job interviews and academic anxieties
I did a lot of journalling while in Philly for last week's conference/job interview gig; the whole event just seemed so wildly improbable that I had to keep writing things down to convince myself they were really happening. This post is my first attempt to process and synthesize some of that stuff.
Warning: this got pretty long.
Five of the interviews went reasonably well, I think, and three went *really* well - at least from my perspective, although I am acutely conscious of how little that means (given that I know nothing about the other interviewees and very little, in most cases, about what the schools are looking for in terms of fit). I was thrown by only one or two questions; the others were either expected or easy. (I bet I could answer "Tell us how you teach freshman comp!" in my sleep, complete with automatic correction of "freshman" to "first-year".)
The interviews that I liked best - the ones I actually enjoyed and which I am therefore inclined to think went well - were those that were really conversations rather than disconnected Q/A. Not coincidentally, those were the ones that started with the interviewers saying things like "We love your work!" or "We were so happy to see that your interests match our needs so closely" - openers that made me feel less like I had to prove myself. These were also the interviews that I left thinking "I really like those people. I want an office next door to those people. We could hang out. We could go to lunch and talk about teaching. That would be cool."
There were some bad moments, of course, when I stood in the elevator on the way down and thought only of the opportunities I'd missed: to provide theoretical or pedagogical context for particular practices, or to mention specific experiences that illustrate the practical manifestation of my teaching philosophy, or whatever. But on balance I think it went okay; and I don't think I would prepare differently or behave differently. I do have a lot of regrets right now about my whole dissertating process, but that's a separate issue (see below).
The preparation thing is interesting. I saw so many people cramming before interviews - whether reviewing their own work or memorizing information about schools and interviewers I couldn't say. I understand the temptation, but I can't do that; I'd make myself too nervous. I did make up little info sheets about each of the schools (to remind myself about basic things like what the job description actually was and what aspects of myself and my academic preparation I should emphasize), but I mostly just showed up a few minutes early and slouched in chairs or leaned against walls outside hotel suites reading Doty's Sweet Machine and Darlington's Maybe Baby, which garnered me hostile looks from a few of the variously coiffed, starchy, or expensively underdressed hunched-over-their-notes anxious-looking job-seeking people in the various vicinities. Depending on my mood at any given moment, the contrast either made me defensive (Yeah, I'm a slacker, you wanna make something of it?) or amused (Dude, you look like a grad student. I look like a colleague. And my hair gunk is clearly superior to yours.).
I spent time in a really remarkable number of posh and semi-posh hotels, walked all over Philly's center city to do it, and developed a blister the size of a quarter on the ball of my right foot. If I ever do this again, as I'm sure I will, I am wearing my earth shoes. I don't want to work with anybody who would form a negative opinion of me based on my wearing earth shoes to an interview.
It occurred to me about halfway through my interviews that the interviews are a chance for me to assess the schools (or at least their representatives) as much as the other way around. This observation seems obvious now, but in my panicky flurry of pre-trip preparations to show myself off to decent advantage, and the subsequent enforced-zen not-worrying, I'd entirely forgotten about it - just as, at a few crucial moments during application season, I forgot that I can apply (or not) wherever I want, that my directors will not in fact be slain dead by the real-world consequences of my philosophical opposition to teaching at a giant university, that it is not shameful to say "I am not even remotely qualified for that job either academically or temperamentally, no matter what my transcripts, letters, etc. might indicate to the contrary, and therefore, fuck it."
My most beloved professor from grad school, who's jumped schools twice since I taught for her my third year of grad school, listened to me worrying about the non-midwestern location of some of my interviewing schools and said: "Do they pay in U.S. money? That's the most important question." And I thought, You know, it's not. Not to me. I love this woman and I want to be able to teach as well as she does - hell, I would settle for teaching half as well as she does - but I do not want to live like she does. I don't want to float around from school to school in search of power and prestige and better research leave policies. I don't want to deal with needy graduate students (though I'm grateful that she did). I don't want to not care where I live. There's a certain hard-edged pragmatism to her comment which I appreciate, because I need that, but still I found myself standing there and listening to this person whom I love and respect and have tried so hard to learn from and to emulate, and thinking: I don't want to be you. Which I knew already, but it just felt... strange.
So. Anyhow. I assessed, they assessed, and I will be hearing (or conspicuously not hearing) about their assessments sometime in the third or fourth week of January, at which point my own assessments will become more relevant.
As for the academic elements of the conference... Well. I emerged from the experience feeling both energized and guilty about my own work: energized about it as an intellectual enterprise, an intervention in existing conversations, and guilty about all the things I haven't gotten done in the past three years.
I should have made much more progress on the dissertation. I spent quite a bit of time last week projecting confidence about my ability to finish this year, and sometimes I even feel that confidence, but... not always.
