Introducing “Pearls of Wisdom–The Blog”
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Posted on July 5, 2011 by

~~ “Her occasional pomposity does not render all her points poor”  ~~     FeministPhilosophers blog

I post once or twice a week on Pearls of Wisdom on topics related to the academic job market, academic life and politics, general professionalization skills related to writing, publishing, conferencing, networking, and scholarly comportment, and the tenure process.

Let me know if there’s a topic you want to see me post on!  I am always happy to put Special Requests into the queue. Comment here, or email me at: gettenure@gmail.com.

Please note that as of January 2013  the rate of comments to this blog has exceeded my ability to respond individually to each one. I’m sorry that not all comments will get a personal response by Dr. Karen.  If you have a really pressing question, do consider getting in touch to get on my calendar to work together.  I strive to make services affordable to all.

<——- You can  always get to a particular Category by clicking it in the Categories column to the left.


Posted in Strategizing Your Success in Academia | 14 Comments

Eight Tips on Writing Efficiently while Overloaded with Teaching, Service and Kids (A Guest Post)
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Posted on June 10, 2013 by

A reader wrote asking for a post on how to write a book while working at a teaching-intensive university.  I put out a request for a guest post on the subject on Facebook, and Steve Engler responded with this account of writing a book while teaching a heavy schedule and taking care of three young children at home.  (His bio is below).  Thank you, Steve, for this inspiring guest post!

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1. Delimit your teaching.

Marking/grading student work consumes a lot of time.

  • Be harshly realistic when planning courses: avoid the temptation to ask students to write that reading response or blog post every week; maybe four times over the term…? You’ll thank yourself later.
  • Think very clearly about specific pedagogical outcomes. Often these can be met more effectively with less time-consuming assignments.
  • Use coded rubrics as feedback devices. For example, my “paragraph response sheet” (available on my website) has over thirty numbered comments, allowing me to write numbers instead of certain often-repeated formal comments. The handout also helps students draft their work, as it describes my expectations.

Preparing for classes can expand to fill all your available time. The same three points apply: be realistic about your time (allow yourself a measured period for prep, and call it good enough); stick to what supports your outcomes; and use modular elements (e.g., small group tasks that can be fitted flexibly into different contexts).

  1. Merge teaching and research.

This is one that we all know well. If prepping a lecture covers ground we need to cover anyway for an article or chapter, we are further ahead. If we can teach from something we are writing, so much the better. Don’t forget that various journals publish work on teaching and pedagogy in specific disciplines and that an established interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is a valuable asset when applying for positions at teaching schools. Write a brief teaching note on a classroom technique that works for you…

We tend to think about the teaching-research interplay in terms of content. I have discovered the value of focusing on methods. I code interviews for my own research, and I assign my students the task of conducting, transcribing and coding interviews before writing a very brief essay. The methodological work in the classroom helps me keep my own skills quick and sharp. Plus students have a way of teaching us with their occasional brilliant insights.

  1. Make writing personal.

Write for people you know and get to know the people you write for. Networking produces invitations to write. The better you know the person to whom you “owe” a piece, the more motivated you are to get it done, and the less nerve-wracking you find the looming (or passed) deadlines.

Even when responding to a Call for Papers or submitting an unsolicited article, it is good to communicate with the editor(s) – e.g., about formal issues – just to make a connection. This can seem daunting when you are getting started as an academic writer, but optimism is justified: editors are almost always open, approachable, helpful and interested in helping more junior colleagues.

  1. Co-author.

Though often just as labour intensive, co-authoring is especially good for keeping the ideas flowing and, above all, for keeping up your motivation and momentum. (Of course, co-authorship is standard in the natural, medical and some social sciences.) The essential prerequisite for a good co-writing relationship is getting along in more general terms. An excellent way to get an article going is to springboard from that hallway or faculty-centre conversation you had with a colleague in a different area or department and to write a cross-disciplinary piece. Try starting with a joint book review to test the waters.

  1. Assess appointment and tenure criteria.

Our employers and senior colleagues do not necessarily rank types of publication (e.g., monograph vs. article) the same ways we learned at graduate school. Pay close attention to the specific criteria of appointment, tenure and promotion processes. (For adjuncts and those seeking employment, this involves some strategic research into policies at a range of desired or potential schools.) Focus on what counts more. E.g., why write a book when two peer-reviewed articles equal a monograph, as in my Faculty? Assess the value of service work in the same way.

  1. Seek alternative publication venues.

There are many more academic presses than you think, including a growing number of venues for open access (OA) monographs. (For a useful snapshot of academic presses, albeit with some debatable rankings, see this Dutch list <http://is.gd/FYPgbE>.) A growing number of on-line specialty journals are seeking good material. OA journals (like the PLoS journals, SAGE Open and the emerging Open Library of Humanities) have undermined the bottleneck of limited space for peer-reviewed articles. Check out the explosion of very solid and reputable journals, often OA and on-line, in various countries around the world. Many of these accept English-language submissions. Many smaller, especially international, journals accept unsolicited book reviews.

  1. Practice.

Reconsider things you do already as modes of practice: work up graduate essays into articles; when reading a new book, turn your notes into a review; accept invitations to review journal submissions; etc. Editing is an excellent way to develop skills in recognizing the characteristics of good (and bad) writing and in developing a sharp sense of how arguments take shape. Working with students on the process – not just the products – of writing is a great way to hone your own skills.

  1. Manage your environment.

We all have our own quirks and preferences as writers: some write late at night, while others get up early in the morning to be more productive; some brainstorm ideas in a coffee shop or on a treadmill, while others search for inspiration listening to music or taking a long walk. We have all unconsciously found our way to habits and spaces that happen to work for us at different phases of the writing process. A key way to become more efficient in writing is, first, to spend some time reflecting on what works for you (and what doesn’t) and, second, to maximize the conditions that foster productive writing, given your many other constraints…

Steven Engler is Professor of Religious Studies at Mount Royal University, Calgary, an undergraduate teaching institution. He publishes and edits extensively. He wrote his first articles while teaching nine courses per year with no research requirement and – now on a new “teaching-scholarship-service work pattern” – teaches six courses per year. He continues to sit on too many committees. He is married with three children (6 years, 18 months, and 5 months). For more information, see http://stevenengler.ca.

Posted in How To Build Your Tenure File, Publishing Issues, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Surviving Assistant Professorhood, Work/Life Balance in Academia, Writing Instrumentally, Yes, You Can: Women in Academia | Leave a comment

The Price You Will Pay for Work-Life Balance
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Posted on June 7, 2013 by

One of the most common questions I’m asked now, and in the years when I was active as an academic, is how women in academia can manage to combine children and career.  I did it, having two babies as an assistant professor and still getting tenure and moving forward in my career.  But in the end, of course, it was my kids who were the catalyst for my leaving academia, in the sense that the pressures of coping with an awful and frightening custody battle, combined with the distractions of a stint in administration, caused me to cease research and writing, and indeed lose interest in the whole enterprise as a satisfying life goal (this is described in this post, Death of a Soul on Campus)

In my webinar, How To Manage Your Career Once You Have a Job, I begin and end with a single point—work-life balance is possible, but it takes vigilance and absolute commitment, it requires that you defy the expectations of your colleagues in the department and in the field at large, and that you be prepared to suffer a price for it, in terms of speed of promotions, raises, and career advancement.  You *can* have work-life balance, but it will be in resistance to, and defiance of, the norms that govern academic careers, and you will suffer consequences, and you need to be prepared for them.  And consequences that you don’t experience in terms of career advancement you might well see in terms of your physical health and mental well-being.

Now, today, there are two articles out, “Family Friendly Comes at a Price,” from the Chronicle of Higher Education and “The Mom Penalty” from Insider Higher Ed, that both provide evidence of the truth of this claim.  Please read them.

