Category: Teaching

A scan of my web stats shows that my recent Academic Job Market Notes post has already received more traffic than any other single post in the past 12 months, and almost twice as many pageviews as its closest competitor. Wow. This leads me to wonder if there any other advice that I ought to share.

The truth is, most everything that really matters and which is generally applicable to just about everybody has been covered already by Chris Blattman’s original post on the academic job market. I wholeheartedly endorse all of this, especially the parts about increasing returns for the main chapter/paper and the absurdity of concept of the “limited market” or “going selectively on the job market.” I applied to more than 100 jobs the first time around.

That said, I can think of two additional, disconnected points that probably deserve separate emphasis.

Practicing the Job Talk

Your file gets you an interview, but your job talk is the single most important part of the interview. Lots of things can prevent a fly-out from turning into an offer (your competition, search committee/department politics, funding, etc.), but your talk is one that you can control. I advise students to practice delivering the complete talk at least once a day, every day starting September 15.  Do it on skype with your friends or family, or in front of a mirror, or just sitting at your computer. Note what that means: you should have your talk to be ready by September 15 so that you can practice it. I’d advise even earlier. Shoot for Labor Day.

Once a day for at least a month probably seems extreme for many readers, but I stand by it. Here is personal note to explain why. I practiced my talk in 2007 at least 50 times before the first time that I delivered it “live” in an interview. I practiced it so much because when I was younger I struggled with stuttering, and in high pressure situations my stutter returns. Now that I’ve had years of lectures and conferences and presentations in other languages, it doesn’t bother me so much, but I am positive that having practiced my talk dozens of times made it easier for me to deliver, even if practicing was nothing more than a psychological crutch. I don’t regret for one second the time that I invested in practicing that talk.

Now, most people don’t stutter, but my advice still stands. The broader point is that you want to be so familiar with your presentation that you can move fluently through it, especially when you are presenting anything complicated (which you almost certainly are). Fluid delivery projects confidence and comfort, with your work and with yourself. It puts the audience at ease and helps them to focus on you, which is exactly what you want your talk to do.

The Variety of Academic Jobs

The more “job market advice” that I read, the more I realize how little I know. Most advice targets tenure-track jobs at the most research intensive, PhD-granting departments. That’s the advice that I’m qualified (I guess) to provide. From time to time I see advice from other types of academic jobs: community colleges, liberal arts colleges, departments that offer a master’s degree but no PhD, public policy schools, interdisciplinary departments, plus the global academic marketplace (a PhD granting department in the U.S. looks very different than one in England, to say nothing of Europe or emerging Asia). PhD candidates on the market ought to know that people like me are not the best people to provide advice on applying to those kinds of jobs.

Postscript

Here are the Top 10 Indolaysia posts between 10/30/2011 and 10/29/2012:

1. Indolaysia
2. Academic Job Market Notes
3. If It Rains Tomorrow, I Save
4. Identification is Neither Necessary nor Sufficient for Policy Relevance
5. OMFG Exogenous Variation! Or, Can You Find Good Nails When You Find an Indonesian Politics Hammer
6. Graduate Study in Southeast Asian Politics at Cornell: Advice for Prospective Applicants
7. Chinese Indonesians, Then and Now
8. Methodology in Southeast Asian Studies (Part 2 of 2)
9. About the Author
10. About Indolaysia

Also interesting are the top ten sources of web traffic, by city: Ithaca, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Unknown, Singapore, New York, Washington, London, Oxford, and Cambridge (MA).

Two recent posts about the academic job market for political science PhDs are worth a read: Chris Blattman‘s search committee notes give a good demand side perspective, and Nate Jensen has some useful data on the supply side. As the PS job market is happening right now, these posts are probably too late to be useful to anyone currently on the market for a tenure-track job, but they are food for thought.

Based on my own experiences, I agree with  just about everything in both posts. Some of these things are third- or fourth-order concerns, like having too many publications on your CV (if your worst pub is far worse than your best pub, something which unlikely to matter if you are looking for assistant-level jobs) or if your department does not prominently list its PhDs for hire on its website (I have never used a department website to find someone to hire). But the rest is all useful information.

Nate’s findings about ABDs with publications are particularly useful. He is right: my sense is that ten years ago,  having a good publication was the best way to land a couple of interviews. There has been a structural change in the political science job market since 2008, and today, having a good publication is closer to necessary but not sufficient for getting an interview. I commonly hear that search committees these days are choosing among dozens of candidates who all have articles in good journals. In that kind of job market, things that are more difficult to judge from the CV alone, like the quality of the work or the collegiality of the candidate, become even more important. One good friend who will remain unnamed—except for to say that he is not at Cornell—put it to me like this: “we don’t have to risk it on untested ABDs, horrible teachers, or giant assholes anymore.”

That further support’s Chris’s advice for recommenders: explicit and direct is good. I pay a lot of attention to letters, and I think that they are important in different ways than most ABDs realize. Not who writes them (the ABD’s common fear), but what they convey about the applicant. I mildly disagree with Chris about relative rankings, which are indeed useful, but this only makes sense in letters from the most senior faculty who have been advising for 20+ years. After all, what does it mean when Assistant Prof Pepinsky says that someone is his best student ever? I want to know pipeline, trajectory, and contributions to my department, in that order. And because pipeline and trajectory are more “observable”—they should partially evident from the CV, writing samples, and cover letter—I am particularly interested in the intangibles to which letter writers can attest.

A final, unconnected thought: it is bad news when a recommendation letter summarizes the dissertation’s argument or contribution better than that applicant’s own cover letter does. I see this frequently, and it is hard to fix because the applicant never sees the letter! A cover letter is (ideally) vetted multiple times by multiple letter writers, so perhaps one useful exercise would be for the letter writer to summarize for the applicant what s/he believes the applicant’s main argument and contribution to be.