your areas of expertise and experience
- if you’re a mentee:
– what would you value most from a mentor?
– is there anyone specific you have in mind as a mentor?

Please note that if you’ve volunteered in the past as a mentor you don’t need to contact me again unless you wish to opt-out.

2) ACH MENTORING MIXER (time and location to be announced)

This is a very casual outing where all mentors and mentees are invited to a local pub or bar to chat with one another. The first round of refreshments is offered by the ACH. We will provide more details on this event as we approach DH2011.

3) JOBS SLAM – at the ACH Annual General Meeting

During the AGM we will have an opportunity for people currently or imminently on the job market to introduce themselves to digital humanities colleagues and potential employers. As well, there will be an opportunity for employers to present jobs that are currently advertised or about to be announced. Each spoken presentation is limited to 30 seconds. This year we’re also encouraging advocates to speak (more flatteringly) on behalf of job seekers, if possible and when desired.

If you’re looking for a job or if you have a job to offer (staff or faculty), please send the following information to the email address at the end of this message:

* your name, affiliation and basic contact information
* your discipline or the discipline of your job
* a link to other information, if available

If you’re interested in any or all of the above, please email me (sgs at the domain mcmaster.ca) or tweet me (@sgsinclair).

While the info came from MLA, I found this at the University of Wisconsin: Steven’s Point site.

According to the MLA’s “Midyear Report on the 2009-10 Job Information List,” about 1,000 people have earned a Ph.D. in English each year since 1995 [emphasis added]. Meanwhile, about 400 tenure-track jobs in English have been available each year (plus or minus 50-100) [emphasis added]. The discrepancy between these two numbers means that the market for tenure-track academic jobs in English is very competitive, and has been for some time. On the other hand, the vast majority of English Ph.D.’s find jobs of some kind. The MLA’s most recent survey of Ph.D. placement indicates that of those who earned a Ph.D. in 2004:

49.4% found tenure-track jobs
20.5% found full-time non-tenure track teaching positions
8.7% found other types of academic jobs (i.e., administration)
6.7% found jobs outside higher education
6.1% found part-time non-tenure-track teaching positions
5.2% were awarded postgraduate fellowships to continue their research
3.3% were unemployed
While no one can reliably predict the future of the job market in this or any other field, shrinking budgets for education (especially in the public sector) suggest that this situation is not likely to improve right away. While there are things you can do to strengthen your prospects of landing a tenure-track job, there is nothing you can do to guarantee that outcome. Numerous brilliant, talented English Ph.D.s fail to get hired into the kinds of positions for which they have qualified themselves. Also, because jobs are scarce, few Ph.D.s can pick and choose among locations, and must be flexible about where they will live.

Academic Cog has a great post on this topic that I find a little scary.

[T]here isn’t going to be a “safe” area of the economy to guide our students into. I mean, clearly no one is going to want to take on college debt to go scrub toilets and fold towels (some of my returning students have told me that this has already happened in health care: I had multiple people last semester who went for janitorial-type job openings and were beaten out by someone who had an RN, even though the ad specified it didn’t even need a high school diploma. Hence going to college to try and pick up an RN or BPN. I predict, and have been for a while, that the health care and especially nursing bubble is a big bubble that is going to explode soon).

My students are trying desperately to get out of manual labor jobs so that they can support their families. What else can they do? Is there a safe area?

I worry about this with graduate schools as well. We have too many PhDs for the amount of college teaching we have. So, for example, at my college, one PhD has published three books in the last ten years, one with a major UP, and has written over 100 articles (including chapters and ency articles). He teaches at a CC and is happy to be there.

What can newly minted PhDs do instead of college teaching? What can they do if they get out with debt?

This is scary on many levels.

What will you and I do if literature can be taught by a single professor and papers graded by the computer?

Do we really need more/new graduate students in English? I asked myself that question after reading Minding the Campus’ A Terrible Time for New PhDs.

This year’s MLA convention, after a 50 percent drop in the number of tenure-track job openings between the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 academic years, was just plain grim, from all reports.

For months now, the spotlight of negative attention in the academic trade press has been trained on the for-profit “career colleges,” with their high dropout rates, sometimes questionable recruiting tactics, and poor reputation for “gainful employment” on the part of their graduates, who can find themselves with no jobs and mountains of debt from the student loans that account for nearly 90 percent of their alma maters’ revenues. Ph.D. programs, especially in the humanities, can be viewed as career colleges for the highly educated. As with career colleges, their stated purpose is vocational training: for that full-time faculty position in academia.

I’m wondering if we are really doing our students a favor when we encourage them to go into graduate school in English.

I was at a conference last year and someone asked me whether they should go to grad school in English. I said no. The other professor with us jumped all over me. But really? There are 200 people applying for a low-paying community college, teaching heavy, no research position every single time one opens up. Do we really need more grad students to up that number?