The irony of course, as one of the writers points out, is that only when more people, especially more men, demand adequate maternity/paternity leave, will the penalties and resentments directed at those who take it begin to diminish.

I close with this long quote from “The Mom Penalty.”

‘For women in academe, said Mason, “At every stage, there’s a ‘baby penalty.’ In the earlier stages, graduate students have children and drop out or grad students get turned away from the academic profession, in terms of the [lack of family-friendliness] they see around them.” Concerns about time demands in relation to caretaking, and worries that advisers, future employers and peers would take their work less seriously were all reasons female Ph.D. students, more than male, cited for not having a child or being uncertain about having a child in one survey of graduate students in the University of California system. In another survey of postdoctoral fellows in the system, more than 40 percent of women who had children during their fellowships were considering changing their career plans to those outside academic research, compared to 20 percent of childless women with no plans for children.

‘Young female professors with children leave the profession in greater numbers than their cohorts, too. The retention gap between female professors with children and those without, as well as men with and without children, narrows at mid-career – presumably when children are older and require less care – but women are still underrepresented at the higher rungs of the academic ladder. Tenure-track female professors also are likelier to be unmarried, divorced and childless than their male counterparts (12 years after receiving their Ph.D.s, 44 percent of female tenured faculty were married with children, versus 70 percent of male tenured faculty, according to the National Science Foundation’s landmark Survey of Doctorate Recipients, which has tracked 160,000 Ph.D.s in the sciences, social sciences and humanities since the effort began in the 1970s) – what Mason called a “double equity problem.”’

 

Posted in Mental Illness and Academia, Quitting--An Excellent Option, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Surviving Assistant Professorhood, Tenure--How To Get It, Work/Life Balance in Academia, Yes, You Can: Women in Academia | 7 Comments

Writing Your Book While Juggling Teaching and Kids (A Guest Post)
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Posted on June 3, 2013 by

A reader wrote asking for a post on how to write a book while working at a teaching-intensive university.  I put out a request for a guest post on the subject on Facebook, and Katherine Vukadin responded with this account of writing a book while teaching a heavy schedule and taking care of three young children at home.  (Katherine’s bio is below).  Thank you, Katherine, for this inspiring guest post!

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“A book!  We should write a book.”  My colleague stood at my office doorway, her excitement irresistible.  “A book of legal writing exercises–and answers.”  The idea was a good one.  At a previous law school, I had heard professors bemoan the lack of such a book.  But how would we write it?  We were assistant professors with just one or two years on the tenure track, we taught time-consuming legal writing courses, and we held committee assignments that seemed to expand by the day.  

Home was demanding too.  My kids were four, six, and eight at the time.  My spouse worked long hours.  Write a book?  Surely not.  And yet . . .  the idea was a good one.  Would such a window ever open again?  “Yes!  Yes, I’m in,” I heard myself say.  

We spent the month of May grading papers and reading up on book proposals.  Six months later we had a contract in hand, and fourteen months after that, the completed manuscript to Legal Analysis: 100 Exercises for Mastery.  How did it happen?  The process wasn’t perfect.  The book isn’t perfect.  But it’s done, we love it, and we survived.  Our families are still with us.  Your process may be different from ours; it may be better.  Here, though, are a few thoughts on how we got it done.

Be passionate.  Your book idea must excite you.  It’s the book you looked for, but never found.  It’s the thing you need to say.  You will have to sell this idea, champion this idea, and sacrifice for it too, so make sure you believe in it and love it.  Next, get fired up to write.  For encouragement and non-nonsense tips, try Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeksand Paul J. Silvia’s How to Write a Lot.      

Ask up front for as much time as you can.  Our proposal gave us a year to write; our publisher sagely added a couple of months.  Many times, I was so grateful for this.  If you can get more time up front, ask for it.

Shrink what can be shrunk.  Say “no” as never before.  If asked to join a time-consuming committee, explain that this year, you can’t.  Because you can’t.  Contain your teaching obligations as much as possible.  This is not the year to revamp your lectures.  If your teaching is spread over five days, see if that can be tweaked before the semester begins.  If higher-ups see that a simple schedule change can help you publish more, they may be receptive.  

Schedule your writing time; be realistic.  The most productive writers at my institution and the writers on writing seemed to hit a common theme: squeeze in writing time and don’t wait for the “perfect” time.  This became my mantra too.  I used Wendy Belcher’s scheduling forms http://wendybelcher.com/pages/WorkbookForms.htmand wrote a big picture goal in on a yearly planner.  Each week had its own goal too, either in words (a goal of 2,000 words for a week for example) or in number of exercises.  If life throws you an unexpected event (a sudden two-hour hunt for a lost blankie or an attack of lice that must be addressed NOW), you can make up your work on another day within that week without blowing your goal.  

What about the children?  It’s tricky, of course, to write with small children.  I tried to make the absolute most of the days in December and May when my own classes were out, but the children were still in school.  During that period, I wrote in the mornings and graded at night.  When the kids were home, their down time or play time was my writing time.  I also wrote most days from 8 p.m. until about 10:30 p.m. or 11 p.m.  We allow video games on Saturday afternoons, so Saturdays became good writing days; we also started the popular Sunday Movie Outing with Dad.  During the summer, the kids were in day camps about half the time, although camps can be pricey.  When the children were home and bored or bickering with each other, I bribed, wheedled, and begged–let Mommy work for one hour, and then we’ll go to the park, get ice cream, etc.  

At times, I felt guilty.  But the kids still thrived.  And the book had an unexpected positive side-effect.  When my oldest, who had most noticed the writing process, saw the book, he was elated and so proud.  He takes for granted that he can write a book when he wants to—because that’s just what people do.  He’s seen it done.  I had only considered the down side for the kids, but there is a huge up side too.   

Know your limits and circumstances.  We aimed to make just someprogress during the school year.  We did not schedule any writing during the weeks that we conferenced with each one of our students, for example.  But a summer alone may not be enough time to start and finish a large project.  If you squeeze in some work during the year, you’ll be all set when summer hits.
Do something.  If you can’t face the thought of writing on a given day, do some other task for your project.  Read a source once again.  Re-read what you’ve written.  Or force yourself to write just fifty or a hundred words.  Try one method Daniel Pink used in writing his bestseller Drive: sit down and make yourself write five hundred words before you do anything.  And he means anything!

Bring it.  Frustrated with lost time in car pool lines, doctors’ waiting rooms and the like?  Bring along some small part of your project.  Even a rough draft to read or an article to peruse can inspire you and keep you thinking.  This probably won’t be your most focused work.  But again, something is better than nothing and momentum counts.

Accept help.  Help came in various forms.  Friends and family read book sections; colleagues and former colleagues talked to us about writing and contracts; family and fellow moms offered help with school pickups.  We gave our profound thanks, a grateful mention in our acknowledgements, and a rousing party when the book came out.  

Billy Joel said in a recent interview that he loves having written but hates writing.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/billy-joel-on-not-working-and-not-giving-up-drinking.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0  Writing is so hard, and so solitary, and so time-consuming.  But when you dig deep, and your book comes out, you will love having written.

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Katherine T. Vukadin is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University.  She was previously an associate at the law firm of Baker Botts L.L.P.  She teaches, researches, and writes in the areas of law school pedagogy, legal writing pedagogy, and health care policy. Professor Vukadin received her J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and her B.A. from the University of Houston.

Posted in Adjunct Issues, Book Proposals and Contracts, How To Build Your Tenure File, Publishing Issues, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Surviving Assistant Professorhood, Tenure--How To Get It, Work/Life Balance in Academia | 5 Comments

The Postdoc App: How It’s Different and Why
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Posted on May 28, 2013 by

 

For the next few months I will be posting the “best of the best” Professor is in blog posts on the job market, for the benefit of all those girding their loins for the 2013-2014 market.  Today’s post was originally published in 2011.

