Academic Job Market Hacks
Academic Job Market Hacks
Lukas Szrot, PhD
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Bemidji State University
Meet yourself where you are.
As a teacher who works at a school that serves historically under-served student populations, I try to meet students “where they are.” I think the same advice applies to turning a Ph.D. into a job. The summer before you go on the job market for the first time (and hopefully well before that), take the time to take a good, hard look at where you are and where you want to be. Talk to your advisor, and perhaps at least one other member of your dissertation committee, sooner rather than later. Some issues that people (including me) often don’t address early enough:
· You got to move. The academic job market is a global market. If you want a tenure-track job, the odds that you’re going to get one near your hometown where you lived before college or grad school, or in the city where did your PhD work, are close to zero. I know from experience that it sucks to think about seeing friends and family once or twice a year when you were used to seeing them every week. It’s also worth thinking about what it would mean if you were to take that attractive postdoc, fixed term, or visiting position. If you’re offered such a position, this should be considered a major success your first time on the market. But it may come with difficulties: I had to live apart from my spouse for the better part of a year because her job was halfway across the country from the job I accepted (academics and other professionals call this the “two-body problem”).
· Listen to those who know. If your advisor thinks you’re not going to be ready to defend in time, listen. If your committee is concerned about how much you still have left to do, or whether you’re well-positioned to go on the job market, listen to them. Not only because they know (even if it’s been a long time since their last foray onto the job market) but because they’re the ones who are going to be writing your letters of recommendation. You’ll get stronger recommendations from people who are confident that you’re ready. Listen to those who know.
· Take an honest professional inventory. This should be part of getting your materials together, but it means more than that. You’re going to be updating your vita, drafting a generic cover letter, teaching statement, research statement, and diversity statement, all of which at least one other smart, invested, sympathetic person (ideally your advisor, if possible) should read and critique. This is also a time to think about where you are, professionally: how many publications do you have, and where are you published? How much grant money have you successfully brought in? How are your research interests related to one another? What teaching experience have you had? Even if the answer to any of these questions is “none” or “I don’t know,” that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “dead in the water,” but it is going to limit in advance whether you are qualified for some jobs.
· Budget your time. The academic job market is a one-year process. It begins in August of this year for a position that will start in August of next year. Job ads will be released throughout the year, but the kinds of job ads will vary. Typically, tenure-track positions start coming out in August, slow to a trickle after October or November, but may pop up throughout the year. Postdocs are often a little later, opening up late fall or winter and lasting until the following spring. Visiting professorships and full-time, fixed-term positions are like postdocs, but there will often be more, and more urgent, searches taking place for these into the spring and even the summer of the following year. Applying for academic jobs, keeping your materials updated, plus possible interviews (by phone or Zoom) and campus visits are practically a full-time job in and of themselves. This is the year to focus on getting done with your dissertation, applying as broadly as you can, and seriously networking—and probably not taking that advanced statistics grad seminar, even if it looks really, really interesting.
Be a pragmatist.
My advisor was heavily influenced by Deweyan pragmatism. Personally, I think I prefer William James, but either way, learning to be whatever you are, and whatever you want to be, is an ongoing process formed by habits of body and mind. What’s true, at the end of the day, is what works, and figuring out what works is probably going to take time.
· Everything is practice for what comes next. Look—you’re not going to get the first job you apply for. And you’re probably not going to get the first job you interview for. It’s highly likely that you’re not going to get a tenure-track job your first year on the market, and reasonably likely that you’re not going to get a job offer at all your first year on the market. Academic work more broadly involves a lot of rejection. You can either let it crush you or learn to learn from it. If you’re not getting call-backs, take another hard look at your materials, and keep doing so as the year unfolds. Is there a typo in your cover letter? Did you forget to put that recent publication on your CV because it isn’t in print yet? Is your research statement more than two pages long, and filled with jargon and pedantic language? Is your teaching statement vague, unorganized, or obvious? Does your diversity statement read as tone-deaf or sanctimonious? Be honest. Get a second, third, fourth opinion. Even fellow candidates who are on the market may be willing to exchange materials with you, to make one another’s better. When you interview for a job, it’s ok to spend a good amount of time second-guessing yourself, thinking about what questions you were not well prepared for.
