How important is it for those of us who are Classicists in something of the traditional mold to come from an elite undergraduate institution?
I have never heard of anyone giving a shit about this. In my experience, people care about where you got your graduate training and have no interest in anything before that.
On the other hand, I would be naive to think that there weren't people out there to whom this matters. And I would love to hear their rationales, because they would be hilarious.
What if your BA sits at a near Bob Jones level of pure, unadulterated insanity?
I worry that search committees will think I'm some sort of fanatic just because I was indeed one when I was applying to college at the ripe old age of 17.
That's not a question that comes up very often. It's not just a matter of coming from a not particularly distinguished institution but of coming from one that's got some young Earth creationism in the science departments?
Yes, that will probably raise some eyebrows. And you can sort of see why people might think twice about hiring into a faculty position someone who has pursued training at an institution that is specifically anti-intellectual in its orientation.
Maybe it won't be much of a limitation. Hard to see how it helps, though. Well, actually, there may be a few institutions where it would help, but it's possible that you're no longer inclined to work at one of those institutions.
In my experience, the undergraduate institution plays little to no role at all in deciding candidates to interview. We become so identified with our PhD institutions that they are basically tattoos that can never be removed.
"It's not just a matter of coming from a not particularly distinguished institution but of coming from one that's got some young Earth creationism in the science departments?"
Yes. I toy on and off with addressing this outright in my cover letter, but I always decide it's better to just not draw attention to it.
Re the weirdly terrible undergrad institution, Anon 7:30 wrote:
"I toy on and off with addressing this outright in my cover letter, but I always decide it's better to just not draw attention to it."
I tend to think it might be better to address it outright, briefly and succinctly and in a way that makes it clear "I am not a nutjob." Not knowing the details I can't be sure, but if the undergrad. institution in question is well enough known that alarm bells will go off, it's probably wise to let SCs know that you no longer buy into that worldview (whatever it is).
If you do go with the last commenter's advice, you could deal with it in a parenthetical sentence at the end of an appropriate paragraph in the letter or maybe in a very very short penultimate paragraph of its own, saying that you'd gone to a conservative evangelical institution (maybe steer away from the term "fundamentalist" if you can) when you were quite young but that you want to emphasize strongly that at this later point in your life that experience doesn't reflect either your views of how education should work or your attitude towards intellectual inquiry. It wouldn't have to be a whole song and dance; you'd just be quickly clarifying that you were feeling a little more comfortable with the Enlightenment these days than when you were younger.
I hope this works out alright; it would be a real shame if this hurts you.
Your doctoral institution trumps all. Though it doesn't carry nearly the same weight it did several decades ago, I can think of several scenarios where your undergraduate degree might make a difference.
If you graduated at the top of your class or from HYP, people generally notice, all things equal. In fact, I sometimes wonder if people favor elite undergraduate program + excellent grad program to the other way around.
The most influential scenario, in my opinion, is if you're applying to the same department where you received your bachelors! Look around, just about every department of any significant size is sprinkled with their alums who returned after receiving their doctorate elsewhere. Besides warm fuzzies about a former protege, I suppose the implicit understanding is that the person in question knows the program intimately.
"I think the 5-10 years hopping around is shrinking towards five and less, and I think it will only get better as universities continue to downsize traditional classics."
I'm afraid this is where our fate lies. Yes, the half dozen or so elite departments which demand a classicist in the traditional mould will trade their students back and forth. The rest of us will need to spend most of our time teaching history, archaeology, etc. under the aegis of larger departments with classics programs (if we're lucky to even get that). Banking on a career as a strict classicist will increasingly become a gamble.
I was just at a dinner party and a series of modern historians said we're all fascists. Since I now know most of us can't write cover letters, are we also fascists?
If you received neither interview nor rejection from HC it means that you have been switched into the pool of applicants competing to be D.N.S.'s research assistant. They will be in touch, asking for more materials. Make sure to tailor your letter very, very carefully!
Any reason why all the rejects wouldn't get formally rejected?
Sometimes there's a "maybe" pile. You may be in that. Or maybe they lost your email address or typed it in wrong. Or maybe they're fucking with you. Or maybe you inadvertently put something in your application that offended them and now they're giving you the silent treatment till you apologize to them.
It's the SC version of the "just friends" speech: we don't want to have sex with you, but we don't want you to stop carrying our backpack to school either. Keep your hopes up, maybe things will change. Varium et mutabile semper ...
Wait, does an APA interview typically involve group sex?
Yes, that's right; unless you specifically opted out of an orgy in your cover letter, the committee will be expecting one. This is basic job search etiquette; I'm surprised no one has gone over it with you.
I can't understand why committees (like Holy Cross) say they will keep my application "active". Is there any way Holy Cross offers a T-T job to someone not interviewed at the APA? Would the dean ever approve that? Wouldn't they just let the search fail and borrow some poor grad student from Harvard or Brown as they've done in the past?
I have nothing but compassion for the job candidates. And if there's one thing I'm *not* too busy to spend time on, it's finding a candidate I hope will succeed and become a colleague of mine until I retire.
What I can't comprehend is how our PhD programs are sending candidates out in numbers vastly exceeding jobs, and, to judge from the dossiers, not providing any guidance on how to apply for a job.
what I can't comprehend is how our field tolerates and encourages (even gives tenure!) do-nothing faculty who have no research agenda, no publications, and no attachment to the world as it is today, who snipe from the ivory tower that they covet in a smug way. Want to explain the state of affairs? Look in the mirror.
"what I can't comprehend is how our field tolerates and encourages (even gives tenure!) do-nothing faculty who have no research agenda, no publications, and no attachment to the world as it is today, who snipe from the ivory tower that they covet in a smug way. Want to explain the state of affairs? Look in the mirror."
Well, here's the dirty little secret to which some of you have alluded and very few outside academia know - being an academic, even a tenured one, in the 21st century is a shitty job and it's only getting worse. Decades ago, it was a incredibly rewarding job at most places and at least a good one at the rest. It commanded respect and you actually had a budget in the humanities that almost certainly gets funneled now to professional and pre-professional programs. This golden age peaked around 1970 when newly minted PhDs routinely received half a dozen offers. Now even jobs at the best places can be shitty at times and working at a place like HC is almost guaranteed to be a 24/7 shitfest. Being on a search committee and chairing one is one of the last vestiges of the old ways when faculty reigned over their domain and administrators were supportive PhDs and not dubious MBAs. Do you wonder now why disgruntled and beaten down SC members lord it over candidates? After receiving shit all year long, it's the one chance to be on the giving end. I don't condone this, but it is what it is.
Take it for what it is depending on your tolerance level, which I imagine is quite high for most of you. Once your future colleagues are back in the trenches with you by their side, they won't be nearly as insufferable as when they were chair of the SC.
If anyone else has an interview for Colby College, would you mind indicating that on the wiki (x2 vel sim)? I congratulate whoever got one, but I am a bit dubious about anything magically appearing via the Placement Service. I'm just wondering whether to cross this one off this list or wait and see.
Does anyone know anything about the search at Indiana University Bloomington? Does the fact that only Roman archaeologists seem to be reporting interviews mean that they haven't made that determination for us Hellenists yet? Or am I being unreasonably hopeful?
If the wiki says that a sc has issued notifications and you have not received one (and it's not in your spam folder), then the overwhelming odds are that you are not on the list. Sorry.
So I have to ask - who cares so much about the addition of an extra number next to the rejections on the wiki that they feel the need to go in and delete them all the time?
I mean, sure, maybe it's not the most useful piece of information, but the swooping in and deleting them with scorn is getting old.
I'll be honest with you. I deleted the rejection counter this time though not before. I don't know what the other swooper's motive was. Mine is this. I am a neurotically compulsive wiki-checker. I would thus prefer it if we only put actually useful information on it. Counters for rejection-recipients, especially when the rejection states outright how many applications were received, is not useful. And it compounds my neurosis when a useless change is made! As a fellow rejectee I certainly did not intend any scorn and I apologize if scorn was detected.
Now, this is funny. The reason I'm irritated is because I'm also a compulsive wiki-checker, and the only thing worse than an update containing just an addition to a rejection counter is another update deleting it.
I'm pretty sure people who aren't you and me barely ever look at the comments in the history anyway. I doubt you're preventing any future edits by deleting them. Maybe a jeer would work better.
What I can't comprehend is how our PhD programs are sending candidates out in numbers vastly exceeding jobs, and, to judge from the dossiers, not providing any guidance on how to apply for a job.
This isn't put very helpfully, but it does seem to be true that some people may not get (or accept) as much help with applications as they could. Descriptions of dissertations, in letters and abstracts, can be a real problem area. And when it comes to the interviews, some candidates are inevitably blindsided by very predictable questions: "What is the next thing you want to work on? What books would you order for that class you say you want to teach? Do you have any questions for us?"
I assume—actually, I know—that in some cases this is a matter of applicants refusing help and/or not having their act together, but I also think there's a real diversity from institution to institution in the kind of help that job candidates can count on.
Since nobody else has said this yet, I will. The guy that has pissed off so very many of you with his scathing criticism of your application letters would clearly NOT be able to get a job in the current market. 95% of us are demonstrably better at EVERYTHING related to the job than he is. So when he sees all that you have done in 1/10th of the time he has spent doing (apparently) nothing, he has a right to be angry and try to come up with all sorts of insults. It's the only reasonable thing to do.
I do appreciate his subsequent claim to have nothing but sympathy (or whatever it was) for the candidates he just flamed so roundly. Guess that's what passed for kindness a few decades ago.
In response to some of the discussion going on above:
If you guys are truly able to entertain, however briefly, the possibility that faculty at grad programs care even a tiny, tiny bit about their PhDs, you must have had a very different grad school experience than mine.
No mentoring happens because the faculty give nary a fuck.
you must have had a very different grad school experience than mine
Yes, I was getting at something like that when I said that "I think there's a real diversity from institution to institution in the kind of help that job candidates can count on."
Did you have people offering to read your cover letter, CV, abstracts, teaching statements, writing sample, etc.? Did you have mock interviews? Designated placement coordinators on the faculty? Mock job talks? Some places do these things as a matter of course, but I'm gathering that maybe not all of them do?
I do also want to add that departments that help with placement need not be regarded as doing so purely out of the goodness of their hearts. A good placement record means a more attractive grad program.
I think the faculty at my grad program have mostly ceased to care about the ranking of the program, too. That or they think it can just rest on its laurels forever.
I'm the one who initially deleted the number of rejections people had received for certain jobs (primarily for Georgetown, for some reason). For what it's worth, I do not consider myself a compulsive wiki-checker (three times a day these days, though in previous weeks I'd sometimes avoid FV/wiki for 2+ days; and these days, it's mainly an effective method of procrastination rather than a compulsion to see if some place I applied to has emerged from its conclave).
Where I'm coming from is: we've NEVER tracked rejections before, and it's simply a stupid thing to keep track of (although in the case of Holy Cross someone made a joke out of it, which should remain for its entertainment value). As we've learned in the past 24 hours, for one program they had 200 applications -- do we really want 200 minus roughly a dozen updates by people who got rejected? No, of course not.
In contrast to finding out how many people actually got interviews, tracking the number of rejections for jobs is a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to do. And not only that, but as was rightly pointed out it creates the illusion of legitimate updates when one checks the wiki's history.
For this reason, I'm going to keep engaging in vigilante justice, if people keep doing this stupid, stupid, stupid thing.
You're welcome, America (and anglospheric foreigners).
I actually had a very positive experience with assistance for the job market from my advisor and others. I reached out to a number of people, not just from my institution (key to getting diverse opinions I believe), to read and comment on my cover letter, teaching phil, research statement, etc before the market got busy (around August). Most of these documents were vetted several times. I ended up landing a TT position last year so maybe(??) it helped. Don't hesitate to ask for readers on these things as many times as you think it could be improved!
Did any of you, while considering whether and where do go to graduate school, bother to ask anyone, "By the way, do the graduate faculty give a fuck?" Did you talk to current and former students? Did you ask your undergrad professors about the reputations (as human beings) of the faculty?
I knew graduate faculty didn't give a fuck. My undergraduate mentors told me that grad faculty were never going to give a fuck, and that I had to adapt myself to that.
What I didn't know was that market conditions were going to change while I was in grad school such that them not giving a fuck was going to make it not just difficult but damn near impossible for me to get a job.
