philosophysmoker-Mstarz

Anonymous has requested a new thread. Sure, why not?

Play along, if it please you.

Zombie, can we start a new thread? 

Smokers, give us your vitals ... 

Number of APA/Skype interviews**:
Universities (n):
SLAC (n):
Other (n):
PhD in hand (Y/N):
PhD program (top 10/25/50/below or unranked):
AOS:
Publications (n):
Comments:

**Zombie thinks it might also be useful to know how many applications you've filed this year.

And two Anon replies have been registered:

2
2
0
0
Y
50
Political Phil/Ethics
40 (inc. 3 books)
No job market for old men

and

1
0
1
0
N
Unranked
1
Indeed, this is no job market for old men.

~zombie

p.s. Now that APA is over, how about some reports? Did the unemployed philosophers swarm seem smaller? Was the Smoker less crowded/desperate? Was the beer still lousy and overpriced?

The interview skeds seem to be gradually filling up. My impression this season is that a lot of departments are offering alternatives to APA in the form of Skype/phone/remote interviews. Some are offering both, which, I guess, should raise concerns about the Skype interviewees being disadvantaged when compared to real live desperate philosophers. (See here, here, and here for Skype tips, and here for a defense of Skype). But, weighing the costs of going to Baltimore vs. staying home for the holidays, many will opt to stay home and try to become a Skype-master. If you ask me, a significant advantage of remote interviews (aside from cost) for candidates is that they allow you to be a little more relaxed, since you can do the interview in a familiar environment. APA interviews, whether you're in the ballroom or a suite, have added tension built in, since the setting is foreign, uncomfortable, noisy (in the ballroom), and smells of flop sweat. There's all that awkward time waiting outside the door (should I knock? are they running late? are my palms sweaty?). I'll be interested to hear how many of you are being offered Skype type interviews in lieu of APA interviews.

And increasingly, it seems some departments are forgoing first round interviews altogether and skipping straight to the campus fly-out. So, if nothing's happening for you yet, there's still time.

For those of you visiting scenic Baltimore, or chillaxing by the warm glow of your internet tubes, it's pre-game time.

Last year's post linked to previous years' advice and question preps, so start here.

When I was last on the market, I was surprised at how often I was asked about my dissertation, even though I had moved on to a different research project, and had a few publications under my belt. I guess that's a search committee asking everybody the same questions, but I didn't really prepare myself to talk about the diss 2 years after it was finished. So, even if you're a few years out... probably should prepare to talk about the diss. Or be prepared to gracefully duck the question by quickly segueing into how X relates/led you to your current research on Y.

Good luck to all of you!

~zombie

Here. It’s behind a paywall, and unfortunately I don’t know of anyone who has posted a PDF to the internet like last time. Sorry.

It paints a horrible picture of McGinn using mostly his own words. It has him saying stuff like, “a superior person is not necessarily arrogant, but just superior”; and how he is “the most enlightened person in the world”; and how “his situation will fan anti-American sentiment” (in the words of the author, but attributed to McGinn). He complains, again, of everyone else’s lack of senses of humor and irony.

(Which is really old hat, right? “It's not that I'm a jerk; it's that your sense of humor sucks.” Y’all jerks need to work on your excuses.)

But as far as I can see, it doesn’t say anything new or groundbreaking, other than a few stray details, with one fairly notable exception. It does contain what would seem to be the verbatim text of the handjob pun: he says that he “had a handjob imagining you giving me a handjob.” First off, that’s awfully yucky. Secondly, even if his claim that it was a joke in which ‘handjob’ doesn’t mean “handjob” is credible, it seems to me that it’s still pretty clearly inappropriate. Thirdly, although he makes another attempt to connect the stuff with the handjobs to his research, it still seems to me like that entire avenue is complete bullshit. Fourthly, even if you interpret it as McGinn says he intended, it’s still really weird. He, McGinn, had a manicure while imagining her, his research assistant, giving him a manicure. What? A) who thinks about their research assistant while getting a manicure? B) who thinks about getting a manicure from their research assistant under any circumstances? C) what is he talking about? I mean, he’s free to insist that he had created a context in which ‘handjob’ is to be read as “manicure,” and where anyone who doesn’t see that is has an irony-related disability. But the fact is that if you read it that way, the message doesn’t make any goddam sense. And this is why nobody who has ever read it has read it that way.

It has him describe his relationship with the RA as an “intellectual romance.” Whatever that means. Seriously: what does that mean? Why would anyone ever say something like that? If I were in his position, I think I’d be very careful to avoid using the term ‘romance’ in any capacity whatsoever.

