118

In my last major post, I gave the details on how a major depressive episode radically disrupted my academic year and ongoing job search, but I never specified how that search ended. The job search itself wasn’t the core topic of the post, and it wasn’t over when I first drafted the post. But I did survive the gauntlet, and enough time has passed that I think I can finally catalog everything that transpired.

In this post, I’m going to chronicle some of the noteworthy events  that took place during my 8-month academic job search in 2018-2019 while I was completing the final year of my postdoc at the University of South Florida. As will become obvious, there are some aspects of this story that are extremely idiosyncratic and unlikely to be a part of anyone else’s job search. Still, I think there are some meaningful takeaways from the tale, and since it does actually end in success, it’s a reminder that perseverance does sometimes pay off – a message that is all too often overshadowed by the grim realities of the current job market.

Once the lengthy recap of the job search is complete, I’ll highlight some general lessons that can be gleaned from the journey.

October 1, 2018
I send out my first application. It’s time for another round on the market.

November 9, 2018
I get my first interview – it’s for a tenure-track job with New Mexico Tech. I’m happy to know that I won’t be a dreaded no-interview cycle. I’ve had some good friends suffer that fate, and I’m always grateful when I get at least a little positive feedback from the market.

November 14, 2018
I have my interview with New Mexico Tech in the afternoon. They use a type of video-conferencing software that I have not used before (i.e., not Skype or Zoom), and we have difficulty connecting. Even after that’s sorted out, I’m in the midst of a depressive episode (though I hadn’t really grasped that yet), and my answers lack their usual crispness and confidence. I just feel slow. It’s like I’m operating with 30% of my brain, and it’s the worst interview I have ever had.

November 30, 2018
I’ve completed 47 applications. The only one on tap for today is an assistant professor position at Tulane University. It’s an Interfolio application, and I have until 11:59 pm to complete it. These Interfolio applications typically go faster than others, so it shouldn’t be a problem. But the several preceding months of insomnia are wearing on me today. I leave the office early and lie down for a nap at 3:30. I wake up at 11:53. I shake off my mental haze, log into Interfolio, and start to upload files for the application, but it’s immediately obvious that I don’t have enough time. The deadline passes before I can finish the process.

There are plenty of other jobs, but this is the first time I’ve ever missed a deadline for a job I intended to apply for. It’s not a pleasant feeling.

December 3, 2018
I get my second interview request – this one with Missouri University of Science and Technology.

December 10, 2018
I have my interview with Missouri University of Science and Technology. It goes much better than my first interview. I’m still not entirely myself, but I’m also better prepared, and with the semester over, I’m a little less stressed. Unfortunately, I conclude the interview with a lingering sense that it still wasn’t good enough to land a campus visit.

January 2019
I get two more interview requests. The first is from Missouri State University, and the second is from University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. The Missouri State job is particularly appealing because it gets me close to home and because the teaching responsibilities would be right in my wheelhouse. Both these interviews go decently, but again, I have this feeling that “good” is not good enough.

I plan out a trip for just after the semester at South Florida wraps up. I hope that having something to look forward to will keep me motivated over the next few months , and I suspect that I’ll need some R&R when this whole ordeal is over.

February 2019
Time drags on, and I continue to fill out applications. By the end of the month, I’m up to 86. But I get almost no news at all this month – no new interview requests, no follow-ups on prior interviews, and almost no rejections – though one notable exception is New Mexico Tech: they actually send me a rejection letter in the mail. It feels antiquated, but I’m just happy they cared enough to send me something. (In my experience, roughly 40% of my applications receive no response whatsoever.)

March 2019
After a period of relative radio silence, things start to pick up again. I receive several more interview requests, though most of them are not for tenure-track jobs at this stage. There’s one such job at Northern Michigan University, but the others are a VAP at Minnesota-Duluth, a postdoc at Hamilton College, and another VAP at Colgate University.

This batch of interviews is a mixed bag. The Minnesota-Duluth interview is conducted over the phone and consists of only four questions. With no non-verbal feedback, I have no idea how my answers are received, and it’s difficult to tell when someone on the other side of the conversation is done speaking. But the interviews with Hamilton and Colgate go very well. To date, I still think the Colgate interview is the best one I’ve ever done. For 45 minutes, I was completely locked in: I gave quick and clear responses to every question, my jokes all landed, and our conversation flowed well enough that it didn’t really feel like an interview. It’s the only time I have ever left one of these interviews feeling good about my chances.