 

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It has come to my attention that many junior people do not have a clear picture in their minds of the requirements of a postdoc application.

Some treat it too much like the job application. And some treat it too differently from the job application. The fact is, it falls somewhere in the middle. It’s quite different from a job application…..and yet many of the same principles apply.

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that the postdoc application is requiring a cover letter, a 4 page research proposal, a description of a proposed course, and a brief statement articulating how you will participate in the scholarly community of the campus. While not all postdocs will require this exact set of documents, by discussing these here, we can address the major requirements, expectations, and potential pitfalls of the typical postdoc application effort. I will take them in order.

Cover Letter

This cover letter will be very similar to your job cover letter as explained in this post. It will contain the standard set of paragraphs to start: introduction, dissertation, dissertation import, publications.  In all of this first part, the relevance of your work to the stated mission of the postdoc will be emphasized clearly.  This requires carefully tailoring the cover letter materials. It’s difficult but it must be done.  If your topic is Mexican women immigrant workers, then for a gender postdoc, you will emphasize how the phenomenon reflects changing gender relations at home or abroad; for a globalization postdoc, you will emphasize how the phenomenon reflects changing labor mobility globally; for a Latin American Studies postdoc, you will emphasize how the phenomenon reflects new economic circumstances in Mexico.  This tailoring requires an original recasting or reframing of your work to meet the mission of the postdoc!  Failure to do this reframing means failure to get the postdoc.

After the discussion of research, the postdoc app letter will specifically discuss the plan of work for the postdoc year–ie, month by month, what new research and revisions will be made.

It will then include a very brief discussion of teaching experience (much shorter than for a regular job cover letter), followed by a discussion of the proposed class required by the postdoc, and how the proposed class will also advance the mission of the postdoc.

Lastly, in place of the typical tailoring paragraph, the letter will conclude with a brief paragraph explaining how the research and writing time of the postdoc will be used, how the scholarly community on campus will advance the project, and how the candidate will participate in said scholarly community.  The letter will be no more than 2 pages long.

The principle in operation here—and the one that too many applicants don’t seem to grasp—is that the campus is funding this expensive postdoc not so some random academic can come and sit in an office and write for a year, but rather, to “buy” the energy, contributions, and participation of an additional world-class scholar to their campus community for the period of that year. The postdoc, dear readers, is not meant to serve YOU. Rather, you are meant to serve the postdoc. That means, that in every document, you articulate how you will PARTICIPATE in campus/departmental scholarly life. You do this, however, as in all professional documents, without flattering, pandering, or begging. Rather, you identify faculty on campus with whom you would collaborate, and initiatives and programs on campus that are likely to house interdisciplinary conversations and debates to which your project relates, and you articulate clearly your interest in engaging with them in substantive ways.

4-Page Research Proposal

This research proposal looks very much like a grant application, and Dr. Karen’s Foolproof Grant Template will serve you well here, at least for the opening paragraphs. As in all research proposals you will want to open by proving the importance and urgency of your topic. Following the standard Dr. Karen template, you will construct the Proposal As Hero Narrative, with yourself in the role of Hero.

You may follow the Foolproof Grant Template all the way through to the point where it breaks off into things like budget and methodology. In place of those sections, you will focus entirely on timeline. The point of a postdoc research proposal is to, first, articulate an important and significant project, and second, articulate a coherent and feasible plan of work. It is this second element that most applicants fail to grasp.

Remember: the postdoc is not there to serve you, you are there to serve the postdoc. What does that mean? It means that the postdoc wants to see publications result from your time there. The postdoc wants to be mentioned in the acknowledgments of your book. The postdoc wants to be in the line, in the footnote, “this research was supported by generous funding from xxxxx.” The postdoc committee is going to judge the applications based on how likely it is that the applicant is going to efficiently and effectively use the time on campus to complete a specified set of publications. You will impress them when you include a month-by-month timeline/plan of work that shows explicitly what new archival/etc. research you will conduct, and when, what book chapters you will complete, and when, and what journal articles you will finish and submit, and when.

You will conclude this document with a strong and expansive conclusion that clearly shows how the postdoc year will play into your larger scholarly and career trajectory as a world-class scholar. Why? Because the postdoc wants to get part of the fame and glory that attaches to you as you move ahead in the world.

Postdocs are in the business of supporting the next generation of leaders in the scholarly world. To the extent that you represent yourself as a leader, you will do well. To the extent that you represent yourself as a little lost sheep desperately looking for a chance to get out of teaching for a year while you try and figure out what your book is about, you will do poorly. Be aware that the vast majority of postdoc applications are written by the latter.

Proposed Class Description

A point of vast confusion among postdoc applicants seems to be how to pitch the required class. Many applicants do not clearly grasp the difference between the postdoc and an adjunct. As such, the class they propose is one that is adjunct-level. Basically, applicants too often envision a course that is generic and basic. This is a mistake.

Postdocs are very expensive. If a campus wanted a generic and basic course, it would hire a cheap adjunct. There are many available. Instead, however, they are advertising for a postdoc. That means, they want a highly specialized course, that reflects the postdoc’s unique and distinctive scholarly program. The class can’t be absurdly specialized, of course. If the applicant’s specialization is the emerging gay male community in Jakarta, the course cannot be “Emerging Gay Male Communities in Jakarta.” Too narrow. Neither should it be “Introduction to Indonesia,” or “Gender and Sexuality.” Too broad. Rather, it should be pitched somewhere around, “Global Sexualities,” or “Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asia,” or “Queer Globalizations.” The final choice for how to pitch the course will hinge on the climate of the department and the campus, and the postdoc mission itself—if it’s an Asian area studies postdoc, then you’d prioritize SE Asia, if it’s a gender postdoc, then you’d prioritize Global Sexualities, if it’s a transnational studies postdoc, then you’d prioritize Queer Globalizations. Get it? The tailoring happens here.

Statement of Participation in Campus Community

Here’s what the postdoc committee does not want: someone who arrives, walks into their allotted office, and is never seen again for the rest of the year. Here’s what they do want: someone who arrives and dives into the scholarly work of the department and the campus community. A postdoc is (should be) exempted from all service work on campus. However, the postdoc should make herself visible as an involved and interested departmental member. She should show up for brown bags and talks, symposia and conferences, and coffee and lunch with colleagues. In this statement, you articulate your orientation in that direction. Identify programs and initiatives in the department and on campus, by name, and discuss how you anticipate participating. Mention two or three faculty members by name, and how you look forward to engaging with them.

In all things, however, do NOT fall back into graduate student habits. You are NOT on campus to “learn from” or “study with” the scholars there. Rather, you ARE one of the scholars there. They may well learn from you. The proper stance here is that of a colleague who brings her own dynamic field of expertise to the campus, and who looks forward to energetic and innovative interactions with the colleagues there.

In sum, remember that, no matter how much you need that postdoc to get your book written, the postdoc is not there to serve you. You are there to serve the postdoc, but as a first-rank, world-class scholar and specialist in your field whose work speaks directly—DIRECTLY—to the mission of the postdoc. By virtue of your energy and brilliance, you cause the postdoc committee to pick you, out of all the competitors, to spend the year on their campus, sharing your work, and augmenting their teaching and intellectual profile and advancing their scholarly cause. Remember, make them want you.

Posted in Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Postdoc Issues, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Teaching and Research Statements, Tenure--How To Get It | Tagged , , | 49 Comments

Why Your Job Cover Letter Sucks (and what you can do to fix it)
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Posted on May 17, 2013 by

For the next few months I will be posting the “best of the best” Professor is in blog posts on the job market, for the benefit of all those girding their loins for the 2013-2014 market.  Today’s post was originally published in 2011.  I’ve now read about two thousand more job letters than I mention here. All the advice still applies.

