This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large, on how to mindfully take care of yourself during the holidays (especially if you’re on the academic job market).

How in the world is an academic job seeker supposed to enjoy the holidays, when departments are calling some candidates for first-round interviews, applications for late-deadlined jobs, VAPs, and fellowships are due, and well-meaning relatives want to know what’s happening in your life? Here are some tips for self-care in the middle of the madness.

Try to clear the decks.

This may be late-breaking advice, but if you have free days between the end of the semester and the beginning of the holiday, try to hit some of your late-December or early January deadlines early. Even if you can’t finish those applications before you travel, try to at least “break the seal” on them:

• Review the requirements
• Take a pass at an essay
• See what old materials could be repurposed to suit

Getting a head start is key so that you aren’t faced with a huge amount of psychologically challenging work to do as your family is eating cookies, drinking eggnog, and playing games downstairs.

Identify a few people to be your sounding board.

Is there someone in your family who you think will be able to listen to you talk about the job market without reacting anxiously to your own worries, or giving you unnecessary advice? Try to get some one-on-one time with them, then lay out everything, including the seething mass of feelings you’re surely experiencing. It can really help to know that at least one or two family members know the entire story.

Figure out how to avoid unhelpful conversations.

For lots of people, the holiday is full of encounters with nosy uncles and family friends, who will want to talk about your employment status. These polite interactions can be deeply demoralizing, especially if your conversation partner knows nothing about academia, is superannuated, or both, and offers all kinds of advice that’s useless (“Why don’t you call up the department at [desirable institution] and find out if they’re hiring?”) You might find it helpful to deputize an ally who can come save you from these conversations when you flash a (discreet!) sign. Or, prepare a script for yourself and repeat it: “I’m hoping for the best. I’m trying not to dwell on it too much over the holidays!”—and then change the subject.

Cut yourself off from the parts of the Internet that make everything worse.

The Academic Jobs Wiki is an obvious place to start. If your field is very active on the wiki, you’ll know how terrible it can feel to see that a job that you’ve coveted has started emailing candidates for first-round interviews, and you haven’t made the cut. This isn’t actionable information—if you are going to be interviewed, you’ll be contacted—so try to stay away from the site. If you can’t make yourself do it for the entire vacation, give yourself the gift of 24- or 48-hour stints without wiki-checking.

Similarly, if you find that social networks make you anxious—maybe your online friends are in your field, and they’re into job-market gossip—try to be minimally present on Facebook and Twitter. Consider deleting the apps from your phone, and checking them only on desktop; that’s an easy way to make sure you’re not fixating on the latest news while you’re out sledding with your kids.

Be kind to yourself.

All the standard self-care advice still applies. Get enough sleep. Try to get exercise. Take time during the day to get immersed in a novel or a comic book—something completely unrelated to your research. Eat as well as possible, given the constant presence of peppermint bark. We’re all rooting for you.

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 how to step back into the academic job market.

You emerged from the academic job market with a position, you’re coming to the end of your first semester of your first tenure track-job, and… it’s just not working. Although the idea exhausts you to the core, you’re considering going on the market again. What should you do now, early in your first job, to prepare for your next search?

First, take time over the next year or so to make sure you’re thinking of leaving for the right reasons, and that those reasons are your own. Today’s academic job market is rough (understatement), and there are a lot of older academics out there watching their favorite students take jobs they consider subpar. Don’t leave a job you like on your mentor’s advice, because it’s not prestigious or doesn’t offer enough time for research. Maybe you’ve come to realize you don’t mind a perceived lack of shine, or you prefer teaching anyway.

As Eric Anthony Grollman advises in an essay on his own decision to stay in a job despite the expectations of others, you should try to keep an open mind in your first year and see how you feel. “Starting a new job is hard,” Grollman writes, and “the job market takes up a lot of time.”

That said, if you are truly dissatisfied—your partner or spouse doesn’t have a job, or any prospects of one; you are too far from family; your department is toxic; the conservative politics of the town you’ve ended up in make you feel unsafe—start making plans now.

Here are some tips for how you can approach the search when you already have a job.

Publish, publish, publish.

You may feel disillusioned and unmotivated, especially if finishing your dissertation was a slog, but keeping your publication record new and shiny will put you in the best position to leave. If you’re in a book-oriented field, get your book proposal in shape, and get going on finding a press.

Get teaching experience, and keep track of it.

Start thinking about your teaching as possible fodder for future job letters and teaching statements. Keep personal files of everything:

• Good assignments you gave
• Student evaluations
• Syllabi

A couple times a semester, jot down some reflections on how the course is going. When it comes time to write applications again, you’ll have a much easier time of it with these documents to jog your memory.