April 2019
A few days into April, I have my interview with Northern Michigan University. Despite the prior two interviews going very well, this one goes quite poorly. I am confident that I will not be getting a campus visit.

Later that week, I get an interview request from Western Governors University. They adopt an educational model that is very different from traditional 4-year colleges, but the job has its appeals: its status as an online university means that I could work remotely from almost anywhere, and I like their emphasis on one-on-one mentoring and the university’s low tuition costs. I make it past the first round interview seemingly without too much trouble, but I learn their hiring process contains three rounds of interviews. I falter at the next stage.

The search committee members ask a series of questions modeled on the STAR method of interviewing, which is very different from how a standard academic job interview goes. In most cases, they present me with a scenario and ask me how I have handled similar situations in the past. Unfortunately, about half the scenarios are situations I have never encountered, so it’s difficult to state what the results (the “R”) from my actions would be.

Later in the month, Western Governors University, Northern Michigan University, and the University of Minnesota-Duluth all confirm that I am no longer being considered for their job openings. No surprises there. But I get the same news from Hamilton and Colgate. The search committee chair at Colgate informs me that I was their second choice for the job but that the top candidate is planning to accept their offer. And so it seems my absolute best interview is still not enough to land a VAP job in my core AOS.

As the month nears its end, I take stock of what’s left to do. I am about to wrap up the semester at South Florida, and I have about a dozen job applications left to send out. Sizing up the calendar, I identify an application with a May 17th deadline as my last one. By the time June arrives, I’ll need to commit to a plan for next year, decide whether I’m renewing my lease, and so on. The only bright spot on the horizon is that I have a vacation coming up.

May 3, 2019
I finish the last bit of grading for the spring semester and prepare to depart for Knoxville, TN to track down a few old friends and deliver a presentation to some of the graduate students about navigating the academic job market. The trip to Knoxville is a little much for a single day of driving, so my plan is to spend this Friday night in Georgia and then spend the next four days in Knoxville. On Wednesday the following week, I’ll drive down to Atlanta, and after 5 nights there, I’ll head back to Tampa.

At this point, I have submitted 116 applications and had 9 interviews, but none of that has yet culminated in a job. Some applications are still out, but things are looking grim. I have two applications left to submit, but I’ll get back from my trip on May 13th, and they both have deadlines after that date. So I decide they can wait and get on the road.

I generally don’t answer phone calls when I’m driving, so when I stop for gas in southern Georgia, I check a voice message from an unknown number. Evidently, Stonehill College wants to interview me the following week for a teaching postdoc.

I laugh. On the one hand, I’m relieved that my job search is still alive; on the other, I’m frustrated that even this little vacation that I had planned months in advance must be tainted by the job market. At least I had prepared for this scenario. The dress clothes that I’d packed at the last minute would get some use after all.

I call back and accept the interview request. The available times are not the best, but they are doable. I can squeeze in the interview before I leave Knoxville.

May 5, 2019
To my bafflement, I get two more interview requests – one for a postdoc at Lawrence University and the other for a lecturer job at Towson University. Both of them want to interview me near the end of the current week. It’s good news, but the timing could be a problem. I explain to both departments that I’ll be traveling and would prefer to do the interviews on Monday or Tuesday of next week after I’m back in Tampa.

May 6, 2019
I deliver a presentation about my recent job market experiences to some of the graduate students at the University of Tennessee. I had agreed to give this presentation in January: at that time, I had assumed that my circumstances would be resolved – for better or worse – by the end of April. But they aren’t, and so I can’t tell them whether all this work will ultimately be for naught. In retrospect, I think the presentation came off as a little too dreary, but if you’ve read up to this point, you should understand why.

That night, I get responses from Lawrence and Towson. They can’t reschedule their interviews for next week. We are too late in the academic calendar: for them to relay their decisions to the dean in time, they have to get these interviews done by the end of the week. They give me a list of available interview times, and I weigh my options.

May 8, 2019
I conduct my interview with Stonehill College in the morning from one of the empty faculty offices. It’s the end of the term, and the halls are quiet. The interview seems to go pretty well, but I know from recent experience that I shouldn’t get my hopes up.