He seems to suggest that the “genius project” literally had that name while it was going on, in spite of what he says in one of his blog posts:

Another time, the professor says, the student expressed reservations about her job prospects in philosophy. He devised a solution, an undertaking he called the “genius project.” He describes it as an experimental learning endeavor in which he hoped to help the student improve her philosophical abilities by fostering creativity and encouraging taboo busting.

I totally understand being worried about your job prospects. I could not be more sympathetic. I worried about that when I was in grad school, and my worries have not been assuaged since then. And I completely understand approaching your faculty honcho person with these concerns for advice and counsel and stuff. Makes perfect sense. And I totally get why the faculty member might start a formal or semi-formal project designed to put the student in the best position possible to go on the job market. I understand. With perhaps less explicitness, something exactly like that happened with me and with basically everybody I knew in grad school. We were all worried; we all went to our advisors for advice; our advisors all tried to help us get prepared. Nobody ever gave it a name, as though they were the first person to ever think of helping their students get ready for the job market, or they were really special for actually going through with it, but we were all engaged in some kind of Genius Project. If you twisted my arm, I would have just called it “My Graduate Training.” The “Ph.D. Project.” Whatever.

What I don't get is why “taboo busting” always so high on the list of Genius Project techniques. My “Ph.D. Project” consisted, in part, of various discussions with my advisor: what I should read; what I had read; how to approach the material; where my ideas fit into the larger literature/conceptual space; etc. Another substantial chunk of the project consisted of submitting written work; receiving withering criticism in return; revising the work in response; receiving more withering criticisms; and so on. We spent a lot of time working on my teaching, too.

Now, I understand that the Genius Project involved spending part of each day thinking about your own ideas without relying on outside texts, and that it also involved asking, “is that really true?” a lot, and that sounds good to me. And I don’t have any problem with the tennis or the paddle boarding. Seems basically normal. But I don’t get why busting taboos was such an important part of the project. Is there some reason to suspect that unbusted taboos cause problems for candidates on the job market? And what was the pedagogical purpose of agreeing that manicures will henceforth be called “handjobs”? That seems to come out of left field, as far as mentorship goes.

(Just kidding, kind of. I realize that the reason that the “taboo busting” aspect of the Genius Project has been getting so much press is that the taboo-busting stuff is what got him in trouble, and that the press its been getting is not necessarily proportional to its prominence in the Project. But seriously. It got him in a shit ton of trouble, and it served no clear pedagogical purpose. It was a bad idea, and he should have known better.)

There's also this passage,

When he saw the student, they would perform a “ceremony,” he says, during which they went through a series of “hand grips” simulating closeness and social interaction.

Which sort of makes it seem like they had a secret handshake. What the hell? Is he a Mason? And what would it mean for a “hand grip” to “simulate social interaction”? Is that something people do?

Another passage reads,

“The relationship was difficult,” he says, speaking in his living room. “It wasn’t natural. It was constrained by the fact that I was a professor and she was a student. … We couldn’t just go in the way people normally would.”

Which really makes you wonder. Hadn’t he been teaching for a long time? The ins and outs of the teacher/student relationship shouldn’t have been that bizarre for a senior professor like him. You’d think that it would be sort of normal. He’d been around the block a few times by then.

But it seems to me that the most substantial new piece of information is that according to the RA’s boyfriend,

McGinn once wrote to the student that they should “have sex three times in my office over the summer when no one else is around,” Mr. Yelle [her boyfriend, that is] says. He also says the professor once suggested that the student should wear shorts more often because he thought her legs were attractive.

McGinn denies suggesting sex, and says that he merely told her that her legs were muscular. He also declined to share the emails.

Now, there are a lot of potential reasons why he might not want to share those emails, and the fact that he doesn’t share them doesn’t mean he said what Yelle says he said. And from our standpoint, there's a very real sense in which this is just a he-said/she-said thing. And if you just look at how he describes his style of interacting with people in general and her in particular, it’s fairly clear that the best-case scenario for these emails is that there's a lot of very borderline, easy-to-misunderstand material there, interspersed with a few things that are genuinely inappropriate (such as the oft-mentioned handjob pun). So, best-case scenario, releasing the emails won’t help him very much, and it makes sense for him not to release them.

On the other hand, on the best-case scenario, McGinn seems like the kind of person who wouldn’t realize how harmful releasing the emails would be. Case in point: everything he’s said up until now.

--Mr. Zero

On another thread, Anonymous asks:

When is it appropriate to ask a potential employer if accomodations can be made for a significant other?
And, if one's significant other has a campus visit in the vicinity of one's own campus visit, should both partners make this known during the in-person interview as a way of indicating their respective interest in the jobs?