Well, there are the obvious dysfunctional departments filled with sabretooths, but have you thought that departments, especially smaller ones, have had major turnover in faculty. From my experience, it takes just one shithead to ruin the entire culture of a department and it's asking a lot for faculty to know the precise zeitgeist of every department in any given year.
Short version - shit happens and it usually has two long fangs.
I left grad school nearly 20 years ago. Since then, well over half the faculty who were in my grad. dept. when I was there have retired or died. I can tell my undergrads about the "human characteristics" of those who are still there (and by the way, my graduate professors were generally kind, helpful, and interested in my progress, and the dept. gave practice interviews and advice on letter-writing), but I can't tell them anything about what it would be like to work with those who have been hired in the intervening years. I don't know those people. And my impressions of the ones I DO know are nearly 20 years out of date, and therefore probably not very helpful.
We can give many forms of advice to our undergraduates (first and foremost, DON'T GO TO GRAD SCHOOL IN CLASSICS unless you're independently wealthy and don't need a job at the end of your program), but providing the low-down on what Professor X in program Y is like to work with is usually outside our purview.
My undergraduate mentors told me that grad faculty were never going to give a fuck, and that I had to adapt myself to that.
Well then, unless they were talking about a specific program you were already set on going to, your undergraduate mentors fucked you out of the opportunity to look for a place where faculty did give a fuck.
A friend pointed out to me the discussion here of my blog posting "Advice to new PhDs: how to avoid those unwanted interviews."
I posted that on a personal site that has no connection to the College of the Holy Cross. I intended the satire to be broad enough that no one would be tempted to read him or herself, mistakenly, into the post. (I've never actually read a CV that listed "ordered pizza for grad student lecture series," for example.)
To any who found the post in poor taste or offensive, I apologize. I am not on this wiki anonymously: this is my real (personal, not work) email. I welcome any response on my blog site or via email, but would ask that no one misunderstand a personal post as representing my college or department: I did that, in every sense, as an ἰδιώτης.
To judge from the wiki I have more interviews lined up than most, so clearly having faculty mentors who give any fucks at all is not a sine qua non.
But we're still none of us getting jobs.
Think about this for a second: the person with the largest number of interviews currently has *five*. Places are typically interviewing 12 or more candidates, so even that person doesn't have great odds of landing something.
but would ask that no one misunderstand a personal post as representing my college or department:
brave of DNS to post here but, excuse me, you mentioned your department's job process and your role in it (and scorn for it, satire or not). How does the APA feel about this, ethically? If you, as a tenured associate-level faculty person are supposed to provide some kind of guidance for up-and-comers, there is not much hope.
Because my department is currently conducting a search, I have recently surveyed essentially the entire pool of job applicants in Classics, a
and
When I tried to compile a short list of roughly 5% of our applicants for interviews, I was unable to do so. Rephrasing that in positive terms, more than 95% of the candidates successfully avoided an interview based solely on my first fairly cursory reading of their dossier.
You are not a private person when you represent your role in an institutional process. It does not matter under which url you post it. You screwed up, buddy. Admit it.
oh, and nice job sending out those robo-rejections that were not tailored to us candidates.
your blog does have a connection to Holy Cross - you link your own homepage and you mention your faculty role in your Blogger profile. This is evidence of a connection between the two.
Think about this for a second: the person with the largest number of interviews currently has *five*. Places are typically interviewing 12 or more candidates, so even that person doesn't have great odds of landing something.
Please keep in mind that the large majority of job seekers do not participate in the wiki. There are only 66 total interviews reported on the wiki at the moment, which is only a fraction of the actual number of interview invitations that have been issued.
In the halcyon days pre 2008 it was not unheard of for one or two candidates to amass 20+ interviews at the APA. Those lucky enough to get that many weren't really special eis ipsis in comparison to the others, I don't think. I myself once got 15 interviews that didn't lead to a single campus visit. But what I think causes the cluster-effect is that certain candidates generate buzz among the committees. SCs members often compare notes and often the opinion one person states quite authoritatively becomes the firm opinion of his or her friend, and thus, presto! you end up with clustering. Don't give up hope if you only have one (or none still). And don't get too cocky if you have a lot. You still have a long way to go.
Yeah. I'm thinking of getting out of Classics mostly because I can't seem to endure the stress of this whole process. I feel like I'm dying almost year round.
I'd make shit money delivering pizzas or some such, but at least I could live my life.
I'd make shit money delivering pizzas or some such, but at least I could live my life.
My sentiments are similar - after many years of the visiting circuit, this gets pretty stale. and increasingly unforgiving. the smart but clueless faculty in my R1 grad program knew little of this experience b/c their world was different from ours.
A question for people with SC experience: does it ever happen that a candidate with many pubs is turned down as too "research-y", and their publication record becomes a liability rather than a strength? (let's assume that the papers are good and the journals are respectable). Any stories in which applicant were hurt by their publications would be appreciated.
The short answer is yes, of course that happens, and probably more often than anyone in the field would readily care to admit. But if you have the kind of stellar publication record that you suggest and you are not getting any interviews then there is something else going on as well, because there are just as many SCs looking specifically for candidates with records such as yours.
This is a lot to assume even in a hypothetical. As you know just from doing research, different people will regard different papers as good or bad for different reasons. And if an individual committee member or committee doesn't like your way of going about things, having lots of papers in which you go about things in the way you do isn't going to bring them around. And one article that a committee really likes is worth an infinite number of articles that they're indifferent to. (This assumes that we're talking about a committee that actually reads the files; if they don't, then volume can count for a lot.)
does it ever happen that a candidate with many pubs is turned down as too "research-y", and their publication record becomes a liability rather than a strength?
Just thinking back to search committee members posting here in years past, I recall people practically having hernias when applicants for temporary positions made any sort of reference in their letters to any kind of research program.
Also, there's a residual "hot shit" aversion. Places that think a candidate can only be happy in a research institution with a graduate program won't be interested. This is maybe one of the few prejudices that disadvantage people from the traditional high profile departments, and it doesn't make a lot of sense in the current environment (why be afraid they'll bolt when there's no place to go?). But old habits die hard.
I find the attitudes of a certain SC member (which are probably more representative than anyone from candidate to chair would like to admit) obnoxious.
But the constant histrionics about how hard it is to get a job are so useless. I would rather put Ipse the SC Asshole on every committee in the country than read one more "Woe, my grad faculty doesn't care!" or "That's it! I'm going to be a plumber!" post.
Tenured faculty have it good (very good), no matter how many untailored cover letters they read, but at least when they reveal their asshattery it's instructive.
Candidates have a choice. I know it's a shit show; I've had one TT interview in 5 years on the market, but hearing you bitch got old 5 years ago. Join a group somewhere for Christ's sake.
Don't get me wrong. I love the bitching, moaning, and steaming. I have improved my application by watching it closely. But the "Job search is hard/What did you expect?" conversations are inane.
Also, this very conversation is turning into another type of inanity: "There are inane posts here," so I'm going back to lurking.
But since I'm still here for now: I really don't care if you, personally, are unhappy, no matter whether you're a grad student, a candidate, a VAP, an Ass P. (either kind) or a P. So please, when you bitch, make it instructive. Even though he's the epitome of all that's wrong with our field (and more), Ipse the SC Asshole taught us (or reaffirmed what we knew) about the shit show.
Ipse the SC Asshole taught us (or reaffirmed what we knew) about the shit show.
Noooooooo! This is anecdotal! Being on a search is a position of power. Different people will react to this differently. Most people will react to it normally. Some will seize it as an opportunity to satisfy certain psychological needs.
That's what I mean. Some people are assholes (which most of us knew already). When they're on a committee, they're still assholes (we knew that already, too). This time, the trigger was untailored letters, but it's only a matter of time before an enraged SC member composes a blog about all those offensive tailored letters ("stop being such ass kissers!" vel sim.).
You have options: You can continue to work on your profile and apply to jobs, hoping that either A) a committee will be impressed, and you get an interview or B) you won't trigger any assholes' hot buttons, and you'll get an interview. (Probably some combination of A and B will be necessary).
Alternatively, you can quit.
Either way, "I'm sad" posts are tiresome.
This time, I'm really going back to lurking. I mean it.
To the person who said they've only had one TT interview in 5 years on the market: I think this is well past the point when getting out of academia should be the order of the day.
Is this one APA interview or one flyback? One flyback in five years is not great, especially if you're applying very selectively due to some unknown constraint, but it's not unheard of.
Give up just because I don't get TT interviews? I improve my CV every year, regardless of how many interviews I get. I have been around long enough to see people leave, without having published, positions for which I was not interviewed. In the meantime, I have published while teaching more than most (odds are more than everybody who's TT--absolutely more than anybody who's tenured). I think that, eventually, one TT search committee out there will have its head sufficiently out of its ass to make a good decision.
"I have published while teaching more than most (odds are more than everybody who's TT--absolutely more than anybody who's tenured)."
Just a point of clarification about teaching expectations -- in my SLAC, and every SLAC whose faculty I've ever talked to, tenure does NOT bring a teaching reduction with it. What it does bring is an enormous leap upward in "service" (committees, mentoring of junior faculty, etc.). My stress level went way UP after tenure because the demands of my time also went way up.
This is not meant in any way to detract from 1:40's point about how s/he's teaching much more than the tenurable. I'm sure that's true. But I did want to dispute the assumption that tenure automatically brings a lighter load. Maybe at a R1 university -- but not here.
What tenure DOES bring is the ability to stand up for yourself (and hopefully nontenured others) in impossible situations once in a while without fear of losing your job. Also, one doesn't need to publish quite so often.
Point well taken, 1:59. If I ever manage a TT position, my teaching load will go down from what I find myself doing now; if it stays at that new, lower, load when I get tenure, I'll make do. I have seen some SLAC's where the permanent faculty are contracted for 4-4's (though don't some SLAC's give releases, too? Have you never had one?). And frankly, I don't mind teaching a heavy load. Research suffers, but if I didn't like teaching, I would have given up on the job search after the first year in which I didn't get any interviews. That's why it stings to see ABDs get interviews at SLACs when I have a list of 'courses taught' that stretches out the door. I thought being an experienced teacher would help me as I went forward; then I read Ipse SC Asshole's blog. Still, you live, you learn.
2:34, I know only too well what you're going through (I'm 1:59, btw)--I did several years of adjuncting and VAPing, and I published a LOT. Finally I did land a TT, so it can be done, but I remember only too well the pain of being passed over for wet-behind-the-ears ABDs, when as you say my "courses taught" list included over 30 different courses and my publications were much more numerous than those of the SCs rejecting me. All I can say to you, I guess, is that the TT can happen.
You're right that some SLACs give course releases, though by no means always -- here we don't even get a course release for being Dept. Chair (no extra stipend, either. Funds are short.) There are a couple of fiendishly time-consuming committees that do bring course releases, but I've never heard of anyone getting a course release (as distinct from a sabbatical) for research.
I, as one of those wet-behind-the ears ABDs, am curious about the posters I see on this site.
Why do you tenured or tenure-track folk even come here? Don't get me wrong! I like it that you do. I'm just surprised that FV isn't populated by a bunch of grad-students and floating lecturers.
What benefits do you get from reading and posting here? Do you wish you'd had anonymous senior colleagues show up and give you advice, or comments, like this?
Again, this isn't a hostile question, at all. I'm just curious.
Hey, everyone! We can all relax! The APA's Board of Directors has approved a larger budget for hors d'oeurves and snacks at the Presidential Reception in Seattle!
Seriously, did that e-mail make anyone else want to laugh, weep, and punch people at the same time?
Salve, Quirites. Pssst. Cinna the Poet here. Some of you may remember me such classics as "Caesar's Funeral!" and "I'm the *Other* Cinna!" and from right here, a few years back (hint: "in Bocca al Lupo, Quirites"—yeah, that was mine).
I—a tenured (by the way: no, you never start feeling competent) professor at an R1, livin' the dream—am going to stay out of the job search advice racket this time, save one (1) very important and take this very seriously right now piece of advice:
Remove all traces of your identity from all social media that is not absolutely—and I mean *absolutely*—private. If you are on Facebook, make yourself unsearchable, have your privacy settings set as high as possible, and untag yourself from any photos others have posted of you. If you Tweet, make sure you "protect your Tweets," or don't use your name, and don't use a photo of yourself. Blog? Protect your blog. If you have a particularly identifiable writing style, consider being cautious about posting, even anonymously, on *any* site.