Once it’s over, I head to Atlanta. After taking their rail system into downtown, I wait at my hotel for a friend to arrive. He’s flying in from the Pacific Northwest, but he shows up right on schedule. Later, at dinner,I explain how my original plans for the weekend will have to be altered.

He understands my need to do these interviews: he was once pursuing an academic career in psychology but went a different direction after seeing the nomadic lifestyle typical of early career academics. But he also recognizes the ludicrous nature of what this entails: in the days ahead, I’ll be interviewing for two jobs while simultaneously attending a furry convention.

May 9, 2019
I’ll avoid a preposterously long digression here, but I will provide some context for those of you who haven’t encountered the term “furry” before. Furries are a group of fans interested in artwork that depicts animals with human-like appearances and intellectual abilities, such as typical cartoon characters or the humanoid animal characters in many modern video games. The artistic genres of interest include animation, comics, video games, literature, costuming, dance, and a variety of other performance-based art forms. Furries usually create custom human-animal avatars and aliases to represent themselves at fandom events and sometimes even go so far as commissioning elaborate costumes of their characters. Those colorful, distinctive outfits – called fursuits – are probably the aspect of the community that most widely known and easily recognized.

Now these conventions developed a not-so-flattering mythos 15-20 years ago – largely as a result of misleading or flat-out inaccurate representations of them in popular media. Many venues couldn’t resist the chance to portray furries as mentally ill, socially inept, perverted, etc., for a cheap laugh. Those stereotypes don’t hold up well to the empirical research on the fandom, and more positive stories about furries aren’t that hard to find anymore. But even discounting the myths, these events are still zany, chaotic, and tiring. That’s especially true of this event – Furry Weekend Atlanta – because it’s the fourth largest convention in the world, and that means more people (around 5600 this year), more eye-catching costumes, more programming, and more  random shenanigans than at most other events.

So this isn’t quite the ideal backdrop for potentially career-altering job interviews, but I'm going to have to make this work. Bailing on my friend would be a rather cold move (especially since he's there in part out of curiosity and knows little about furries beyond what I’ve told him), and the two of us have already paid for a large chunk of the accommodations. I was also on the convention program and booked to pick up an art commission. Plus, as a matter of principle, I couldn’t let the job market take any more from me. It had already taken so much of my time, energy, and happiness. Could I really let it take my right to sit in the audience while five fursuiters perform a choreographed dance number? No. That would just be too much to sacrifice.

I had to split my interviews between Friday and Saturday, but I did manage to get them both scheduled fairly early in the day. I thought it would be difficult to spend time in con space and then retreat back to my hotel room for a professional interview. How could one venture into the cartoonish landscape of ludicrous photo-ops and cringe-inducing animal puns, and then later be expected to discuss population ethics or how to approach teaching non-philosophy majors? It’s possible, I imagine, but it sounds difficult. Instead, I would start those days professional and finish them slightly less than professional.

Photo with animator Jib Kodi. I think this qualifies as "slightly less than professional."

My friend (who has adopted the alias Niko for this event) and I register and then grab a quick bite to eat. Amusingly, today is the final day of the National Rural Health Association’s annual meeting, and they have a bunch of posters set up in the atrium. So we spend some of our mealtime observing the conference attendees try to maintain their focus while furries flood into the hotel. Some of them fail spectacularly at this, though that’s completely understandable – could you really see a 6-foot-tall blue fox walk by and not do a double-take?

Sadly, I have to cut the evening short to do some research on Lawrence University. So after the official opening ceremonies, I retreat back to the hotel room to crack open my laptop.

May 10, 2019
I’m up bright and early the next morning, and I fall into my pre-interview routine pretty naturally. After this many interviews, the ritual isn’t hard to repeat. The hotel’s wifi seems pretty stable, and I look just as suave as I would under normal circumstances. I review a few notes, and at 9:00 am, I’m back into the fray of familiar interview questions.

The context is unusual, but the interview actually goes pretty well. Not quite as well as Colgate or Stonehill but definitely above average. I’m satisfied with my efforts given the circumstances.

