Several weeks ago, I learned that my most recent job search yielded what should be a long-term position. In the upcoming fall, I’ll be joining the University of Arizona as a member of both its philosophy department and the W. A. Franke Honors College as an Assistant Professor of Practice. While the position is not tenure eligible, it carries the same promotional ranks as a “standard” Assistant Professor position and operates on long-term contracts. My hope and expectation is that the University of Arizona will be my home for the foreseeable future. (Prepping for this transition is part of why I've been preoccupied the last few weeks and have not posted anything in that time.)
The post-COVID job market was not favorable, even by the appallingly low standards of the typical job search in academic philosophy. While the number of tenure-track job openings returned to near pre-COVID levels, the market seemed even more saturated with candidates than usual because the job offerings the previous year had been so meager. While I had a few interviews heading into April, none of them had yielded any tangible results. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it was eerily similar to what transpired last time. But April yielded a new cluster of interviews – a combination of visiting jobs and long-term positions. I even got invited for a campus visit midway through the month. Ultimately, I missed out on that particular job but was offered a visiting position near the end of April. In early May, just before I had to make a decision about the offer in hand, I got the news from Arizona.
I’m thrilled with how it all ended, but having reached this juncture, I have been thinking about how much it required. Here is a short encapsulation of each time I was on the job market and what the results were:
- 2016–2017: 90 applications; 4 interviews; 1 job offer
- 2017–2018: 19 applications; 1 interview; 0 job offers
- 2018–2019: 118 applications; 13 interviews; 3 job offers
- 2021–2022: 54 applications; 7 interviews; 2 job offers
You may notice that there’s a great deal of variance in the application numbers each year. My second job search was a soft search: my postdoctoral position was guaranteed for a second year, so there was no pressing need to find another job. I applied selectively to tenure-track positions for which I thought I was a good fit. My first and third searches were more strenuous endeavors where I went to far greater lengths trying to secure academic employment. The 2018–2019 search almost destroyed me, however. It was simply too time-consuming and emotionally taxing to apply for that many jobs, so on this most recent job search, I opted to be more selective. My target number of applications was 60, and when I received my first offer, I had exactly 6 jobs left in my spreadsheet that I intended to apply for.
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