Figure out when you’ll go on the market.

Most people do this in their third, fourth, or fifth years in their new jobs. Karen Kelsky advises that people with very good publication records and teaching experience can “consider leaving around the third year, from a position of strength.” In the fourth or fifth year, you probably have your dissertation book all tucked away in press, and you will be able to focus on looking for another job.

Try to suss out what your current department will think of your ambition to move.

Are you anxiously imagining that the department that hired you will hate you if they find out you want to leave? It might not be the case. Kelsky writes, “The important thing to realize here is that every department, and every departmental culture, is different.” Get the confidential advice of a senior mentor who can transmit the institutional memory of what happened in the past when people tried to leave, and operate accordingly.

Stay positive, and low-key.

In all of your communications with your department about your desire to move, give reasons that aren’t “I hate everyone here and I’m miserable in this town.” Foreground more neutral rationales—your partner’s need for a job, you yearn to be closer to your parents—even if you are secretly furious at every single one of your colleagues. It’s good practice, because when you do prepare job materials again, you’ll want to be similarly close-mouthed about anything negative concerning your first employer, sticking to the positive reasons why you want to jump ship to your second. If you must vent, cultivate a confidante completely outside of your department’s ecosystem—be they mother, partner, friend, or dog.

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 searching for (and finding) teaching inspiration.

Whether you are a new instructor or a seasoned professor, you can find yourself in search of inspiration for your class structure or the latest trends. Depending on your institution and its culture and expectations, it can be difficult to find people to talk with productively about the philosophy and the daily practice of teaching.

Enter stage left: the Internet to the rescue!

If you love thinking about pedagogy, and especially if you’re interested in teaching with digital tools, the Web is full of like-minded people. They are sharing their assignments, syllabi, and ideas openly for all to see. Here are a few places you can find them.

The Pedagogy Project

HASTAC, a digital humanities collective based at Duke University, hosts The Pedagogy Project on its website.

“More than 80 projects and assignments to shake up your syllabus!”

Examples of posts from professors include explanations of collaborative digital projects, multimedia projects, and in-class activities. The material is designed to be used at the beginning of the semester, when you’re writing your syllabus, or even in the middle, when you need new ideas for a given class day.

Open Pedagogy Notebook

This site’s materials are tied together by a philosophy of “open pedagogy”: a democratic approach to teaching that emphasizes student autonomy and the relationship between students and the teacher.

Posts in the “assignment” category come from professors who have created class projects where students have contributed articles about history to Wikipedia, written multiple-choice questions in order to understand concepts in social psychology, and created a genetics worksheet using the National Library of Medicine’s Genetic Home Reference.

Hybrid Pedagogy

This is an open-access journal covering college teaching. Articles run the gamut, and most combine discussions of theory and classroom practice.

For example, you can find:

• A biology professor talking about using active learning strategies, like letting students plan the syllabus, in the context of science classes
• A professor teaching a graduate course in the history of publishing describes teaching through “maker pedagogy,” and having students create zines or podcasts
• Two professors making an argument as to why you should resist using the software Turnitin to identify plagiarists

The journal has a podcast, too, if you’d find it helpful to have the option of listening rather than reading.

Twitter

College teachers regularly share ideas and hash out problems on Twitter. It may take some poking around to find the places where the conversation is happening; start by following accounts of pedagogical groups, like @HybridPed and @DigPedLab, and build out from there, following the people they retweet.

Spontaneous acts of pedagogical sharing happen often on Twitter. For example, the Twitter account for the Southern Historical Association’s Graduate Council recently asked its followers to describe good first-day activities, generating a great thread. And a hashtag, #twobookpedagogy, started by a professor who wanted to know which books inspire college teachers most, yielded a rich reading list.

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 making the most out of a research assistantship.

So you’re one of the lucky professors who’ve secured funding to hire a graduate research assistant. Finally! Somebody to help you hit fast-forward on the slow process of picking through archives, working on a digital project, or crunching data. But for some academics, especially those working outside of the sciences, the relationship between the professor, the graduate research assistant, and the job can be nebulous. Here are some tips to make sure everyone gets what they need from your research assistantship.

1. Be clear about your expectations, with yourself and your assistant.

This may be harder than it sounds, especially if your project is more open-ended in nature, or your department doesn’t set many guidelines for the relationship. Think about it ahead of time, and then talk it out with your assistant.

