Job market search

Yesterday I made a binder of all the stuff I've been collecting about conducting an academic job search. There's a lot of information provided both by my department and out there on the web, but all of it says the same thing, and none of it answers the magic question "Will I find an academic job I like this year?"

I guess I'll only know the answer to that question by the time next year's hiring season rolls around, at which point, I'll either be moving, or preparing to do the whole thing all over again.

The more official sources talk about how the "big" list starts coming out September 15th with dossiers due in October and interviews (if you get them) at the conference in December. But the more I read, the more I realize there's a lot of hiring that goes on outside that schedule. For instance, on the Canadian academic sites, there are already a couple of listings that fit my qualifications.

But before I get to the point where I'm ready to start sending out materials, there's a lot to be done. I'd been forewarned by my lovely friend who went through this process a couple of times already, so I've started some of it, but there's still much to be done.

The dossier requires a c.v., which is up-to-date except for those two articles I edited this summer which I'll need to see if I can find a publishing ETA for. So that's pretty much done. It also requires a teaching summary of student evaluations and a teaching philosophy. My advisor likes the teaching philosophy I wrote, so that's pretty much good to go, and I just need to enter the last of the student evals. Then I just need to write cover letters for each position as I find them.

The bigger problems are the writing sample, and the letters of recommendation. Two of my committee members are willing to write letters and said so when I met with them last month. The third committee member has much less confidence in me, probably because we haven't worked together as much, and so I worry about what that letter will look like.

You see, I know that I have a very good chance of finishing on time, but because of the backlog of chapters I now have I don't know that they're convinced that I will be. And they need to indicate in their letters that they have confidence I will be finished by the time a job would start next September. So that might be a tricky negotiation.

The other concern is the writing sample. If they like your application enough to consider you for an interview, the first thing they will ask for is a writing sample. This should be about 20 pages and from the dissertation, which means I will need to do some serious editing of a selected chapter to get it to 20 pages since most of my chapters so far are in the 40-60 page range. It also has to be indicative of the kind of scholarship I'm doing, and so far, most of my writing has been in the chapters that set-up, or provide an alternate approach to the core of the dissertation's argument. Yes, for the purpose of the writing sample, this was not a good plan of action, but for the purpose of the dissertation, I think it was the perfect way to tackle the material. So if I get to the point of needing a writing sample, I'll have to do some serious scrambling. But no sense crossing that bridge till I come to it.

So I'm sitting here with a binder full of information that I'm going to hopefully fill with wonderful job opportunities that I will then apply for. I'm both nervous and excited... but mostly nervous...