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In my 15 years as a faculty member I served on approximately 11 search committees. Some of these search committees I chaired. These committees brought in ten new assistant professors into my departments.

Estimating that each search brought in an average of 200 applications (a conservative estimate for a field like Anthropology, a generous estimate for a much smaller field like East Asian Languages and Literatures), that means I have read approximately 2200 job applications.

That means I’ve read 2200 job cover letters.

I’ve also read the cover letters of my own students, and a passel of Ph.D. students who came to me for advice, as well as a large number of clients since opening The Professor is In (as of July 2012 let’s say 600).

So let’s say I’ve read 2400 (2800) job cover letters. Of those 2400 (2800) job cover letters, it is safe to say that 2300 (2700) sucked. Sucked badly. Sucked epically. Sucked the way Cakewrecks cakes suck.

What’s up with that?

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Here’s what’s up with that.

Advisors don’t teach their grad students how to write cover letters. They send them out pathetically, humiliatingly ill-informed.

It is, in my opinion, a criminal degree of neglect.

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I am on a mission to get Ph.D. students, in the social sciences and humanities especially, to stop sending out worthless, embarassing, self-sabotaging job cover letters.

I am infuriated that close colleagues of mine in the top programs in the country–think Ivy Leagues–routinely allow their Ph.D.s to send out job letters to departments across the country–to potential colleagues and peers and reviewers across the country– that make those Ph.D.s look ill-trained, unqualified, and unhireable.

How do I know that? Again, because I was on the hiring committees that received the letters from those Ph.D.s, the students I knew well, had met at conferences, and recognized as the students of my friends and colleagues at prestigious departments in the field.

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So, anyone reading this now, here is why your cover letter sucks, and what you need to do to fix it.

1. It Is Too Long. And 1a. It’s Not on Letterhead. And 1b. It must follow proper letter norms of etiquette

Your letter must be on letterhead if you have a current academic affiliation of any kind. This is not negotiable. It has come to my attention that some departments are denying their graduate students access to letterhead. This is unacceptable, and any act is justified in response. You may steal the letterhead. You may photoshop the letterhead. Do what you must, but send all professional letters of every kind on the letterhead of the department with which you affiliated.

If you do not have an affiliation because you finished your Ph.D. and have no academic employment at all, including adjuncting, then you must submit without letterhead (although a very sober, understated, and proper personal letterhead can sometimes be a nice touch).  You may not use letterhead to which you’re not entitled.  That is unethical, and it is also stupid, because your readers are smart, and they notice.

Your letter must be two pages max. No longer. Do not argue with me. If you are arguing with me, you are wrong. It must be two pages max.

It must be 12 point (ok, *maybe* 11.5) font, and have a minimum of 3/4″ margins.

It must follow normal letter etiquette, which means that it will include the date (fully written out) just under the letterhead, then a space, then the full snail mail address of the person/committee to whom the letter is being sent just below the date, left justified, and then a space, and then the address:  ”Dear Professor XXXX/Members of the Search Committee:” Then it will have another space, and commence: “I am writing in application to the advertised position in XXX at the University of XXXX.  ETc. Etc.”  Nothing in this heading material may be left out.  Similarly, nothing beyond this may be added in, including any kind of memo heading or title such as “Re: position in XXX.”  LETTERS DO NOT HAVE TITLES! 

Why must it be these things? I will tell you. Because the care you show in the norms and forms of proper letter etiquette represent you as a fully adult, functioning professional.  It demonstrates that you are a full-fledged member of the tribe, and not an embarassing wanna-be.

And the length?  Because the faculty members on the commitee reviewing your letters are tired, distracted, irritated, and rushed. They will give your cover letter 5 minutes. They will not hunt for your main point, they will not squint, they will not strain their eyes, they will not pore over it.

Serve up your brilliance, your achievements, and your delightful collegial personality loud and clear, in legible large font, and a considerate quantity of verbiage. You are respecting your future colleagues’ time and eyesight, and believe me, they notice.

Do I hear whining, that you “can’t possibly say all you need to” in 2 pages? Tough. Do you want a job or don’t you? Do it.

2. You Are Telling, Not Showing.

All academics in the world, by virtue of being academics, require evidence to accept a proposition. Even the wooiest humanists have to be persuaded with some form of evidence that a claim is valid.

Your letter must include evidence. Empty claims like “I am passionate about teaching,” or “I care deeply about students,” or “I am an enthusiastic colleague” contain no evidence whatsoever. They can be made by anyone, and provide no means of proof. They are worthless verbiage.

Show, don’t tell: Instead of “I am passionate about teaching,” you must write, “I used new technologies to create innovative small group discussion opportunities in my large introductory classes, technologies that were later adopted by my colleagues in the department.” Or, “I worked one on one with students on individual research projects leading to published articles. Several students later nominated me for our campus’s “Best Undergraduate Teacher” award, which I won in 2011.”

Get it? Don’t waste our time with unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable claims.

3. You Drone On and On About Your Dissertation

We actually don’t care about your dissertation. Seriously, we don’t. Your dissertation is in the past. It’s in the past even if you’re actually still writing it. It’s what you did *as a student*, and we’re not hiring a student. We’re hiring a colleague. We want to know about your dissertation only as it relates to identifable past, present, and future faculty colleague achievements, i.e., debates and interventions in your fields, publications, conference talks, grants, teaching.

Package up your dissertation into an easily digestible paragraph.  Then, in a brief paragraph following, specify what major debates in your field/fields the dissertation intervenes in, and the nature of the intervention it makes.  We care less about the micro-details of the topic, than we do its intellectual or disciplinary import and significance.  Your goal here is to speak as a world-class scholar whose work is changing the face of/pushing the boundaries of/engaging the leading thinkers of a discipline.

From this discussion, move quickly to the conference papers and publications that came out of it, and the current and future publication plans that are forthcoming from it. Also how it inspires and motivates your teaching. See #4 below.

4. Your Teaching Paragraph is All Drippy and Lame

We don’t care that you “love” teaching. What we care about is that you are an effective teacher. We need evidence of that so give us some (see point 2 above). And more to the point, we want to know you are an inspired teacher. How do you show that? By showing us that “the same commitment to xxx that inspires my research also propels my work in the classroom. Here’s how….”

Like that sentence? You can use it. I give you permission. It’s been used by a bunch of Ph.D. students of my acquaintance, and it’s damned effective. Here it is again, “the same commitment to xxx that inspires my research also propels my work in the classroom. Here’s how….” [UPDATE 10/3/12:  Please stop using this sentence!   The readership of this blog has expanded to such a degree that the sentence is now becoming overused and resented.   You may keep the sentiment, but find your own words to express it.]

And then, give evidence. If you don’t have any, then start being a better teacher. If you’ve been fully funded without ever setting foot into a classroom (my own case, actually), seek out limited teaching opportunities at universities or colleges in your area. And craft a really persuasive teaching philosophy statement, with help from experienced teachers.

5. You Present Yourself as a Student, Not a Colleague

I’m restating #4 above, but more directly. We’re not hiring a student. We’re hiring a colleague. We want to hear you speak like a faculty member. Don’t know how? Fake it ’til you make it.

Don’t be humble. Don’t be a supplicant. Don’t be groveling. Be firm, confident, and forceful. Write in short, declarative sentences. Don’t make excuses. Don’t write about what you didn’t do, don’t know. You’re an expert in your field. Act like one.

Don’t EVER refer to faculty in the department to which you’re applying as “Professor so-and-so.” What are you, a grad student? In your paragraph about why you’re a good fit, write something to the effect, “I am excited about the prospect of teaching in the xxx department and would look forward to collaborating or co-teaching with faculty such as Smith and Wesson.”

6. You Don’t Specify Publication Plans

Clearly specify what publications are out, which ones are in press, which ones are in submission, and which ones are in manuscript stage, and where you intend to submit them. Do NOT expect the committee to locate this information on your c.v.