During the rest of the day, Niko and I participate in the charity poker tournament (and advance to the next round), buy some merch from the Dealer’s Den, drop in on a couple panels, and attend a performance by Dad’s Garage, an improv group based in Atlanta. In between some of these events, I run a panel of my own titled “Discussing the Furry Fandom with Non-Furries.” It’s essentially a public speaking workshop to help attendees think about how they can explain the fandom to others and address misconceptions about the group. Since I’d run the same panel the previous year, it doesn’t involve too much prep work - a good thing given  what else I have going on.

As the evening winds down, I remember that business isn’t yet concluded. I squeeze in a little research on Towson University but not much. The environment at a furry convention is a little over-stimulating for introverts, and after a job interview and panel presentation on top of the other festivities, fatigue is running high. Sleep comes calling a little earlier than usual.
 

May 11, 2019
Things don’t go as smoothly as yesterday, although not for the reason I would have expected. I still do the same routine, but I have difficulty throughout the interview just hearing my interviewers clearly. They have some sort of conference call setup, and the reception on it seems inconsistent. Or perhaps the wifi connection just isn’t as good as it was the previous day. Either way, it’s a problem. I ask them to repeat or clarify questions a couple times, but this really disrupts the flow of the conversation. On the whole, it’s a below-average interview, and I’m all but certain that this particular job is not in the cards. Even so, I’m happy just to be done with the matter.

Niko and I come up just short of making the final table in the poker tournament. Afterward, I attend a panel where a professional voice actor discusses how to balance professional pursuits with fandom participation – something I feel I’ve learned a lot about in the last 48 hours. Later in the afternoon, my phone buzzes with an email notification. It’s an interview request from Georgetown for their 1-year postdoc. I close the window without responding. It's another bit of good news, but don’t want to think about another interview just yet.

Fortunately, furry conventions are very distracting. Several hours later, I’m just another one among hundreds cheering and singing and dancing at the Mystery Skulls concert. For a little while, concern about my uncertain future is eclipsed by visual spectacle and awesome music.

May 15, 2019
A day after returning from vacation, I finish my final two applications. #117 is a VAP at Franklin and Marshall College, and #118 is a postdoctoral position at The Ohio State University. As I check off these last two entries in my Google Spreadsheet, I look back at all the others. It’s been 7 months, and it feels longer.

May 17, 2019
Georgetown wants a postdoc to help coordinate their Ethics Lab programming, and today’s my interview with them. Unfortunately, the way that the interview goes, I doubt that I'm the right fit for what they want. I suppose I could be wrong, but I'm not optimistic after the interview wraps up.

May 21, 2019
I get an offer to interview with Ohio State on Friday May 24th for their postdoc. I’m impressed by how quickly they evaluated the applications. This will be my fifth interview this month, so maybe something will fall my way yet.

May 22, 2019
I receive a phone call from a dean at Stonehill College. The voicemail gives no details except a request that I call him back. For a moment, I get hopeful, but then I remember the times I’ve felt that way in the past and then felt gutted shortly thereafter.

Upon returning the call, I am offered a 1-year teaching postdoc for the upcoming academic year. I want to be happy, but I am so bewildered and emotionally exhausted by the last few weeks that my remarks have no energy behind them. The teaching responsibilities are certainly manageable, and the department had seemed like a good group of people. Even considering the steep cost of living in the Boston area, there are far worse transitional jobs out there. I am not thrilled about potentially being back on the market in 4 months, but I try to push that thought from my mind.

I mention that I have some other institutions I’d like to contact, and the dean and I agree to talk again in one week. I need to make a decision by then.

May 24, 2019
I have my interview with the faculty at Ohio State. It’s the first interview I’ve ever done where I have an offer in hand, and I feel a little more confident than I have in some of the prior ones. It’s also my 15th interview in this job cycle, so by now, there’s not much that can surprise me. I inform them of my offer from Stonehill but also candidly tell them that I’d probably accept theirs instead if it were available. They tell me that they will make a decision by May 28th – one day before my deadline with Stonehill.

May 28, 2019
I get the offer from Ohio State. I can hardly believe it – it was literally the last application I completed for this job cycle. The position pays reasonably well and can be renewed for at least a second year. The cost of living in Columbus, OH is much lower than Easton, MA, and going there gets me closer to my roots in the Midwest. I've already been informed by Georgetown and Towson that I'm out of the running for their positions. So I take the job at Ohio State, just as I told my interviewers I would under these circumstances.

