If you’re a grad student and you’re going on the academic job market soon, listen up! You’re probably already behind the curve, and you’re running out of time to get prepared for the job market. It’s a cut-throat business these days, and CVs that used to get newly minted Ph.D.s jobs at top research universities 5 years ago now barely raise an eyebrow for adjunct work at the local college. Here are five things you should have already started doing to prepare for the job market.
1. Do More Research
You might already have a publication or two, but you can always have more. I think the norm for getting tenure-track jobs at research universities is to have at minimum one strong publication (ideally first authored or solo authored, in a big name journal), and/or a few publications that are a step down (e.g., lower impact journals, non-first authored articles, and so on). Ideally, for a research-intensive tenure-track professor job, you’ll have like 4-5 publications, with at least 1-2 of those being first authored/solo authored and in well-known journals. More importantly, though, you want the publications to hang together as a collection. You want to demonstrate that you have a coherent program of research, that your articles build on each other, and that you have a clear future as a productive scholar in this area.
Super creepy image to suggest that you should be researching and writing more. Sorry.
If you think you don’t have enough time to do this kind of thing, you’re dead wrong. Every paper you write for a class needs to be beefed up for submission to a conference or journal (ideally both). If you take a methods class that involves proposing a study (or any other class project that doesn’t actually result in a full paper), then it’s your responsibility down the line to execute it and publish the results. Let’s assume you take like 3 seminars a semester over about 2.5 years of Ph.D. coursework (like I did at Utah). That’s 14-15 classes where you’ll produce a paper. If you only send out 10 of those papers to conferences, and if only half of them stuck, you’d have 5 fully vetted research papers. At least 3 of these five would/should make it into journals eventually. There’s your three publications, and all of it from classwork. Add on another couple of papers from your outside research pursuits (perhaps part of your eventual dissertation), and you’ve got a robust publication record.
The Ph.D. is about transitioning from student-of-knowledge to producer-of-knowledge, so get cracking. And if you’re complaining about not having enough time in your day to do extra research, then you either need to 1) get creative about how you squeeze more out of your day, or 2) prioritize your work life over your non-work life. In terms of getting creative, that could mean teaming up with others to co-author articles or making a more concerted effort to streamline one class paper/project into another. In terms of skewing your work-life balance toward work, that’s just what needs to happen. If you think you work a lot now, wait until you are pursuing tenure. I lost all of my hobbies in grad school–ALL of them. It sucked, but I’m thankful I now enjoy a job where I have enough resources to make my research go smoothly so that I can now revisit my hobbies on my own time. These are harsh words, but they’re the truth.
2. Do More Teaching
Many of the best Ph.D. programs discourage doctoral students from teaching. Rather, the focus at these places is to excel in coursework and do research (independently and as research assistants to professors). Some Ph.D.s may graduate having never actually taught their own class from start to finish, most will graduate having taught or been a teaching assistant for fewer than 5 sections, and hardly any get the chance to develop new courses or affect curriculum. The (completely misguided) logic at these universities is that you need to focus on cranking out research. But the reality is that even for the most research-intensive professor jobs, you still need to prove you can teach. The vast majority of professor jobs require you to teach undergraduates some basic courses to earn your salary. No matter how much a school talks up its research focus, teaching is still the bread and butter of this profession (as it should be). So if you can’t demonstrate that you know how to give a good lecture, lead a discussion, or interact with students, you’re sunk.
Don’t listen to your advisor, frankly, especially if they tell you not to teach. You’re free to pick up your own side teaching gigs, pick up adjunct teaching at the community college nearby, take on summer teaching, and so on. I’m of the opinion that unless your outside obligations start to noticeably interfere with your academic performance, no one at the university has a right to tell you what you can and can’t do. This includes picking up any extra side job to make extra money, deciding to have kids, deciding to devote time to community service, or deciding to devote your time to religious obligations. Be proactive, too, in letting your department chair or dean know that you’re interested in teaching in the department. This way, they may ask you to teach before hiring an adjunct.
Besides, the more experience you get as a teacher in grad school, the easier it will be your first year of teaching as a professor. If you’re a seasoned teacher, you’re a seasoned teacher anywhere, and this will let you devote more of your energies in your first years as a professor to research.