If you’re in a book field, mention the presses with whom you’re in discussions about your book. If you’re not in discussions with presses about your book, start that immediately. Set a timeline for the book, and an anticipated publication date well in advance of spring of your 5th year in the job.

7. You Don’t Have a Second Research Project

It doesn’t matter if you’re still dotting your i’s on your dissertation before submitting it, or haven’t even defended it yet, you still have to have a second major research/book project in sight, well thought out, funded if possible. This second project should arise organically out of the first, showing BOTH continuity of interest and specialization, but also vibrant new directions.

This shows that you are the real deal, a tenurable assistant professor.  Not a one-hit wonder, but someone who is going to keep up the work schedule through 6 years, tenure, and beyond.

They do NOT want to hire someone only to turn them down for tenure 6 years later. Show them you’ve got what it takes.

Here’s what you may not know: the second project is now required for a successful tenure case at many institutions. It may not have to be “out” in published form, but by the 5th year, when your file goes out to external reviewers, that second project has to be, at minimum, proposed, underway, funded, and have produced some high profile conference talks.

8. You Didn’t Do Your Homework

Show that you have researched the department, know the faculty, have read their work, appreciate their contributions, know the focus and specializations of their specific program.  If they specialize in Gender
Studies, and your project relates to Gender Studies, make that explicit. Mention one or two faculty members by name as potential collaborators. COLLABORATORS, mind you, NOT mentors. Refer to Point 5 above. You are now to be a faculty member, not a student.

9. You’re Disorganized and Rambling

Here’s how a job letter should read:

Para 1: Short self-intro; your current position; your Ph.D. granting institution, your general field and subfield and area of specialization.

Para 2: Your primary research project, briefly what, where, and how, and the achievements arising out of it such as publications, conference papers, panels, and grants.

Para 3: Your primary research project’s large contributions to the field and discipline as a whole—how it pushes boundaries, engages in dynamic new debates, and enlarges the discipline.

Para 4: Your publication plans.

Para 5: Your second project.

Para 6: Your teaching, as it ties in with all of the above.

Para 7: Your specific interest in the job and department to which you are applying, with specific programs, specializations, and faculty by name.

Para 8:  ”I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you, signature”

10. You Didn’t Tailor.

You don’t have just one job letter template file. You have at least 8. Let’s take my own case—a cultural anthropologist of Japan with a focus on gender and transnationalism. I had the following letter template files ready to go:

1. General anthro job, research institution
2. General anthro job, teaching institution
3. Japan area studies job, research institution
4. Japan area studies job, teaching institution
5. Gender studies job, research institution
6. Gender Studies job, teaching institution
7. Transnational studies job, research institution
8. Transnational studies job, teaching institution

The difference between research and teaching institution jobs? The former emphasizes your research, the latter your teaching.

This list doesn’t even include the postdoc letters. And it doesn’t include the tailoring for EACH INDIVIDUAL JOB, which as I said above, must include mention of that department’s specific specializations, programs, and faculty.

Follow these ten rules, and you have a fighting chance of getting shortlisted.

 

Posted in Bad Advisors and Good Mentors, How To Write Academic Job Cover Letters, Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Major Job Market Mistakes, Stop.Acting.Like.A.Grad.Student, Strategizing Your Success in Academia | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 129 Comments

The Dutch Academic Job Market for Americans and Other English Speakers (A Guest Post)
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Posted on May 13, 2013 by

One of my blog commenters, Veronica Davidov, who has worked for many years in the Netherlands, remarked that American job seekers would benefit from knowing more about the Dutch job market, which is relatively open to American candidates. I asked her for a guest post, which she has kindly provided.  Thank you, Veronica!

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Veronica Davidov is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Leiden University College.  She previously worked as a Lecturer in Globalization and Development at Maastricht University.  She has lived and worked in the Netherlands for almost five years.  You can find out more about her work on her website, veronicadavidov.com

The Dutch academic market is not very well-known in the US (in my experience).  But it should be:  English is the working language of a large part of Dutch academia, and the market is very open to American scholars and researchers in a way that French, German, or Belgian academic markets are not.  I put this post together drawing on email exchanges I have had with friends who have taken up employment in the Netherlands in the last few years, and contacted me prior to accepting their jobs, to make sense of some of the cultural and institutional differences.

Recruitment and employment: all Dutch academic jobs are published on one central websites, www.academictransfer.com.  This includes PhD positions (as those are “employee” rather than “student” positions here), postdocs, and full and part time faculty jobs.  Dutch universities also recruit through jobs.ac.uk and sometimes through CHE job boards, especially for jobs that are in English-language faculties and programs.

The hiring process is somewhere halfway between the American multi-level videogame-like campus visit experience and the UK minimalist one.  It is standard for the whole thing to last several hours.  For the first job I had in the Netherlands, I flew for an interview from the US.  The visit started at 10 am with an hour-long interview with two faculty members of the program into which I would be appointed and the dean of faculty, followed by lunch with the same two faculty members, and then a 30 minute research talk, open to faculty and students.   By 2 pm I was done. The second job I got in a different Dutch university had a campus visit that consisted of a one-hour sample class, one-hour research talk, and one-hour interview with the search committee (including the dean), back-to-back.  

Negotiations are similar to the UK system, or any US state or city system with clear salary scales and a comprehensive union contract.  All Dutch universities have an identical union contract, as they are all in a sense public/government jobs (there are private universities in the Netherlands but they are unlikely to be the ones hiring foreign staff, with the exception of American-based Webster University, which operates a campus in Leiden, and is indeed outside the Dutch system).  The HR calculates which scale and step your experience corresponds to, and there is not much room for negotiation in most cases.  Universities subsidize “kennismigrant” (skilled worker) permits for foreign employees; foreigners are also eligible for something called “the 30% rule” under which 30% of one’s income is untaxed.  This is an incentive from the Dutch government to recruit foreign talent, and (presumably) to offset some of the financial disadvantages one has living in the Netherlands as a foreigner who is ineligible for certain benefits, for example social housing or housing allowance.  The university is also supposed to buy you a bicycle every 3 years (or otherwise subsidize commute costs), although for some reason this rule seems to be erratically followed, depending on the university and the HR office.  

The types of positions (University Docent I, University Docent II, UHD (Associate Professor, Professor) are described in the Collective Labor Agreement, so I will just refer you to that document (http://www.staff.leiden.edu/h-r/cao/cao-and-regulations.html) and instead here spend a bit of time on things that are crucial but less codified.  As is the case everywhere, the Dutch university system is increasingly neoliberalized.  There are more and more fixed-term appointments.  While some are renewable, there are no infinitely renewable situations here—Dutch law stipulates that after three contract renewals one receives a permanent contract, so the universities will let people go before that condition is met if thy are not on the tenure-track.  Tenure process can vary from university to university.  At some universities the process is increasingly similar to the American system, with the tenure process taking 5 years, and the applicant undergoing a review based on their achievements in research, teaching, and service.  At others, there is still the “soft tenure” system, where permanent contracts are awarded after three years as long as the annual performance reports have been satisfactory.  In either case, the important thing about tenure at a Dutch university is that it is decoupled from promotion.  It is possible and common to be tenured as an assistant professor, and stay in that position until retirement, which is mandatory at the age of 65.  At some faculties it is literally impossible to advance to associate or full professorship for reasons of faculty politics and budget constraints.  At most faculties promotion to Associate or Full is contingent not on an ongoing track record of publications but on winning major grants, either from the NWO (the Dutch equivalent of the NSF and the NEH rolled into one), or through the ERC (the European Research Council).  The European Commission administers a grant program called a “Marie Curie Incoming Fellowship” specifically for non-European researchers coming to European universities.  

