Book review of Karen Kelsky's "The Professor is in"

Kelsky, Karen (2015). The Professor is in. The essential guide to turning your PhD into a job. Three Rivers Press. 

This book is aimed at job candidates in academia, graduate students but also more seasoned people looking for their first tenure-track job. The author has a consulting firm, with the same name as the book, which helps people with their dossier materials, negotiating job offers, prepping for interviews and editing grant proposals. Before starting her firm, she was a tenured professor, a position she left to pursue other things. 

Kelsky has trained as an anthropologist, which is clear not only in the examples she uses (many examples are drawn from anthropology, especially Japanese anthropology, her specialization), but also in the way she analyses the academic job market and academia more broadly. Anthropologists are good at making explicit all the implicit norms within a community.

For example, on posture during the academic interview she writes, "Keep your gaze level, head held high, stance firm, feet strongly planted (no winding or twisting your feet below the podium), shoulders squared, and your hands calmly on the podium or gesturing" (p. 238). She recommends a strong finish to the job talk: "Do not dribble away with, "So, yeah, uh, I guess that's it..."... Finish strong. Assertively. With a clear falling tone in the final words, then a pause, and then a confident gaze with half smile taking in the whole audience, and a strong and gracious "Thank you"." (p. 238).  I'm sure that many of us figure these sorts of things out eventually, but it is a very convenient shortcut. 

The book has a massive 63 chapters (which are all quite brief, but yet informative) that guide the reader step-by-step through what you have to do to get a job. Overall, it is a sobering read. Any romantic notions the reader has about academia are demolished in the course of reading this book. The book starts by detailing the adjunctification process to show how competitive the job market becomes, explains how the job market process works (what is an R1, a SLAC and so on, what does a search timeline look like), then explains how you should build a competitive record as a grad student. The meat of the book focuses on dossier materials, interviews, negotiating an offer, postdocs and grant applications, and closes with a brief final part on alt-ac jobs.

On the whole, the book is very informative and filled with details, including on unusual situations job candidates might find themselves in. For example, it deals with the question of what to do if you are invited to an on campus visit when pregnant. Kelsky recommends to warn the committee "By the way", you might write "I just wanted to mention that I'm six months pregnant. This will not impact my visit in any way; I mention it just so nobody is too startled when I arrive" (p. 296). The rationale for this is that "springing a pregnant belly on an unsuspecting search committee or dinner group might not produce ideal results" (pp. 296-297).

The book provides an in-depth set of resources. The sections on alt-ac are a bit brief, and I would recommend a separate resource for those who want to explore going the alt-ac way. For example, Kelsky's book gives a bit of info on how to write a resumé, but not enough for an inexperienced alt-ac candidate to do this on her own.

Another minor criticism is that this book seems to me most useful for readers from the humanities (including philosophy, even though this is an atypical discipline within the humanities) and to a lesser extent the social sciences. Norms in the sciences are quite different (and Kelsky herself often admits this, and encourages readers in the sciences to check with trusted advisors). 

Reading this book, one cannot help getting an uncomfortable feeling. It is not so much that this book lays bare the inadequacies of academia: absent and unethical advisors who don't give their graduate students the support they need or a realistic view of the world, as Sarah Kendzior wrote.My main worry for this book is this: the book does not address (except cursorily) mental health, a main problem of being on the job market in academia. How can we keep our sanity on the job market? How can we flourish as people on the job market? This can be a very long period in your life (I had my first permanent job when I was 36), and Kelsky is largely silent on how not to get totally mentally crushed by it (chapter 38, "Waiting wondering wiki" does touch on the issue of mental health, but more could have been said). Her book provides a manual on how to give yourself a fighting chance, but little advice on how to keep on fighting. The overall impression is that you need to surrender yourself completely to the unwritten norms of academia if you want to succeed. Chapter 13 is ominously titled "Why "yourself" is the last person you should be". In a way, it is unsurprising as Kelsky herself left academia, saying (in the book) that her soul was dying. Indeed, the final chapters about alt-ac do pay some attention to mental health, with such chapters as "It's OK to quit" (ch 58), and "Let yourself dream" (ch 59). 

However, overall I would strongly recommend this book to philosophers on the job market. I found the advice (which appeared on her blog earlier) very useful, especially on how to craft the cover letter, teaching statement (such a tricky document!) and a postdoc grant proposal.  

Comments

[Calvin]

Great review! I very much agree that this is a great book.

[Carlo Ierna]

It is an excellent book with a lot of good advice (I bought it immediately and did profit from her advice), but like many other publications on this topic, regrettably focused on the American market. I'd love to have a handbook on the European one, which has quite different conventions and a much larger focus on grants.

[Helen]

Yes, this is a good point. I think a book like this for the European job market would be helpful, although it would be difficult to figure out how big the geographical scope would be. Having worked in the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, I find there are subtle differences and similarities between these areas, for example.

[Shen-yi Liao]

How much of the book's material is unavailable from her blog?

[Helen]

From what I've seen the book provides both new content, and some content previously available on the blog is no longer available there. For example the foolproof grant template here https://theprofessorisin.com/2011/07/05/dr-karens-foolproof-grant-template/
is only available in shortened version on the blog. The full version that explains all the steps is only available in the book.

[Jerry Green]

Have had this book close at hand for most of the last two years. *Very* helpful. Even if you don' take the advice exactly as given, its very useful to be made to think about the issues the books raises. And its quite cheap, so the convenience of the book format and the added content are well worth the price (vs. just reading the blog).

[New facutly]

Fwiw, I hired and then fired Karen Kelsey as a consultant in part for the reason you mention here. Her feedback was not useful for the kind of person I am (her suggested edits just didn't sound or feel like me) nor the kind of job I wanted. And I found her feedback and tone (very short and firm) to only further stress me out during an already stressful time. Without her help, I ended up doing surprisingly well on the market that year in terms of interviews (no offers), given the low prestige of my PhD granting institution, having no publications, and not much of the dissertation being done. I think this was in large part because my application was genuine, unique, and showed passion. Since finishing the PhD, I have secured a TT job at an institution that is a fantastic fit for me and I feel comfortable knowing I was hired for who I am. Not saying the book or advice is bad, but echoing that it's also important to stay true to yourself and focus on (thank you Helen!) mental health.