May 29, 2019
In my follow-up exchange with the dean at Stonehill College, I inform him of my plans to take the job at Ohio State. It is strange not to be the one on the receiving end of rejection. I should be thrilled to have options, but after feeling such elation at that initial job offer, telling him that I won't be coming just feels wrong – like some kind of cosmic injustice. Must everything related to the job market somehow make me feel bad?

June 3, 2019
Because this job search hasn’t had enough intrigue, I get a call from Lawrence University. Evidently, their top choice had declined the position after waffling for two weeks. They want to know if I’m still interested. I take a day to talk over the matter with those in my academic circle, but it’s mostly just to ensure that there’s no good reason to abandon my commitment to Ohio State. (I’d already considered the possibility of getting an offer from Lawrence prior to voicing my intention to head to Ohio, but for a decision of this magnitude, I wanted to double-check a few things.)

Sometime later, on the phone with a close friend, we discuss how 50% of my interviews at furry conventions yielded job offers, which is much higher than my success rate for other interviews. Sure, it’s a small sample size, but it’s one of those factoids that’s worth a laugh or two.

June 4, 2019
After some discussion and deliberation, I conclude that it would not make sense to pick the job at Lawrence University over the job at Ohio State. So today I tell those at Lawrence University that I am grateful for their offer but must decline it.

June 5, 2019
I receive my official offer letter from Ohio State through Docusign. I read through it and provide my signature. I’ll have to return to the market in Fall 2020, but at least a temporary reprieve is in sight. I now turn my attention to the logistics of the 1000-mile move.

--------------------------------

So that’s the story. Now that you can see the full timeline, let me highlight a few things I learned over the course of all these applications and interviews.

First, if you are going on the job market, prepare for the long haul. In my first 100 applications, I did not get a single offer. In my last 18 applications, I got 3. You might get a job offer in February (as I did in my first job market run), but it is also common not to get one until very late in the game. Don’t expect that you’ll be on the market for just a short while: act as if it’s going to take almost the entire academic year.

Second, be mindful of the hidden costs of being on the job market. I think most are well aware of the time costs associated with completing applications and preparing dossier materials. Even if each application only averaged an hour to complete, that would still mean that completing 118 hours would take up 3 work weeks of your time. And in practice, this figure would be an extraordinary underestimate: dossier preparation can take dozens of hours on its own, updating your online profiles and websites adds even more hours, and many applications require custom documents that will only be of use for their specific application. The costs are so much higher than just eating up hundreds of hours of your work time, though.

Every interview requires a disruption to next week’s plans. Every unsuccessful interview cuts deep because opportunities seem like such a precious resource. The repetitive and tedious nature of applying will become mind-numbing after you cross a certain point: once you have spent more than 10 hours making slight tweaks to PDFs to accommodate various application systems’ weird upload requirements, your patience for this task will deteriorate. Beyond these things, you don’t know where you’ll be living next year or what you’ll be doing. This hidden cost is perhaps the most pernicious because it is so hard to expunge – it seems like you’re always thinking about your uncertain career prospects, always wondering whether there’s a future for you in the profession at all.

Third, job interviews are bullshit. This is not a new observation, but it was reinforced throughout the year. I was always the same job candidate, and I always engaged in roughly the same interview preparation – same attire, same amount of time researching each school and department, the same interviewing location (with a few exceptions). Yet my interview performance varied dramatically and usually due to factors that had nothing to do with how well I could do the job in question. For this reason, you shouldn’t be discouraged if an interview goes badly, but it’s difficult to have that outlook when they can have such a huge impact on your career and life more generally.

Fourth, when you’re on the job market, you have to find a way to prevent your job search from dominating your life. Now, if you’ve read this post and its predecessor, you know that I completely failed in my efforts to do this during 2018-2019, and it’s no coincidence that this ordeal included the worst 6-month stretch of my life. (I’m not exaggerating here: only the fall semester of my sophomore year of high school even comes close.) I’m not yet sure what I’ll do differently next time – perhaps place a limit on how much time I’ll commit to the job search each week and reserve more time for leisure activities to reduce stress. We’ll see. I just know that some changes will be in order after how this last run went.

All that said, things could have turned out worse. Perhaps much worse. I consider myself fortunate that this job market story – bleak as it was at times – did not have a bleak ending.