Winning such a grant can in some cases mean an instant promotion, but the grants are increasingly hard to get and the granting agencies increasingly favor projects with “applied” or “policy relevance” potential.  The grants are especially hard to get if one does not get in “on the ground floor” of the grant system.  The NWO has a series of individual grants for each stage of a research career—the Veni, a grant for 250,000 EUR, that buys one three years of teaching-free research time, is available for early-career researchers, the Vidi for mid-career researchers, and the Vici, the largest one, for established scholars.  While in principle anyone can apply as long as they fit the official criteria, it is common knowledge that it is much easier to get a Vidi if you had a Veni, and it is virtually impossible to have a Vici without having one or two of the “earlier” grants.  So, the system is good for job stability (if you are on the tenure-track), but erratic for advancement, unless you are one of the people who lucked into a succession of grants.  This is not to say that publications don’t matter—they do, they just don’t have the dramatic impact of such mega-grants.  Also, with publications, generally articles are more important than books—even in fields that might be “book fields” in the US.  Many Dutch faculties have a list of journals in which their faculty should be publishing, with a point system assigned to journals in different tiers, and scholarship criteria primarily focus on peer-reviewed journal publications. The symbolic economy of book publishers differs quite a bit from the US as well.  Outside the big names (Harvard, Yale, Stanford), American university presses are not as well-known, and not necessarily as desirable as, for instance, placing a volume with one of the Dutch academic presses (Amsterdam University Press, Brill) or with Routledge, Palgrave, or Praeger.  

There is a strong sense in Dutch academia that it is “Americanizing” in some ways.  Dutch universities are very open to hiring American scholars (especially ones from elite universities), and in the recent years Dutch universities have been increasingly interested in developing spaces for liberal arts education at the undergraduate level, similar to, and sometimes modeled after, the American SLACs.  These institutions are called “university colleges” and at this point many major universities have one (UvA and VU share one, Leiden and Maastricht have one each, and Utrecht University has two—Utrecht University College and The Roosevelt Academy; Erasmus University is set to open its own UC this fall).  While regular Dutch universities have open admissions, and students choose a specific fixed courses of pre-professional study early on, University Colleges have selective admissions and draw students who are interested in a broad liberal arts, interdisciplinary approach to BA-level education.  As with SLACs, appointments at UCs are likely to be teaching-heavy or teaching-only, and classes are likely to be capped at 15 or 20.  

The working culture in the Netherlands is very stereotypically European in that weekends are sacred, and so are vacations (mostly—on occasion there will be Open Days that different faculties plan for student recruitment on Saturdays).   At work there is generally more teamwork than one might be used to at American universities.  Co-teaching classes in one way or another is common; designing a syllabus literally by committee may also be common, depending on the faculty and the department.  There is a lot of service and there are many meetings.  Sometimes I have three meetings in a day for the various service committees I am on.  Such a normatively collaborative atmosphere may be very appealing for some—I have come to appreciate it a lot–and frustrating for others, especially if you are not used to the amount of bureaucratic work you might be expected to do as faculty, or to making sure your syllabus complies with a template not of your choosing.  

A recent rule in Dutch academia is that every faculty member at every university has to achieve a BKO certificate.  BKO stands for Basiskwalificatie onderwijs, in translation—Basic Qualification in Education.  Every university and faculty has its own procedure for how that assessment is made, but in principle everyone must submit a teaching portfolio to a BKO committee, which will assess it on the basis of certain rubrics.  Because this is a mandated requirement, most job ads for academic jobs in the Netherlands today mention the BKO or the willingness to earn one as a prerequisite.  

One last thing to consider that I think is indicative of the cultural differences between the Netherlands and the US—the expectations around what goes into a letter of reference.  If you ask a Dutch colleague to write you a letter, they are likely to write a very balanced assessment of your character, doing a strengths and weaknesses analysis and explaining why you would be effective in a particular position.  The adjectives that make up a “glowing” letter of reference are likely to be absent from such a letter.   The letter is also likely to be much shorter than what American letters look like.  Conversely, although many Dutch academics are familiar with the American style of reference letters, some find the standard heaps of praise excessive and difficult to “use” in terms of figuring out whether the person would be a good colleague.  This is a helpful thing to remember if one considers applying for a job in the Netherlands; it is even more important to remember if one decides to apply for jobs back in the US after working in the lowlands.   Well-meaning Dutch colleagues may end up damning you with faint praise with American search committees not attuned to this particular intercultural difference.  

I want to end with the caveat that although I have lived and worked in the Netherlands for 5 years, at two different universities, and I think I have some insight into how Dutch academia works, the aspects I wrote about are representative in some ways, but of course the Dutch academia is not monolithic, and different universities and departments function in different ways.  So this is not meant to offer definitive generalizations about the Dutch university system, but rather to provide an overview of an academic market that many American job-seekers are not familiar with, and give the readers a sense of the possibilities and limitations in this academic context.  

 

Posted in International Perspectives, Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Strategizing Your Success in Academia | 2 Comments

The Six Ways You’re Acting Like a Grad Student (And how that’s killing you on the job market)
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Posted on May 10, 2013 by

For the next few months I will be posting the “best of the best” Professor is in blog posts on the job market, for the benefit of all those girding their loins for the 2013-2014 market.

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Today we have another Special Request post, this one coming from Liz, who asks, “You’re always telling us ‘not to act like graduate students.’ But how do I know when I’m doing it??” Thanks for asking this, Liz. It is an excellent question, especially at the start of the conference and job season.

O, you graduate students! What am I going to do with you?

How am I going to explain to you all of the ways that you sabotage and undermine yourselves, with the best of intentions, and with complete lack of self-awareness?

I wish I could grab each and every one of you, get up in your grill, and say “stop it!”

But alas, I have only the means of this blog. So I will do what I can. I will list the ways that grad students act like grad students. I will name the behavior, describe it, and then explain how and why that behavior sabotages you in a job market situation.

1. You drone on and on about your dissertation.

Oh. My. God. People. Stop talking about your dissertation!!!!! Nobody wants to hear about your dissertation!!!!! We do not care about your dissertation!!!!!

Job market: one of the primary “instant reject” cover letter types is the one that spends more than one paragraph on the dissertation. Remember from this post: search committees don’t want to know about your dissertation beyond proof that you wrote one and it’s (soon to be) finished and defended. What they want to know is how that dissertation accomplishes specific goals that serve the hiring department: ie, produces refereed publications, intervenes in a major scholarly debate, wins grants and awards, translates into dynamic teaching, transforms quickly into a book, inspires a viable second project.

In interview situations, learn to talk about your dissertation in short, punchy bursts, no more than a sentence or two long.  This gives your interlocutor the chance to say, “How interesting! Tell us more about that.”  To which you respond in another short, punchy burst.

Please recall that interviews are dialogues.  They are not monologues.  Think of a tennis match.  They lob the ball, you lob the ball back.  Rinse and repeat.

2. You think people are out to get you in your department.

Enough with the paranoia, people! Finis! Stop now.

With very rare exceptions, faculty barely even think about the graduate students in their departments. Except to ask, once a year, whether they’re on track to defend so that the Dean can stop hassling the department for its low completion rate.

The people in the department want you to finish. Period. Whatever that takes, that’s what they want you to do. So just do that, ok?

Job market: paranoia is extremely unattractive and a major red flag signalling an immature candidate not ready for prime time. You may think that your dark insinuations of how “my project really offended some people in my department” make you look mysterious and desirable, but actually they make you look tiresome. Regardless of how you were treated in your department, you say nothing but collegial things about it on the market. Period. Because how you talk about your Ph.D. department signals how you will talk about your future department. And your future department wants a colleague who has a positive attitude.