Despite the fact that I love what I do and I know others might too, I am starting to think that we would be more responsible if we pointed out that they can drive a truck and make the same amount of money that a full-time professor in our field makes.

This post quotes a discussion of MLA’s midyear report explaining what PhD graduates do. I know that if I show it to graduate students, most of them will cling to the “49.4% found tenure-track jobs” without even realizing that is less than 1 out of every 2 PhDs, without understanding that some of those tt jobs kick the scholars out after three years (R1s according to the CHE fora, unless the scholars are in the top .001%). That some of those tt jobs are in places the students have never heard of and had no desire to go to.

Update: Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education has an in-depth discussion on this topic which starts with:

A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to even meet with her. “I won’t talk to students about graduate school anymore,” he explained. “Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.”

I wouldn’t go that far, but it is much more difficult to get a job in academia than it was twenty years ago, when you could just walk in (like Robert Ford, my chair at the CC) or call (like I did) and get a full-time, tenure-track position. We at least need to prepare our students for the realities of the situation today.

Updated.
Publications are needed even for community college full-time positions in this time when there are hundreds of folks looking for the same job and very few jobs available. I learned that the hard way.

But I was very interested to read a comment on the CHE forums on job searching.

I’ve seen applications shut down because someone had about 5 pubs in lowly journals. It would have been better to have none. If you want to keep going after the tt job, keep publishing.

That definitely depends on the job you are going after, but it is something to keep in mind.

Update: One thing I think is interesting/odd about the comment is that it is better to have none than to have five in lowly journals, but you should keep publishing. So 0>5, but…

To some extent the “publish or perish” has trickled down to the community college, at least in terms of being a visible measure of determination on whether or not you should be hired. There are so many people on the market, that even the CCs are being inundated with applicants. In that case/those cases, the search committees have to winnow. Publications are a good winnowing tool.

Once at the CC, however, the publish model is significantly less of an issue. My department definitely promotes our work, especially any books we have published, but they don’t give us any more money or anything else about having books out.

MLA Panel

This is a live blogging of the session.

We are here to talk about careers in two-year colleges. Two-year colleges in general. Appropriate preparation for teaching in two-year colleges.

Number of handouts at the end, so you will stay.

Two reasons for being here. (Yes, I know there are four.)
1. English professor
2. Experience with two-year hiring practices
3. Member of the Executive Committee of this
4. Seeing myself 40 years ago

Began looking for job in early 1970s. Could not find job. Got out of academia. Now professor again.

Taught diverse classes: Dev Writ, Dev Reading, Freshman Comp, Queer Studies, etc.

CC has multiple missions. Have found these challenging.

Can stretch my talents with colleagues. Members of my own department bring a range of backgrounds. We learn from each other. National CC folks, too. Body of knowledge that overlaps with high school and university.

CC English professor: teaching writing and reading

Remarks are geared to new PhDs in English.
No guarantee that CCs will offer full-time jobs.

2010 1,165 CC in US
99% public
12.4 million students
ave age 28
58% women
most Latino and African-American students attend CC
Most CC faculty have MAs. Usually lower than in four-year institutions.
Pay almost always not negotiable.
5/5 load common
At some there is a 4/4 load for comp teachers.

Ratio of lit to comp. Most of our departments only offer a small number of lit courses.

2-yr college faculty is supposed to be active in the university.
Many write and publish. Publication is not required but is valued. “Teacher scholar.”
Tenure process is 4 years.

He said his salary range is from $50-100K.
Ours is $34-72K. ($72K = 27 years of ft and a PhD)

Four Points:
1. Know what we do before you apply. Know how they are similar to or different from how you have taught. Explore current issues in community colleges. TYCA. Inside English, California two-year college journal, MLA
2. Learn about minimum qualifications.
In California: MA in some English field, PhD is rarely required.
Training in the teaching of writing.
Teach.
3. Get the right training.
Composition training is required.
Reading training is a wonderful addition.
4. Get some experience.
Adjunct work is available.
Willingness to serve on department committees. Participate in the governance.
Online teaching experience.
Publish.

Cover Letter and Application
Fill out the application. Make sure you have minimum requirements.