2. Decide on the skills you want them to come away with at the end of your time together.

In your initial meeting, discuss the experiences you think are possible to gain from the assistantship, and see which ones your assistant thinks would be more helpful for them to have under their belt when applying for grants and jobs in the future. Some of the work you need them to do will not be negotiable! But if there are choices they can make—”It would be better for me to be able to put ‘has built sites with Omeka’ than ‘fluent in Excel’ on my CV”—find out if you can tailor the work they’ll be doing, so that they come away with experience that helps them as well as you.

3. Find out where they are, and meet them there.

It’s not fair or helpful to set your assistant loose at the archives, when they have never used a finding aid. Talk about what their experiences with research have been; if they don’t have the level of skill you’d like, start them small, tell them how to do things, and help them work their way up.

4. Be transparent about the amount of time you expect the assistant to work, and what structure that work will take.

We’ve heard informal reports that some professors expect more work from their assistants than the number of hours per week that the job officially specifies. Try not to do this—and try not to expect assistants to do last-minute, “emergency” work on holidays or weekends. There may be a culture of exploitation of graduate students in the academy, but there are ways you can avoid being part of it.

5. Let them know how they’ll be evaluated.

Graduate assistantships can feel like a mentoring relationship, which they are, but they’re also a job, and your employee will want to know how they’re doing. Does your department have a structure you can use to evaluate the job performance of graduate research assistants? If so, let your assistant know what it is. If not, you might consider instituting an informal process—perhaps a chat in the middle of the assistantship to review how things are going.

6. Try to help them use the assistantship as a stepping stone.

Wherever possible, introduce them to archivists, colleagues, and staff; mention their work, and talk them up to help them get traction in your field. Recommend conferences, and if your field allows for it, collaborate on a publication, and give them fair credit.

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 requesting letters of reference for non-traditional pursuits.

Once you’ve decided you want to apply to alt-ac jobs—that is, not-quite officially academic jobs but those that still have a scholarly scope, such as at nonprofits, libraries, museums, newspapers, high schools, or in business—you may wonder whether you need to seek out reference letters at all. Some of these jobs (like a high school teacher at a private school) will certainly want you to have academic recommendations. Others may not require it, but may be open to receiving letters that attest to your readiness to step into the kinds of non-academic positions you want. If you can collect such letters now, while the people you worked with in grad school remember you best, do it.

Here’s how to go about getting the best alt-ac recommendation letters possible, whether you want to ask for a standard letter or one tailored to a particular position.

If it’s still early in your grad career, cultivate people outside of traditional academia who can speak to your good qualities.

Standard advice for preparing for a faculty job search is to spend your grad-school years seeking out collaborations and relationships with people who may be able to write letters for you when the time comes. On an alt-ac track, you should do the same, but it may be a little bit less obvious who to target.

Ideally, throughout your grad school years you’ll have sought out a variety of experiences:

• Internships
• One-semester assistantships
• Tutoring positions

They can all help you develop skills you think you might like to use in an alt-ac career. Then, when it comes time to apply to jobs, think broadly about the kinds of letters you could request. Just because you aren’t applying to work in a library doesn’t mean that your supervisor from that year of work at the archives couldn’t speak about your organizational skills or your sense of initiative. And the fact that you had that experience in the first place shows that you are interested in a number of different work settings, and can function well outside of a traditional academic context.

If you’re already at the end of your years at school, and it’s too late for all that, consider asking friendly academic advisors for an alt-ac letter.

Some grad students or recent grads may be wary of requesting alt-ac letters from their academic advisors. This is because—unbelievably, considering the state of the academic job market!—there is prejudice in some departments against students who openly air their alt-ac ambitions. You may fear losing access to departmental resources if you’re out of the closet (so to speak) when it comes to the alt-ac path. And given the fact that a requirement to submit letters may not be as standard for alt-ac jobs as for faculty job searches, you may not want to risk it.

However, if you do think you can go ahead and ask advisors for a letter, do it. They may be well-placed to testify to the ineffable qualities you hope to translate into an alt-ac position. If you have been your advisor’s research assistant, he may have a great sense of your diligence, organization, and resourcefulness. If you were head TA for her big lecture course, you were effectively her employee, and you proved your own managerial skills, punctuality, and attention to detail.

As with any other letter you request, make sure to tell your academic advisor as much as you can about the position(s) you’re seeking.

They may be a little bit less confident of their ability to write a letter for a position that (unlike Assistant Professor) they’ve never held, so it will be good to be extra-specific in your request.

If you’re going for a particular job, include the job ad, and let them know just how you think your experiences will fit the bill, so they can hammer home the point in their letter. If you want to have a letter on hand for the future, tell them what kinds of jobs you might be seeking, and what qualities you want to highlight for employers. That should make the process easier on them, and result in a better letter for you.

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.