This week the CRDM program sponsored an excellent roundtable discussion on the academic job marketing. The discussion included fourth-year students who were on the market this year and faculty members who have served on search committees recently. This productive conversation allowed for students in the program to receive perceptions of the market, but it didn’t include a practical component with strategies for a successful year on the market. The biggest piece of advice that I have on this topic is simple: Know what works for you. Having said that, I’ll tell you what worked for me.

Hit the ground running

I started the semester with a strategy for searching for jobs.

1. I generally determined the kinds of jobs I would be most interested in. For me, that meant jobs in rhet/comp or media and/or cultural studies with specializations in digital or social media in areas I wouldn’t mind living in. Whenever possible, I tried to get information on whether I would be interested in working in the department. After a discussion with a colleague, I did choose not to apply to a job that fit my other criteria based on his/her knowledge of the program.
2. For years now, I have subscribed to a number of listservs related to my fields, and I began monitoring them closely for job postings appropriate to my skills and experience.
3. I determined additional sites that would be appropriate to my job search. It depends on the field, of course, but I checked jobs on higher education sites (e.g., The Chronicle) about once per week.
4. Once the MLA Job Information List was published, I checked it fortnightly for updates.

Choose a system of organization that works for you

I had a multi-pronged system of organization that bordered on obsessive. It centered on three things

• Things for Mac: I use Cultured Code’s Things for Mac to manage all of my tasks, and job searching is no different. When I found a job I was interested in, I copied it into a Things to-do item. This program allows you to right-click from a page on the interwebs and create a new task. I would actually create two tasks in Things for all new jobs: 1) the deadline for sending information about it to my committee and 2) the deadline for the position.
• A Google Spreadsheet: I used a google spreadsheet to I shared with my committee that included all of the jobs I planned to apply for, their deadlines, the departments they were in, and the materials they required. It is highly important to track the required materials and to share them with the committee. Every school wants something different, and both you and your committee need to know that. I added columns as schools requested additional information or scheduled conference/phone and campus interviews. I also used highlighting to indicate completed applications and, later in the process, whether I was still in the running for a position.
• Folders on My Laptop: I created a folder on my laptop with the materials I sent to each school.
• Physical Folders: I’m old, so I also had physical folders that included all the same materials that were in the folders on my laptop. These project pockets (hello, years in industry!) also included a coversheet with a checklist of items required for the application.

Determine how long you think each app will take–then triple that

In order to customize materials for each job, I researched the program, department, university, and city. I tailored my cover letter to the needs of each department and university community. Whenever I had an interview with a school, I went into it with a detailed table that included information on all of the people I would talk to, courses I could teach in the department, courses I could propose for the department, an understanding of the department’s structure and its role in the college (and the college’s role in the university), and the university’s strategic plan. It took hours to prepare each application packet. It took many, many more hours to prepare for interviews.

Remember that it has nothing to do with you

Probably the biggest piece of advice I can offer related to the job search is just to prepare yourself as best you can, put yourself in the best possession to get a job, take the process seriously, and then let go. The job search is a lot like poker. You can get your money in the middle in the best position to win, but you can’t control how the cards fall. There are so many things out of your control, so many things that have absolutely nothing to do with you, that you just can’t take it personally. If graduate school is soul crushing, then the job search is soul eviscerating. In order to survive it, even if it results in a fantastic job that you’re elated to have (which is the case with me), it’s still pretty much impossible to come through without a few nicks.

My point here is, and I tend to take the winding road to my points, that I’m going to offer some advice here. I’ve decided to do it for two reasons. First, as I mentioned earlier, I have some things I’d like to share with my twittering friend, and I can’t do it in 140 characters. I could send her an e-mail, but that gets me to my second reason for writing this post. Over the past couple of semesters, I have been requiring my students to blog about a topic/interest across the course of the semester. One concern that many have is their lack of authority as authors. I think it’s a legitimate concern, but I encourage them to find a niche and join the conversation. (I will add that this is a media-writing class that is generally taken by students who hope to be professional writers and therefore must become accustomed to engaging in public writing. I’m not sure how I feel about these sorts of assignments in other kinds of writing classes, but that’s a conversation for another time.) Truth be told, I suffer from those same authorial doubts. And if I, a burgeoning expert (oh, that still feels sooo uncomfortable) in my field, can’t blog on a topic, how can I expect them to? So this is also a case of my doing some practicing to go along with all the preaching I do (and must do) as a writing instructor.

Now that i’ve sufficiently situated my advice-giving so as to distance myself from the act of choosing to give it, here goes.

One of the reasons graduate school is so completely ego ravaging is that it’s a struggle to assume a new identity (Phd student) only to be forced out of it. The goal of being a graduate student is not being a graduate student anymore. Once you get comfortable as a successful seminar participant, you’ve finished your coursework. Once you figure out how to succeed with taking preliminary exams, you will (hopefully!) never take another exam. All the while, you’re also trying on different scholarly identities, donning different cloaks of thought. If you’re in an interdisciplinary program (like me), your academic closet is of the walk-in variety, the kind that gets special attention in real estate listings, perhaps even multiple photos in the virtual tour. Playing dress-up is fun, but when it comes to determining the uniform of your life’s work, it can be anxiety inducing as well. I am not saying that it’s necessary–or even a good idea–to pick a narrow specialty. (I am certainly not advocating teaching the pony to count to five and nothing more. Goodness knows I have worked very hard not to become the Buffy girl. By the way, since we’re in a parenthetical aside here, I take full license to move between metaphors willy-nilly.) I think my work spans a pretty wide spectrum. From twenty-thousand feet, it probably looks more than a bit scattered. However, there are clear themes (identity construction, the problematic of a public-private binary, the study of cultural practices) that run through my research trajectory, regardless of the diversity of methods and the disciplines I choose to engage with.