Cover letter is my first impression.
1. Be choosy. Don’t apply to every single job opening. Apply to the ones you want. Make sure you are applying because you want to work in CC. Don’t apply out of “sense of failure” (Rob Jenkins).
2. Forget Whitman. Consistency is not the hobgoblin of little minds. 230 applicants. Many were weeded out because of different numbers of classes.
3. Tailor your letter and your CV.
4. Highlight your strengths. Show us how what we are looking for matches you.
5. Learn the lingo and use it, but only if you use it well.
6. 2-pages business single-spaced.
7. Begin by introducing yourself. Tell us which you are applying for. Identify your teaching experience pretty early and in great detail. Don’t talk about your research a lot. If your research area does have a connection to your teaching, make that connection.
We said 3 years minimum preferred. Teach at a CC. It is too risky for us to hire you if you don’t have experience at a CC already. Any teaching experience is important to us.
8. Your cover letter should be read by someone with a community college background.
9. In your letter describe specific experience. Did you create it? Did you grade it? Sometimes we can’t tell from the CV or cover letter. Tell us.
10. How will you retain those students (in foreign languages)? What are you going to do to help us keep them? What is your methodology?
11. Any service you can do (even in graduate school) makes you look good. Be an engaged colleague.

Over the past twenty years at a CC (30,000 students), I have hired 26 faculty members. In the last 4 years I have hired 100 adjuncts.

Everyone of us has someone from outside the department also interviewing you. Think about the ability to talk across the department or could be a staff person.

Best thing to do for the interview. Be there in person. Phone interviews are the worst for everyone concerned. We have a teaching demonstration. Not a taped demonstration, because those don’t turn out well. One hour to an hour and 15 minutes.

We come up with questions and then HR looks at them. We ask them in all sorts of different ways. We take copious notes.
A good chair of a committee will explain the interview process, keep it on time, collect materials, should tell the pay range, start date, and class load, class size, hiring process including the time frame.
We like to give the candidates a list of the questions.

Types of questions that we ask:
Something about rhetorical theory applied to the classroom.
We use a standard text and standard syllabus. How could you put a course together without any help?
What do you value about student writing?
Diverse student body issues?
Ability to be collaborative but also how you will fit and adapt.
How broad of a person can you be?
Lead teachers. Usually after tenure. Dealing with students, book issues, adjuncts.
Special needs.
Working with high school students. Different needs.
Student success. How many you can get to finish a course?
Assessment.
Advising a club.
Freshman orientation or experience.
Practical classroom problem solving.
How you deal with plagiarism?
Teaching theory. If you have a statement about philosophy, good to have.
Ask questions about how would you like to improve personally that will benefit our students?
Stamina.
What have you learned from your mistakes?
What you already know about the dept, college, and our students?
Ability to teach with technology.
Allow for time for your own questions. Ask a question. Always have a question.
Be as thorough and concise as possible. Give examples.

Teaching demonstration:
10 minutes.
How quick you can be on your feet.
How you can engage your class.
Sometimes you might be in an actual classroom, but usually in the SC.
Prove you can work interactively with your students.
Something about the writing process.
What is the most important thing to teach to freshman? Do 5-7 minutes to teach us. (Did not tell them beforehand.)

100 applicants per position. 10-12 that we interview.

Can be frightening to meet with the president or the provost. An hour with each. Trying to see how you will fit in. Final say on whether to hire.
Hired 7 people last year.
Hire at the instructor level. We lost some good candidates.

$4-5K in placement

We like to get thank you letters. Letters to the panel work.

It can be a very slow process. It’s always okay to contact the chair of the committee or the chair of the department. A good committee chair knows that professional lives are at stake. There are things we aren’t allowed to say or do. We can’t talk to you till we have a yes on the acceptance if you are the second or third choice.

Questions?
Committees. Service. I am on a campus committee that does nothing. I feel weird about putting it on my CV. What would you do?

You can do community service relevant to your field.

Reading. Finding that a lot of CC are looking for actual degrees in reading. Training? Working in learning centers counts, right?

Reading: Getting training in reading is terrific. Very few graduate programs focus on reading, transitional/developmental reading. Have to go hunting for that training.

Some CCs have departments of reading.

Tutoring: Tutoring is terrific. Tutoring is a great place to begin getting experience. It will begin to help you see the kinds of problems all sorts of students do.

We do employ our adjuncts in the writing center, but not our full-time people.

In groups of eight students? Not in English, but is teaching or tutoring experience. If that’s the first, it will be wonderful.

You mentioned a little about your personal philosophy. How much in your cover letter v. separate statement? How much will the teaching statement be different?

Our college doesn’t request a teaching statement any more. But they were useful when we were in the final times.

Anything you can add specifically about your teaching you should put in your cover letter.

Go ahead and have someone who is in CC look over your whole app package.

One of the important points that I am hearing from my colleagues is that you really have to look at what a particular department is looking at/for. We want different things. For example, we don’t have cover letters. We look for the supplemental questions, like the teaching statement.

Address everything that a particular department asks for. Put it in the requested material even if you are repeating.

Just finished my PhD, have been working in student affairs with transfer students. Are there opportunities like that?

Most people in student affairs have education/educational leadership degrees. Rarely do our faculty go into something like that.

We don’t have a position that bridges that.

