It's Raining Men! Hallelujah!

In case anyone missed it, here's A Guy on Hiring Committees' take on departments that want cover letters to say why the candidate's interested in their particular school:

Writing school-specific cover letters is a pain, and asking applicants to write an essay on the topic of "What special qualities I would bring to your department" is moronic. But I've heard that some schools that aren't in the Leiter top 50 toss files out based solely on the cover letter: if it's generic, the file goes. At first, I was scandalized. They might be eliminating loads of good candidates! But they're not worried about eliminating good candidates. They know that, with 100 or 200 (or 300 or 400 or 500) files, they won't have trouble finding 12 candidates who are good enough. And what they're looking for are 12 candidates who are good enough and who actually show some interest in the job. So what they're doing isn't crazy. (Yes, you could show interest at the interview. But why should they wait until then? They can find 12 people who, before the interview, have evinced particular interest.)

That's right, isn't it? God damn.

No Time Left For You

Okay, so there's an ad in the JFP asking me to "address the department description on our website and the university mission statement." Is the department description on the university mission statement? No, that obviously makes no sense. But let's put that phrase's need of a relative clause to one side. Because what really doesn't make sense is asking me to address the department's description and the university mission statement in my application package.

Listen, search committees. I know you want to see us candidates making an effort to show you how well we'd fit in at your school. You want to see the thought we've put in to our applications for your department. After all, you don't want to hire just anyone. You want to hire someone who wants to be there. Fair enough.

And you know what? We will put that thought in. I swear to fucking god, we will put many hours of thought into figuring out how we'll fit into your department and your school. But we're not going to do it right now, okay? Because right now, all our thought's going into figuring out who we need to talk to get our hands on our old course evals, how to get the secretary to mail our letters today and not next week, and whether or not we can ignore the increasingly pissy e-mails about our unpaid tuition for another month, because this month we're dropping a few Benjamins at the post office.

Give me an APA interview. Then I'll address your department's description and your university's mission statement.

The rich get richer.

Like PGS, I spent the weekend barfing out applications. Unlike PGS, I spent some time before grad school doing admin work in the special circle of hell that is temp work. So I've got the mindless busywork thing down cold. I make one hell of a fine secretary. And I actually find the work relaxing, in its way. "Take a break today, brain. Won't be needing you for this one. Here, have some schlocky pop music to drool to. You like the new Iron & Wine album? Sure. Perhaps a beer and some salty snacks? I'll let you know if we need you for anything."

While I don't mind the work itself, I do mind the obscene amount of time it seems to take. I really do have better things to spend my time on. (Like, oh, say, finishing the dissertation. Fuuuuuuck. The dissertation.) Which is why I kind of threw up in my mouth a little bit when a friend of mine told me that his dept's secretaries take care of all their mailing for them. Now, said friend's dept is admittedly a lot more Leiterrific than mine. But I'd thought the perks of coming from a fancypants program were supposed to be limited to things like name-brand recognition and big-name letter-writers and posh funding and non-exploitative teaching responsibilities. Now I find out these fuckers get all their secretarial work taken care of too? WTF? How common is this?

No wonder they're getting all the fucking jobs.

The Early Bird Catches the Fuckin' Worm

I had big plans to get all my applications in the mail in one massive batch. I know, there'll be more in the November JFP, but I wanted to get the first wave away early so I could get back to my dissertation. (Oh, god. My dissertation.)

The massive batch hasn't happened. I've been working on research statements for close to two weeks now, and I just can't get them done. Every postdoc application needs its own version. But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is, I work on stuff so obscure that the October JFP has exactly zero jobs asking for what I do. That means I'm applying to a lot of jobs meant for people with AOSs that aren't mine. In fact, besides open jobs, I'm applying to jobs for three, very different AOSs, none of which are exactly me. So for the jobs with these different AOSs, I'm trying to use different research statements to, um, let's say, emphasize the side of my interests that best fits the job. Except open jobs, which are getting the real me.

So I've been writing four different research statements, revising them, and revising them again. Some early deadlines meant I had to put some applications in the mail this weekend, but I'm still not done.

So. Now I'm aiming for next weekend. We'll see. I want this stage to be over.

A Dollar When I'm Hard Up II

The first wave of applications is out. Good. But just now at the post office, I found out my regular application package--weighed down with a long writing sample and a teaching portfolio that's somewhat expanded from last year--is too heavy for regular first-class mail. The cheapest it could be would be a dime--a dime--less than priority mail. So I just sent the whole batch by priority, at $4.60 an envelope. Fuck.

