Mid-career reflections, part 6: trajectory matters

In my first post in this series, I explained why I have come to doubt some common pieces of conventional wisdom in the discipline: conventional wisdom about program rankings, publishing, putting research in front of teaching, and blogging. In brief, a lot of things that seem intuitive--things that just 'seem like they should be right'--are in my experience not right.

Today's post is about the other side of the coin: something that doesn't appear to me to be widely disseminated conventional wisdom, but in my experience probably should be. The issue I want to discuss is the importance of one's perceived career-trajectory. Allow me to explain what this means, and how in my experience it matters.

I first went on the job-market in 2007, while ABD at Arizona. While I didn't have any publications yet, I had an ambitious dissertation my committee seemed excited about, and had a central chapter from it accepted as a symposium presentation at the Eastern APA. Anyway, that year I got several TT interviews at some fairly elite universities. While I didn't get an offer from any of them, I got and accepted a non-TT offer from the University of British Columbia, an R1. I was delighted and lucky to get that job. However, it was only a two-year post, and more importantly, it separated me from my fiance at the time (now spouse), who could not move to and work in Canada. Consequently, I went on the market my first year at UBC in a limited way, looking for positions that might enable us to live together in the same place. I lucked out, getting and accepting a non-TT offer from the University of Tampa, where I now work. While not a TT job (though I was later hired TT there), the job otherwise seemed ideal in every way: the job at UT was pitched as a three-year post that could be renewed for up to seven (!) years. This sounded wonderful--and in many ways it was. It enabled my spouse and me to live together. It enabled her to enter a top PhD program in the area. And, or so I reasoned, it would give me a good amount of time to improve my competitiveness on the job-market.

In many ways, accepting the job at UT was one of the best career decisions I ever made. Although I did end up spending seven pretty painful years on the job-market, everything worked out in the end. What I didn't know at the time, however, was that my decision to move to UT plausibly affected my perceived career-trajectory--something which I later learned to be important. Allow me to explain how.

Some time after moving to UT, I had a surprising discussion with a senior mentor in the profession. "That was quite a risk you took moving from UBC to Tampa", he said. I was a bit shell-shocked by this. I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he said to me (I paraphrase), "Career trajectory matters a lot on the market. People who look like their careers are on the upswing--coming out of good programs, getting good postdocs, etc.--are perceived as attractive candidates for research programs. Now that you've moved to a teaching university, you've changed your perceived trajectory. You are probably not going to be as competitive for research jobs now, as you look more in line for jobs at teaching schools." I have to confess: this hit me like a ton of bricks. Perhaps I should have thought of it, and perhaps some of you may think it is obvious, but it just wasn't something I considered when deciding to move from UBC. While I had nothing against teaching schools--and indeed, would have been (and am!) entirely happy working at a teaching-focused school (and think UT is a great school!)--I was incredibly disappointed to hear from this person that I had, for all intents and purposes, torpedoed my chances for research jobs. Call me idealistic, but I had hoped as a candidate I would be judged, you know, on the basis of my dossier, not my 'trajectory.' 

Was my mentor right about the importance of perceived trajectory? I don't have anything more than anecdotal evidence to go on here, and suspect no one else does. But the anecdotal evidence I do have suggests he was probably right--in a way that has, I think, important practical implications for job-candidates. Here are some anecdotes. First, the moment I got to Tampa, I stopped getting interviews at research universities and elite SLACs. Just about all of my interviews from that point on were at teaching schools. Second, I know people who came out of good programs but have been stuck in non-TT jobs for the better part of a decade now. When I look at their CVs, their job-market strategy seems to have followed the conventional wisdom I raised doubts about recently: they have focused on publishing in top-ranked journals. Not only that. They have been very successful at it. The people I'm talking about here have published in top-5 generalist journals, top 10 journals, top 20 journals. But they still don't have a TT job. Why? The only thing I can think of is this: they may have the wrong job-market strategy for their 'perceived career trajectory.' In effect, their job-market strategy is plausibly akin to swimming upstream in a fast-moving river.  They are trying to position themselves for a research job while competing against people just now coming out of places like Rutgers, NYU, Harvard, and Princeton. Given what I learned about perceived trajectory, I worry this may be a losing strategy. They can publish in all of the top-ranked journals they like: they appear to be fighting a battle they can hardly win.

Anyway, I think this may be a very important (and underappreciated) lesson to learn. After my mentor told me about this, I changed my job-market strategy to match my 'perceived career trajectory.' Instead of shooting for top-ranked journals, I adopted a 'teaching-market strategy': publishing in lower-ranked journals, improving my teaching pedagogy and student reviews, service record, and so on. It paid off in a big way. Although I rarely received interviews at research schools, I got an increasing number of interviews and flyouts at teaching schools, and ultimately, a TT job.

This is just my experience, and it may be wrong. But I am curious: how many of you out there have heard about this before? For the job-candidates out there, were you told anything about the importance of 'perceived career trajectory'? And, for the search committee members out there (particularly search committee members at R1s and elite SLACs), do you have the impression it matters as much as my anecdata suggest?

Comments

[Me too]

Marcus,
My experience is similar. I think one generally goes "down" the status hierarchy in one's career. Incidentally, I recall reading a sociological study of academics that concluded that where one is 10 years after one's Ph.D. is, generally, where one will be the rest of one's career. Upward mobility is near impossible. Indeed, one way "around" this that I have seen is for people to get involved in administration. It is easier to move up as an administrator than as a faculty member.