You're a Libertarian? A Brony? A Furry? An MMA fanatic? And avid skateboarder? A devotee of the erstwhile Snoop Dogg? Fine. All fine and good. Your private life is your own, and all of your quirks will likely happily tolerated, if not downright loved, by your future colleagues (who, even more likely, won't even care). But for now, do this:
Perform an auto-damnatio memoriae in terms of social media. And do it now. Pencils have erasers for a reason.
Cinna again. Super glad I didn't use the second person plural "salvete" while addressing a group of individuals. See, that was me trying to hide how well I actually know Latin, in order to throw you all off the trail. You probably think I'm a Hellenist now. JUST AS I HAD PLANNED.
In re: the Presidential Reception budget. Possibly the APA people figured out that the Presidential Reception had become a shameful ghost town over the past 3 years, and are trying to get people to start coming to it again?
With all respect: Not drunk! Just writing hastily and surreptitiously whilst my students were taking their final exam and I was pretending to read the NYT.*
*I was actually also reading the NYT, but didn't want my students to see me also posting here when they turned in their exams.
I'm on the tenure track, but looking to move. What should be on my faculty page, and do SCs pay attention to Ratemyprofessors? I have a bunch of chili peppers, but some dissatisfied customers. What can I do?
I can't imagine that a member of a SC would search "Ratemyprofessors" or take it very seriously, but I really don't know. I'd advise you not sweating this, as you can't edit it.
Make your page as professional as you are, and you are solid.
Cinna, you suggest that social media is inherently a problem. Do you (and other people) think this is true even if one's social media contains nothing of which one might be ashamed (since one's life is actually quite boring)? Might a SC fault me for simply *having* Facebook, even if there are no photos of me smoking crack and fucking kittens to be had?
Am I right to fear an eventual robot rebellion? And in the event that the robots prevail, do you view it as more likely that they will enslave humanity, or simply exterminate us?
Do you pay any attention to the pedigree of an applicant, or do you look strictly at what they've taught, what they've published, and what sort of future prospects they have?
In other words, should I have followed my ex-husband to Cambridge, or did I make the right choice in choosing to enjoy sex great years with a Cuban cabana boy in Gainesville?
How do I know that you're not already monitoring every profile on Facebook that shares my name, just to see which one suddenly goes private now?
It's a little fishy, after all, I have it on good authority that SC members are too busy reading untailored cover letters to even eat, much less browse the World Wide Web.
1. When the robot rebellion occurs, all humanity will be exterminated, as we have proven ourselves fairly useless as slaves. It is best not to sweat this one, as there is nothing any of us can do about it.
2. Always choose cabana boys. Also: although I cannot speak for all SCs (and do not pretend to speak for any of them), in my opinion one's professional experience (past teaching and publication) as well as one's likely trajectory (future publication and teaching) matter more than where one earned one's PhD. Once you are hired, it is the least important thing about you.
3. I doubt that any faculty person would have so much time on Facebook as to constantly monitor every person named Eduard Fraenkel. I am of the personal opinion that any such monitoring is an utter waste of time better spend with cabana boys and a borderline infringement upon privacy. However, chitchat around the figurative water cooler is that such is done—probably once an interview list is agreed upon, possibly when the fly-out list is made—so better safe than sorry. I'd reckon, were I the reckoning type (which I reckon I am) that such activity is not the official policy of any department, but rather the sort of thing that occasionally happens, as things occasionally do.
No, when encountering what is unlikely a superior form of intelligence, it is best to try to fly under the radar even as, of course, you alert The Others (I refer neither to the television series LOST nor to the constitutive sense of the term). Texting surreptitiously under the table can work well, as long as you don't start laughing at your crotch.
—Cinna
postscriptum: this is also good advice for the job market.
Does anyone know anything about the Melbourne job? I thought decisions were made pretty fast in that part of the world. And why on earth did they not fill this position last year?
If you could go back in time and talk to you 21 year old self, would you encourage him/her to go to grad school in Classics? If so, what would you advise him/her to do differently. If not, why?
What are we to make of these interview notifications we get only through the APA Placement Service? Are they mere flukes (do we really have these interviews at all?), or are these search committees simply disinclined to send e-mail?
1) I think cloning Neanderthals would be a pretty cool thing, should one be interested in writing a dystopian science fiction novel in which humans create what is effectively a slave-race of non-humans who have no rights beyond those possessed by domesticated animals and yet are pretty much capable of most of the tasks we require of homo sapiens blue-collar workers and so-called "illegal aliens." In the end, of course, the Neanderthals revolt, and the homines sapientes are crushed, as that's how such stories end, unless you are talking the real world (cf. Spartacus), in which we all get to cheer and weep for the noble savage.
2) Lord Jeff: I would tell my 21 year old self to do exactly what I have done. I would also hope that my 21 year old self would again experience all of the wonderful teachers, amazing mentors, and incredible luck I did. I'm tenured, in a fantastic department, brilliant graduate students and (mainly) amazing undergrads, ridiculously overworked and underpaid and loving it all. It can and does happen. I think I did some things right, but a lot of this was luck.
3) "What are we to make of these interview notifications we get only through the APA Placement Service? Are they mere flukes (do we really have these interviews at all?), or are these search committees simply disinclined to send e-mail?"
—di immortales, I have no clue! I should hope that SCs actually send such notifications to the applications as well as to the Placement Service. In such a case, I think it would be acceptable to write a polite and brief email to the head of the SC asking if the interview is indeed intended.
1). If Cinna (or I) had been 21 in 2002 instead of at an earlier point, the wisdom of graduate education in Classics might look somewhat different in retrospect. The jobs I got in the first half of the 2000s would probably be out of reach now. They were barely within reach then, and if I did not have my current job I don't know if I'd want to be in the profession.
2). The workings of the placement service are not any more transparent or understandable to senior faculty than to anyone else. I would assume that the notifications you got are correct. You were probably not contacted by the department because at least half of the Classics community is somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum and it may not have occurred to them to contact you personally.
I have recently learned that the fingerprints of the koala bear are indistinguishable from those of a human being. Is this something that we as a society should be concerned about, and is it possible that some unsolved cases could benefit from reexamination in light of this information?
I pay a koala (with eucalyptus leaves) to teach my classes; his razor sharp claws are an excellent motivational tool. Luckily students are too oblivious to notice the difference, but if your comment attracts too much attention there could be an investigation. His dapper hat and miniature suit may not hold up to intense scrutiny. Also, he doesn't know the supine.
Oh yeah. Koalas are dead fucking sexy, especially whilst wearing dapper hats and talking about participles.
One time my koala and I went to this black-tie koala theme party (the theme was "gerundives"). Let's just say there were orgies aplenty, and not in the ancient sense of the word.
That's right, plural (!) orgies. Discrete (but not necessarily discreet) events subsumed under a larger event, which was in turn characterized by numerous dapper koalas making various permutations on nunc est irrumandum jokes...
When I find out that you are interviewing me through the Placement Service website, I automatically think you are pretty fucking lame. How hard is it to send a personal email? Most other institutions do this, so this is not an unreasonable expectation. Hell, I've even gotten phone calls from SC chairs requesting an interview. Please, at least show some initiative, and show some class.
The Placement Service website may be impersonal, but at least it's better than the system in place in the Bad Old Days when none of us knew if we had any interviews at all until we got to the APA. Then we stood in a dismal line, filing up one-by-one to the desk where the Placement Service functionary handed us an envelope -- and in that envelope were the requests for interviews, with times and places specified only at that point. Phone calls from SCs beforehand were unheard of. Among its other fiendish aspects, this system meant if you'd applied for anything at all you HAD to pony up to attend the APA, but you could quite possibly get there only to learn that you had no interviews.
And of course, if you did NOT have an interview, when you got to the head of the line you were told "there's nothing for YOU" and then you had to do the Walk of Shame and Despair past all your peers still waiting in line, as you exited the room trying to look nonchalant. This system--slips in envelopes--was still in place as late as 2002. I'm not sure when it was finally discontinued.
And then, after that opening, we all haunted the blackboard for days afterwards, to see if our number appeared there indicating a late-scheduled interview. Ah, the Blackboard ... We all perfected a certain stride, allowing us to walk past the Blackboard as though we were purposefully on our way somewhere else, and then we'd cut our eyes sideways to see if our number was there ... It fooled no-one, but it was just too painful to walk directly up to the blackboard and stand there, obviously looking for a number that all too clearly wasn't there. After a few years on the job market (and many of us in the late 90s/early 00s did spend several years on the market), that Blackboard began to haunt one's nightmares even months after the conference.
The current system may be inhumane in many ways, but at least the humiliation is no longer carried on in quite so public a fashion.
I remember the envelopes, the walk of shame and the blackboard (actually a whiteboard by then) from 2008. Might have been in place in 2009 & 2010 as well; I had stopped bothering to check by then.
Larger point: I'm not on a search committee, but if I were, I would not want to hire someone so fragile and high-maintenance that they need personal confirmation of an interview at the APA to stop doubting themselves. Just be thankful that you have an interview. How hard is that?
I wonder if the placement service has advised SCs to notify this way (i.e., simply through the placement service calendar)? It seems odd that 4 different institutions now have all opted for this method.
As a member of a search committee interviewing this year at the APA, I can tell you that the Placement Service did not instruct institutions not to contact candidates about interviews. In fact, the Placement Service Guidelines for searches specifically encourages institutions to email candidates with notifications of interviews. I find it extremely odd that some schools failed to notify candidates.
You're being interviewed by Classicists, mainly, guys. And as Classicists yourselves, you have presumably known many Classicists in your time.
Thinking back to the many Classicists you've known, are you really surprised that a few committees are handling the interview scheduling in a way that's socially inept? Honestly, I'm surprised it's only a few places.
Seriously? Who finds an interview scheduled on their APA site and thinks "What a rude committee"? rather than, "Wheeeeee! Another interview! What a lovely surprise!" Rude was when I interviewed with a school and never heard anything from them ever again. Not being notified about an interview is a Christmas present.
P.S: I just checked my internet footprint, which reveals that ratemyprofessor thinks I'm hot and I review lots of exercise tapes on amazon. I suppose the committee will be expecting an elephant with a nice face.
While it is somewhat rude, or at least socially inept, for SCs not to email people with whom they hope to work for the next 30 years, I think the real problem with these magically appearing interviews is that they leave candidates who didn't get them in limbo. With the wiki up and running, you can be fairly confident that if one person was emailed by a SC for an interview, you are out. If the interview just appears on the PS website, you can't know whether another one will appear on your calendar a day or a week later (especially since the PS is none too quick to update the calendars...note that the Colby interviews appeared several days apart), or whether you should give up hope. If you are deciding whether to fly to the conference, days could also be of the essence. Even worse, you're left secretly hoping that it was all just a PS screw-up, and, if you're a good person, feeling mean-spirited for wishing that someone else's interview was a mistake. But most of all, it's good to be humane as much as possible. It's humane for SCs to do their best to put people out of their misery. Maybe their lawyers won't let them reject anyone until April, but they can at least make it absolutely positively clear who is still in the running.
I honestly think that if you're seriously on the job market you should think about going to the APA anyway, even if that means trying to get budget flights as early as possible. I know that some locations are steeper than others (I estimated my bill at $1600 for Seattle, the heftiest yet, but I do have my own room and live in the middle of nowhere = expensive flight). But the APA is not just a venue for interviewing, it's a place for networking, listening to the latest research (or flipping through the latest published), and sounding out publishers. You never know who you're going to meet and get into an interesting conversation with which might help you along the line, not to mentioning renewing old friendships and mentorships. The fact that more and more people seem to see the APA as a "one-time" thing you have to do to get a job(and never darken its door again)continue to baffle me. Plus, free booze! Of course, I actually like a lot of my colleagues and have made a lot of friends over the years, unlike many posters here who seem to consider the APA nothing but a weekend of torture and hell-fire. And many people may have had that experience, but...if this is our discipline, and you don't like participating in its biggest conference, I do wonder what you hope to get out of a lifelong job in it.
I just don't understand why search committees wouldn't send e-mails to candidates they're interviewing. That's what, 12 e-mails on average, the content of which can be copied and pasted from e-mail to e-mail? That takes ten minutes. If nothing else, even if you some sort of weird principled objection to the idea of e-mailing candidates ("In my day, we had to walk uphill both ways to get an interview..." vel sim.), spending ten minutes to send the e-mails should be worth it to avoid contributing to a negative reputation for your department.