To answer the first question, it's appropriate to ask when you get a job offer. Some schools, due to factors like location, might volunteer this information during a fly-out. Mine does. And they have a pretty good accommodation record, but it's important to know -- and this is probably especially true in the current economic and educational climate -- that a spousal accommodation can take many forms. It will not necessarily be another tenure-track job. I know of several couples who got SAs at my school -- for both male and female spouses, BTW (all with MAs or PhDs). Some of them are VAPs. Some are instructors. Some have jobs in admin, or elsewhere on campus.

Second question: I think it would probably be inadvisable to mention that at an interview. But others might have different opinions. What say you, smokers?

~zombie

If you're prepping for your first fly-outs, you may have questions. Here's some logistical advice from last year:

The campus visit is a strange beast, a two-day (more or less) gauntlet of job interviews and social calls, with some harrowing, high pressure philosophy thrown in. You'll meet with various deans, and lots of faculty, and students. You'll be continuously shuttled from one thing to the next, with very little down time in between. You'll be dined (not often wined -- many university budgets don't permit putting alcohol on the tab) more often than you can bear. The worst of the meals is breakfast -- to my mind, if you want to know what kind of colleague someone might be, don't evaluate them before they've had caffeine. (Advice: if your hotel room has a coffee maker, use it, even if it makes lousy coffee, just for the medicinal benefits.) You might give a talk, you might be asked to do a teaching demo. Or both.

 The campus visit is also an opportunity to learn about the school. You can get a sense of the campus culture, and of the department. Don't think like someone who is desperate to get a job, any job, but rather like someone who might be sold on this particular job. Hopefully, the people you're interacting with are of a mind to sell you. Ask questions about the students, about campus life, about what it's like to live there. You will need to exhibit at least minimal chit-chat skills, because you'll be doing lots of it while people are walking you around campus, driving you to the airport or restaurants, etc. A five minute walk becomes much longer when filled with awkward silence. 

Take granola bars and portable snacks, especially if you have dietary restrictions. The days are really long, and being hungry makes you cranky. Have at least two pairs of good pants, especially if you're going to a wintry clime where the odds of getting mud/snow/salt on your pants are high. It's a short trip, so take a carry-on so nothing gets lost in transit. Be polite. Practice a firm but not crushing handshake -- you'll be shaking lots of hands. Be very nice to the department secretary/admin assistant. They know where the bodies are kept.

This is advice from an historian, but it's quite useful and applicable to APA: http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/aha-interviews-redux/ 

This from last year's week of dread Smoker [Which is a compendium of advice going back to the early years of the Old Job Market Blog]:
http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2010/11/interview-rehash-3.html 

Mary Sies' extremely useful article at IHE:
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2009/12/02/sies 

And this thread from LR:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/how-to-best-pre.html 

What worked for me: create a master list of questions, and write a response. For me, knowing the answer makes it far easier to extemporise on the spot. (I do the same thing prepping for class. I write extensive notes, but only glance at them for prompts.) You can't take your notes with you to an in-person interview (one of the fringes of a phone interview is that you can have all your notes and papers in front of you), so you have to know what you're going to say. 

Mundane advice: When you get the call (or email), you will likely be asked to choose among several interview times. It's easier to handle this question by email, but if by phone, you'll need to have your calendar handy to write down the appointment (and to make sure you don't have any scheduling conflicts). This seems obvious, but the first time I got "the call," I had already concluded that I was not getting any interviews, and was completely unprepared and had to run around my house trying to get it together. This is much harder to do when your head is buzzing loudly from that massive adrenaline rush you just experienced. You may be asked if you have any questions. One question you should ask is "Who will I be meeting with?" Get their names. (Later, look them up. Read something they've written that's of interest to you. You'll have time on the plane ride to DC). Ask who you can contact on the SC if you have any questions prior to the interview. Get contact information in case something happens that prevents you from getting to the show on time. 

APA is a mob scene. It's stressful. The wi-fi can be really sucky, so don't count on it working. Take snacks (the food is expensive in the hotels). Try to have fun. Silently judge the other philosophers based on irrelevant factors like hair and shoes. Don't get drunk. Few people are as charming as they think they are when drunk. 

Take your intervew clothes in your carry-on bag.

A while back, in comments somewhere, Carolyn Dicey-Jennings posted a link to this helpful website.(So long ago, in fact, that I have no idea where this happened, and I'm only 80% that my memory that it was CD-J is accurate.)

Further suggestions are appreciated, as always. I hope things are going better for you than they are for me. So far I'm drawing a fat goose egg. I've been following the recent discussion on Leiter about "degree staleness" with a mixture of deep and familiar anxiety, horror, worry, and more anxiety. But for those of you who will be in Atlanta, knock 'em dead. (But not all of them, because then nobody will be left alive to hire you.)

