What I learned by applying for a different job

Although I said after I received a job that I never wanted to go on the job market again, I applied for one job in the years since beginning in my current position. The job was at a higher-ranked and better-funded school near my current institution. Since the job was in my teaching area but not my research area, I assumed that I would not have much of a chance (the fact that I didn’t get an interview suggests I was correct) but it was the type of job that I would have regretted not applying for. Despite my lack of success, applying for another job actually helped me put my current position in perspective.

The first thing that I noticed was related to my confidence level. As an ABD graduate student on the job market, each job application had raised insecurities about whether my interests aligned with the school’s desires, whether my teaching was good enough, whether I had published enough, and whether liberal arts schools would take my application seriously since I hadn’t attended one myself. As an early-career assistant professor there were still insecurities about some of those things but they were greatly reduced by the fact that I already had a good job. If I hadn’t published enough for the school I was applying to, for example, it didn’t matter because I already had a good job. I could also talk in my application about the job that I currently held and the fact that I had been successfully teaching at a liberal arts school since finishing my Ph.D. Rather than groveling for a position, I felt like a peer exploring my options.

In addition to feeling like a peer, the application process also forced me to consider what I want out of an ideal job and how close to that I can get at my current institution. For example, if more time for research is a reason I would consider changing jobs, how can I find more time for research in my current schedule? There are also aspects of my current institution, such as travel funding and opportunities for research with students, that compare favorably to other schools. In the end, although I’m happy at my current institution, keeping an eye on job openings is a good way to consider what my work life could, and should, be like.

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Popularity contest results

The other day I posted my ten favorite posts from the past three years. One thing I’ve been interested in during this time is how people end up here. The ten most-viewed posts from the past three years give some interesting insight into how that happens. There is also relatively little overlap with my ten favorite posts, reinforcing the idea that people will do what they want with what you’ve created. While I would like people to come here because they want to read “Inequality as a room on fire,” then, they’re more likely to come here looking for demeaning pictures of women. The ten most-viewed posts for the past three years were:

1. Sexism sells

This is the most-viewed post by quite a large margin due largely to the search terms that end up leading people to it. “Matchbox” is the number two overall search term and “big women,” “women and cars,” and “small women” are also in the top ten. I think it is safe to say that most people who arrive here after searching for one of those terms leave disappointed.

2. I don’t date sociology majors

This post’s popularity is a combination of the number one search term (“I don’t date sociology majors”) and a link from the political science job rumor forum.

3. PowerPoint, podcasts, and ending the illusion of student reading

This is one of two posts that appears on my list of favorites. I tried to make an important point here so I’m glad that it has been read quite a few times.

4. Turning down a tenure track job

I sometimes wonder if I would have made the same decision if I had known how bad the job market really was in 2008-09. With the benefit of hindsight, I definitely made the right choice.

5. Ten years of Office Space

“Office Space” and “Office Space Poster” are also in the top ten search terms.

6. Floundering on fellowship

Another one of my personal favorites. I’m still suffering from Major Procrastination Disorder.

7. STFU, Students!

These sentiments must still be true since they keep showing up in my dreams.

8. Bad reviews

There’s nothing like a mention on Scatterplot to make you realize how few readers you normally have.

9. The world’s most offensive Christmas song

I have to admit that I may have propped this one up by linking to it again a year later, but it needed to be said. Plan for it to become a Christmas tradition.

10. A compilation of job market resources and advice

I hope that some of these links still work, since “Sociology job market” is the third most popular search term!

One More Thing: The other SLACs

If you type “SLAC” into your browser’s address bar and hit “enter” with the intention of arriving at this site, you may end up at one of these other SLACs instead:

• SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
• Selective Liberal Arts Consortium
• Salt Lake Acting Company
• Student Labor Action Coalition
  

 

 

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Three years summarized in ten posts

A lot has changed since my first post three years ago. Parts of the transition from ABD with a job offer to third-year assistant professor at a small liberal arts college have gone the way I expected while others have not. I’ve decided to celebrate the past three years with an early-career retrospective of my ten favorite posts from this time period. When selecting them I was happy to see that they were distributed fairly evenly so that I didn’t end up with a Pearl Jam Twenty situation in which most of the attention is focused on the first 25% of the overall time period. The fact that it was hard to narrow the selection down to ten posts probably speaks more to my self importance than the quality of my posts, but without that self importance I probably would have never started a blog!