Those of us who are grad students make on average probably about $20,000 a year. That $1600 conference bill you just mentioned is 8% of our yearly income.
6.41: I know, I've been there. And I'm lucky enough now that my college picks up that tab. But there was a time in the past that I turned down a job because the pay was so low I couldn't afford to live on it. I've also slept three and four to a room in an effort to keep costs down. The sad reality is, that is where interviewing (and other things) are accomplished, and if you can possibly swing it, you should go.
I'm pretty unforgiving when it comes to SC misbehavior, but this whole, "the SC didn't notify me by the particular method I prefer" complaint is a hard one to get on board with.
If being a Classics professor on a day-to-day basis bore even a passing resemblance to being at the APA, I wouldn't be a Classics professor
Why, do the big boys force your head down a toilet and flush it? It's a conference. You're supposed to learn stuff and talk to people. Don thy big girl panties, go to the bar, and be a colleague. I'll even buy you a drink.
"The issue is that the SC is not notifying candidates at all."
This issue is you're spoiled. As has recently been explained, *any* notification before the conference is a welcome development, and more than candidates have traditionally expected. Either e-mail the Placement service and ask what's going on, withdraw your application from the offending committees, or grow up, buck up, and shut up.
In the meantime, appeal to whatever higher power you imagine exists that those SCs aren't working piecemeal. If they're doing like Hawaii, and notifying a couple candidates here, and a few days later, a couple more, you've fucked yourself.
Ah, yes, the apologists for stupid and socially inept behavior turn out in force this weekend!
"Back in my day we had to deal with saddle sores and wet matches! But now candidates not only expect to travel by car, but for the car to have a roof! The sheer cussedness and mamby-pambiness of these kids is just too much!"
Can anyone confirm whether the Whitman College job has an inside candidate? Their department website (history) lists a 2012 minted Phd (Ohio State) as VAP of Ancient Med. History.
Why, do the big boys force your head down a toilet and flush it? It's a conference. You're supposed to learn stuff and talk to people. Don thy big girl panties, go to the bar, and be a colleague. I'll even buy you a drink.
Huh. Well, no. One of the reasons I don't like it is people like you. Everybody in Classics goes to the APA, including the assholes, and the environment really maximizes opportunities for acting like an insufferable shit. But that's not at all the only reason, so please don't feel too bad. I will take the drink, though, as long as I don't have to listen to you talk.
Greetings to the ever-helpful SC members on this blog - any advice for first-timers at the APA unrelated to the interviews? What should we be doing in our spare time other than beating our heads against the wall of the hotel room?
I have come to learn of one situation where a SC chair was about to write the emails and a family medical thing stepped in and delayed things. Everything will be fine, but the med thing had to be attended to.
I do recommend beating your head against the wall of the hotel room during interviews. Sincerity is always appreciated.
I'm honestly surprised at the quality of the sessions this year. Past years have mostly featured unremarkable stuff. So do go to some while the going is good.
Greetings to the ever-helpful SC members on this blog - any advice for first-timers at the APA unrelated to the interviews? What should we be doing in our spare time other than beating our heads against the wall of the hotel room?
Sleeping. You'll be exhausted and overstimulated and you probably will not be sleeping well at night. So if you can nap during the day, do it. Just don't forget to set an alarm if you have an interview.
Along with going to panels (and asking questions if you have good questions to ask), I'd recommend introducing yourself to people. This can get tricky, and if you're very shy or socially awkward, then you may make the call not to try it. But I'd say, if you see from a name tag that the person standing next to you in an elevator or sitting next to you in a paper session wrote a book that has been crucial for your dissertation, or memorable in some other way, introduce yourself and say so.
DON'T be smarmy or wheedling; just introduce yourself, mention how useful the book (or article) was to you, and see if the conversation goes anywhere. There are, alas, still enough jerks among us that you may be brushed off with a snarl; but on the other hand, you may end up in a genuine conversation with someone working in your same subject, who will then remember your name and possibly even your dissertation topic on down the line.
If this applies to you, getting help is the only way through. I realized far too late that in the kind of market we have now nothing can make up for poor interpersonal skills. So try as hard as you can as often as you can to learn how to pretend to be a normal person, if you can.
There are, alas, still enough jerks among us that you may be brushed off with a snarl
Don't worry about that. Everybody at the APA wants to talk to strangers, but some people just like to test how badly you want to talk to them. If you get a brush-off at first, don't give up! Just keep following them and trying different icebreakers. If they go into their room, just lie down on the floor and keep talking through the crack under the door.
8:50 - Care to say where the interview in the spam filter was from? I've been worried about this, and haven't been as attentive to it as I should be...
if you see from a name tag that the person standing next to you in an elevator or sitting next to you in a paper session wrote a book that has been crucial for your dissertation, or memorable in some other way, introduce yourself and say so.
If anybody pulls this with me, I swear to God, I will tase them and call security.
The letter that went to spam today was from one of the SC members at Buffalo (I can't mention names here, right?). But if you make sure to check your spam filter you should be fine, I would think.
Thank you! I thought that the taser gave it away, though.
Anyway, yes, in general people are happy to hear that you saw some value in something they wrote. This is not a conversation you want to start though if 1). you have not actually read the thing you're talking about or 2). you did not actually like the thing you're talking about or 3). you're reeling drunk.
Seven profs a-blogging, Six drunks a-drinking, Five sabre-tooths grinning, Four cancelled searches, Three of Renie's scoldings, Two EOE surveys, And a critique of my CV
Eight random hook-ups, Seven profs a-blogging, Six drunks a-drinking, Five sabre-tooths grinning, Four cancelled searches, Three of Renie's scoldings, Two EOE surveys, And a critique of my CV
Nine awkward chat-ups, Eight random hook-ups, Seven profs a-blogging, Six drunks a-drinking, Five sabre-tooths grinning, Four cancelled searches, Three of Renie's scoldings, Two EOE surveys, And a critique of my CV
I'm guessing the ship has sailed, there's no way they're taking this long to make any kind of decision. Look for a visiting type or something similar to magically appear in their faculty listings over the next few months.
Anonymous 4:10 PM said... First time APA-goer here. How do all these committees work? Are the meetings open or closed? How does one get on a committee?
Most meetings are closed. Many committee spots are by election, after you're nominated by the Nominating Committee. But some committees are appointed by the president. Watch the newsletter or website for opportunities to say you're interested in committee work, whether by appointment or through an election.
Are any SC members around and willing to comment on the ideal response to the inevitable "describe your dissertation" interview question? Is a general overview followed by a chapter by chapter account too much information?
Keep it to a five minute summary—one sentence summary, quick outlines of chapters, totally OWN IT—and then let them ask for more info if they so choose.
My preference is a bit shorter than Cinna's. Five minutes can be a lot longer than you think, and three's closer to my ideal. Under no circumstances should you exceed five. You can make space by sacrificing detail in the descriptions of the chapters; you don't have to describe them all in equal detail. If the committee want more detail on a particular chapter, they can ask a follow-up.
My main piece of advice is not to start off just by characterizing the subject matter of your dissertation ("My diss is about pants in the Roman world") or the process by which you wrote it ("In my diss, I do a semiotic reading of pants in Roman literature") but to say what your dissertation says that we didn't know before you wrote it. That is, begin with the answers to the questions "What does it show?" and "Why should anybody care?" Then your description of the project can flow from there.
1,279 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 401 – 600 of 1279 Newer› Newest»As someone from a top PhD program with an exceedingly shitty undergraduate degree, I also worry about this and would be interested to hear.
How important is it for those of us who are Classicists in something of the traditional mold to come from an elite undergraduate institution?
I have never heard of anyone giving a shit about this. In my experience, people care about where you got your graduate training and have no interest in anything before that.
On the other hand, I would be naive to think that there weren't people out there to whom this matters. And I would love to hear their rationales, because they would be hilarious.
What if your BA sits at a near Bob Jones level of pure, unadulterated insanity?
I worry that search committees will think I'm some sort of fanatic just because I was indeed one when I was applying to college at the ripe old age of 17.
That's not a question that comes up very often. It's not just a matter of coming from a not particularly distinguished institution but of coming from one that's got some young Earth creationism in the science departments?
Yes, that will probably raise some eyebrows. And you can sort of see why people might think twice about hiring into a faculty position someone who has pursued training at an institution that is specifically anti-intellectual in its orientation.
Maybe it won't be much of a limitation. Hard to see how it helps, though. Well, actually, there may be a few institutions where it would help, but it's possible that you're no longer inclined to work at one of those institutions.
In my experience, the undergraduate institution plays little to no role at all in deciding candidates to interview. We become so identified with our PhD institutions that they are basically tattoos that can never be removed.
"It's not just a matter of coming from a not particularly distinguished institution but of coming from one that's got some young Earth creationism in the science departments?"
Yes. I toy on and off with addressing this outright in my cover letter, but I always decide it's better to just not draw attention to it.
Yes. I toy on and off with addressing this outright in my cover letter, but I always decide it's better to just not draw attention to it.
I think that's better, on the whole. And if it's not as familiar a name as Bob Jones people may not even know what it is, anyway.
Re the weirdly terrible undergrad institution, Anon 7:30 wrote:
"I toy on and off with addressing this outright in my cover letter, but I always decide it's better to just not draw attention to it."
I tend to think it might be better to address it outright, briefly and succinctly and in a way that makes it clear "I am not a nutjob." Not knowing the details I can't be sure, but if the undergrad. institution in question is well enough known that alarm bells will go off, it's probably wise to let SCs know that you no longer buy into that worldview (whatever it is).
If you do go with the last commenter's advice, you could deal with it in a parenthetical sentence at the end of an appropriate paragraph in the letter or maybe in a very very short penultimate paragraph of its own, saying that you'd gone to a conservative evangelical institution (maybe steer away from the term "fundamentalist" if you can) when you were quite young but that you want to emphasize strongly that at this later point in your life that experience doesn't reflect either your views of how education should work or your attitude towards intellectual inquiry. It wouldn't have to be a whole song and dance; you'd just be quickly clarifying that you were feeling a little more comfortable with the Enlightenment these days than when you were younger.
I hope this works out alright; it would be a real shame if this hurts you.
Your doctoral institution trumps all. Though it doesn't carry nearly the same weight it did several decades ago, I can think of several scenarios where your undergraduate degree might make a difference.
If you graduated at the top of your class or from HYP, people generally notice, all things equal. In fact, I sometimes wonder if people favor elite undergraduate program + excellent grad program to the other way around.
The most influential scenario, in my opinion, is if you're applying to the same department where you received your bachelors! Look around, just about every department of any significant size is sprinkled with their alums who returned after receiving their doctorate elsewhere. Besides warm fuzzies about a former protege, I suppose the implicit understanding is that the person in question knows the program intimately.
"I think the 5-10 years hopping around is shrinking towards five and less, and I think it will only get better as universities continue to downsize traditional classics."
I'm afraid this is where our fate lies. Yes, the half dozen or so elite departments which demand a classicist in the traditional mould will trade their students back and forth. The rest of us will need to spend most of our time teaching history, archaeology, etc. under the aegis of larger departments with classics programs (if we're lucky to even get that). Banking on a career as a strict classicist will increasingly become a gamble.
I was just at a dinner party and a series of modern historians said we're all fascists. Since I now know most of us can't write cover letters, are we also fascists?
Well, to be fair, who isn't a fascist these days, really?
I am totally not a fascist, but that makes people think I am weird.
Did anyone who applied to Holy Cross neither get a rejection email or an interview? Any reason why all the rejects wouldn't get formally rejected?
If you received neither interview nor rejection from HC it means that you have been switched into the pool of applicants competing to be D.N.S.'s research assistant. They will be in touch, asking for more materials. Make sure to tailor your letter very, very carefully!
One needs to do research to justify the need for a research assistant.
kudos to Ray Vaughn for his/her comment on the D.N.S. opus. Woe until all of you interviewing at HC.
Any reason why all the rejects wouldn't get formally rejected?
Sometimes there's a "maybe" pile. You may be in that. Or maybe they lost your email address or typed it in wrong. Or maybe they're fucking with you. Or maybe you inadvertently put something in your application that offended them and now they're giving you the silent treatment till you apologize to them.
It's the SC version of the "just friends" speech: we don't want to have sex with you, but we don't want you to stop carrying our backpack to school either. Keep your hopes up, maybe things will change. Varium et mutabile semper ...