--Mr. Zero

There have been several recent discussions concerning concerning the best way for interviewees to deal with interviewers who ask so-called "illegal" questions. (Although my understanding is that Glaucon, writing here, is basically correct: though it is illegal for search committees to use the information as a basis for hiring decisions, it is not literally illegal for them to ask the questions. But whatever. I'm not a lawyer, and its not as though there's no relationship between the information the search committee attempts to collect in the interviews and the information the search committee might use as the basis for its decision.) A discussion at Feminist Philosophers is here; a discussion at NewAPPS is here.

As I read through the suggestions, I find myself thinking the same thing over and over and over: this won't work. It seems to me that all such suggestions are basically misguided, in that they are based on the premise that there is some reliable way to diffuse the situation without harming your chances of getting the job. I don't think there is any reliable strategy here.

As I see it, there are four main ways of responding to the situation:

1. Answer the question honestly. There's always the chance that they just want to let you know how great their department/school/community is for people in your situation, or how open and welcoming they are, and that they won't use the information in their deliberations, after all. Maybe. Probably, even. But I guess I wouldn't count on it.

2. Answer the question dishonestly. After all, at this point in the process, it really isn't any of their business. Of course, it'll be somewhere in the range between difficult and impossible to maintain the lie if you get the job, and it'll be awkward when the truth comes out. AWK. WARD.

3. Decline to answer the question in a way that draws attention to its inappropriateness. You can do this in a way that conveys some negative emotion, such as anger, frustration, disappointment, or sadness, but doing so is not going to be good for your chances however you do it. Letting your interviewers know you're not happy with them isn't a good interview strategy.

You could try to do it in jokey, laughy way, but any way you frame the joke, it's a joke about how the interviewer has asked you a question you find inappropriate and/or legally problematic. It won't work if joke is at the interviewer's expense; you have to bring him into the joke with you, but in a way that still makes it clear that the question was not appropriate and you're declining to answer it. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's going to be hard. This is not a beginner-level joke.

4. Decline to answer using stealth, without drawing attention to the inappropriateness of the question. Maybe by changing the subject or something, or by telling an unrelated joke. There's a lot of potential for weirdness here. They asked you a question; you didn't answer it. It's not like they're not going to notice.

If I had to pick, I'd say #1 and #4 are the best of a bad bunch. This has happened to me only a couple of times, and both times it was fairly clear that they were just trying to let me know that their area had a lot to offer. At least, that's how I read the situation at the time. I adopted strategy #1, and answered honestly while trying to thread the needle between seeming open and forthcoming while revealing as little as possible and trying to move on quickly. The alternatives seemed much riskier. But I felt really awkward, and the awkwardness was not alleviated when, on one occasion, one of the other interviewers pointed out that the question was out-of-bounds. I wasn't at all confident that I was handling it right. And it goes without saying that I didn't get the job (not that I have any reason to suspect that there's any direct connection).

And so it seems to me that once a question like this comes up, there are no good alternatives. There's no reliable way to maneuver oneself out of the situation. It's possible to pull off, of course. There are things that will work here and there. But I can't see any general piece of advice that would be widely applicable and effective in a risk-free way. Which bums me out.

--Mr. Zero

I recently underwent diversity training at my university. Good times. Part of the course materials included a paper on gender bias in hiring, which contained a list of recommendations for institutions (for avoiding bias in hiring decisions), but also included the following evidence-based recommendations for women seeking employment (to help them counteract bias and implicit bias in hiring decisions). As we often get questions on the blog about things like interview attire, family status issues, etc., this seemed pretty relevant as we approach the interview season. (My posting of these recommendations should not be construed as an endorsement of any of them. I can't say that I ever did any of these things, at least not consciously. If you're interested in the reasons for the recs, read the article.)

Recommendations for female applicants
● Provide some evidence of communal job-relevant behaviors (e.g., being helpful and sensitive to the needs of subordinates)
● Indicate clear evidence of competency (e.g., resume, third-party endorsements) but avoid appearing self-promoting in an interview
● Do not show anger or discuss previous job-related situations that made you angry
● Best to avoid feminine-scented perfume, but wearing masculine-scented perfume may be beneficial (although you would need to pretest the scent to ensure that it is considered “masculine”)
● Avoid revealing parenthood status until job and salary are secured
● In your initial application, if you have a female-gendered first name, consider using initials only, and if you have a gender-ambiguous name, consider removing gender-identifying information
● Strive for an “attractive” but neutral appearance for interviews or application photographs. Avoid interviewing in overly feminine clothing (more masculine clothing and facial features may be beneficial)
● If you are visibly pregnant, it might be wise to obscure it with your clothing
● Avoid tentative speech patterns (e.g., use of intensifiers such as “really” and “definitely,” hedges such as “I guess” or “sort of,” and hesitations such as “well” or “let’s see”)