· Learn to be prepared (from those times you weren’t prepared). Hate to put it this way, but there is a learning curve to getting an academic job. Make notes for yourself before the interview, have your CV beside you during a phone or Zoom interview, make sure you know what the school is about, where they are, who works there, what they are looking for, what the broader mission and vision is, and how you align with them (administrators like hearing this stuff when faculty hiring committees recommend a hire). If your department can do so, see if they will set up a practice job talk with professors and fellow students who can ask hard questions and try to stump you. You’ll get nervous and you’ll forget obvious things, especially the first time or two (On a phone interview, I once said “good morning” to a hiring committee at 2 o’clock in the afternoon—not a good first impression!). You will get better every chance you have to practice.
· Learn serenity. It can feel like the end of the world, but it’s not. Tomorrow is another day, whether you get the job or not. Learn from what’s behind you, and focus on what is directly ahead, and what is within your control. You may interview great and be an awesome fit for a job, and they still might offer the job to someone else. It may not have anything to do with you, but something they were looking for that you didn’t know about. It happens. You may be on the job market for multiple years and have to find ways to cobble together a living, teaching part-time, working in various administrative positions, at your PhD-awarding university, and taking one or more jobs outside academia that will keep you afloat financially until you get that first offer. It happens.
To apply broadly, search broadly.
· You can’t win if you don’t play. The academic job market is tough (otherwise I probably wouldn’t be writing this). The probability that you’re going to get hired for any one job is quite low, all other things equal—even small regional universities conducting rushed job searches may get dozens of applicants, and big research schools are likely to have hundreds of applicants. There are going to be a lot of jobs that seem out of reach, but the probability of getting any one job is infinitely better if you apply than if you don’t. I recommend casting as broad a net as you can, and applying for that “big” job if you have the time and meet the qualifications. The worst they can do is say no if you apply. If you don’t apply, you’ll never know one way or another.
· You can’t win if you don’t fit. You could be a really impressive candidate overall, but if you don’t meet the minimum qualifications for the position, you’re wasting your valuable time (and the valuable time of the already-very-busy members of the search committee). If the position requires one year of teaching experience, or expertise in gender studies, or demonstrated success at writing grants, and you don’t have it, then don’t apply. Not only because you’re wasting everyone’s time (including yours), but because the people whose time you’re potentially wasting might be reading other materials written by you in the future. You don’t want that to be the first image that comes to mind, least of all as they imagine a potential future colleague.
· Don’t rely on one source. Seek out multiple job posting sites to apply as broadly as you can, because not every position will be advertised in every forum. The ASA Job Bank, for example, has a lot of jobs, and you might even get some of them sent to you through your subfields’ listservs, but don’t just wait for those opportunities to drop into your email box. You have to go find them! Check, double-check.
· Organize your applications. So, you applied for 50 jobs, but you don’t remember where, or for what. When they reach out to contact you for more information or a phone interview, you’re in big trouble. I created an Excel spreadsheet with the position, school, type, city and state, required materials, and deadline, as well as a place to update where I was in the process (letters pending, materials submitted, interview *date*, or simply “nope” when I got a rejection email). It may still get away from you but resist the urge to pester search committees—they need time to deliberate. This may sound counterintuitive if you (like me) have applied for jobs outside academia before. If you do reach out, do so politely, and/or wait until near the end of the spring semester/have a really good reason (you have a major CV update or are interviewing for another position).
· CV or resume? Both. CVs are several pages long and detail the life and scholarship of a professional academic. Resumes are one page long and show how off your qualifications for a specific job. I recommend writing both and having both on hand—even if you’re only applying for academic jobs at first, knowing how to translate your skills (and do so concisely) is good practice in terms of talking about who you are as a job candidate.
Can people find you?