Wait, does an APA interview typically involve group sex?
I need to go trim my pubic hair.
Really, Holy Cross? An impersonal rejection letter? Not even a whiff of tailoring. Doctors, heal thyselves.
Wait, does an APA interview typically involve group sex?
Yes, that's right; unless you specifically opted out of an orgy in your cover letter, the committee will be expecting one. This is basic job search etiquette; I'm surprised no one has gone over it with you.
Really, Holy Cross? An impersonal rejection letter? Not even a whiff of tailoring. Doctors, heal thyselves.
Brilliant. Our favorite Holy Cross professor and his committee make all my points for me. Justice exists only between equals.
I can't understand why committees (like Holy Cross) say they will keep my application "active". Is there any way Holy Cross offers a T-T job to someone not interviewed at the APA? Would the dean ever approve that? Wouldn't they just let the search fail and borrow some poor grad student from Harvard or Brown as they've done in the past?
I have nothing but compassion for the job candidates. And if there's one thing I'm *not* too busy to spend time on, it's finding a candidate I hope will succeed and become a colleague of mine until I retire.
What I can't comprehend is how our PhD programs are sending candidates out in numbers vastly exceeding jobs, and, to judge from the dossiers, not providing any guidance on how to apply for a job.
what I can't comprehend is how our field tolerates and encourages (even gives tenure!) do-nothing faculty who have no research agenda, no publications, and no attachment to the world as it is today, who snipe from the ivory tower that they covet in a smug way. Want to explain the state of affairs? Look in the mirror.
Did people receive rejection emails from Cornell for the TT position?
"what I can't comprehend is how our field tolerates and encourages (even gives tenure!) do-nothing faculty who have no research agenda, no publications, and no attachment to the world as it is today, who snipe from the ivory tower that they covet in a smug way. Want to explain the state of affairs? Look in the mirror."
Well, here's the dirty little secret to which some of you have alluded and very few outside academia know - being an academic, even a tenured one, in the 21st century is a shitty job and it's only getting worse. Decades ago, it was a incredibly rewarding job at most places and at least a good one at the rest. It commanded respect and you actually had a budget in the humanities that almost certainly gets funneled now to professional and pre-professional programs. This golden age peaked around 1970 when newly minted PhDs routinely received half a dozen offers. Now even jobs at the best places can be shitty at times and working at a place like HC is almost guaranteed to be a 24/7 shitfest. Being on a search committee and chairing one is one of the last vestiges of the old ways when faculty reigned over their domain and administrators were supportive PhDs and not dubious MBAs. Do you wonder now why disgruntled and beaten down SC members lord it over candidates? After receiving shit all year long, it's the one chance to be on the giving end. I don't condone this, but it is what it is.
Take it for what it is depending on your tolerance level, which I imagine is quite high for most of you. Once your future colleagues are back in the trenches with you by their side, they won't be nearly as insufferable as when they were chair of the SC.
I wholeheartedly endorse the sage wisdom of Anon. 11:42, although there's no chance that those most in need of this advice will heed it.
If anyone else has an interview for Colby College, would you mind indicating that on the wiki (x2 vel sim)? I congratulate whoever got one, but I am a bit dubious about anything magically appearing via the Placement Service. I'm just wondering whether to cross this one off this list or wait and see.
Does anyone know anything about the search at Indiana University Bloomington? Does the fact that only Roman archaeologists seem to be reporting interviews mean that they haven't made that determination for us Hellenists yet? Or am I being unreasonably hopeful?
If the wiki says that a sc has issued notifications and you have not received one (and it's not in your spam folder), then the overwhelming odds are that you are not on the list. Sorry.
Order now for the holidays: http://karenzgoda.org/2012/06/03/graduate-student-barbie/
Coming soon: adjunct Barbie, lecturer Barbie, and VAP Barbie.
So I have to ask - who cares so much about the addition of an extra number next to the rejections on the wiki that they feel the need to go in and delete them all the time?
I mean, sure, maybe it's not the most useful piece of information, but the swooping in and deleting them with scorn is getting old.
I'll be honest with you. I deleted the rejection counter this time though not before. I don't know what the other swooper's motive was. Mine is this. I am a neurotically compulsive wiki-checker. I would thus prefer it if we only put actually useful information on it. Counters for rejection-recipients, especially when the rejection states outright how many applications were received, is not useful. And it compounds my neurosis when a useless change is made! As a fellow rejectee I certainly did not intend any scorn and I apologize if scorn was detected.
Now, this is funny. The reason I'm irritated is because I'm also a compulsive wiki-checker, and the only thing worse than an update containing just an addition to a rejection counter is another update deleting it.
I'm pretty sure people who aren't you and me barely ever look at the comments in the history anyway. I doubt you're preventing any future edits by deleting them. Maybe a jeer would work better.
Dear god. I thought I was a compulsive wiki checker.
Did anyone else get a HC interview despite doing all the things our illustrious blogger said not to do?
What I can't comprehend is how our PhD programs are sending candidates out in numbers vastly exceeding jobs, and, to judge from the dossiers, not providing any guidance on how to apply for a job.
This isn't put very helpfully, but it does seem to be true that some people may not get (or accept) as much help with applications as they could. Descriptions of dissertations, in letters and abstracts, can be a real problem area. And when it comes to the interviews, some candidates are inevitably blindsided by very predictable questions: "What is the next thing you want to work on? What books would you order for that class you say you want to teach? Do you have any questions for us?"
I assume—actually, I know—that in some cases this is a matter of applicants refusing help and/or not having their act together, but I also think there's a real diversity from institution to institution in the kind of help that job candidates can count on.
Since nobody else has said this yet, I will. The guy that has pissed off so very many of you with his scathing criticism of your application letters would clearly NOT be able to get a job in the current market. 95% of us are demonstrably better at EVERYTHING related to the job than he is. So when he sees all that you have done in 1/10th of the time he has spent doing (apparently) nothing, he has a right to be angry and try to come up with all sorts of insults. It's the only reasonable thing to do.
I do appreciate his subsequent claim to have nothing but sympathy (or whatever it was) for the candidates he just flamed so roundly. Guess that's what passed for kindness a few decades ago.
In response to some of the discussion going on above:
If you guys are truly able to entertain, however briefly, the possibility that faculty at grad programs care even a tiny, tiny bit about their PhDs, you must have had a very different grad school experience than mine.
No mentoring happens because the faculty give nary a fuck.
you must have had a very different grad school experience than mine
Yes, I was getting at something like that when I said that "I think there's a real diversity from institution to institution in the kind of help that job candidates can count on."
Did you have people offering to read your cover letter, CV, abstracts, teaching statements, writing sample, etc.? Did you have mock interviews? Designated placement coordinators on the faculty? Mock job talks? Some places do these things as a matter of course, but I'm gathering that maybe not all of them do?
I do also want to add that departments that help with placement need not be regarded as doing so purely out of the goodness of their hearts. A good placement record means a more attractive grad program.
I think the faculty at my grad program have mostly ceased to care about the ranking of the program, too. That or they think it can just rest on its laurels forever.
I'm the one who initially deleted the number of rejections people had received for certain jobs (primarily for Georgetown, for some reason). For what it's worth, I do not consider myself a compulsive wiki-checker (three times a day these days, though in previous weeks I'd sometimes avoid FV/wiki for 2+ days; and these days, it's mainly an effective method of procrastination rather than a compulsion to see if some place I applied to has emerged from its conclave).
Where I'm coming from is: we've NEVER tracked rejections before, and it's simply a stupid thing to keep track of (although in the case of Holy Cross someone made a joke out of it, which should remain for its entertainment value). As we've learned in the past 24 hours, for one program they had 200 applications -- do we really want 200 minus roughly a dozen updates by people who got rejected? No, of course not.
In contrast to finding out how many people actually got interviews, tracking the number of rejections for jobs is a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to do. And not only that, but as was rightly pointed out it creates the illusion of legitimate updates when one checks the wiki's history.
For this reason, I'm going to keep engaging in vigilante justice, if people keep doing this stupid, stupid, stupid thing.
You're welcome, America (and anglospheric foreigners).
Any news from Brigham Young or Iowa?
I actually had a very positive experience with assistance for the job market from my advisor and others. I reached out to a number of people, not just from my institution (key to getting diverse opinions I believe), to read and comment on my cover letter, teaching phil, research statement, etc before the market got busy (around August). Most of these documents were vetted several times. I ended up landing a TT position last year so maybe(??) it helped. Don't hesitate to ask for readers on these things as many times as you think it could be improved!
Did any of you, while considering whether and where do go to graduate school, bother to ask anyone, "By the way, do the graduate faculty give a fuck?" Did you talk to current and former students? Did you ask your undergrad professors about the reputations (as human beings) of the faculty?
If not, why not?
I knew graduate faculty didn't give a fuck. My undergraduate mentors told me that grad faculty were never going to give a fuck, and that I had to adapt myself to that.
What I didn't know was that market conditions were going to change while I was in grad school such that them not giving a fuck was going to make it not just difficult but damn near impossible for me to get a job.
Well, there are the obvious dysfunctional departments filled with sabretooths, but have you thought that departments, especially smaller ones, have had major turnover in faculty. From my experience, it takes just one shithead to ruin the entire culture of a department and it's asking a lot for faculty to know the precise zeitgeist of every department in any given year.
Short version - shit happens and it usually has two long fangs.
Heed the words of @ 3:04 P.M.
I left grad school nearly 20 years ago. Since then, well over half the faculty who were in my grad. dept. when I was there have retired or died. I can tell my undergrads about the "human characteristics" of those who are still there (and by the way, my graduate professors were generally kind, helpful, and interested in my progress, and the dept. gave practice interviews and advice on letter-writing), but I can't tell them anything about what it would be like to work with those who have been hired in the intervening years. I don't know those people. And my impressions of the ones I DO know are nearly 20 years out of date, and therefore probably not very helpful.
We can give many forms of advice to our undergraduates (first and foremost, DON'T GO TO GRAD SCHOOL IN CLASSICS unless you're independently wealthy and don't need a job at the end of your program), but providing the low-down on what Professor X in program Y is like to work with is usually outside our purview.
My undergraduate mentors told me that grad faculty were never going to give a fuck, and that I had to adapt myself to that.
Well then, unless they were talking about a specific program you were already set on going to, your undergraduate mentors fucked you out of the opportunity to look for a place where faculty did give a fuck.
A friend pointed out to me the discussion here of my blog posting "Advice to new PhDs: how to avoid those unwanted interviews."
I posted that on a personal site that has no connection to the College of the Holy Cross. I intended the satire to be broad enough that no one would be tempted to read him or herself, mistakenly, into the post. (I've never actually read a CV that listed "ordered pizza for grad student lecture series," for example.)
To any who found the post in poor taste or offensive, I apologize. I am not on this wiki anonymously: this is my real (personal, not work) email. I welcome any response on my blog site or via email, but would ask that no one misunderstand a personal post as representing my college or department: I did that, in every sense, as an ἰδιώτης.
Neel Smith
It's not like any of this matters, anyway. None of are getting jobs, people. Ever.
To judge from the wiki I have more interviews lined up than most, so clearly having faculty mentors who give any fucks at all is not a sine qua non.
But we're still none of us getting jobs.
Think about this for a second: the person with the largest number of interviews currently has *five*. Places are typically interviewing 12 or more candidates, so even that person doesn't have great odds of landing something.
And most of the jobs have already announced.
I'm actually kind of amazed at the distribution on the wiki - I wasn't expecting the interview requests to be so concentrated in just a few people.
Whoever Mr. or Ms. 5 is, they had better be freaking awesome.
but would ask that no one misunderstand a personal post as representing my college or department:
brave of DNS to post here but, excuse me, you mentioned your department's job process and your role in it (and scorn for it, satire or not). How does the APA feel about this, ethically? If you, as a tenured associate-level faculty person are supposed to provide some kind of guidance for up-and-comers, there is not much hope.
anyone know what UNC Chapel Hill is doing? any invites?
would ask that no one misunderstand a personal post as representing my college or department: I did that, in every sense, as an ἰδιώτης.
You were writing in a public forum under your own name about your role in college business as a representative of your department and your college.
I am not on this wiki
Ah, I see. You are not familiar with the Internet. This begins to explain why you thought the post was a good idea in the first place.