3. You think people are out to get you in your discipline.

You’re sure that your “radical” perspective/argument/position/stance has earned you powerful enemies in the field. It very likely has not. Very likely few people are even thinking about you. If you’re getting negative responses to your work, it’s very likely not because your argument single-handedly overturns the foundational orthdoxy of your field and has inspired widespread jealousy and resentment. No, it’s because the work is not yet good enough. As irritating as most professors are, they generally do respect sound argumentation backed up with intensive evidence. Provide those, and chances are your “radical” perspective will get a balanced hearing. I’m not saying you won’t have to fight for your perspective. But it will be a fair fight, not a case of your total persecution by the “powers that be” in your field.

Job market:  Dark tales of victimization at the last conference and mutterings about how “my argument has really pissed off some people in the field” will not make you look mysterious and desirable. They will make you look like a drama queen. And one thing no search committee wants? A drama queen.

4. You constantly repeat your main point.

Graduate students are insecure. This is understandable, because their status is insecure. One outcome of the insecurity is that you tend to “pile on” examples that “prove” that your topic is a legitimate one. It’s the classic dissertation disease of seeing your topic in every single thing in the universe. Everyone suffers this to some degree while writing the dissertation.

Job market: The “piling on” of examples is a hallmark of immature writing and an insecure identity. Search committees will reject anyone who appears immature and insecure. Search committees are looking for someone who already speaks and writes like an employed colleague. What that means is someone who is confident that their topic is sound, who gives a reasonable amount of evidence for the topic, but then quickly moves on to why the topic is important and path-breaking, and how the topic intervenes in major, top-tier debates in the scholarly field.

5. You make excuses for yourself.

This is the one that if I had superpowers, I would reach through your computer screen, grab you by your collar, and shake out of you. Right now.

Graduate students are so conditioned to dealing with intimidating advisors and committees that they’re like the Pavlov’s dogs of excuses.

Professor: Hi, how are you?

Grad student: I’m sorry I didn’t get that chapter in to you! I got sick over the weekend, but I’ll have it done this week, I promise!

Professor: You were sick? How are you feeling now?

Grad student: I have a 102 fever but it’s ok—I spent the morning in the library and as soon as I get through teaching my 3 sections I plan to skip dinner and make up for the writing I didn’t get done over the weekend!

Professor: Wow, take care of yourself.

Grad student: It’s ok! I can write through the delirium!

Stop that! Stop it now!

Job market: When someone on the search committee asks, “how would you teach our Intro course?” You do NOT answer in any of the following ways:

  • “I haven’t really had a chance to teach a big course but I’m a quick study and think I can learn fast!!!”
  • “I’m not sure how your department likes it to be done so I’d definitely follow your lead on that.”
  • “I taught it last year but it didn’t really go all that well so I’d want to make a lot of changes.”

No, those are excuses. Instead, you answer in one of these ways:

 

  • “I love the chance to teach large courses because I get to reach a new set of undergraduates and turn them on to how fascinating our field is!”
  • “I will use XXX textbook because I find that to be the best one, and I will augment it with some interesting and unconventional materials like xxx and xxx.”
  • “I will take a balanced approach that introduces the xx perspective and the yy perspective. Obviously my own work falls more in the xx perspective, but it’s important in an Intro class that the full scope of the field is well represented.”

Get it? You are the expert. You are the authority. You are in command.

The cover letter version of this advice:  Don’t discuss what your dissertation doesn’t do or still needs to address.  Focus exclusively on what it does achieve.  Embrace the positive.  Banish the negative.

No. Excuses.

6.  You’re submissive.

Graduate students tend to display the classic signs of submission—tilted head (ref: your puppy), bowed shoulders, tightly crossed legs, weak and vague hand gestures, a querulous, questioning tone. They have a wimpy, cold fish handshake.  They avoid direct eye contact.  They mumble and mutter and talk too fast, and above all, they ramble in an unfocused and evasive way. They will often either smile and laugh too much, or conversely be grimly humorless (a sense of humor being one of the first casualties of the graduate school experience).  They also display their lack of capital through old, worn clothes and ungroomed hair.

Few people have ALL of these traits, to be sure.  But most grad students have some of them.

Job market: Search committees are hiring a colleague, not a graduate student. You must appear at your interviews as if you are a person who is already successfully employed as an assistant professor. Your clothes must be new and must fit you at your current weight, and be hemmed (sleeves, pants, skirt) to the appropriate length. Your clothes must be more formal than is customary in your department, because interviews require formal clothes. Your hair must be cut and styled. You must wear decent shoes that are appropriate for professional settings.

More to the point, you must square your shoulders, straighten your back, lift your chin, and loosen your elbows. Take up ALL the space in the chair (you can do this even if you are a small woman—it’s in the body language). Make direct eye contact. Do not, under any circumstances, fuss with your hair, clothes, or jewelry. Speak in a firm, level tone. Women, work on any tendency to a high pitched nasal tone. Speak in a lower register if you can—lower tones are the tones of authority, for better or worse. Smile in a friendly way at the beginning and end, but not too much while you’re talking about your work. Your work is important and deserves a serious delivery.   If a joke arises naturally in the conversation, though–run with it.  Search committees love a sense of humor, when it’s displayed in the course of smart collegial repartee.

Do. Not. Ramble.

Have short and pithy responses rehearsed so that they trip off your tongue easily and fluently. Always give the search committee the chance to say, “Oh, how interesting, tell us more!” And then follow up with another short and pithy elaboration.

To repeat: Do. Not. Ramble.

And lastly, the handshake. Oh my god, the handshake. If you do nothing else from this post, please, I beg you, do this. Get up from your computer, go find a human, and shake their hand. Shake it firmly. Really squeeze! Outstretch your arm, grip their hand with all your fingers and thumb, look them firmly in the eye, smile in a friendly, open way, and give that hand a nice, firm shake. Repeat. Do this until it’s second nature. If it doesn’t feel right or you aren’t sure if you’re doing it right, find an alpha male in your department, and ask him to teach you.

Banish the wet noodle handshake.

Seriously, grad students, butch it up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in How To Do Conferences, How to Interview, How To Write Academic Job Cover Letters, Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Major Job Market Mistakes, Stop.Acting.Like.A.Grad.Student, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Tenure--How To Get It, Yes, You Can: Women in Academia | Tagged , , , , , , , | 43 Comments

How To Identify Yourself as a Diversity Hire
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Posted on May 3, 2013 by

One of the most important things a job document can do is communicate an applicant’s status with regard to diversity hiring. If you qualify as a diversity hire, you must make sure the committee knows it. But how does one do that? In my work with clients, I find that they tend to either not mention it all because they don’t know how, or else devote an entire paragraph of the job letter to a long, involved, sometimes overwrought story about all the painful trials and tribulations they had to overcome to get the Ph.D. and how passionate they are about mentoring students in similar circumstances.

Both of these are mistakes. The first, obviously, because diversity hiring is a door that you want to make sure is open to you, if you qualify. The second, because even when speaking of your identity, you still have to remember the basic rules of job documents: show, don’t tell, eschew adjectives and emotion, focus on professional outcomes not personal process, remain factual and evidence-based.

Here’s one method that works. In the basic template of the job letter described in the Why Your Job Letter Sucks blog post, open the paragraph on teaching with this phrase: “As a Native American/African American/Latina/queer/disabled scholar, I am sensitive to issues of diversity in the classroom/I prioritize a diversity of perspectives in my classroom/I make a point to include a range of diverse voices in my classroom. In all of my courses I assign readings by xxx and yyy, and incorporate projects that include ppp and qqq….” You can then add a line such as, “because of my background I am familiar with challenges faced by students of color/queer students/students with disabilities, and am committed to mentoring them for success in the university setting.”

Why does this work? Because it makes your identity an asset in your work for the department. You are showing in concrete and evidence-based ways how your identity informs and enriches your pedagogy, and by extension the pedagogical offerings of the department as a whole.

