This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on ways an academic institution or department can demonstrate that they are family-friendly.

There’s a well-known gender-based pipeline problem in academia: women earn 50% of PhDs granted to American citizens, but get fewer tenure-track jobs and achieve tenure less often. People who study the problem theorize the reason may be because academia has variable hours, but those hours can be long. A caregiver—be that a mother, a father, or somebody caring for an aging parent or sick family member—pays a price. Luckily, departments can take significant steps to retain caregivers as faculty. Here are a few suggestions. 

Make expectations extremely clear.

In an Inside Higher Ed interview about their 2012 book on academic motherhood, Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel reported some surprising findings. Although you might assume that professors at research universities would find parenthood most demanding, their book found that these larger universities have more support structures for (and around) research. Having well-defined structure and clarity was a benefit to working parents. 

The study found that professors at schools without these well-developed guidelines suffered more. Often, it was exacerbated when these same schools also had a strong culture of faculty campus presence. You take a big chunk out of your parenting faculty’s mental load (and your non-parenting faculty’s, as well) if you can be more specific about what’s needed and expected. 

Be open about caregiving while recruiting. 

Of course, you shouldn’t ask about people’s family responsibilities (current or hoped-for) in the interview process, but you can make a point to talk to potential faculty about all the things that your institution does to make those responsibilities easier. Faculty with children on a hiring committee can be open about their experience, as well. 

Be extremely careful not to penalize caregivers during reviews. 

This can obviously have a directly negative effect on the faculty under review, but comments like “You had maternity leave, you should have gotten more writing done” will also travel by grapevine through your department. The next person contemplating taking advantage of a family-friendly policy or program may think twice. 

Schedule important events between the hours of 9 and 5. 

Academia is great at flexibility, but small children (and the preschools and daycares that care for them) are not. After about 5 pm, schools close, and parents need to get frazzled children on the dinner-bath-bed train. Try to offer lunchtime talks, or even breakfast seminars. If you must sometimes convene colloquia including dinners after 5, make it very clear to parents that their presence is not required—and try to schedule the events as far in advance as possible. 

Make sure your expectations about email and text responsiveness are clear. 

Clearly defined boundaries around electronic communication help caregivers relax about their work obligations when they’re home—and socializing these expectations is  helpful to non-caregivers, as well. 

Don’t allow a culture of resentment to develop among the rest of the faculty. 

Negative comments about a caregiver’s absence or non-participation should never be allowed to pass unremarked—even if they’re couched as humor. You’ll know the difference!

These are only a few ways that a department or institution can demonstrate that they are family-friendly to employees. What are some other ways you have experienced that helped you manage both your personal and professional responsibilities? Tweet us using #familyfriendly.

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Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on presenting non-traditional work for academic promotion or tenure.

It’s early on in your career on the tenure track, and you hope to create scholarship that has real public impact—the traditional monograph or articles, to you, doesn’t feel like enough. But will the work you do help you reach your goal of promotion inside academia? Here are some tips to help you achieve that goal, while producing the museum exhibit, podcast, or social-media page of your dreams. 

Find out what policies, if any, your department or institution already has on the books.

And do it early—before you invest too much energy in a project that might not be legible to those in charge. 

Plot out ways to connect your non-traditional work to the more traditional categories of research, service, and teaching. 

Maybe your students participate in the podcast you’re producing; maybe you mount an exhibit at a local gallery and invite the neighborhood to an opening, with musical performances; maybe you use archival material you’ve uncovered in more traditional research as the backbone for a website, or a series of articles in newspapers or magazines. Then, in your statements for the tenure file, be prepared to describe how these connections have worked. 

Build external evaluation into the process. 

When you’re working on a plan for non-traditional work, make sure that you plan ahead to include a survey—formal or informal—of users or visitors, so that you can find out what your impact has been. 

Keep good records.

This advice applies to most aspects of the tenure file, but goes double for non-traditional work: try to take notes as you go along. Remind yourself, in a text file that lives in a prominent place on your computer, of the names of people you’ve encountered along the way who might be able to provide supportive commentary on your project’s strengths and impact. Excerpt any helpful comments that you get from users or readers during planned evaluations. Consider other ways to quantitatively or qualitatively measure the impact your work has had, like:

• Download numbers for a podcast? 
• Emails from others who’ve used a tool you’ve created? 
• Numbers of retweets for the viral thread you wrote for Twitter?