("Interventions That Affect Gender Bias in Hiring: A Systematic Review." Carol Isaac, PhD, PT, Barbara Lee, PhD, and Molly Carnes, MD, MS Academic Medicine, Vol. 84, No. 10 / October 2009)

These are basically about countering implicit and unconscious bias -- bias the discriminator doesn't even recognize as bias -- and many of them are common sense. Probably best to avoid ranting about your previous scumbag employer, although apparently, that goes double for women. The issue of self-promotion, and avoiding it if you're a woman, clearly points to a double standard. Talking about your work in a non-self-promoting way in a job interview is going to require some real verbal finesse. Hiding an advanced pregnancy would be pretty hard for a lot of women. Some of this advice seems, on the face of it, kind of offensive. You might well ask yourself why women should have to hide a pregnancy or wear "masculine" perfume (AXE body spray anyone?). (Although if you ask me, just don't wear perfume. That goes for you guys too.) But again, this is about getting past implicit bias.

And I'll tell ya. The interactions with others in the diversity workshop revealed a level of ignorance about gender bias, and what constitutes bias, and what is legally permitted in interviews that was pretty eye-opening. You might think that people actually taking a workshop on diversity would not publicly say crazy shit that is discriminatory, sexist, and racist, but they do, and I'm going to guess that it's because -- despite efforts to re-educate them -- they just don't know better. Which is just to say that sexism is alive and well in academe, and forewarned is forearmed. Some of this advice probably applies equally well to minority candidates (use initials if you have an "ethnic-sounding" name, don't show anger, etc.). I have not been able to find comparable practical recommendations for countering racial bias, but I'll post it if I do.

~zombie

Some interesting things emerging from this thread. 10:41 writes,

A few years ago (maybe 4, I don't recall), we had an applicant come straight from the airport. He was a mess. He admitted to us that he tried to minimize how much time he'd be on site, so flew in the morning of his interview with us, and was flying out the next day after another interview.

We asked if he'd rather reschedule for the next day (that's when he told us about his plans to fly out the following afternoon after an interview), and then offered to give him a few hours to get himself in order (we offered to interview him at the end of the day). He refused, and said he'd rather just get it over with.

He failed miserably. He couldn't concentrate, and screwed up the answer to every question (including the "tell us about your dissertation" softball). Despite being very strong on paper, we simply couldn't consider bringing him out to campus after such a terrible interview. I wonder what he would have been like with a good night's sleep and a hot meal.

I know this is not really about the original post, but I want to note that you simply cannot overestimate the importance of a good night's sleep and a hot meal. If there is any doubt, try and stay the extra night. Get there the day before your interview, and if you're planning early, get there the day before you might be expected to be available for interviews. Yes, it means spending a little extra money; and maybe because of the realities of grad school/adjuncting, a little extra money is a big deal. Lie, cheat, steal, share rooms with friends, do whatever you have to do. This is your career, and the difference between success and failure just might be a good night's sleep and a hot meal.

This is exactly right. Interviews are hard. You have to be at your best. That means well-rested, well-fed, and not harried from a recent, highly stressful air-travel clusterfuck. Don't take yourself out of the game by not being at your best.

To which 7:03 adds,

10:41's comment underscores the absurdity and injustice of this whole arrangement. It is not only that we must make (very) expensive plans to travel to a city during the holidays when we may or may not have any interviews there. It is also that we must do this in an even less economical way than we might have--staying 3 nights instead of 1, for example--in order to allow for the possibility that schools will want to interview us at any time during that window. And, of course, if that's not true at all, or if we have only one interview, we learn of it too late to make any difference.

This is my 4th year on the market. I have a good VAP job, and know how to navigate the gauntlet that is APA logistics pretty effectively. And even so, I am forced to spend money that I don't have (since my institution's travel funding is limited, due to state budgeting issues). I am, more and more, wary of institutions that--despite all that we know about the financial burden the APA puts on grad students and junior/underemployed philosophers--continue to interview at the APA. There are other options available, and I'm glad to see that more and more departments are choosing them.

This is also true. I realize that not everyone agrees, but there is no reason to hold interviews at the APA anymore. Skype interviews are not at all ideal, but they're a hell of a lot better than $650 to fly to Atlanta and another $100 a night to stay in Atlanta plus food and expenses. And while we're on the topic of a good night's sleep and a hot meal, how about a good night's sleep in your bed and a hot meal that was prepared in your kitchen? Or, like, your favorite restaurant in your town. Or something.