My ten favorite posts, in chronological order:

• Floundering on fellowship
• If this is a marathon, stop telling me to sprint
• PowerPoint, podcasts, and ending the illusion of student reading
• I’ve never heard of that
• How often do you brush your teeth?
• The publication current
• The art of class discussion
• Sociology and the “real world”
• Inequality as a room on fire
• The near impossibility of befriending students

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Giving the Grad Skool Rulz

I recently purchased copies of Fabio’s Grad Skool Rulz for myself and some students who are planning to go to grad school next year (and yes, I paid for the “copies” that I gave to students). The question I always have about packaged collections of things that originated on the internet is whether it is worthwhile to purchase something that is essentially available for free. In this case, I think that the ability to send the entire package as a PDF that a student can save somewhere is probably a better way of delivering information than saying “there’s a series of blog posts about grad school – look them up!” Since none of the undergrads that I know regularly read sites like Scatterplot, OrgTheory, or Crooked Timber, this is also a way to introduce them to the world of academic blogging that they will surely become familiar with when they are procrastinating during grad school.

Overall, I think that Fabio does a nice job of discussing things that grad students should know. I went to grad school in a supportive environment where these issues could be openly discussed with advisors, but not everybody is so lucky. For prospective students, this makes choosing a graduate program incredibly important. For those who are already enrolled, the Rulz should help navigate potentially uncertain waters.

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Why are graduate advisors so bad?

Near the beginning of the semester I read an article at The Chronicle of Higher Education that my recent experience semi-annual experience of surviving advising brought to mind.  The gist of the article is that some graduate advisors do such a terrible job that their advisees pay for advising from others.  As a faculty member with over 40 undergraduate advisees, I would argue that many of the same lessons apply.  The relevant passages state:

Your responsibility to your advisees extends to telling the whole truth about the academic enterprise at this time. Tenure-track lines have been evaporating for years. Aiming for a tenure-track job is, for most students, unrealistic. For those students who wish to try, the effort requires years of methodical training and calculation of career chances, from the point of arrival in the graduate program through the dissertation defense and beyond. Your job is to look up from your students’ dissertations, and assist them in mastering those skills and calculations.

How? By teaching your Ph.D.’s how to write a CV; to cultivate prominent scholarly supporters; to pursue grant money with a single-minded purpose; to apply for national awards; to publish, publish more, publish higher, write a stellar application letter, and do the elevator talk.

And when, even after doing all of the above, the tenure-track job doesn’t materialize, as it often will not, instead of averting your eyes in shame from their so-called “failures,” you step up, professors, and work with your Ph.D.’s to transfer their skills into some sector of the economy that is not contracting as badly as your own.

While it is true that there are some bad advisors at my institution, and I’m glad that I don’t have to advise students writing master’s theses or dissertations, it seems that if I served my advisees as poorly as some professors serve their graduate students I would be out of a job.  For example, the person that I replaced was reportedly a bad advisor, but that person that I replaced was replaced after failing to get tenure.  I’m not sure if any research exists on this, but it would be interesting to see if the general orientation toward students and teaching at a SLAC also leads to better advising than the orientation toward publications and grants at larger institutions.

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Are you a SLACer?

This spring I gave a presentation at a conference in which I aimed to help graduate students determine if life at a liberal arts institution is something that they should consider pursuing.  In a lot of ways, the talk encapsulated my experiences through two years as a faculty member, touching on many of the themes I have highlighted here but in a (perhaps) more coherent way.  The majority of the talk is below:

I’m John Smith and I work at a private liberal arts school with about 2000 students.  Right now, you’re thinking, “I saw the name of your school in the program and I’ve never heard of it,” which brings me to my first point: a liberal arts school is not the place to go if you want or need status.  Even top-ranked liberal arts schools do not have the status of top-ranked research schools – Picture telling your grandfather that you got a job at Williams College (Williamstown, MA), the top-ranked liberal arts school by US News vs. telling him that you got a job at Harvard, the top-ranked research school.  I’m guessing that most people would get a much bigger reaction from their friends and family if they got a job at Harvard than at Williams.