If so, save every bit of that evidence, too!

Reach out to professional organizations and colleagues outside of your school who might be able to help. 

If you are the only person at your institution who does the kind of work you want to do, this step may be even more important. Hearing stories from other people who’ve successfully—or unsuccessfully!—included non-traditional work in their own dossiers can help you plan your course. And professional organizations like the National Council on Public History and the Modern Language Association have been considering the question of how to evaluate non-traditional scholarship for tenure and promotion for years, and may have guidelines available that you can share with your institution. 

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Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on places to look for and find your next academic job.

As the fall creeps ever closer, academic job-seekers are a few months into the Web-combing part of the cycle, hoping to see new postings pop up that fit their profile. A few years ago, we shared a brief list of job-board websites, meant to serve as an intro to those new to the market who might need more sites to haunt. Here are a few others to add to the pile. Because when it comes to the job market, more options are definitely merrier! 

• California’s community colleges maintain a job board that lists open positions across the state. You can search these opportunities by job types or counties; the listings include staff positions as well as instructorships. This board is particularly robust, but what if you’re not trying to get a job in California? Try Googling your target state and “community colleges jobs” to find a job board that fits you better. 
• If you’re open to jobs outside of the United States, AcademicJobsOnline.org is a portal built by the Department of Mathematics at Duke, that aggregates jobs in the United States and beyond. Departments from 45 countries have put up ads on the site in the past year, so if you would jump at the chance to teach in Rome, Botswana, or Tokyo, you should check it out.  
• Also for the globetrotters, Times Higher Ed’s jobs board is heavy with jobs in the UK, but also offers positions across all continents. (Well, not Antartica; sorry to the penguins.) The site also offers career advice, including a series of posts, aimed at those on the global market, that explain the structure of academic careers in places like Hong Kong, Canada, and Australia. 
• Minority Postdoc’s job listings include ads for academic jobs, as well as for positions in government, non-profits, and industry. This site is targeted to current minority students in postdoctoral positions in STEM, and the job ads come from employers who have diversity action plans in place and would welcome minority applicants. 
• Academic Keys is a recruitment site that puts adjunct jobs in a separate category from other job ads. This may give you the ability to exclude these from your search, if you wish to do so—or, if you need to find short-term work in a specific place, to search only for adjunct work. 
• Finally, if you are Christian (or, enough of a believer to teach at a Christian school!), there is a job site run by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities that puts those positions together in one place for you to search. At last count, there were 169 jobs on the site; if this is a fit for you, adding this slightly-more-off-the-beaten-track option could pad your list of “good leads” considerably. 

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Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on considering postdoctoral fellowship options & whether or not you should apply.

In the past few decades, as it’s gotten harder and harder to land a tenure-track job in the humanities right out of school, more early-career scholars (especially in fields like history and sociology) have joined scientists—who have long been accustomed to taking temporary jobs after getting a Ph.D.—in assembling a string of short-term postdoctoral positions, while looking for something permanent. But when should a grad student, or recent grad, apply for postdocs, and when should they stop? There’s no hard-and-fast rule, but here are some considerations. 

Make sure the postdocs you’re applying for are worthy of the name.

There’s no industry-standard definition of “postdoctoral fellowship,” especially in the humanities. That means that some of these positions—the most prestigious ones—require no teaching at all, while others ask recipients to shoulder a 3-3 or even a 4-4. At that point, they’re really “Visiting Assistant” jobs in sheep’s clothing. 

So what should you look for? A postdoc should give you ample time to do research and promise access to a new network of scholars at the host institution. Ideally, you should have enough money to attend conferences and acquire the research materials you need. 

In newer types of postdocs, like those that have proliferated in the digital humanities over the past decade, the need for applicants’ vigilance is still higher. In many situations the institution offering the gig might be well-meaning but have very little idea of what they want from the person who fills their position. Miriam Posner, an assistant professor of information studies and digital humanities at UCLA, has a good blog post outlining questions people should ask when they’re applying for an unconventional postdoc—some of these apply to other fields, as well. 