--Mr. Zero

An anonymous Smoker asks:

I am planning on purchasing flights for the APA in advance in the hopes of avoiding higher prices later. What assumptions are safe to make about when interviews are held during the conference? Should I assume that an interview could be on any of the four days (27-30th), or just the two full days (28-29th)? It would be nice to avoid the expense of unnecessary extra hotel nights.

I've never had an interview at the APA that wasn't on the 28th or the 29th. My sense is that it's fairly unusual for interviews to be scheduled that first day, and maybe a little less so for the last day. But you'd probably be pretty safe if you were to plan to be in town for just those two days.

That said, I wouldn't want to plan to arrive on the 28th for an interview on the 28th. Flights are always late, and you want to be rested and non-harried on the day of the interview. You probably knew that, though.

What say you, Smokers? Am I wrong?

--Mr. Zero

A little while ago, I got a nice but impersonal PFO letter from the HR department of the school that interviewed me at the APA. They wrote to let me know that I didn't get an on-campus interview, that they hired somebody else, and to encourage me to apply for other positions at their institution that might interest me. Of course, I already knew I didn't get the job when I didn't get the on-campus, and I knew I didn't get the on-campus when the wiki said other people were invited to campus and I didn't hear from them. Also, when the hire was announced on the Leiter jobs thread, that was a clue, too.

The thing that made this one stand out is that, at the interview, the lead interviewer specifically said that I would hear from them either way by a certain date. They made a point of saying that this wasn't going to be one of those things where they drop off the face of the earth. I didn't bring it up; they did. They went out of their way to emphasize it. This struck me as unusual. And then they dropped off the face of the earth, and then six or seven months later I got a form letter from their HR department.

I find this really galling, but maybe that's the wrong attitude. Maybe I should lighten up about this. It happens all the time, after all. But that's exactly what's so galling about it. This disregard for job applicants is such a normal thing that if you mention it whenever it happens then you end up mentioning it all the time—so much that you're the one who's annoying. And I don't want to be someone who doesn't find that galling.

But that doesn't mean I don't realize that I'm somewhat of a broken record about this. I realize that I write about it all the time and have been for years. You're probably sick and tired of reading my complaining, whiny posts about it. I feel the same way, frankly. I'm tired of this. I set this post aside several times as I was writing it. Not only have I said this a billion times before, but I can't imagine I'll ever say it better than I did here. What's the point?

Nevertheless, it seems to me that how search committees treat job candidates is a basic issue of some importance. So allow me to just reiterate. If you conducted a search this past season, you really ought to contact the people you interviewed but didn't hire to let them know you appreciate that they took the time to meet with you and to wish them well. You should especially do this if they spent their own money to travel to the interview. You should especially especially do this if you told them you would. You should definitely do this if the interview involved a trip to your campus. If you haven't done this already, you should do it now. If you are only doing it just now, you should probably also apologize for having taken so long to get around to it. And if you're not sure whether you've done it, you should make sure. It's only the decent thing to do.

--Mr. Zero

I wrote this post a while ago, but didn't feel like posting it just then. I'm not sure I feel like posting it now, but I figure, what the hell. So, here's what I hope is my last annual "I didn't get a job this year" post:

Although I haven't received any final word on any of the jobs I interviewed for this year, I have some pretty convincing data that suggests that I'm out of the running for every job I applied for so far in this year's job cycle. There's one school I haven't heard a peep from but is listed on the wiki; another I haven't heard from and which isn't on the wiki but whose department website lists a suspicious number of colloquia by junior philosophers who work in my area; another who sent me a nice "we'll be glad to hire you if the folks we invited to campus don't work out" note. (Seriously. It was a very nice note, for a note that says "we invited people to campus, but not you, though.")

This is a real bummer. I mean, that's obvious, but it's also worth repeating. What a fucking bummer.

When I arrived at my first full-time teaching job out of grad school, I had two goals. 1. To learn how to do this job well—to do a good job of teaching while at the same time carrying out a productive research/publishing program; 2. To compile a record that demonstrates that I am capable of doing a good job of teaching while carrying out a productive research/publishing program. I feel good about what I've accomplished. I'm proud of what I've accomplished. My teaching is going well; my publishing is going well—I had no idea that my publishing would ever go as well as it has; but my job search is not going well. And I am bummed.

Last fall, someone asked me in comments how I can continue to muster the energy to keep applying for jobs year after year. I didn't answer at the time because I wasn't sure. How do I keep this up? It's hard to say. One important factor is that my family is very supportive—Mrs. Zero is behind me all the way, as are my parents and my siblings and what subset of my extended family has a clear idea of what's going on. My friends, both in and out of the profession, and particularly my colleagues here in my department, are supportive, too.