So, if liberal arts schools aren’t for people who want status, who are they for?

Teaching

The primary answer to this question is: people who really enjoy teaching and want to be good at it.

At a liberal arts school you will be working closely with students both in and out of the classroom, so it is important to mention that not all private schools have the same type of students.  While some have nothing but privileged students, my school has a diverse student body from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a wide variety of abilities.  During class discussions I am typically glad for this diversity, even if I wish that the ability levels of the bottom students were a bit higher when I’m grading papers and exams.

Still, the student body overall is similar to what you might experience as a graduate student teaching at a large state school.  This means that there are some weak students but there are also some excellent students, with most students somewhere in between.  At more selective schools there are probably more excellent students but less demographic diversity.

At my school I have a 3-3 teaching load, which means that I teach three classes per semester.  In general, my classes range from 25-35 students but this is partly because I am in a popular department.  Faculty in some departments have fewer and faculty in other departments have more.  I also advise 45 students, which differs a lot from department to department as well.

The range of students at a liberal arts school is important when thinking about your plans for research (or scholarship, as it is often called at liberal arts institutions).

Research

People who want to work at a liberal arts school should not need an army of graduate students to be productive researchers (or to do their grading) and should enjoy the challenge of doing research with undergraduates, which often involves a lot of teaching about the research process.

It is also important to recognize that research can take a number of forms, even at highly ranked schools.  This may include things like conference presentations in addition to peer-reviewed publications as demonstrations of the “continued scholarly activity” that is necessary for tenure in addition to service and good teaching.

Given a higher teaching load than most R1 faculty and the fact that you will be grading exams, papers, and quizzes yourself, the reality is that you will not have as much time to spend on research as those at other types of schools.  This typically leads to fewer concurrent projects and fewer publications.

While there are general differences in research productivity, there can also be differences between departments on the same campus.  In my department, for example, everybody has a research agenda but research is rarely the main topic of conversation because it is not what people spend the majority of their time on during the semester.  In another department, however, the faculty publish much more frequently.  I’m not sure if this is a result of the types of graduate programs that the faculty in each department came from or the stages they’re at in their academic careers, but there is a definite difference and it can be difficult to go against the norms of your department.  For example, others in your department may not have much experience applying for grants or publishing in major journals, which can make it difficult if you want to do these things.  This is also something to consider if you are being hired into a department in which the standards have changed since the current faculty members have been granted tenure.

Obviously, I could work into the night and complete more research during the semester but the rewards for doing so are relatively small.  In the summer and over breaks when I focus mostly on research, however, small amounts of money are available if I am working on my own and larger amounts are available if I am collaborating with a student.  So research is definitely valued and supported but it is not my primary responsibility.

Nearby Peers

Continuing on the topic of research, something that I never heard anybody mention about liberal arts schools when I was in graduate school, and one thing that I found myself missing in my first year as a faculty member, was the community of those with similar interests that arose through departmental colloquia.

Because you will almost certainly be the only person with your specialization in your department, if you end up having a choice between jobs (however unlikely that may be in the current job market) you may want to consider the proximity of other schools that would allow you to form reading or writing groups.  There are a large number of schools in my area and I was able to join a reading group consisting of faculty from a wide range of research and liberal arts schools.  This helps me keep up with current research and it also gives me a connection to people who are more active in research than the other members of my department and can give me advice in those areas.

Campus Involvement

Beyond these teaching and research concerns, people who want to work at liberal arts schools should have a willingness, if not a desire, to be deeply involved in the workings of their institution and interact regularly with administrators and faculty in other departments.

To give you some perspective, the entire faculty of my graduate institution has met twice in the past 25 years.  At my current institution, there are monthly meetings of all faculty, and this is where major decisions about the curriculum are made.

Work-Life Balance

The final group of people who should consider working at liberal arts schools are those who are searching for the mythical work-life balance.  As I’ve said, during the semester you will be busy with teaching and over breaks you will likely be busy with research, but the ability to focus on these things at different times, and the corresponding emphasis placed on each when making tenure decisions, allows you to work without spending every waking hour worrying about whether you will be able to publish enough to get tenure.

Despite wishing for a higher level of scholarly engagement in my own department, I have never regretted my decision to work at a liberal arts school and, just as some likely have a hard time imagining why somebody would want to teach three courses per semester, I have a hard time imagining why somebody would want to work somewhere that gave journal editors and reviewers so much control over their futures.