3. Make a CV and a Website
Seriously? You don’t have your CV written and kept up to date? And you don’t have even the most basic WordPress site about yourself? Get on the ball. People will definitely search for your name when you apply for a job, and you want your site to be an even more robust portfolio of your work than what you submitted in the job application. And your CV should always be up to date and ready to be sent out (and found online) at a moment’s notice. It’s also good to start developing a teaching philosophy, a research statement, and other documents you’ll need for the job application process and for applying for various grants.
4. Read Job Ads
You should have signed up to get listserv emails from a bunch of academic associations by now. This will provide a constant stream of intelligence about the academic industry to your inbox, which also includes job ads. You should also visit sites like the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s job board and AEJMC’s classifieds periodically, too. Why should you look at job ads long before you yourself are actually looking for a job? Because it will let you see the trends, and that will help you better prepare to be a competitive candidate when it’s your turn. Here’s what I mean:
Read it (and possibly weep, since no one is hiring)
Say you’re a former newspaper journalist and your dissertation is going to focus on the history of newspapers in some region of the country. Fair enough. If you keep your eye on job ads, though, you’ll notice that 1) hardly any schools are specifically hiring historians, and 2) hardly any schools are hiring people who study print media. Rather, the job trends seem to indicate that schools are looking for people with new media expertise, with expertise in “multiplatform” or “convergence” journalism, and for people with expertise in international/multicultural/diversity issues in mass communication. So what does this mean for you? Well, it means that if you continue to just teach the basic newswriting course and you push ahead with a historical dissertation that studies some regional American newspapers, you might not be the most compelling candidate on the market. What you can do, having followed these trends, is begin to frame yourself as a better fit for this kind of job. You can start lobbying your department chair to get a chance to teach the convergence journalism course rather than yet another section of newswriting. Or you could lobby your chair to start making the newswriting curriculum more innovative and convergence-focused in its own right. As for research, you could change up your previous plan of examining the history of regional American newspapers by including an analysis of a similar foreign newspaper. Or by including an analysis of a minority-run newspaper. Or by including a more robust explanation of how the newspapers you’re studying paved the way for multiplatform journalism today. Essentially, what you can do is begin to frame yourself as somehow speaking to these trendy issues of new media, diversity, and so on. And none of these changes really means you’re selling out to what’s fashionable. It means you’re adapting to what’s important in the discipline. It means you’re relevant.
5. Get Up to Speed on Money
Lastly, you should start figuring out what you’re worth, what you’ll reasonably get paid in a new professor position, and what kind of life you’re wanting for yourself if/when you get that professor job. Start studying the cost of living in various parts of the country. Also start looking up the average salaries at various schools around the country. There are many freely accessible resources for this, especially since public universities are compelled to publish salaries.
If you watch these money trends, you’ll get a good idea of what to expect in a job offer. And if you get a feel for cost of living around the country, you can get an idea of what your life might be like if you were to move there for a job. Some schools might seem to pay very well, but they might also be located in a very expensive part of town. That means the salary is probably not that much better than any other place, and it might mean that you 1) will have to rent rather than buy a home for a while, and/or 2) live rather far away from school and commute every day. If you dream of being able to walk from your house to campus every day and grab a coffee on your way to work from the boutique coffee shop on the corner, then you need to seriously look at what it will take to live that close to campus, that close to local cafes, and so on. It’s often completely out of reach for junior faculty to do that. If you got a job at Pepperdine, for instance, you might be wowed by the average $76K a year salary they might offer you as a new professor. But you’ll need to temper that with the fact that Pepperdine is in Malibu, which is 281% more expensive to live in than the average American city (one resource says that would be like making $20K a year in Durham, NC). And on the other end of the spectrum, you may be tempted to sneer at a $33K a year offer from the University of the Southwest, but this school is located in Hobbs, New Mexico, which is 14% less expensive to live in than the average American city. And according to that resource, making $33K in Hobbs would be like making $150K in Malibu; or put in reverse, making $76K in Malibu would be like making $16K in Hobbs. Interesting, eh?
Don’t forget about student loans, either. You’ve been deferring those damn things all throughout grad school, and they’re about to come back with a vengeance in your first year of your professor job. So prepare for that as well. You need to crunch the numbers to find out this kind of stuff, and the number crunching takes time, so the better you are at following money trends, the better off you’ll be come job time.
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[...] for a dissertation project relatively early on – like in your coursework – then you can focus each class paper toward your dissertation project. You can effectively chip away at the literature review and method sections through these small [...]
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