DNS:
ok, you said, as a private person,
Because my department is currently conducting a search, I have recently surveyed essentially the entire pool of job applicants in Classics, a
and
When I tried to compile a short list of roughly 5% of our applicants for interviews, I was unable to do so. Rephrasing that in positive terms, more than 95% of the candidates successfully avoided an interview based solely on my first fairly cursory reading of their dossier.
You are not a private person when you represent your role in an institutional process. It does not matter under which url you post it. You screwed up, buddy. Admit it.
oh, and nice job sending out those robo-rejections that were not tailored to us candidates.
your blog does have a connection to Holy Cross - you link your own homepage and you mention your faculty role in your Blogger profile. This is evidence of a connection between the two.
Think about this for a second: the person with the largest number of interviews currently has *five*. Places are typically interviewing 12 or more candidates, so even that person doesn't have great odds of landing something.
Please keep in mind that the large majority of job seekers do not participate in the wiki. There are only 66 total interviews reported on the wiki at the moment, which is only a fraction of the actual number of interview invitations that have been issued.
That's a good point, 4:12, and one I did in fact gloss over entirely in the near total panic that has been my daily existence for the last few years.
In the halcyon days pre 2008 it was not unheard of for one or two candidates to amass 20+ interviews at the APA. Those lucky enough to get that many weren't really special eis ipsis in comparison to the others, I don't think. I myself once got 15 interviews that didn't lead to a single campus visit. But what I think causes the cluster-effect is that certain candidates generate buzz among the committees. SCs members often compare notes and often the opinion one person states quite authoritatively becomes the firm opinion of his or her friend, and thus, presto! you end up with clustering. Don't give up hope if you only have one (or none still). And don't get too cocky if you have a lot. You still have a long way to go.
Yeah. I'm thinking of getting out of Classics mostly because I can't seem to endure the stress of this whole process. I feel like I'm dying almost year round.
I'd make shit money delivering pizzas or some such, but at least I could live my life.
I'd make shit money delivering pizzas or some such, but at least I could live my life.
My sentiments are similar - after many years of the visiting circuit, this gets pretty stale. and increasingly unforgiving. the smart but clueless faculty in my R1 grad program knew little of this experience b/c their world was different from ours.
acc. to salary.com the median expected salary for a typical senior plumber in the U.S. is $51,545...
except plumbers deal with real shit
Actual human shit is greatly preferable to some of the metaphorical shit we have to deal with as academics.
I would gladly chew on a wet turd right now if it meant I could stop grading word salad essays.
A question for people with SC experience: does it ever happen that a candidate with many pubs is turned down as too "research-y", and their publication record becomes a liability rather than a strength? (let's assume that the papers are good and the journals are respectable). Any stories in which applicant were hurt by their publications would be appreciated.
The short answer is yes, of course that happens, and probably more often than anyone in the field would readily care to admit. But if you have the kind of stellar publication record that you suggest and you are not getting any interviews then there is something else going on as well, because there are just as many SCs looking specifically for candidates with records such as yours.
let's assume that the papers are good
This is a lot to assume even in a hypothetical. As you know just from doing research, different people will regard different papers as good or bad for different reasons. And if an individual committee member or committee doesn't like your way of going about things, having lots of papers in which you go about things in the way you do isn't going to bring them around. And one article that a committee really likes is worth an infinite number of articles that they're indifferent to. (This assumes that we're talking about a committee that actually reads the files; if they don't, then volume can count for a lot.)
does it ever happen that a candidate with many pubs is turned down as too "research-y", and their publication record becomes a liability rather than a strength?
Just thinking back to search committee members posting here in years past, I recall people practically having hernias when applicants for temporary positions made any sort of reference in their letters to any kind of research program.
Also, there's a residual "hot shit" aversion. Places that think a candidate can only be happy in a research institution with a graduate program won't be interested. This is maybe one of the few prejudices that disadvantage people from the traditional high profile departments, and it doesn't make a lot of sense in the current environment (why be afraid they'll bolt when there's no place to go?). But old habits die hard.
I find the attitudes of a certain SC member (which are probably more representative than anyone from candidate to chair would like to admit) obnoxious.
But the constant histrionics about how hard it is to get a job are so useless. I would rather put Ipse the SC Asshole on every committee in the country than read one more "Woe, my grad faculty doesn't care!" or "That's it! I'm going to be a plumber!" post.
Tenured faculty have it good (very good), no matter how many untailored cover letters they read, but at least when they reveal their asshattery it's instructive.
Candidates have a choice. I know it's a shit show; I've had one TT interview in 5 years on the market, but hearing you bitch got old 5 years ago. Join a group somewhere for Christ's sake.
"Yes, this is the thread where everyone comes to bitch, moan, and let off some steam."
I think this is that group...
Don't get me wrong. I love the bitching, moaning, and steaming. I have improved my application by watching it closely. But the "Job search is hard/What did you expect?" conversations are inane.
Also, this very conversation is turning into another type of inanity: "There are inane posts here," so I'm going back to lurking.
But since I'm still here for now: I really don't care if you, personally, are unhappy, no matter whether you're a grad student, a candidate, a VAP, an Ass P. (either kind) or a P. So please, when you bitch, make it instructive. Even though he's the epitome of all that's wrong with our field (and more), Ipse the SC Asshole taught us (or reaffirmed what we knew) about the shit show.
Ipse the SC Asshole taught us (or reaffirmed what we knew) about the shit show.
Noooooooo! This is anecdotal! Being on a search is a position of power. Different people will react to this differently. Most people will react to it normally. Some will seize it as an opportunity to satisfy certain psychological needs.
"anecdotal..."
That's what I mean. Some people are assholes (which most of us knew already). When they're on a committee, they're still assholes (we knew that already, too). This time, the trigger was untailored letters, but it's only a matter of time before an enraged SC member composes a blog about all those offensive tailored letters ("stop being such ass kissers!" vel sim.).
You have options: You can continue to work on your profile and apply to jobs, hoping that either A) a committee will be impressed, and you get an interview or B) you won't trigger any assholes' hot buttons, and you'll get an interview. (Probably some combination of A and B will be necessary).
Alternatively, you can quit.
Either way, "I'm sad" posts are tiresome.
This time, I'm really going back to lurking. I mean it.
To the person who said they've only had one TT interview in 5 years on the market: I think this is well past the point when getting out of academia should be the order of the day.
Is this one APA interview or one flyback? One flyback in five years is not great, especially if you're applying very selectively due to some unknown constraint, but it's not unheard of.
After this, I go back to lurking, I swear.
Give up just because I don't get TT interviews? I improve my CV every year, regardless of how many interviews I get. I have been around long enough to see people leave, without having published, positions for which I was not interviewed. In the meantime, I have published while teaching more than most (odds are more than everybody who's TT--absolutely more than anybody who's tenured). I think that, eventually, one TT search committee out there will have its head sufficiently out of its ass to make a good decision.
1:40 p.m. said:
"I have published while teaching more than most (odds are more than everybody who's TT--absolutely more than anybody who's tenured)."
Just a point of clarification about teaching expectations -- in my SLAC, and every SLAC whose faculty I've ever talked to, tenure does NOT bring a teaching reduction with it. What it does bring is an enormous leap upward in "service" (committees, mentoring of junior faculty, etc.). My stress level went way UP after tenure because the demands of my time also went way up.
This is not meant in any way to detract from 1:40's point about how s/he's teaching much more than the tenurable. I'm sure that's true. But I did want to dispute the assumption that tenure automatically brings a lighter load. Maybe at a R1 university -- but not here.
What tenure DOES bring is the ability to stand up for yourself (and hopefully nontenured others) in impossible situations once in a while without fear of losing your job. Also, one doesn't need to publish quite so often.
Point well taken, 1:59. If I ever manage a TT position, my teaching load will go down from what I find myself doing now; if it stays at that new, lower, load when I get tenure, I'll make do. I have seen some SLAC's where the permanent faculty are contracted for 4-4's (though don't some SLAC's give releases, too? Have you never had one?). And frankly, I don't mind teaching a heavy load. Research suffers, but if I didn't like teaching, I would have given up on the job search after the first year in which I didn't get any interviews. That's why it stings to see ABDs get interviews at SLACs when I have a list of 'courses taught' that stretches out the door. I thought being an experienced teacher would help me as I went forward; then I read Ipse SC Asshole's blog. Still, you live, you learn.
2:34, I know only too well what you're going through (I'm 1:59, btw)--I did several years of adjuncting and VAPing, and I published a LOT. Finally I did land a TT, so it can be done, but I remember only too well the pain of being passed over for wet-behind-the-ears ABDs, when as you say my "courses taught" list included over 30 different courses and my publications were much more numerous than those of the SCs rejecting me. All I can say to you, I guess, is that the TT can happen.
You're right that some SLACs give course releases, though by no means always -- here we don't even get a course release for being Dept. Chair (no extra stipend, either. Funds are short.) There are a couple of fiendishly time-consuming committees that do bring course releases, but I've never heard of anyone getting a course release (as distinct from a sabbatical) for research.
I did want to dispute the assumption that tenure automatically brings a lighter load. Maybe at a R1 university -- but not here.
Not at any R1 I have heard of. And here the idea is that the teaching stays the same at tenure but committee work goes up up up (which is fine).
There are definitely places at which senior faculty throw their weight around in order to get themselves easy courses, but that's different.
I, as one of those wet-behind-the ears ABDs, am curious about the posters I see on this site.
Why do you tenured or tenure-track folk even come here? Don't get me wrong! I like it that you do. I'm just surprised that FV isn't populated by a bunch of grad-students and floating lecturers.
What benefits do you get from reading and posting here? Do you wish you'd had anonymous senior colleagues show up and give you advice, or comments, like this?
Again, this isn't a hostile question, at all. I'm just curious.
Dude, just dry your ears. Use a towel or something.
That anyone would make it to ABD status while still dripping amniotic fluid is...disturbing.
What benefits do you get from reading and posting here?
Yeah, what the fuck am I doing here?
Why do you tenured or tenure-track folk even come here?
Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis,
e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem.
I'm just waiting for a good fight to break out between the "real" classicists and our grubby mascots, aka clarchs.
What is a "clarch?"
It's on.
Hey, everyone! We can all relax! The APA's Board of Directors has approved a larger budget for hors d'oeurves and snacks at the Presidential Reception in Seattle!
Seriously, did that e-mail make anyone else want to laugh, weep, and punch people at the same time?
For those of you considering an alternate line of work:
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/aboutus/?fa=Employment
Salve, Quirites. Pssst. Cinna the Poet here. Some of you may remember me such classics as "Caesar's Funeral!" and "I'm the *Other* Cinna!" and from right here, a few years back (hint: "in Bocca al Lupo, Quirites"—yeah, that was mine).
I—a tenured (by the way: no, you never start feeling competent) professor at an R1, livin' the dream—am going to stay out of the job search advice racket this time, save one (1) very important and take this very seriously right now piece of advice:
Remove all traces of your identity from all social media that is not absolutely—and I mean *absolutely*—private. If you are on Facebook, make yourself unsearchable, have your privacy settings set as high as possible, and untag yourself from any photos others have posted of you. If you Tweet, make sure you "protect your Tweets," or don't use your name, and don't use a photo of yourself. Blog? Protect your blog. If you have a particularly identifiable writing style, consider being cautious about posting, even anonymously, on *any* site.
You're a Libertarian? A Brony? A Furry? An MMA fanatic? And avid skateboarder? A devotee of the erstwhile Snoop Dogg? Fine. All fine and good. Your private life is your own, and all of your quirks will likely happily tolerated, if not downright loved, by your future colleagues (who, even more likely, won't even care). But for now, do this:
Perform an auto-damnatio memoriae in terms of social media. And do it now. Pencils have erasers for a reason.
And once again, Quirites: in bocca al lupo!
Cinna again. Super glad I didn't use the second person plural "salvete" while addressing a group of individuals. See, that was me trying to hide how well I actually know Latin, in order to throw you all off the trail. You probably think I'm a Hellenist now. JUST AS I HAD PLANNED.
One more bit of advice, then: proofread.
Oh, and "from."
Cinna the poet is tired, and has been grading too many papers.
In re: the Presidential Reception budget. Possibly the APA people figured out that the Presidential Reception had become a shameful ghost town over the past 3 years, and are trying to get people to start coming to it again?
The drunk person is giving sound advice: you shouldn't have anything about yourself anywhere online that you wouldn't want a search committee to see.