If you are looking at taking more than one postdoc in a row, have something to show for it. 

In a 2014 series on postdocs for Chronicle Vitae, reporter Sydni Dunn interviewed experts who agreed that extended postdoc-hopping didn’t have to be a black mark on a resume—but added that the early-career scholar who had taken more than one such position should be able to provide ample evidence that their time in “limbo” had allowed them to: 

• Produce X number of articles 
• Learn a new skill 
• Get a book well into the publication process

Essentially, at the end of the postdoc, you will want to have a tangible and transferable outcome.

The chance to research without distraction (which you should get, in a good postdoc) will be difficult to come by later on in the race for tenure, so make the most of it. 

Ask yourself: Can my family, finances, and mental health handle another move?

These are not small matters for people looking at adding another short-term position to a CV. Especially in the sciences, the typical salary for postdocs isn’t great. And even if you’re a humanities scholar and are getting slightly better funding for short-term jobs, the opportunity cost of another year (or more) of your adult working life spent trying to get a permanent position in academia should be a consideration. If the idea of moving now makes you feel like screaming, or you’ll have to put off having a baby again, or you’re going to be separated from your partner to take this job, you may not be willing to make the sacrifice. 

Every academic has some anecdotal evidence that argues for persistence—a friend, or acquaintance, with a new-ish Ph.D., who “hung in there” through a string of postdocs and visiting positions and finally grabbed the brass ring: a tenure-track job. But there isn’t much data on the topic of postdoc outcomes, so here’s one good way to think about it: If you don’t feel like you’ll be able to be productive in your third postdoc anyway, because you’re so stressed out about the sacrifices you’re making, that may be an indication that it’s time to step off the treadmill. 

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Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on mentoring and advising graduate students.

In many fields, the academic job market gets worse and worse, year after year. In this climate, where even excellent candidates fail to land tenure-track jobs, faculty members tasked with advising graduate students on job-market matters could be forgiven for feeling like the role is impossible. Here’s some advice on how to be a fair, honest, and supportive advisor to the students who are relying on you. 

Find out what your student really wants. 

In a post about mentoring grad students facing the job market, Jenna Lay writes that students and faculty can gain a lot of clarity from a few honest conversations, conducted very early in the process. “What are your core values?” Lay recommends advisors ask. “How do you see a career relating to those values, if at all? Do you value family? Location? Time? Money? Structure? Freedom? Do you desire a career that provides the central orientation for your life, or are you looking for a career that fits into a certain kind of life?” These kinds of big-picture questions—certainly not ones to be resolved in the course of one conversation, but rather revisited over the years—can help a student understand whether or not they actually want to commit to the academic job market. 

Recognize your own strengths and weaknesses. 

If you haven’t been on the job market for twenty years (or more), understand that you may not have the clearest picture of its vicissitudes. If you’ve never held a non-academic job, or not for decades, know that you may not know how to help your student prepare to apply for something alt-ac or non-traditional. Make sure that you have a true picture of what’s going on, and tap your network when you don’t.

Arm yourself with data—and share it. 

Try not to fall into the trap of guiding your students by anecdote. Tales of the experiences of your friends and former students may or may not be helpful to someone who’s looking at job listings in 2019. Find (and pass on) information about job placement rates and trends in your discipline. And see whether your department maintains records of former students’ placements; if they don’t, you should prod them to start. 

Bring up alt-ac options tactfully. 

For some students, a very frank conversation about the restrictiveness of the academic job market and its possible future impact on their lives and finances may lead them to explore non-academic options. Be open to this! But consider that (as Lay writes) this kind of conversation about non-academic options may be better to have with a student early on, when advisees are less likely to perceive an advisor bringing up non-academic paths as a vote of “no confidence” in their academic potential. 

Make a master plan together. 