Comments

[KF]

Thank you for sharing this. I'm glad things eventually worked out and that you'll have one year at least where you don't have to go back out on the market.

My takeaway from the success of your interviews at the Furry Convention is that when you're doing something fun that makes you happy and your life isn't (at that moment) being consumed by the job market, that it improves interview performance. By the way, I totally thought you were going to say something to the effect that you had to hold an interview in the hotel lobby and people dressed up in costume walked behind you and were seen by the people interviewing you and it made a good talking point.

[Trevor Hedberg]

KF -- Yes, I recall one of my old grad student colleagues who hypothesized that I would have been more relaxed at the event than usual and thought that may have helped me.

Regarding the hotel lobby, it would have been too noisy to conduct an interview there, and as you imagine, there would have been a million distractions in the background. My second choice (if I hadn't gotten decent internet in the room) would have been a downtown coffee shop.

[Anon]

Thank you for sharing this. 118 applications is really a lot. I was wondering, did you feel that you were a good fit for all 118 positions? Does it make a difference in terms of quality of life to be more restrictive and apply, say, to 30 positions? I say this because it seems really unlikely to be a good fit for 100 positions, unless you have 4 areas of specialization!

[nameless]

My time on the job market caused me to become severely depressed to the point that I had to be medicated. So, I'm happy to have left the profession! You've got to be a very strong person to deal with the job market in philosophy, and I couldn't. I simply didn't have the kind of upbringing to leave me psychologically strong enough to deal with a situation like that. It's unfortunate cause I do love philosophy (in the narrow sense) and had contributed a lot to the discipline with my papers. That's just not enough these days...

[Trevor Hedberg]

Anon -- My Google Spreadsheet actually contained 196 jobs that I had flagged. That means that I reviewed and screened out 77 jobs as being too far outside my research and teaching areas. (The Tulane job that I mentioned in the post was just a missed deadline.) I'm not sure how many of these jobs had an "Open" AOS, but most of them were ethics and applied ethics jobs and those are my specialty areas. (There tend to be more jobs in ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy than elsewhere; I'm pretty confident you couldn't plausibly apply for 118 jobs with a metaphysics or epistemology AOS.)

I should also add that it's hard to know whether you're a "good fit" for a position in the abstract because job ads are vague, and it's impossible to know a search committees particular desires. Here's something to think about: of the three positions that I was offered, two were focused on bioethics (Lawrence University and OSU) and one was focused on teaching a unique introduction to philosophy course to lots of undergrads (Stonehill). My core AOS is environmental ethics, and yet I only interviewed for 3 positions where that was an explicit focus (Hamilton, Minnesota-Duluth, and Colgate). So I'd say it was a very good thing that I cast a wide net: if I hadn't, I'm not sure I'd be in academia right now.

Also, as a gut reaction, I think 30 applications would be way to low to have a reasonable chance of success. I do know some people who did well filling out "only" 60-80 applications, though.

[Michel]

Anon: Like Trevor, I don't think you're doing yourself a service by limiting yourself to the 30ish jobs you think are a good fit. You're just not a great judge of your fit, and it's better to be ruled out than to rule yourself out. Spend more time crafting the applications for jobs that are good fits, but apply to as many as you can.

The reality is that it's *horrifically* difficult to get even one interview. Even with 100+ applications out. It's absolutely, totally normal to get 0.

[Anon]

Michel and Trevor: I see your argument, but I'm not sure that by applying for so many jobs you do good to yourself (in terms of mental health) and to the committees (one of my old advisors once told me: "Don't make your applications look like spam").
What I mean is that if your AOS is philosophy of science, and you work on science and values, then I think it's ok to apply for applied ethics jobs - especially if you can show that you are highly familiar with the field, even though you did not publish in certain applied ethics journals. I used this strategy last year, and I landed several interviews. However, if your AOS is logic, then it's very unlikely that you'll randomly land an interview for a job in, idk, political philosophy - especially if you do not dedicate some time to the application in order to explain why. There is also the issue of jobs with open AOS and open AOC. Many of these jobs are at ivy-league or leiterrific programs. Unless you have a PhD from one of those programs, it's unlikely to be even considered (even if you are well connected and have great letters from important people). For instance, there is a job at UC Berkeley with many AOS (including Phil sc) and it is open rank. Why apply for a job like that? Let's be honest: it's a waste of time (even if it's just one afternoon of work). What I'm saying is that one can try - however, mental health is very important. Every rejection and/or application for which you don't hear back, may make you feel worse.
Btw, my AOS lie at the intersection of a couple of niche areas, and I'm surprised that so far I have applied to 29 jobs and I'll probably apply to 6 more (they are really a lot, especially if compared to other years). Moreover, I'm not US citizen nor greencard holder, and hence I have to be selective with respect to the places I apply, because many (small) places do not sponsor for H1B etc (several fixed term positions are like that).