The other thing that keeps me going is that I really do believe in what I'm doing. I feel like I'm doing good work. I like teaching and I believe in my classes. I like writing papers, and I believe in the papers I write, and I am able to place them in good journals. I have compiled a record that I am proud of in the time I've been here. I believe in my record. I believe that my record proves that I can do this job. But my job search is not going well.

In years past I have been able to shrug it off and channel the disappointment into an effort to do better next year. This is the first year I've been genuinely discouraged. I'm not sure what else I can do. I realize that, at a certain point, I just have to get lucky. There are a lot of us—a lot of people who look good on paper. Good enough to interview, and good enough to hire. In order to get the job, you have to look good in all the right ways, and be one who happens to connect in all the right ways. And it's frustrating, because there's not much you can do to make yourself get lucky.

So, I wouldn't say that I'm ready to throw in the towel or anything like that. But I thought about it this year more seriously than I usually do. And I find myself muttering curse words under my breath pretty often.

So, that's what's going on with me. How are you?

--Mr. Zero

P.S. God damn it.

Maybe this has been around before--it seems vaguely familiar. But anyways, I saw this here a couple of days ago and was inspired.



--Mr. Zero

An anonymous commenter (whose comment I can't find right now*) asks about what campus visits for post-docs are like. There were a couple of replies in that thread, but nothing like the sort of lively discussion for which we are known far and wide. So I thought I'd go ahead and post a real post about the question.

There are, of course, (at least) two different kinds of post doctoral fellowship: your teaching post-doc, and your research post-doc, and the two kinds are likely to have different kinds of campus visit. But I don't know about this, since I've never been invited to campus to interview for a post-doc.

What say you, Smokers?

--Mr. Zero

*This was a little while ago, and it was posted in a thread that was mostly over. I meant to post a post about it at the time, but things got away from me. Then the person came back and asked to have a main post about it, and I meant to post about it then, but things got away from me again. Sorry. I hope this isn't too late to be helpful to that person.

As campus-visit season gets into full swing and decision-making season is about to begin, I'd like to offer a small piece of advice to search committees.

We job candidates know when you interview us that you might not invite us to campus. We know when you invite us to campus that you might not offer us the job. That's fine. You don't have to invite us to campus if you interview us, and you don't have to offer us the job if you invite us to campus. We'd love it if you did, obviously, but we know you don't have to. We know you don't owe us a job.

But that doesn't mean you don't owe us anything. What you owe to us is a nice note that thanks us for our time and wishes us well. You owe it to us to communicate with us one last time after the interview or campus visit. You owe it to us to let us know, from you, that we didn't get the job. You owe it to us even if we already found out, or will eventually.

Because the people you interview are people. And they traveled to Washington, DC to meet with you; or else they took the time to get together with you over Skype or on the phone; they invested time and energy into preparing for the interview, researching your school, your department, and their potential colleagues; maybe they even traveled to your town to meet with you and your colleagues and your administration and attempt to win you over with a presentation or two. And they did this because you invited them to do it—because you contacted them and said you wanted to interview them. Because you expressed to them that you were interested in them. And that goes quadruple for the people you invite to campus.

That means you owe something to the people you interview. You owe them courtesy. You don't owe them a job, but you owe them thanks for doing those things, which they did at your request and invitation. And then you owe it to them to wish them well.

--Mr. Zero

You probably already heard about this, but the APA has agreed to try moving the Eastern APA meeting to the end of the first full week in January for the 2015/16 academic year. I think this is good news, whether or not it ultimately works out. It's good to try new things.

One question I have is, what are they going to do for the 2016/17 academic year? Suppose the first full week in January doesn't work out. Suppose that's a really bad time to have the meeting. Since Eastern APA meetings have to be scheduled years in advance, does that mean we'll be stuck with the early January meeting time until 2018 or 2019? Or are they going to try a range of dates over the next several years? I think they should try a range of dates.

In a related note, our old friend Chris Alen Sula sent me an email last night, saying,

You may have seen the recent APA announcement about the Eastern APA date effective 2015/16. When I looked at the crosstab results at http://www.apaonline.org/APAOnline/Eastern_Division/Eastern_Division_Meeting_Survey_Results.aspx, I noticed there was also data about the question of whether in-person interviews should be a primary function of the Eastern APA meeting, with responses broken out between regular, student, and international members. With that question, more than all the others, I noticed a difference in the pattern of responses among these three groups.

I re-expressed the values as percentages for each group and visualized them [in the chart below]:

This is interesting. It seems that a lot of people don't care whether job interviews are a primary function of the Eastern meeting, but you are significantly more likely to think job interviews should be a primary function if you're not a student. Hmmm.