You can of course write similarly with regard to your research, but the advantages here, in terms of the job search, are not as clear. Departments are going to be less moved by invoking diversity in research than they are by invoking it in teaching, because departments are under the gun to demonstrate to higher administration, accrediting agencies, state legislatures, and the community at large that they are not elitist bastions that train only the white and the wealthy. Indeed, as my niece said recently, about her experience collecting recruitment brochures from colleges across the country, “you’d think that no white kids go to college at all…” so intent are the brochures to proclaim (usually not very truthfully) the supposed diversity of their student body.

In any case, the larger point here is this. A flat statement of identity, or a story of struggle based on identity, is valuable in many contexts but not in job documents, because these do not do the work that your job documents need to do. To be effective, your identity has to be shown to inform your contributions to the department, and that is achieved by showing in factual and unemotional ways how it is mobilized in your classroom teaching and student mentoring.

A little goes a long way in this. Just the line, “As a xxxx scholar…” immediately identifies you as a candidate who can be considered a diversity hire. Search committee members are alert to this and will not miss it.

By the way, in my examples I included queer and disabled as examples of diversity identities, but in terms of university hiring in the United States, these may or may not “qualify” as diversity hires. The criteria will vary by campus and department, and in some cases by the priorities of the particular hire. In STEM fields just being a woman is often “diverse.” I’m not making any statements here in this post about what does or should constitute a diversity hire. I’m making the point that if your identity plays a role in your status on the job market in your field, there are better and worse ways to signal that in your job documents.

Posted in How To Write Academic Job Cover Letters, Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Major Job Market Mistakes, Promote Yourself!, Race/Gender/Sexuality, Yes, You Can: Women in Academia | 37 Comments

Of Cover Letters and Magic (A Follow-up Post)
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Posted on April 29, 2013 by

There is some advice I give that I believe in fiercely and will defend to the death (ref: Should I Do an Edited Collection?).

 

And then there is some advice I give that I am very willing to concede may be wrong or at least, less than completely (or universally) right. It seems my advice of last Friday, “How to Write a Journal Article Submission Cover Letter” might fall in the latter category. It’s drawn enough friendly critical commentary on the blog and on an FB thread to suggest that the instructions I give for the letter may be inappropriate for many journal contexts.

 

There seem to be two critiques: the first is that in many cases no cover letter—or no substantive cover letter—is required at all, and this is an outdated and obsolete practice. The second is that a cover letter may be required, but it should not contain the elements that I suggest, particularly the self-introduction in paragraph one, and the suggested reviewers in paragraph three.

 

Unless you know for sure that the practices I suggest are the convention for your field, please take the time to investigate their appropriateness for your particular journal article submission. Take particular care with the issue of listing suggested reviewers, which could be very wrong indeed!

 

The first thing I’d suggest to anyone wondering how to go about submitting a manuscript to a journal is to carefully read the instructions for submission; you may find the clarification you need there on these matters.

 

The second thing I’d suggest is that you inquire carefully of senior people in your field, and follow field-specific conventions.

 

The third thing I’d suggest, if you are still anxious, is to send an email to the specific journal editor inquiring as to the need for a cover letter, and clarifying what it should contain.

 

It is very possible that you need nothing more than a few lines like, “here is a submission; it hasn’t been submitted elsewhere; here is my contact info.”

 

The responses to the post didn’t come as a huge surprise to me, actually.  I was not entirely comfortable with the idea of this post to begin with. I now wish I’d paid more attention to my own instincts.

 

Over the past couple of years I have been frequently asked for advice on the journal submission cover letter, just as I am constantly asked for advice on the proper form of the post-campus visit thank you note. I have always considered both of these requests to be of a kind—a somewhat strange preoccupation of my readership with an overly nice (as in fastidious or exacting) concern for protocol in minor contexts. I have often wondered about this.

 

I probably should have prefaced my original post with that observation, that the journal submission cover letter, like the post-campus visit thank you note, is a genre of writing that really ought not to merit the level of anxiety so often directed to it.

 

Indeed, in response to the email request from my rock-star former client that finally prompted me to write this post, I wrote, “The cover letter? But, it’s such a piddling little thing. Why are you getting hung up on THAT?”

 

This rock-star client is hung up enough about the cover letter that it is becoming a small obstacle to getting manuscripts submitted.

 

I think that this may be the crux of the matter. Everyone is anxious about their publishing, just as everyone is anxious about their campus visit stage performances. Where uncertainty in high stakes situations is rife, the anthropologist Malinowski observed, the practice of magic will be found.

 

“We find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear, have a wide and extensive range. We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable,and well under the control of rational methods” (Malinowski, 1954)

 

I think it’s not far fetched to consider the DEGREE of concern about the journal article cover letter and the post campus visit thank you note that I have observed to be an instance of magical thinking, and a very natural human response to the obscenely high stakes, at the present moment, of publishing and the job search. (My client, it’s worth noting, is at an institution that requires two books and a handful of articles for tenure.  Short of magic, how is anyone to accomplish that?)

 

Let me be clear: I’m not saying that it’s irrational to wonder about the proper form of this writing. I’m saying that the degree of intensity that I observe focused on these two relatively minor genres of writing is out of proportion to their importance.

 

Some might say that my focus on the minutiae of all job documents has a magical quality to it, but I of course disagree. These documents are cases where good and effective writing has a clear capacity to achieve or advance a desired outcome. But the thank you note and the article cover letter have no impact on outcome—they play no role in the review process that will inevitably ensue.

 

In any case, I wish I’d heeded my instincts and responded to my client, “Dude, get over yourself and submit the damned manuscripts.” And I wish I’d written a post that raised this meta-question first, before descending into “rules” that could well enable magical thinking.  In any case, it’s very likely you need something different than what I wrote in the blog post to accompany your journal article manuscript; I urge you to find out yourself what that is, for your particular field and journal context, and then move on and devote no further attention to this subject.

Posted in How To Build Your Tenure File, Landing Your Tenure Track Job, Major Job Market Mistakes, Publishing Issues, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Tenure--How To Get It, The Campus Visit, Writing Instrumentally | 4 Comments

How To Write a Journal Article Submission Cover Letter
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Posted on April 26, 2013 by

Today’s post is a special request post for several clients who have written to inquire how to write a cover letter for the submission of an article manuscript to a journal.

****Addendum (4/29/13):  Please read the follow up to this post, “Of Cover Letters and Magic,”  as it retracts some of the advice given in  this post!****

This is pretty straightforward. 

First, by all means follow any instructions given to you for the cover letter on the journal submission website!  Those will override anything I say here.

Assuming there are no instructions, the following is common:

The letter should be on letterhead if it is available for your use. The letter will typically be just one page long.

It will have proper letter heading material, ie, the date and the address of the recipient at the top left, under the letterhead.

It will address the editor by name, if the name is known.

It will then have four short paragraphs. The first introduces the writer, and follows the basic format of the intro para of the job cover letter described in this post (ie, field, Ph.D. institution and year, current institutional affiliation and status, and general focus of work). It then states that the writer is submitting a manuscript for review.

The second paragraph covers the topic of the manuscript. This will be a crisp 4-5 sentences that will give a title and describe the topic, the specific material/data covered, the theoretical orientation or approach, any special issues of methodology if important, and, most importantly, the core argument.

The third paragraph will be shorter, and will take about 2-3 sentences to describe the manuscript’s contribution to the field and the suitability of the manuscript to this particular journal based on topic, theme, or methodological or theoretical approach, with reference to other work recently published in the journal.

The final paragraph will list 2-3 possible reviewers for the manuscript, and will thank the editor for considering the manuscript for publication. Contact info can be added here.

Sign off, “Sincerely, XXX.”

And that is about it.

 

 

 

Posted in Major Job Market Mistakes, Publishing Issues, Strategizing Your Success in Academia, Tenure--How To Get It, Writing Instrumentally | 22 Comments