[Trevor Hedberg]

Anon -- First, many of the jobs I screened out were jobs exactly like you described: Open jobs at distinguished schools or jobs with a wide assortment of AOSs and little evidence that they were really looking for someone with my credentials. Second, I never applied to a single job that was nearly the stretch you are talking about -- that is, applying to a political philosophy job with an AOS in logic. I agree that would be a waste of time. My biggest stretch was applying for some philosophy of technology jobs, and two of my interviews were for positions like that, so it clearly wasn't a waste of time.

I don't think you're disagreeing with me or Michel on these matters. Perhaps you're underestimating how many jobs there are in ethics and applied ethics compared to some other areas of philosophy, though I'm not really sure.

Third, the marginal costs of applying to additional jobs dramatically decrease once you hit a certain threshold because you'll have drafted cover letters for so many different job types that making additional revisions takes very little time. You mention a job app taking an entire afternoon of work, but very few apps should take that long once you've got a dozen or so under your belt. (The cover letter is often the only thing that's different across applications, after all.) I agree that there are some psychological benefits to scaling down one's number of job market applications, but the odds are stacked against you so much that cutting your application total beyond a certain point just makes it that much more difficult.

[Will work for tenure]

I think it's totally reasonable to limit the amount of jobs you apply for to maintain a decent quality of life while on the market. I guess this depends on your constitution--and probably also on how long you've spent on the market--but, in my case, I've found I just can't maintain a decent quality of life while applying to every job that I'm not obviously unqualified for. So if I want to make allowances for my well-being, I'm going to have to forgo applying to some jobs that I conceivably could. Unfortunately, there's probably no non-arbitrary way to draw a line in a situation like this. That's part of what makes it so difficult. What's important, though, is that there *is* some sort of line. Yes, this will limit my chances of getting a job. But, given that my odds of getting a job will be low regardless, it's not always worth it to sacrifice short-term well-being to maximize those odds.

[Michel]

Like Trevor said, it gets *a lot* easier and faster with time and experience. After sending several hundred applications, I've already done the research on most schools that are hiring, or on relevantly similar schools. Customizing doesn't take much time any more. The longest part of most applications for me now is filling out the HR forms. The exception is when I'm applying for something that I *really* want (e.g. it's squarely in my AOS, which is 0-2 jobs a year), or if idiosyncratic documents are required.

But the mental health component improves with time, too. I used to be very invested in each application, no doubt because I spent so much time crafting them. At this point, four hundredish applications later, I send 'em out and forget all about 'em. Applications and rejections barely even register for me any more.

What does still register, though, is not getting any interviews. And not having a job. Those are huge stressors, and left me pretty miserable until very late last cycle. Happily, I can leave that stress behind now that I have 3/4 of a job (totally outside my AOS, btw).

But your mileage may well vary. I can only report on my own.

[Lucky]

Anon - you're certainly right that it makes no sense to apply for a job that lists AOS Logic if you're a political philosopher or a job for Chinese philosophy if you do contemporary philosophy of science. On the other hand, none of my job offers over the past 8 years have come from schools looking for my AOS.

My first lecturer position had an AOS that I was not qualified for, but one of the listed AOCs matched one of mine. My first tenure track position was an open AOS that listed four teaching areas that they were particularly interested in, none of which I was qualified for. And my current position was another open position where the advert said they already had teaching coverage in my main field.

I almost didn't apply for that first TT job since while the job advert didn't disqualify me, it gave me no reason to think I'd be considered seriously. And it ended up being the only academic offer of any kind I got that year. For me that decision was the difference between leaving the field (I had promised my wife that was my last year on the market) and sitting in my current pretty cushy job.