I should have revised seminar papers and sent them out for publication. I have the chapbook, and I have a short piece in an anthology about peer tutoring, but neither is a serious scholarly article in a peer-reviewed journal.
I should have searched out appropriate conferences rather than drifting into things I heard about from other people. I have done quite a lot of conference presentations, actually, and I'm proud of that work, but in fact I've done so many and on such a wide range of things that I think they suggest more that I'm a dilettante than that I'm a serious scholar. If I had a couple more - a presentation at the big 18th c. studies conference, for example, and one at MMLA - I could do "selected presentations" on my CV and make that section look a little more serious, a little more focused.
I keep thinking: if I were really serious about being an academic, I would have done all these things already.
There are a lot of things about being an academic that I am not faking: I'm bright, I can write, I can teach, I perform very well under certain kinds of pressure, I give good presentations, I can do "articulate" and "poised" on pretty short notice. But in terms of the types of credentials mentioned above? I'm lacking. Period. And I'm profoundly unhappy about that right now.
I should add, for those of you who have read this far and are getting ready to reassure me that I don't suck (and how I love knowing that there are some of you doing exactly that!), that my unhappiness is not directed exclusively at myself. I am also frustrated with my department, in which the lack of formal professional training means that each of us gets different preparation from our directors and other professors, who vary widely in the explicitness of their instruction on such matters, not to mention in their willingness to initiate said instruction. As someone who didn't even know how clueless I was, I needed a lot more help than the department is set up to ensure. I'm working to rectify the situation - plenty of people are happy to help once I know what I need - but it's too late to benefit this particular run at the job market, and I'm too busy to do all that I'd like.
It's also true that I have had a lot of other stuff going on in the past few years. Among other things: I got obsessed with BtVS; I started vidding; I taught myself HTML, CSS, and the basics of web design; I resumed writing poetry after a hiatus of nearly six years; I took up writing nonfiction; I fell in love with reading again. I would not give up any of those things, even if I do now sometimes wish that I'd had a bit more sense of proportion about them. I can say, with complete honesty, that I have not been wasting my time. I just wish that I'd had more discipline - that I had worked harder to make time to do more scholarly and professional work in addition to all these things.
Anyway. I'm trying to hang on to the excitement, rememember the things that went well, and minimize the guilt, since at this point all I can do is go forward.
I'm thinking fairly seriously about writing up a "how to learn from my mistakes" manual for younger grad students in this department. My notes on Clarissa and on living through prelims have already become department apocrypha - can't start resting on my laurels now.
Warning: this got pretty long.
Five of the interviews went reasonably well, I think, and three went *really* well - at least from my perspective, although I am acutely conscious of how little that means (given that I know nothing about the other interviewees and very little, in most cases, about what the schools are looking for in terms of fit). I was thrown by only one or two questions; the others were either expected or easy. (I bet I could answer "Tell us how you teach freshman comp!" in my sleep, complete with automatic correction of "freshman" to "first-year".)
The interviews that I liked best - the ones I actually enjoyed and which I am therefore inclined to think went well - were those that were really conversations rather than disconnected Q/A. Not coincidentally, those were the ones that started with the interviewers saying things like "We love your work!" or "We were so happy to see that your interests match our needs so closely" - openers that made me feel less like I had to prove myself. These were also the interviews that I left thinking "I really like those people. I want an office next door to those people. We could hang out. We could go to lunch and talk about teaching. That would be cool."
There were some bad moments, of course, when I stood in the elevator on the way down and thought only of the opportunities I'd missed: to provide theoretical or pedagogical context for particular practices, or to mention specific experiences that illustrate the practical manifestation of my teaching philosophy, or whatever. But on balance I think it went okay; and I don't think I would prepare differently or behave differently. I do have a lot of regrets right now about my whole dissertating process, but that's a separate issue (see below).
The preparation thing is interesting. I saw so many people cramming before interviews - whether reviewing their own work or memorizing information about schools and interviewers I couldn't say. I understand the temptation, but I can't do that; I'd make myself too nervous. I did make up little info sheets about each of the schools (to remind myself about basic things like what the job description actually was and what aspects of myself and my academic preparation I should emphasize), but I mostly just showed up a few minutes early and slouched in chairs or leaned against walls outside hotel suites reading Doty's Sweet Machine and Darlington's Maybe Baby, which garnered me hostile looks from a few of the variously coiffed, starchy, or expensively underdressed hunched-over-their-notes anxious-looking job-seeking people in the various vicinities. Depending on my mood at any given moment, the contrast either made me defensive (Yeah, I'm a slacker, you wanna make something of it?) or amused (Dude, you look like a grad student. I look like a colleague. And my hair gunk is clearly superior to yours.).