Although I know I still have plenty to learn–and a lot of work to do–I have an increasingly clear idea of who I want to be as a scholar, and I am working every day (well, most days, anyway) to become that person. I think the most important thing, though, is owning it–taking responsibility, avoiding defensiveness, and (no matter what my TCM doctor tells me about my sodium intake) taking every single thing with a grain of salt. In the words of the venerable Chuck D, don’t believe the hype–and that goes for your toughest criticism as well as your highest praise. Sycophants and naysayers rarely have your best interests at heart.

However, and this is a big one, voraciously consume (after seasoning it with the aforementioned salt grains) all feedback on your work. Whenever possible, ask for clarification and follow-up. If others take the time to comment on your writing, you owe it to them and you to take the time to take it in, reflect on it, incorporate it whenever possible (and understand when its not appropriate to do so). In graduate school, you have a captive audience of experts and peers–first in coursework and then on your committee–and that might not be the case in the future. Take full advantage of this situation.

Another ego-ravaging part of this process is that fact that we spend almost all of our time with really smart people–people we usually think are smarter than we are. That may or may not be true, but it doesn’t matter. Comparing yourself to others is, at best, unproductive. More than likely, comparing yourself to classmates or scholars in your field or Charlie Sheen is going to make you feel like a fraud, a sham, a loser. How do I know this? Because we’ve all done it, and we tend to compare ourselves to others when we’re feeling especially low. The only comparison you can make in which all variables are accounted for and all playing fields are equal is to yourself. Every now and then, revisit where you were when you started. Reread your thesis. I think you’ll surprised, both by how good it was and by how much better you are now.

In my second year, I had an identity crisis of sorts. I was struggling with how to balance “friend” Dawn with “scholar” Dawn. My friends had always thought of me as a fun girl — carefree, maybe a little too loud, first to the front of the stage at the rock show, last to leave the party — but I felt that I couldn’t be a fun girl and a serious scholar. It was tension in my self-conception that felt unresolvable. I felt that I couldn’t both be the person my friends and family loved and be a serious and productive scholar. I’m not sure exactly where I go this idea, but I was wrong. Now I don’t stay out as late as I used to, and I’ve pretty much traded in all rock shows for late-night rounds of BSG or Dominion (or, on one rare occasion, Talisman), but it is possible to be fun and serious. If you’re fun and serious. If you’re only fun or only serious, that’s okay, too. If you’re going to be only fun, however, you’d better be seriously good. My (academic) writing tends to be straightforward with the occasional splash of whimsy, so I’m not much of a pranker/playa.

I can feel myself losing the tenuous hold I have on this post, so I’m going to make one last point (and then I’m going to make dinner), but I think it might be the most important one. Never pretend to know more than you know. In fact, I tend to approach most every subject as if I know less than I probably do. I find that I learn more that way and that I’m more open to new ways of thinking. Plus, it’s hard to come off as an ass that way. However, I think it’s important to maintain an air of confidence and competence. Don’t play dumb. It’s can be an easy way out for women and girls, but it’s a cheat. Be confident and competent, fun and serious. Be good and good at what you do. Don’t be an ass. It’s a tough game, and the rules aren’t written down anywhere that I could find (not even on the internets!), but it’s kind of a calling, if you believe in that sort of thing. So just accept that you’ve made this crazy life choice and own it.

It was with great interest, she said hyperbolically, that I read a recent LA Times blog post on Foursquare cheating. You see, we had just had a discussion about this last week, except for us it was pranking and not cheating. Users can create and check into locations willy-nilly, so what’s to stop me from checking into a friend’s home when he leaves a rousing game of Dominion to get in a little late-night studying. You know, just for example. The subject of the blog post took it even further, going so far as to create bots to grab mayorships in something like 120 Starbucks locations. In describing his antics, he bemoaned Foursquare’s lax security. He seems concerned that the game has no rules.

Oddly, this reminds of the two projects I’m working on currently, two projects that send me in two lines of flight as I write. And that causes me to think that they’re more closely related than I’ve realized. I won’t touch on both here, but I will address one briefly, primarily because it’s an idea that I’ve been working through lately, and the subject of my Carolina Rhetoric Conference presentation on Saturday. You see, there are rules that govern Foursquare, just as there are rules that govern all communication. Sure, you can do lots of things on Foursquare–create joke locations, become the mayor of the busstop–that aren’t sanctioned by the game. But what makes it okay in my circle to check-in at home when we wake up in the morning, but makes us feel bad for checking in to a friend’s house when he’s not at home? I think it’s because we’ve decided (somehow) on what is appropriate, and I think that appropriateness is determined by how we are choosing to use this game. Although it’s fun to check the leaderboard to see who’s winning that week, we actually seem to be more interested in keeping tabs on one another. Perhaps that terminology is a bit too sinister, but it allows us to know where people are. Whenever someone cheats (or pranks) the system by checking in where she’s not, then that function’s value is diminished for us. So, like so many (rhetorical) situations, what is at stake here is the question of appropriateness, or decorum.