For the most part, student affairs would start by working with academic advisor. Then go to work with registrar.

How do you look at MFAs in Creative Writing? Does 4-year experience count?

First two years would be similar.

Of our 230 files,
60 PhDs
50 ABD
15 MFAs- teaching experience was entirely creative writing

Do you ask for teaching portfolio?

We don’t ask for them.
During the interview process there would be no way we could look at it.

Most candidates bring a folder with syllabi. Even with electronic submissions other documentations are allowed.

If you are in the pool of 20 we are considering, we will look at those other submissions.

Student evaluations, syllabi, sample assignments…

Is it true that PhDs are too expensive?
Our foreign language dept does not have PhDs.
English almost all have PhDs.

Pay is irrelevant. Our pay doesn’t matter for PhD; it’s all on years of service. Ours is linked to PhD.

This is the handout version of the take aways from my Thursday talk (5:15 pm) at MLA.

Take aways:
1. How do you get publications? You look at what you teach, what you know, and you write that. Find places where other people can benefit from your ideas.
2. Look at what you have presented at conferences. While conference writing should be written in a more casual register, the same work, in a more formal academic voice, should be viable somewhere.
3. Do you have a thesis or dissertation that hasn’t been published? What can you do with it? Don’t think that just because you wrote it a while ago, or decades, that it doesn’t have something useful
4. If you are having to make your salary piecemeal, as I was, yes, you can get paid for texts. I made $5,000 for my first book. That’s all I will ever make from it, but it was a very hefty price for work I would have done for free. (Don’t tell my publisher.)
5. What happens when you write something that is rejected? Find something else to do with it.
6. Keep a list of what you have submitted, where, and when. This is easier when you are just beginning and becomes harder when you have more works in the pipelines.
7. Keeping a list of what has been accepted also lets you cycle through publications. 8. If you are adjuncting or think you might be moving, get a stable good email address and USE that one.

How to identify works in progress on your CV:
“In Press”: the manuscript is fully copyedited and out of the author’s hands. “Forthcoming”: a completed manuscript has been accepted by a press or journal.
“Under contract to . . .”: a press and an author have signed a contract for a book in progress, but the final manuscript has not yet been submitted.
“Submitted” or “under consideration”: the book or article has been submitted to a press or journal, but there is as yet no contract or agreement to publish.
from the American Historical Association.

The question of research integration into the classroom is a popular/important one in many job searches today. The CHE had a thread on integrating research into the classroom recently that had several good points.

Polly_Mer asked some good questions.

Is the only thing you do integration of research into your classroom is through selection of syllabi topics or do you share your published papers? Do you share work in progress? Do you share the major theories in the field in a way that is different from the standard texts? Do you use seminars to have students help bounce ideas around? Do you bring in conflicting, cutting-edge papers for students to critique or otherwise work on the cutting-edge for a handful of topics? Do you bring in non-scholarly articles from the popular media that cover your area either correctly or incorrectly for discussion? Is any of your research on pedagogy of your field? Or are you completely mum in all ways about your research because teaching is teaching and research is research?

What could you do with an undergraduate research assistant or as an advisor on a senior/honor thesis? Would taking those students on a trip to an archive and then co-authoring a paper be reasonable? How about maintaining a wiki on your area or otherwise contributing to electronic media? What about doing outreach to the public and the K-12 local schools? Judging at low level research seminars like the Junior Science and Humanities Symposia? Photocopying your papers (don’t mention this one even if it is the only one you can see working)?

In response to the original poster’s (OP’s) query about the question “How do you integrate your research into the classroom?” Marlborough said:

This is also a question about how your expertise plays to a non-specialist audience and how well you can explain it. Good answers include

“Doing this research involved a lot of work with material objects. Now, when I teach research methods, I include examples students might not have thought about, like clothing or grafitti.”

A good general theme–”My dissertation is about the implementation of a government policy on the periphery of its authority. I’ve learned that what is said at the top is not always how it plays out on the ground–and I tend to bring that question to a lot of the situations we encounter.”

“I am always working on something, and I find that sharing the process with students as I go along helps them to understand that we encounter the same frustrations and successes when we work on this field. I tell them about going to the archive, or checking notes, or translation work, or a bad day when I didn’t find anything useful in some books I thought were going to have what I wanted.”

The OP said:

I have had students work on translations of poems, with annotations. Maybe it would be good to try to publish something like that collectively with the students, as a thematic anthology of poems, or example, in which we could collaborate in the translations and introduction.

and Merce replied:

You could take a text already in the public domain and do a crowd-sourced translation with all your kids and publish through a website with images, translations, helpful bio or dictionary historical info links.

This might be something interesting that could be put together for English. Not the translations, obviously, but having students do multiple readings of one poem and do annotations, so that multiple voices about the poem are coming through. That might be really interesting.