· The Internet is your friend. I know the Internet isn’t “supposed to” have as much impact on your job chances as it does. But it does. Have you ever searched for yourself using a popular search engine? What comes up? Can people locate you as part of a scholarly community, academic department? Have you won awards or honors, or are you part of a network, where people can locate you? Even better, have news/media outlets covered your work in a favorable light? Professional social media sites that allow you to share skills and research are immensely valuable so that other scholars can find you; and learn more about who you are. This isn’t going to be of direct interest to the search committee, per se, but having a solid virtual presence that says “this person is a serious scholar” will matter long-term.
· The Internet is your enemy. Remember that embarrassing night out a decade ago, and the photos that managed to make it onto your social media profiles? They gotta go. Seriously. The downside when you’re going up for an academic position in the Information Age is that reputation matters, and reputations can be destroyed by a single social media faux pas. If there’s stuff out there that needs to go, do what you can to get rid of it before you go on the market.
· If you can’t walk away from the past, own the past. If you have a hobby or “side hustle” make sure people (including fellow scholars) know that’s what it is. If you’re going to be a career academic, make sure your virtual presence conveys that, and not something else. I used to be a gigging musician. The kind of life I led then was not like the kind of life I lead now. I can’t rid the whole world of everything that I did back then, nor do I necessarily want to. Instead, I work to manage that part of my life, to clarify that that was something I was doing then, but I’m a scholar now.
· Think like a publicist. If you can’t part ways with social media entirely, create separate social media profiles for what you’re doing now and separate it from what you were doing before, or separate academic and personal profiles, and make sure it’s clear which is which. Be careful what you post, especially when you’re on the job market, and be sure it enhances a public image that is professional, collegial, and employable. Academics are public figures who often face public criticism and backlash, both within and outside the university, so don’t make yourself an easy target (especially when you’re just starting out in your career). I would even recommend creating your own website—it’s cheaper and easier than ever, and if done right, is a great way to regain some control over your public image.
It really is about who you know.
· You learn who you are through interactions with others. It’s such a basic part of sociology, yet it’s easy to forget too. No one who is finishing up a dissertation is going to be a “natural” at talking about their research, let alone their scholarly identity and why they are a good choice to hire. This takes practice, too, and this means taking every opportunity to talk about your work, your research, your teaching—going to regional and national job fairs at conferences, making those informal interviews, practicing your “elevator speech” (the two-minute description of who you are and what you do as a scholar). You may never get a position or even a formal job interview out of all those informal interactions, but they will help you get better at talking about who you are as a scholar, and fitting what you do into the broader discipline and subfield(s) you’re connected to.
· Networking matters. Scholars often talk to each other at conferences and then never see each other again. Try to keep in touch with people by emailing them within a week of meeting them at a conference, expressing interest in their work and research (if it is in fact proximate to your own or interesting in some way to you—don’t force it), and keep track of who you know. One way to do this is to just create folders in your email box that track where you met people and what kinds of information you exchanged. I should point out here that your job talk year is an important year to go to conferences, especially big national conferences and regional conferences in your field, so that you can network by sharing your research and meeting others who are working in your subfield and specializations. Note that you’re probably not going to get a job directly via folks who do something similar to what you do (why hire two people who do similar things in one department?) but building an extended professional network (including those people your advisor knows) is beneficial as a scholar and job-hunter in the long-term.
· Make yourself indispensable. If you get a job, do everything you can to shine. It’s an opportunity; even if it’s a postdoc or visiting gig, it could turn into something more, and you might find yourself benefiting from having colleagues who are impressed by your collegiality and work ethic while you’re there.
· Stay connected. Even if you “strike out” your first year on the market, run out of funding, and don’t have an academic position (not even an adjunct position), maintain a presence. In the long term, if you want to continue pursuing an academic job, or even decide to “switch gears” and do something else in a scholarly vein, stay in touch with your advisor and mentors, other graduate students, co-authors, and if possible, the university and its resources (like the library). Chances are you did this because it’s your passion. Don’t let your passion die just because it didn’t work out as planned. I left academic life for almost a decade and still was able to come back.
Image source: https://www.oif.ala.org/oif/?p=16873
Note: the views expressed here are those of Lukas Szrot, and should not be taken to be the views of Bemidji State University, colleagues, employees, employers, agents, or subsidiaries.