How Can You Get Here?

Now that you have a better sense of whether you want to work at a liberal arts school, you are probably wondering what you can do to end up at a place like this.

The first thing you can do is go to a liberal arts school as an undergrad.  Because of the differences between liberal arts schools and the research schools where people get their Ph.D., schools see the fact that somebody attended a liberal arts school as a sign that they understand what is involved in this type of job.

With that said, I didn’t go to a liberal arts school and I still work at one, so there are some things you can do if you missed your opportunity to go to one of these schools yourself:

These include spending time working to become a good teacher.  This means assigning papers, essay exams, and involving students in class discussions.  Obviously, this takes more time and effort than lecturing from a textbook and giving multiple choice exams, but if you think of a class of 60 students as similar to teaching three classes of 20, you can get a sense of what a full teaching load at a liberal arts school is like.

Another thing you can do is teach classes that are likely to be in demand – schools are always looking for people who can teach classes like statistics, research methods, and social theory, so the ability to successfully teach one of those classes in graduate school gives you a valuable skill on the job market.  The fact that I had taught both statistics and research methods, for example, was a factor in each of the interviews I had.

Conclusion

In the end, the type of institution you want to work at comes down to what you want your daily experience to be like.

If you are interested in teaching, interacting with students and colleagues, and collaborating on research with students without intense pressure to publish, you should consider applying at liberal arts schools.

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SLACers aren’t the only lonely ones

A while back I talked about the fact that there are very different publication currents at the school where I was a grad student and the school where I currently work.  I stated:

When coming out of graduate school I had a strong desire to do important research but I wondered if the desire for high-profile publications would fade.  What I’ve found is that the desire hasn’t faded but the expectations of my institution create a situation in which I appear to be swimming against the current, wondering how long I can last before I am swept downstream.

When writing this, I was thinking about my own experiences and those of others at liberal arts schools, but this feeling is not confined to the SLACers of the world.  In response to these feelings, I talked about joining an old-fashioned (and long-running) reading group.  Historiann, however, presents blogging as another alternative in her blog post summarizing her talk summarizing her feminist blogging (how meta!).  She writes:

From the perspective of an intellectual metropole like Austin, I can certainly see why some might think of academic blogging as a waste of time that competes with the time available to meet concrete career benchmarks.  But most of us don’t end up in major university towns or big cities with seminars and symposia in our fields and armies of Ph.D. students–most of us leave graduate school and spend our careers in places in which we may feel intellectually isolated.  So blogs can be spaces that become virtual communities where we can combat isolation and have conversations about our common interests.  If your goal in blogging is to alienate friends and allies, then blogs may be potentially dangerous to one’s career.

I suspect that not all blogs work equally well for this task.  A pseudonymous blog in which the author never talks about his specific work (and doesn’t allow comments) is probably much less effective at building academic communities than a blog focused on a person’s particular research interests.  Similarly, an individual’s blog may be less effective at building community than a topic-centered group blog such as Orgtheory.  I suspect that if I had ended up in the middle of nowhere the purpose of this blog may have quickly changed from providing “sociological perspectives on life and the liberal arts” to providing “discussions on the sociology of lima beans for the intellectually isolated.”

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Don’t forget your life vest

As a graduate student approaching the job market I heard a few stories about people who initially got jobs at less than ideal institutions and then published their way into better opportunities.  When I was on the job market this was even one of the reasons that I was advised to turn down a job with a 4-4 teaching load.  The implication is that candidates who receive jobs that they like only have to publish enough to satisfy the tenure expectations of their institutions while those who receive jobs that they don’t like need to publish more in order to make themselves attractive to potential future employers.

Given the current uncertainty in higher education (which you can read about here and hear about on your nightly news when state budgets are proposed) I think that the first of those statements is wrong.  Rather than being able to lower their publication standards to match the expectations of their institution, I think that faculty members at all institutions are facing a situation in which a strong publication record is a life vest.  While you may hope that you never have to use it, this life vest will be crucial if you should find yourself needing to abandon ship in these uncharted academic waters.  As those who are on the job market know, there aren’t enough life boats for everybody so your publication record may mean the difference between academic life and death.

