"Demystifying the Job Search: How Mentors Can Reduce Post-dissertation Stress Disorder"
Mike Salvo
Texas Tech University
"Demystifying the Job Search: How Mentors Can Reduce Post-dissertation Stress Disorder"
Mike Salvo
Texas Tech University
The title makes it sound like I am asking mentors to do something for job seekers. Quite the contrary, I am asking mentors to be present for job seekers, to provide support precisely where and when mentors seem least able to provide support. And for job seekers, I am seeking to create a language with which we can articulate the incredible peaks and valleys one experiences professionally as well as emotionally and personally as one faces the job search.Critical literacy is such an important goal of the teaching that we do in the computers and writing community. As Freire and Macedo so neatly said it in 1987, critical literacy is reading both the word and the world. No matter how good critical readers we may be, job seekers need the experienced guidance and critical insight their mentors' years of experience can offer in the mysterious and frightening process of reading job ads, applying for these jobs, and interviewing with the faculties offering these jobs. The dialogue between grad student and mentor is critical at this stage of the game.
Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I had wonderful support from my faculty advisors and mentors. I could count on Fred Kemp, Locke Carter, Sam Dragga, and Myrna Harrienger (who were my committee members), and I could also rely on the rest of the writing program faculty. They did their best to help me understand the process. And yet, when I was waiting for calls for MLA interviews, and then again when I was waiting for invitations to campus interviews, and again when I was waiting for job offers, I felt very much isolated and alone.
At these peculiar moments of isolation, waiting for action and waiting for judgment, I learned about the pace of decision making and about the incredible commitment hiring departments make to job candidates. I also learned that each department has its own idiosyncratic history and traditions. There is no accounting for them, there is no correcting for them, and frankly, if you aren't yourself in an interview a candidate will be very unhappy in that job. Mentors can prepare candidates simply by reminding them of what is at stake for both hiring departments and candidates. It is also important to discuss the consequences for the home department. For instance, what does it mean for a department to see its candidates hired nationally or regionally? What does it mean when graduates of a new interdisciplinary program, like computers and writing, begin to get hired? These issues are clearly not part of the curriculum but are a big part of becoming professional. Being available for students to discuss these issues can go a long way towards reducing stress and an untethered feeling - feeling ungrounded and surreal, even more surreal and Kafka-esque than usual for me.
I felt this way when I was on the job search, and I had a faculty that bent over backwards at every moment to try to help me, to offer help, and to discuss the situations I was facing. Now that I have a job and am looking forward to beginning that new job and moving to a new city, I am wondering just how much a mentor can do. The job search is like so many transitional times: we know our own experiences but are hard-pressed to articulate what we have seen. Once we are through the experience, it begins to look different than when we were experiencing it. Mentors, have patience. Mentors, have patience.
Candidates: apply for jobs you think you can get, but apply for some that seem beyond your grasp. Don't waste your time or the hiring committees' by applying for every rhetoric job on the list, but do not apply for only three jobs, either. Try to have a draft of the whole dissertation done before you send out those applications, even if it means facing another year in Lubbock, or Houghton, or West Lafayette, or Muncie, or Bowling Green. But don't take ten years. When you think you are ready to go out on the market, have at least have two-thirds of your dissertation on your hard drive (and on floppy, zip disk, and anywhere else you can save it). And be sure that your mentors are ready to support what you have written. Remember that your mentors want you to succeed. Indeed, their success will be measured in part by yours. Do your best to articulate what it is you need to know. Do not hesitate to look foolish in front of your mentors, on occasion. Looking foolish in an on-campus mock-interview beats playing the fool in Chicago or Toronto or Washington or wherever MLA will be held when you're on the market. Remember that no one likes the job search process: there just isn't a better alternative ^Å yet. And remember that you are trying to be a good colleague: it's amazing how alike candidates all sound - in part because we are all asked the same 10 questions, in part because we're all nervous, but also because we're part of the same conversation preparing to join a similar profession and part of what you are doing is showing that you know the current conversation. Ask your mentors what they ask candidates during interviews. You'll be pleasantly surprised how well prepared you will be.
One final thought: thank you to all the people who have mentored me at one time or another. The only thing harder than being on the job market, it seems, is having a student on the job market. And as I have told my wife on numerous occasions: if we make it through this year, the rest of our lives will be easier. Only, now that my formal education is over, and I look ahead, I realize just how much of a convenient fiction that was.