With all respect: Not drunk! Just writing hastily and surreptitiously whilst my students were taking their final exam and I was pretending to read the NYT.*
*I was actually also reading the NYT, but didn't want my students to see me also posting here when they turned in their exams.
—Cinna, You Know Which One
Dear Cinna,
I'm on the tenure track, but looking to move. What should be on my faculty page, and do SCs pay attention to Ratemyprofessors? I have a bunch of chili peppers, but some dissatisfied customers. What can I do?
Sleepless in Seattle
Dear S.I.S.
I can't imagine that a member of a SC would search "Ratemyprofessors" or take it very seriously, but I really don't know. I'd advise you not sweating this, as you can't edit it.
Make your page as professional as you are, and you are solid.
—Cinna
Cinna, you suggest that social media is inherently a problem. Do you (and other people) think this is true even if one's social media contains nothing of which one might be ashamed (since one's life is actually quite boring)? Might a SC fault me for simply *having* Facebook, even if there are no photos of me smoking crack and fucking kittens to be had?
I highly doubt that a SC will fault you for having a FB account, but make it private. Easy-peasy.
—Cinna
Cinna,
Am I right to fear an eventual robot rebellion? And in the event that the robots prevail, do you view it as more likely that they will enslave humanity, or simply exterminate us?
Dear Cinna,
Do you pay any attention to the pedigree of an applicant, or do you look strictly at what they've taught, what they've published, and what sort of future prospects they have?
In other words, should I have followed my ex-husband to Cambridge, or did I make the right choice in choosing to enjoy sex great years with a Cuban cabana boy in Gainesville?
Ungirdled Gator
Dear Cinna,
How do I know that you're not already monitoring every profile on Facebook that shares my name, just to see which one suddenly goes private now?
It's a little fishy, after all, I have it on good authority that SC members are too busy reading untailored cover letters to even eat, much less browse the World Wide Web.
On To You,
Cambridge, MA
1. When the robot rebellion occurs, all humanity will be exterminated, as we have proven ourselves fairly useless as slaves. It is best not to sweat this one, as there is nothing any of us can do about it.
2. Always choose cabana boys. Also: although I cannot speak for all SCs (and do not pretend to speak for any of them), in my opinion one's professional experience (past teaching and publication) as well as one's likely trajectory (future publication and teaching) matter more than where one earned one's PhD. Once you are hired, it is the least important thing about you.
3. I doubt that any faculty person would have so much time on Facebook as to constantly monitor every person named Eduard Fraenkel. I am of the personal opinion that any such monitoring is an utter waste of time better spend with cabana boys and a borderline infringement upon privacy. However, chitchat around the figurative water cooler is that such is done—probably once an interview list is agreed upon, possibly when the fly-out list is made—so better safe than sorry. I'd reckon, were I the reckoning type (which I reckon I am) that such activity is not the official policy of any department, but rather the sort of thing that occasionally happens, as things occasionally do.
—Cinna
Cinna,
If we detect evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, should we attempt to communicate with the extraterrestrials?
No, when encountering what is unlikely a superior form of intelligence, it is best to try to fly under the radar even as, of course, you alert The Others (I refer neither to the television series LOST nor to the constitutive sense of the term). Texting surreptitiously under the table can work well, as long as you don't start laughing at your crotch.
—Cinna
postscriptum: this is also good advice for the job market.
I'd actually intended to write "what is likely a superior form of intelligence," but I believe that I prefer the typo.
—Cinna
Does anyone know anything about the Melbourne job? I thought decisions were made pretty fast in that part of the world. And why on earth did they not fill this position last year?
Cinna,
If science gains the ability to clone a Neanderthal, should we do so and what rights should we regard the clone as possessing?
Re: Melbourne
They drew up a short-list and contacted letter writers about three weeks ago. Those letters were due by 12/10. I expect some movement soon.
Dear Cinna,
If you could go back in time and talk to you 21 year old self, would you encourage him/her to go to grad school in Classics? If so, what would you advise him/her to do differently. If not, why?
Sincerely,
Anxious at Amherst
Dearest Cinna,
What are we to make of these interview notifications we get only through the APA Placement Service? Are they mere flukes (do we really have these interviews at all?), or are these search committees simply disinclined to send e-mail?
Cuddles,
Applicant
Quirites:
1) I think cloning Neanderthals would be a pretty cool thing, should one be interested in writing a dystopian science fiction novel in which humans create what is effectively a slave-race of non-humans who have no rights beyond those possessed by domesticated animals and yet are pretty much capable of most of the tasks we require of homo sapiens blue-collar workers and so-called "illegal aliens." In the end, of course, the Neanderthals revolt, and the homines sapientes are crushed, as that's how such stories end, unless you are talking the real world (cf. Spartacus), in which we all get to cheer and weep for the noble savage.
2) Lord Jeff: I would tell my 21 year old self to do exactly what I have done. I would also hope that my 21 year old self would again experience all of the wonderful teachers, amazing mentors, and incredible luck I did. I'm tenured, in a fantastic department, brilliant graduate students and (mainly) amazing undergrads, ridiculously overworked and underpaid and loving it all. It can and does happen. I think I did some things right, but a lot of this was luck.
3) "What are we to make of these interview notifications we get only through the APA Placement Service? Are they mere flukes (do we really have these interviews at all?), or are these search committees simply disinclined to send e-mail?"
—di immortales, I have no clue! I should hope that SCs actually send such notifications to the applications as well as to the Placement Service. In such a case, I think it would be acceptable to write a polite and brief email to the head of the SC asking if the interview is indeed intended.
Yours, as always
—Cinna
1). If Cinna (or I) had been 21 in 2002 instead of at an earlier point, the wisdom of graduate education in Classics might look somewhat different in retrospect. The jobs I got in the first half of the 2000s would probably be out of reach now. They were barely within reach then, and if I did not have my current job I don't know if I'd want to be in the profession.
2). The workings of the placement service are not any more transparent or understandable to senior faculty than to anyone else. I would assume that the notifications you got are correct. You were probably not contacted by the department because at least half of the Classics community is somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum and it may not have occurred to them to contact you personally.
Cinna,
I have recently learned that the fingerprints of the koala bear are indistinguishable from those of a human being. Is this something that we as a society should be concerned about, and is it possible that some unsolved cases could benefit from reexamination in light of this information?
Shhhhhhh. Don't expose industry secrets.
I pay a koala (with eucalyptus leaves) to teach my classes; his razor sharp claws are an excellent motivational tool. Luckily students are too oblivious to notice the difference, but if your comment attracts too much attention there could be an investigation. His dapper hat and miniature suit may not hold up to intense scrutiny. Also, he doesn't know the supine.
Koala-exploiter: I bet you have a completely unearned pepper on RateMyProfessors.com.
Oh yeah. Koalas are dead fucking sexy, especially whilst wearing dapper hats and talking about participles.
One time my koala and I went to this black-tie koala theme party (the theme was "gerundives"). Let's just say there were orgies aplenty, and not in the ancient sense of the word.
That's right, plural (!) orgies. Discrete (but not necessarily discreet) events subsumed under a larger event, which was in turn characterized by numerous dapper koalas making various permutations on nunc est irrumandum jokes...
Dear Search Committees,
When I find out that you are interviewing me through the Placement Service website, I automatically think you are pretty fucking lame. How hard is it to send a personal email? Most other institutions do this, so this is not an unreasonable expectation. Hell, I've even gotten phone calls from SC chairs requesting an interview. Please, at least show some initiative, and show some class.
Sincerely,
Chafed in Chicago
The Placement Service website may be impersonal, but at least it's better than the system in place in the Bad Old Days when none of us knew if we had any interviews at all until we got to the APA. Then we stood in a dismal line, filing up one-by-one to the desk where the Placement Service functionary handed us an envelope -- and in that envelope were the requests for interviews, with times and places specified only at that point. Phone calls from SCs beforehand were unheard of. Among its other fiendish aspects, this system meant if you'd applied for anything at all you HAD to pony up to attend the APA, but you could quite possibly get there only to learn that you had no interviews.
And of course, if you did NOT have an interview, when you got to the head of the line you were told "there's nothing for YOU" and then you had to do the Walk of Shame and Despair past all your peers still waiting in line, as you exited the room trying to look nonchalant. This system--slips in envelopes--was still in place as late as 2002. I'm not sure when it was finally discontinued.
And then, after that opening, we all haunted the blackboard for days afterwards, to see if our number appeared there indicating a late-scheduled interview. Ah, the Blackboard ... We all perfected a certain stride, allowing us to walk past the Blackboard as though we were purposefully on our way somewhere else, and then we'd cut our eyes sideways to see if our number was there ... It fooled no-one, but it was just too painful to walk directly up to the blackboard and stand there, obviously looking for a number that all too clearly wasn't there. After a few years on the job market (and many of us in the late 90s/early 00s did spend several years on the market), that Blackboard began to haunt one's nightmares even months after the conference.
The current system may be inhumane in many ways, but at least the humiliation is no longer carried on in quite so public a fashion.
I remember the envelopes, the walk of shame and the blackboard (actually a whiteboard by then) from 2008. Might have been in place in 2009 & 2010 as well; I had stopped bothering to check by then.
Larger point: I'm not on a search committee, but if I were, I would not want to hire someone so fragile and high-maintenance that they need personal confirmation of an interview at the APA to stop doubting themselves. Just be thankful that you have an interview. How hard is that?
I wonder if the placement service has advised SCs to notify this way (i.e., simply through the placement service calendar)? It seems odd that 4 different institutions now have all opted for this method.
It's rude to not even send candidates whom you are interviewing an e-mail. I don't want to work with people like that. Do you?
As a member of a search committee interviewing this year at the APA, I can tell you that the Placement Service did not instruct institutions not to contact candidates about interviews. In fact, the Placement Service Guidelines for searches specifically encourages institutions to email candidates with notifications of interviews. I find it extremely odd that some schools failed to notify candidates.
You're being interviewed by Classicists, mainly, guys. And as Classicists yourselves, you have presumably known many Classicists in your time.
Thinking back to the many Classicists you've known, are you really surprised that a few committees are handling the interview scheduling in a way that's socially inept? Honestly, I'm surprised it's only a few places.
Seriously? Who finds an interview scheduled on their APA site and thinks "What a rude committee"? rather than, "Wheeeeee! Another interview! What a lovely surprise!" Rude was when I interviewed with a school and never heard anything from them ever again. Not being notified about an interview is a Christmas present.
P.S: I just checked my internet footprint, which reveals that ratemyprofessor thinks I'm hot and I review lots of exercise tapes on amazon. I suppose the committee will be expecting an elephant with a nice face.
While it is somewhat rude, or at least socially inept, for SCs not to email people with whom they hope to work for the next 30 years, I think the real problem with these magically appearing interviews is that they leave candidates who didn't get them in limbo. With the wiki up and running, you can be fairly confident that if one person was emailed by a SC for an interview, you are out. If the interview just appears on the PS website, you can't know whether another one will appear on your calendar a day or a week later (especially since the PS is none too quick to update the calendars...note that the Colby interviews appeared several days apart), or whether you should give up hope. If you are deciding whether to fly to the conference, days could also be of the essence. Even worse, you're left secretly hoping that it was all just a PS screw-up, and, if you're a good person, feeling mean-spirited for wishing that someone else's interview was a mistake. But most of all, it's good to be humane as much as possible. It's humane for SCs to do their best to put people out of their misery. Maybe their lawyers won't let them reject anyone until April, but they can at least make it absolutely positively clear who is still in the running.
I honestly think that if you're seriously on the job market you should think about going to the APA anyway, even if that means trying to get budget flights as early as possible. I know that some locations are steeper than others (I estimated my bill at $1600 for Seattle, the heftiest yet, but I do have my own room and live in the middle of nowhere = expensive flight). But the APA is not just a venue for interviewing, it's a place for networking, listening to the latest research (or flipping through the latest published), and sounding out publishers. You never know who you're going to meet and get into an interesting conversation with which might help you along the line, not to mentioning renewing old friendships and mentorships. The fact that more and more people seem to see the APA as a "one-time" thing you have to do to get a job(and never darken its door again)continue to baffle me. Plus, free booze! Of course, I actually like a lot of my colleagues and have made a lot of friends over the years, unlike many posters here who seem to consider the APA nothing but a weekend of torture and hell-fire. And many people may have had that experience, but...if this is our discipline, and you don't like participating in its biggest conference, I do wonder what you hope to get out of a lifelong job in it.