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Going back to grad school

Until recently, I hadn’t returned to the location of my grad school years since finishing my dissertation and starting my job.  Because I still have some good friends in the program, the trip was part reunion and part nostalgia.  As friends graduate and faculty retire, I’m sure that this feeling won’t be present in many future trips, but I was surprised to see that almost nothing on campus had changed.  I was most surprised, though, by the differences in my interactions with faculty.  I am not sure if the difference was due to my own increased self-confidence upon returning after a year and a half as a successful faculty member, a greater recognition that I was an equal on the part of faculty, or some combination of the two (perhaps it was just the fact that the last time I was there I was just coming out of the foggy dissertation netherworld…).

The most bizarre of these encounters involved a faculty member that I have had some differences with in the distant past.  In one day on campus I am fairly certain that I talked to her more than I had in the final four years of my graduate career.  This is the same faculty member that had wondered what was wrong with me in my first year.  It is possible that she may look at my job at an unknown school and think that I could have done better if I had only listened to her advice.  My hope, however, is that she looks at the fact that I have the type of success that I wanted and considers that she may have been wrong.  Regardless, interactions such as these reminded me that I have come a long way since the beginning of my graduate career.

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The publication current

In my recent (highly scientific) look at ASA submission types, I noted that some of the ASA submissions are papers with promise that could be revised for future submission to a journal.  In that post I stated, “Of these, about half will likely never be submitted because they were written by people, like me, for whom conference presentations count as ‘scholarly activity.'”  This statement, in the second half of my second year, is similar to a concern I raised nearly two years ago when discussing the publication gauntlet:

I wonder how my choice of institution will affect my desire to run the publication gauntlet.  Coming from a “publish or perish” department, I have a strong desire to get my work published in order to contribute to the body of sociological knowledge.  I also want to publish in well-regarded journals in order to increase the chance that others will actually be aware of my contributions.  At the liberal arts school where I will be employed, however, expectations for publication are much lower than for junior faculty in my current program and the fact that a paper went through peer review is more important than the name on the front of the journal.

In addition to lower expectations, I noted, is the fact that liberal arts professors have less time for research and fewer collaborators (especially important is the absence of graduate student collaborators who can do the bulk of the data analysis).  This means that there are fewer concurrent projects.  I suspected at the time that fewer concurrent projects decreased the likelihood of submitting publications to highly regarded journals because the need for peer-reviewed publications would outweigh the need for a high-status placement.  It appears that, at least regarding my own institution, I overestimated the importance of even low-ranking peer-reviewed publications.

As I noted above, scholarly activity is measured a number of ways at my non-elite private school.  Obviously, peer-reviewed publications count, but conference presentations also count, as does working on projects with students.  The balance between these forms of research means that working with a lot of students, leading to poster presentations at regional conferences, can almost entirely make up for a relative lack of peer-reviewed publications.  Certainly, higher-ranking liberal arts schools have higher standards but other forms of scholarly activity count there as well.  In contrast, a research collaboration at an R1 institution is likely to be viewed as a failure (or not viewed at all) by a tenure committee if it does not result in a publication.

A story from a colleague illustrates this difference.  When I mentioned revising a paper based on reviewers’ comments one day, she noted that she once received an R&R at the same journal but never got around to the actual process of revising and resubmitting.  Keep in mind that she was a tenure-track assistant professor when she made this decision.  She has since been awarded tenure.  It is hard for me to imagine a situation in which a tenure-track assistant professor at an R1 would casually ignore an R&R in this way.  Surely, not all R&Rs result in eventual publications, but to not even try struck me as ridiculous.

Given the reality of my situation, the path to tenure  seems relatively clear and there are likely countless others who would take my position in an instant.  There are drawbacks, however.  Among them is the fact that while my colleagues are engaged in scholarly activity, they are not used to submitting papers to highly-regarded journals and, thus, can offer little help in this process.  Research is also not a typical hallway conversation given the primacy of teaching in our lives.  When coming out of graduate school I had a strong desire to do important research but I wondered if the desire for high-profile publications would fade.  What I’ve found is that the desire hasn’t faded but the expectations of my institution create a situation in which I appear to be swimming against the current, wondering how long I can last before I am swept downstream.

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