Dissertation Reflection Series, Part 4: The First Job Market Run

Part 3 of this series focused on the problem of stacking commitments – the tendency for non-dissertation commitments to overwhelm one’s schedule in the final stages of graduate school as one tries to become a viable candidate on the job market. Now’s the time to consider the job market itself and how the initial run can impact your dissertation work.

First, let’s start with the ideal scenario. You manage to get a couple publications during graduate school, and the rest of your CV is pretty solid. You spend most of your summer finishing a full draft of your dissertation. Only revisions and the formal defense remain. You then devote the remainder of your summer and the first half of the fall toward job market preparation. You make sure all your statements are polished and that your writing samples have been thoroughly revised and edited according to feedback from your colleagues. You keep pace with the job market deadlines while making revisions to your dissertation manuscript and schedule a January defense, ensuring that your dissertation will be done long before you start your first job (if you're able to snag one).

That all sounds fine and dandy, but it’s pretty far removed from how things actually play out for most graduate students. In all likelihood, you won’t be so close to finishing your dissertation when your first job market run commences, and the stress and tedium of filling out applications will take a substantial psychological toll. Additionally, for reasons discussed in Part 3, it’s likely that some of your time will be tied up in outside projects during the last couple years of graduate school, which may impede your dissertation progress. Depending on how kind the peer review process has been to you earlier in grad school, you might also be trying to tack on another publication at the start of the fall semester.

In reality, the circumstances for your first job market run are not likely to be ideal, and you will probably still have dissertation progress to make while it’s going on. So how do you balance your teaching, dissertation work, side projects, and the 70, 80, or even 100+ job applications you will be submitting?

Frankly, there’s no miracle to be found here. Or at least not one that I’m aware of. One year ago, I had to postpone work on my dissertation while I prepped and finalized dossier materials (which took about 10 days of very intense work, in addition the initial prep I had done in the summer) and sent out the first major haul of applications. Even after that, the job market continued to suck up time. There is no rigid schedule for job postings anymore, which means that new ones appear throughout the winter and spring. You have to keep checking for new posts and submitting applications throughout the academic year (or until you get a job offer).

To make matters worse, many applications have unusual or idiosyncratic requirements that force you to construct one-time-use documents from scratch. For instance, as part of the application process for the job I currently have – a postdoc at the University of South Florida – I was required to include a statement explaining how my research fit into the university’s strategic plan for the next 5 years. That required me to read this strategic plan and write up something about it, and I didn’t use this material for any other of the 90 applications I sent out. This experience is rather common, especially for postdoc applications, and it means that even after the vanilla dossier documents are assembled and polished, you won’t be done creating content.

If you’re fortunate enough to get first-round interviews, these will also consume a lot of time. You’ll want to research the department and institution that you might work for, and you’ll want to schedule mock interviews to prepare. These interviews will, even if they go well, be very stressful, and most people who get these interviews do not get invited to campus visits afterward. The experience of getting an interview but then being eliminated from the search can be emotionally devastating: you get a flicker of hope, have a short time to nurture it, and then have it abruptly extinguished. It’s not a good time.

All this means that the job market will sap a lot of your time and energy. Theoretically, working on your dissertation during this stretch could function as a type of escape from the tedium of completing applications and the dismay of rejection letters, but it’s very hard to remain honed in on writing such a large project when your mental and emotional resources are so heavily invested in something else.

This probably doesn't sound like a pretty picture, but that's because it isn't. Grinding through the job market is brutal, no matter your career stage, and working on the dissertation at the same time makes it even harder. The good news is that this combination of dissertation work and the job market should only happen once. The best advice I can give is to just push through the 4-6 months that this lasts and then plan to take a significant vacation afterward to recharge (though not until after you’ve passed your defense and made sure all your graduation paperwork is in order). I’ve touched on the importance of vacations before, and there may never be a better time for one than after you have completed your dissertation and survived your first year on the job market.

Comments

[Amanda]

I would recommend not applying to too many jobs or postdocs. Time is better spent polishing applications for jobs that seem as though they are looking for someone like you rather than filling out applications for "long shot" positions. If this is done, my guess is most people will apply to 40-60 positions.

[Trevor Hedberg]

Amanda -- I've heard a great deal of conflicting advice about this. The most common position among those who have given me job market advice is that you should apply to all positions that you can make a plausible case for. The rationale is that the selection process is so random and the margin between qualified candidates so small that you don't really know how you'll fare. You may make the first cut in "long shot" positions and be passed over for all the positions that (to you) seem like an ideal match.

That said, I'm sure there's a limit here. I know plenty of people who have gone so far as to apply for positions that are clearly not in their AOS and for which they have no publications or dissertation research to support their claim that it is their AOS. At a minimum, I think this practice should be avoided.

Beyond that, I'm uncertain what other limits (if any) to recommend. Determining how much to limit the scope of your search is a tough call. If I develop a clear position on this topic, I might write up a full post on it at some point in the future.

[Recent hire]

I agree with Trevor here, from own experience; apply to wherever you can. The job market is weird. I ended up getting a job that was not in my AOS at all, and I only applied to it pretty much accidentally. Now I see I am a quite good fit for the department for multiple reasons, reasons that I was absolutely not familiar with during the application process. I grant that this is not a very frequent scenario, but it might make a difference between getting a job and not getting one.

My only year on the market was the first year, and as Justin said, it is not a fun year at all. My advice is to try to stay on schedule, no matter what. If you teach, keep teaching prep and grading to a minimum, and spend all the rest finishing the diss and job marketing. What got me through was that I had one or two days a week when I did only job market things, and the other days I didn't even look at it. Although it didn't eliminate the stress, it made it more manageable.

[Trevor Hedberg]

I'll add to Recent hire's comment that I think checking the job market wiki is an unnecessary way to spend one's time, and doing so usually just creates more stress. (Plus, as has been pointed out here on other posts, the information there is usually pretty inaccurate.) I never checked it once during my first time on the market, and I suspect that lessened the stress and anxiety considerably.

[Recent hire]

Yeah, good if you can do that --- not checking the wiki at all requires enormous self-control.

[Amanda]

Everyone has to make their own bet with how much time and how many applications, etc. I will say that I think spending extra time trying to tailor applications to a position is often helpful. Recent hire I tend to think you are an exception, but again, it is all a pretty random probability game we all try to make our best judgement about what risks to take.

[Marcus Arvan]

Recent hire: I don't think not checking the wiki requires enormous self-control. I didn't check it once my final two years on the market, and it didn't require any self-control. All it required was me realizing that I was far, far better off not checking it. It is nothing more than a recipe for daily worry and disappointment. I, at any rate, found not checking it liberating, and the positive effects staying away had on my wellbeing made staying away a piece of cake.

[Recent hire]

Marcus, I think this varies from person to person. I'm not saying checking the wiki was ever pleasant, but for me it was hard to resist finding out whether I was still in the run for something. Maybe it had to do with some first-year-on-the-market enthusiasm combined with some extra pressure to get a job due to visa situation.
Anyway, I do agree that checking it often is a complete waste of time and mental energy.

[Marcus Arvan]

Recent hire: fair enough! I checked it for a number of years before my spouse made me promise not to anymore. So, I certainly understand the allure of checking it--and, by all means, not everyone is the same (or in the same kind of situation). I mostly just wanted to register my own experience that distancing oneself from it can make it much easier to continue to stay away. At least in my case, the transition from daily disappointment and worry (when I was checking it) to simply getting on with my life (when I wasn't) was like night and day. It felt really liberating, which is why I try to convey the experience to others. Perhaps if one just makes it a point to stay away from it, one may have a similar experience!