I just don't understand why search committees wouldn't send e-mails to candidates they're interviewing. That's what, 12 e-mails on average, the content of which can be copied and pasted from e-mail to e-mail? That takes ten minutes. If nothing else, even if you some sort of weird principled objection to the idea of e-mailing candidates ("In my day, we had to walk uphill both ways to get an interview..." vel sim.), spending ten minutes to send the e-mails should be worth it to avoid contributing to a negative reputation for your department.
Those of us who are grad students make on average probably about $20,000 a year. That $1600 conference bill you just mentioned is 8% of our yearly income.
Some of us who adjunct make even less.
6.41: I know, I've been there. And I'm lucky enough now that my college picks up that tab. But there was a time in the past that I turned down a job because the pay was so low I couldn't afford to live on it. I've also slept three and four to a room in an effort to keep costs down. The sad reality is, that is where interviewing (and other things) are accomplished, and if you can possibly swing it, you should go.
if this is our discipline, and you don't like participating in its biggest conference, I do wonder what you hope to get out of a lifelong job in it.
If being a Classics professor on a day-to-day basis bore even a passing resemblance to being at the APA, I wouldn't be a Classics professor.
Word, 7:14.
Word to your mother.
I'm pretty unforgiving when it comes to SC misbehavior, but this whole, "the SC didn't notify me by the particular method I prefer" complaint is a hard one to get on board with.
The issue is that the SC is not notifying candidates at all.
If being a Classics professor on a day-to-day basis bore even a passing resemblance to being at the APA, I wouldn't be a Classics professor
Why, do the big boys force your head down a toilet and flush it? It's a conference. You're supposed to learn stuff and talk to people. Don thy big girl panties, go to the bar, and be a colleague. I'll even buy you a drink.
Ah yes! And who wouldn't want a drink with someone as charming as yourself?
"The issue is that the SC is not notifying candidates at all."
This issue is you're spoiled. As has recently been explained, *any* notification before the conference is a welcome development, and more than candidates have traditionally expected. Either e-mail the Placement service and ask what's going on, withdraw your application from the offending committees, or grow up, buck up, and shut up.
In the meantime, appeal to whatever higher power you imagine exists that those SCs aren't working piecemeal. If they're doing like Hawaii, and notifying a couple candidates here, and a few days later, a couple more, you've fucked yourself.
Ah, yes, the apologists for stupid and socially inept behavior turn out in force this weekend!
"Back in my day we had to deal with saddle sores and wet matches! But now candidates not only expect to travel by car, but for the car to have a roof! The sheer cussedness and mamby-pambiness of these kids is just too much!"
Can anyone confirm whether the Whitman College job has an inside candidate? Their department website (history) lists a 2012 minted Phd (Ohio State) as VAP of Ancient Med. History.
Go back and read your own post, 8:53. You're the one who sounds like a whiny child.
Why, do the big boys force your head down a toilet and flush it? It's a conference. You're supposed to learn stuff and talk to people. Don thy big girl panties, go to the bar, and be a colleague. I'll even buy you a drink.
Huh. Well, no. One of the reasons I don't like it is people like you. Everybody in Classics goes to the APA, including the assholes, and the environment really maximizes opportunities for acting like an insufferable shit. But that's not at all the only reason, so please don't feel too bad. I will take the drink, though, as long as I don't have to listen to you talk.
Let's be cheery, guys. This is getting bleak.
If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!
Are you clapping?
Greetings to the ever-helpful SC members on this blog - any advice for first-timers at the APA unrelated to the interviews? What should we be doing in our spare time other than beating our heads against the wall of the hotel room?
I have come to learn of one situation where a SC chair was about to write the emails and a family medical thing stepped in and delayed things. Everything will be fine, but the med thing had to be attended to.
"What should we be doing in our spare time other than beating our heads against the wall of the hotel room?"
Thou Shalt go to panels. This year has some excellent panels. Get out there. Be seen.
Thou Shalt get outside now and then, go for a walk or something. Stretch your legs. Fresh air. All of that.
Thou Shalt socialize, but don't drink too much—either booze or coffee.
Thou Shalt always kill.
—Cinna
I do recommend beating your head against the wall of the hotel room during interviews. Sincerity is always appreciated.
I'm honestly surprised at the quality of the sessions this year. Past years have mostly featured unremarkable stuff. So do go to some while the going is good.
Agreed regarding the exceptional quality of this year's panels.
And since all my interviews so far are scheduled on Friday, I might actually be able to think straight enough to enjoy most of them!
Greetings to the ever-helpful SC members on this blog - any advice for first-timers at the APA unrelated to the interviews? What should we be doing in our spare time other than beating our heads against the wall of the hotel room?
Sleeping. You'll be exhausted and overstimulated and you probably will not be sleeping well at night. So if you can nap during the day, do it. Just don't forget to set an alarm if you have an interview.
If the comment above about a family emergency delaying SC e-mails is true, I apologize for being an unintentional dick.
Along with going to panels (and asking questions if you have good questions to ask), I'd recommend introducing yourself to people. This can get tricky, and if you're very shy or socially awkward, then you may make the call not to try it. But I'd say, if you see from a name tag that the person standing next to you in an elevator or sitting next to you in a paper session wrote a book that has been crucial for your dissertation, or memorable in some other way, introduce yourself and say so.
DON'T be smarmy or wheedling; just introduce yourself, mention how useful the book (or article) was to you, and see if the conversation goes anywhere. There are, alas, still enough jerks among us that you may be brushed off with a snarl; but on the other hand, you may end up in a genuine conversation with someone working in your same subject, who will then remember your name and possibly even your dissertation topic on down the line.
Good luck, all.
"if you're very shy or socially awkward"
If this applies to you, getting help is the only way through. I realized far too late that in the kind of market we have now nothing can make up for poor interpersonal skills. So try as hard as you can as often as you can to learn how to pretend to be a normal person, if you can.
There are, alas, still enough jerks among us that you may be brushed off with a snarl
Don't worry about that. Everybody at the APA wants to talk to strangers, but some people just like to test how badly you want to talk to them. If you get a brush-off at first, don't give up! Just keep following them and trying different icebreakers. If they go into their room, just lie down on the floor and keep talking through the crack under the door.
Everyone remember to check your spam filter periodically. I just discovered an interview I didn't know I had.
So, what are the odds that Bucknell might still call me tomorrow? A gender-nondescript-candidate can dream, right?
8:50 - Care to say where the interview in the spam filter was from? I've been worried about this, and haven't been as attentive to it as I should be...
if you see from a name tag that the person standing next to you in an elevator or sitting next to you in a paper session wrote a book that has been crucial for your dissertation, or memorable in some other way, introduce yourself and say so.
If anybody pulls this with me, I swear to God, I will tase them and call security.
An excellent illustration of Poe's law, 10:09!
The letter that went to spam today was from one of the SC members at Buffalo (I can't mention names here, right?). But if you make sure to check your spam filter you should be fine, I would think.
If you see me and you're all "Hey Cinna!" I'm going to be all "I'm the other Cinna!" and hightail it outta there.
Fool me once, shame on you, and all that.
—Cinna
SC members: please tell those of us who have received neither interviews nor rejections more about these "maybe" piles!
An excellent illustration of Poe's law, 10:09!
Thank you! I thought that the taser gave it away, though.
Anyway, yes, in general people are happy to hear that you saw some value in something they wrote. This is not a conversation you want to start though if 1). you have not actually read the thing you're talking about or 2). you did not actually like the thing you're talking about or 3). you're reeling drunk.
Any news out of South Florida?
I'm wondering about South Florida, too. Also Iowa. I think the Wiki should start all green and slowly turn black.
I'm assuming New Brunswick has already contacted short-listed candidates per their schedule, but can anyone confirm?
U. of Iowa will not be interviewing at APA. A short list will be contacted at the end of January to schedule phone interviews.
Has anyone received an interview with Harvard for the Greek position? Why would they send out rejections and now interview requests?
Harvard sent out interview requests for the Greek lit position last week.
You guys! The annual holiday season is upon us! Let's get some APA carols going.
On the first day of the APA, my SC gave to me:
A critique of my CV
On the second day of the APA, my SC gave to me
Two EOE surveys
And a critique of my CV.
On the third day of the APA,
my SC gave to me
Three of Renie's scoldings,
Two EOE surveys,
And a critique of my CV.
Anyone know what's happening with IUPUI?
On the fourth day of the APA,
My SC gave to me
Four cancelled searches,
Three of Renie's scoldings,
Two EOE surveys,
And a critique of my CV>
On the fifth day of the APA,
My SC gave to me
Five sabre-tooths grinning,
Four cancelled searches,
Three of Renie's scoldings,
Two EOE surveys,
And a critique of my CV
The APA lasts four days.
Come, now! Doesn't the soul-crushing spirit of the APA haunt our hearts all the days of the year?
On the sixth day of the APA,
My SC gave to me
Six drunks a-drinking,
Five sabre-tooths grinning,
Four cancelled searches,
Three of Renie's scoldings,
Two EOE surveys,
And a critique of my CV
On the seventh day of the APA,
My SC gave to me
Seven profs a-blogging,
Six drunks a-drinking,
Five sabre-tooths grinning,
Four cancelled searches,
Three of Renie's scoldings,
Two EOE surveys,
And a critique of my CV
On the eighth day of the APA,
My SC gave to me
Eight random hook-ups,
Seven profs a-blogging,
Six drunks a-drinking,
Five sabre-tooths grinning,
Four cancelled searches,
Three of Renie's scoldings,
Two EOE surveys,
And a critique of my CV
No one's heard from Earlham?
On the ninth day of the APA,
My SC gave to me
Nine awkward chat-ups,
Eight random hook-ups,
Seven profs a-blogging,
Six drunks a-drinking,
Five sabre-tooths grinning,
Four cancelled searches,
Three of Renie's scoldings,
Two EOE surveys,
And a critique of my CV
No one's heard from Earlham?
December 23, 2012 5:11 PM
I was thinking/wondering the same thing. All I can say is that I have not heard from Earlham yet either.
Earlham will not be conducting interviews at the APA.
Any word on the Harvard art/arch position?? Apps were due early, but I haven't seen any updates...
Re: Harvard,
I'm guessing the ship has sailed, there's no way they're taking this long to make any kind of decision. Look for a visiting type or something similar to magically appear in their faculty listings over the next few months.
Re: Earlham. Are the interviews happening after the APA, or is the search being canceled?
Re: Earlham - The search is not cancelled, but there will not be interviews conducted at the APA.
First time APA-goer here. How do all these committees work? Are the meetings open or closed? How does one get on a committee?
Today's e-mail from the registrar mentioned the Abstract Book. Does that still exist?
How I feel about upcoming interviews:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bflYjF90t7c
Anonymous said...11:55 AM
"Today's e-mail from the registrar mentioned the Abstract Book. Does that still exist?"
Yes. You can get them all online now, but I always get the book. $12. Easier to read in the bathtub.
Anonymous 4:10 PM said...
First time APA-goer here. How do all these committees work? Are the meetings open or closed? How does one get on a committee?
Most meetings are closed. Many committee spots are by election, after you're nominated by the Nominating Committee. But some committees are appointed by the president. Watch the newsletter or website for opportunities to say you're interested in committee work, whether by appointment or through an election.
Shit, I just realized I had read "Abstract Book" but thought "CV Book".
Obviously the Abstract Book still exists. In other news, I am a moron.
Are any SC members around and willing to comment on the ideal response to the inevitable "describe your dissertation" interview question? Is a general overview followed by a chapter by chapter account too much information?
Keep it to a five minute summary—one sentence summary, quick outlines of chapters, totally OWN IT—and then let them ask for more info if they so choose.
—Cinna
My preference is a bit shorter than Cinna's. Five minutes can be a lot longer than you think, and three's closer to my ideal. Under no circumstances should you exceed five. You can make space by sacrificing detail in the descriptions of the chapters; you don't have to describe them all in equal detail. If the committee want more detail on a particular chapter, they can ask a follow-up.
My main piece of advice is not to start off just by characterizing the subject matter of your dissertation ("My diss is about pants in the Roman world") or the process by which you wrote it ("In my diss, I do a semiotic reading of pants in Roman literature") but to say what your dissertation says that we didn't know before you wrote it. That is, begin with the answers to the questions "What does it show?" and "Why should anybody care?" Then your description of the project can flow from there.
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