I spent time in a really remarkable number of posh and semi-posh hotels, walked all over Philly's center city to do it, and developed a blister the size of a quarter on the ball of my right foot. If I ever do this again, as I'm sure I will, I am wearing my earth shoes. I don't want to work with anybody who would form a negative opinion of me based on my wearing earth shoes to an interview.
It occurred to me about halfway through my interviews that the interviews are a chance for me to assess the schools (or at least their representatives) as much as the other way around. This observation seems obvious now, but in my panicky flurry of pre-trip preparations to show myself off to decent advantage, and the subsequent enforced-zen not-worrying, I'd entirely forgotten about it - just as, at a few crucial moments during application season, I forgot that I can apply (or not) wherever I want, that my directors will not in fact be slain dead by the real-world consequences of my philosophical opposition to teaching at a giant university, that it is not shameful to say "I am not even remotely qualified for that job either academically or temperamentally, no matter what my transcripts, letters, etc. might indicate to the contrary, and therefore, fuck it."
My most beloved professor from grad school, who's jumped schools twice since I taught for her my third year of grad school, listened to me worrying about the non-midwestern location of some of my interviewing schools and said: "Do they pay in U.S. money? That's the most important question." And I thought, You know, it's not. Not to me. I love this woman and I want to be able to teach as well as she does - hell, I would settle for teaching half as well as she does - but I do not want to live like she does. I don't want to float around from school to school in search of power and prestige and better research leave policies. I don't want to deal with needy graduate students (though I'm grateful that she did). I don't want to not care where I live. There's a certain hard-edged pragmatism to her comment which I appreciate, because I need that, but still I found myself standing there and listening to this person whom I love and respect and have tried so hard to learn from and to emulate, and thinking: I don't want to be you. Which I knew already, but it just felt... strange.
So. Anyhow. I assessed, they assessed, and I will be hearing (or conspicuously not hearing) about their assessments sometime in the third or fourth week of January, at which point my own assessments will become more relevant.
As for the academic elements of the conference... Well. I emerged from the experience feeling both energized and guilty about my own work: energized about it as an intellectual enterprise, an intervention in existing conversations, and guilty about all the things I haven't gotten done in the past three years.
I should have made much more progress on the dissertation. I spent quite a bit of time last week projecting confidence about my ability to finish this year, and sometimes I even feel that confidence, but... not always.
I should have revised seminar papers and sent them out for publication. I have the chapbook, and I have a short piece in an anthology about peer tutoring, but neither is a serious scholarly article in a peer-reviewed journal.
I should have searched out appropriate conferences rather than drifting into things I heard about from other people. I have done quite a lot of conference presentations, actually, and I'm proud of that work, but in fact I've done so many and on such a wide range of things that I think they suggest more that I'm a dilettante than that I'm a serious scholar. If I had a couple more - a presentation at the big 18th c. studies conference, for example, and one at MMLA - I could do "selected presentations" on my CV and make that section look a little more serious, a little more focused.
I keep thinking: if I were really serious about being an academic, I would have done all these things already.
There are a lot of things about being an academic that I am not faking: I'm bright, I can write, I can teach, I perform very well under certain kinds of pressure, I give good presentations, I can do "articulate" and "poised" on pretty short notice. But in terms of the types of credentials mentioned above? I'm lacking. Period. And I'm profoundly unhappy about that right now.
I should add, for those of you who have read this far and are getting ready to reassure me that I don't suck (and how I love knowing that there are some of you doing exactly that!), that my unhappiness is not directed exclusively at myself. I am also frustrated with my department, in which the lack of formal professional training means that each of us gets different preparation from our directors and other professors, who vary widely in the explicitness of their instruction on such matters, not to mention in their willingness to initiate said instruction. As someone who didn't even know how clueless I was, I needed a lot more help than the department is set up to ensure. I'm working to rectify the situation - plenty of people are happy to help once I know what I need - but it's too late to benefit this particular run at the job market, and I'm too busy to do all that I'd like.
It's also true that I have had a lot of other stuff going on in the past few years. Among other things: I got obsessed with BtVS; I started vidding; I taught myself HTML, CSS, and the basics of web design; I resumed writing poetry after a hiatus of nearly six years; I took up writing nonfiction; I fell in love with reading again. I would not give up any of those things, even if I do now sometimes wish that I'd had a bit more sense of proportion about them. I can say, with complete honesty, that I have not been wasting my time. I just wish that I'd had more discipline - that I had worked harder to make time to do more scholarly and professional work in addition to all these things.
Anyway. I'm trying to hang on to the excitement, rememember the things that went well, and minimize the guilt, since at this point all I can do is go forward.
I'm thinking fairly seriously about writing up a "how to learn from my mistakes" manual for younger grad students in this department. My notes on Clarissa and on living through prelims have already become department apocrypha - can't start resting on my laurels now.