Many thanks to Dr. Sula.

--Mr. Zero

Anon 4:12 requested a thread on fly-out advice. Fine idea, as some of you are no doubt preparing for them. The campus visit is a strange beast, a two-day (more or less) gauntlet of job interviews and social calls, with some harrowing, high pressure philosophy thrown in. You'll meet with various deans, and lots of faculty, and students. You'll be continuously shuttled from one thing to the next, with very little down time in between. You'll be dined (not often wined -- many university budgets don't permit putting alcohol on the tab) more often than you can bear. The worst of the meals is breakfast -- to my mind, if you want to know what kind of colleague someone might be, don't evaluate them before they've had caffeine. (Advice: if your hotel room has a coffee maker, use it, even if it makes lousy coffee, just for the medicinal benefits.) You might give a talk, you might be asked to do a teaching demo. Or both.

I spent some time at the APA meeting thinking about whether I would have been enjoying myself if I had been there without any interviews. I continue to think that going to the E-APA without interviews is a waste of time and money, but some people disagreed. Some of these people said that you should go because going will cause you learn to deal with rejection; or else not going means you can't deal with rejection, and if you can't deal with rejection you're some kind of weakling who doesn't belong in this line of work. Or something. I continue to think that, whatever my problem is, it's not that I'm a weakling or that I otherwise can't deal with rejection. I think that anon 12:11 got it exactly right:

Those who are framing the issue in terms of "dealing with rejection" are completely missing the point.

If I send out 100 applications, get 99 PFOs, and 1 job; then I would be ecstatic. As a job market candidate, what I'm most concerned about is not avoiding or minimizing rejection; rather, I'm most concerned about securing the opportunity to do professionally the teaching and research I've been trained to do for the past ten years of my life. That's completely different from the experience of having a paper rejected.

There are candidates who had the misfortune of going on the market for the first time back when things blew up in 2008. These are people who know how to persevere. Every year they publish or otherwise further their research; they design and teach new courses to improve their teaching portfolios; they apply for jobs; sometimes they get interviews, sometimes they don't. These are people who are used to getting knocked down, and they know how to get back up. Telling those candidates that they "need to learn how to deal with rejection" is incredibly fucked-up and condescending.

This resonated with me because I've been on the market since before things blew up in '08. I've consequently been rejected hundreds of times. Almost all the jobs I've ever applied for have declined to interview me; almost all the search committees who did interview me took a pass. Including all the tenure-track ones. In that time I've had a lot of chances to really hone my skills. I don't want to brag, but I have gotten to be a pretty awesome rejection-dealer. I go out every year, get no offers, and I'm ready to try again next time. Dealing with rejection is not my problem.*

And so I feel qualified to say that one thing that I really do find helpful in dealing with rejection is this: don't make things harder on yourself than they need to be. Don't make rejection harder to deal with than it already is. If staying away from the APA makes it easier (or possible) for you to be ready to attack the market again in the spring, then you should stay away without feeling like the desire to do so is evidence of some character flaw. Do whatever you need to do.

Of course, maybe staying away from the APA doesn't help you. Maybe you get energized by the fog of misery, stress, and failure. Maybe it just doesn't matter to you. That's possible. And if that describes you, by all means feel free to ignore my advice. Do what you want. But I find the APA-with-no-interview experience to be intensely miserable, and I don't see the point in putting yourself through an intensely miserable experience just to prove that you can handle it.

--Mr. Zero

*The rejections themselves are.

I've got a lot on my plate this week, so I won't have much time to post any of my own interesting thoughts until after some of these Bowl games are over. But I wanted to register my agreement with the observations of anonymous 1:50, who writes:

I assume there will be a post game thread [indeed], but in the spirit of thread hijacking and impatience, I was curious about trends those on the market for several years noticed. It seemed to me that slightly fewer schools did APA interviews, and even even fewer participated in the smoker. (Both nights it seemed like there were very few candidates at tables)

But it was hard for me to get a handle on overall numbers, especially because I didn't have any comparison class.

Thoughts?

It did seem to me that there were fewer departments interviewing at the conference this year; the ballroom seemed pretty sparsely populated, at least in comparison to past years. And it also seemed to me that there were a lot fewer departments with tables at the Smoker--and that several of the departments who did have tables were not interviewing. Additionally, it seemed to me that there were comparatively more applicants using the placement service than two years ago (which is the most recent year I know anything about, since I skipped Boston last year). I'm not sure what to make of this last thing.

Also, I wanted to express my gratitude to the Smokers who left suggestions in the "Things to Do" thread. I was able to put together a pretty nice sightseeing day on the basis of your suggestions. Thanks!

--Mr. Zero