Start advising students who are aiming for the tenure track early—years before they hit the job market—on things like building relationships that can lead to outstanding recommendation letters, picking the right journals for submissions, and selecting conferences worth attending. As Karen Kelsky has written, faculty should realize that landing a tenure-track job is so difficult now that students must “professionalize” much earlier than their forebears. “For those students who wish to try” to get a rare tenure-track job, “the effort requires years of methodical training and calculation of career chances, from the point of arrival in the graduate program through the dissertation defense and beyond.” Advisors can help by demystifying the process, and save students time by flagging which CV lines are worth their investment. 

In all things, aim for honest and supportive.

This is not the time to sugar-coat the prospects of any student who’s looking for a tenure-track job—even the very brightest star, who you hope will reflect on you well. Try not to make promises. “Be rigorously honest with them and with yourself that no matter how good their work is—no matter how good—the academic job market is not a meritocracy,” Lay writes, “and there are not as many jobs as there are good people.” Above all, if a student determines that their family, finances, or mental health can’t weather years of post-docs, VAPs, and cross-country moves, and decides to leave academia, it’s an advisor’s job to support them in their choice. 

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Interfolio’s Dossier enables scholars to collect, curate, polish and send out their materials at all stages throughout their academic professional path. Learn more about Dossier here.

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on the best blogs for academic inspiration and higher ed advice.

The beginning of the fall semester is a great time to read up on academic productivity, writing strategies, and work-life balance, so you can slide back into the busy season full of new ideas and energy. In the past, academic blogs have been a great place to find this kind of general advice, which applies across disciplines. Although many of our favorites seem to have stopped posting as frequently in recent years (come back, blogs!), the archive of wisdom they pulled together is still evergreen and vital. Here are a few places to start. 

The Thesis Whisperer

The Thesis Whisperer, run by Inger Mewburn, is all about advice for people who are in graduate programs and trying to finish dissertations. The blog has distinguished itself by being super-consistent and high-volume (it had many contributing writers in its first almost-decade of existence), offering post after post on a wide range of matters of concern to doctoral students from:

• Choosing a dissertation topic, to 
• The fine art of complaining effectively about problems in your program, to 
• The ins and outs of parenting as a doctoral candidate.

Get a Life, Ph.D.

Pair The Thesis Whisperer with Get a Life, Ph.D., run by Tanya Golash-Boza. This blog has slowed down somewhat in recent years, but a lot of the advice—on maintaining an exercise habit as an academic parent (yeah, right!) or on restarting a practice of everyday writing after a long time away—still applies. 

The Research Whisperer

The Research Whisperer, which was originally inspired by the thriving Thesis Whisperer, is run by Australians Jonathan O’Donnell and Tseen Kho. The blog focuses on all aspects of doing academic research—not, as the site’s “About” page stipulates, just the matter of finding funding (though that topic is definitely in the mix). Some sample posts include topics like: 

• On being a co-author
• Which academics are happy, and why
• On accepting, and not accepting, feedback on your work. 

Writing for Research

On his blog Writing for Research, Patrick Dunleavy takes a craft-specific approach, offering posts on such topics as writing abstracts to go along with journal articles and efficiently turning articles into blog posts. 

Profhacker

ProfHacker, which was hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education for years, has migrated to its own website. Newer posts include reflections on:

• Resources to consult when you have to edit your own writing (and you hate that task)
• Best practices for facilitating international conferences 
• Thoughts on using Google Forms for online quizzes 

ProfHacker always found the sweet spot between writing advice, productivity tactics, and tech geekery, and although posting seems to have slowed down recently, the deep archive of posts is still gold. 

Blogs and social media (here are 10 great academic Twitter accounts) that speak to the academic community can be invaluable as you navigate the nuances of higher ed. What are your bookmarked sites and go-to blogs? We’d love to hear your recommendations. Tweet us @Interfolio.

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Interfolio

In case you didn’t know, Interfolio’s website has several sections of academic content relevant to  individual scholars and academics in research or administration. They partner with academic thought leaders, clients, and others to explore topics in higher education.

• Their blog boasts several series of content, like this post in their “Ask a Candidate” category, which you can jump to via the right-hand side of the blog homepage

• They host at least one webinar a month for both clients and those interested in their products on a variety of topics
• Client case studies and research, like white papers on managing change, can also be found on their site