So between envelopes, the cost of express-posting my last, late application for an exotic, international postdoc I'm not going to get, and a baker's dozen of regular applications, I dropped $88.80 today. That brings my total for the year to $221.02. It's starting to hurt.

The lives of others.

Something occurred to me a few days ago, in a rare glimmer of respite from the self-absorption. (Don't get me wrong. We're all about wallowing in the self-absorption here at PJMB. But even the navel-gazingest of philosophers can manage to pull her head out of her ass once in a while.) I was talking with another friend about a colleague of ours--this really great guy who's had a streak of shitty things happen to him, both on the job market and off--about how we were both hoping this would finally be his year on the market. And I realized that it's not just my own self-absorbed ass I've got to worry about.

The fact is, a lot of people I care a lot about are going to end up fucked by this beast. That really fucking sucks.

Hey Man, Whats the Plan, What Was That You Said?

Adam Potthast's started an interesting discussion over at In Socrates' Wake. He's talking about how it could be useful for the job market for grad students to work more on our teaching, as opposed to our research. Roughly, his thinking is, since way more departments have teaching as their primary focus and those departments look for real teaching ability when they're hiring, it might not be the worst strategy to spend time making yourself a better teacher.

Yeah, maybe, I guess. But the thing I'm suspicious of here is Teaching! Experience!. It's all fine and good for departments to talk about developing their grad students' teaching skills, but in a lot of places that ends up looking like indentured labor in the hot, dirty mines of "Contemporary Moral Issues" and baby logic. And that way lies an extra year or two in grad school and a very short CV when you finally hit the market.

I'm not really sure I'm disagreeing with Potthast here. We all want to be the best teachers we can. (Um, with the exception of a few people who really don't give a fuck.) But it's sort of hard to evaluate his suggestion without a better sense of what he thinks grad student should be doing, and how much time they should spend doing it.

I Don't Want to Be Late, I'm Waiting at the Gate

Here's a question about how to maybe save a little money. Committee Member #3 says I shouldn't spend the money to send any applications by anything but regular mail. Obviously, I wouldn't bother with fast mail for "postmarked by" deadlines, but he says it even for "received by" deadlines. Even when the "received by" deadlines are, like, tomorrow.

I mean, I know no one's really gong to start looking at applications until December, so there really is no reason to spend the money on the fast mail. But still, it really feels like I ought to get stuff in by the deadline. No?

Domo Arigato

I've talked before about how I can't figure out where my time goes dealing with all the tiny, little pieces of the application package. Let me tell you a story about trying to get my teaching portfolio together.

One of the things that goes into your teaching portfolio is crap from your students' course evaluation forms. As in, some percentage of students rated you "above average," some percentage rated you "average", and some percentage rated you "asshole." Now, I need to get these things from my department secretary, and she needs to get them from the freshman composition program I was teaching in last year. Fine, except for no particular reason, the freshman comp people wouldn't send them over. So, that's a problem.

I was talking through this with my department secretary the other day, trying to figure out what I could do to get the forms sent over, and we got to talking about the people in the freshman comp program. She's convinced they're bad news. In fact, she's convinced they're like a house in a movie she just saw. Not a regular house, mind you, but a robot house. A robot house that seems like a really great idea, what with the way it turns off the lights when you leave the room and sets the oven for your roast beef or whatever. Apparently, the robot house can even talk. But it's not really a good idea, is it? Robots never are. Because it falls in the love with the woman who lives in the house, locks her husband outside its robot doors, and tries to impregnate her. That's what the robot house does.

You following? Me neither. I was trying to figure it out as I stood there in the office listening to the secretary tell me about the very real dangers of a robot house. Which is to say, the very real dangers of the freshmen comp program people, because after all, they're like the robot house.

The point is, I stood there listening to this for about a half hour, because I needed to track down my course eval forms. No dice. A half hour of robot houses and I'm still nowhere on that front.

And I Learned Quite a Lot, When I Was Young

I got an e-mail today from the department with a stupidly early deadline telling me they got my application, but I still need to send them my undergrad transcripts. Yeah, my undergrad transcripts. I don't even know what to say. What possible fucking use could those be? I mean, I wanted to send an e-mail back asking if it was a joke. Because, really, whether they mean or not, it is a fucking joke.

While we're talking about transcripts again, and in case anyone missed it, Inside the Philosophy Factory gave us her take on why her department asks for graduate (note: graduate) transcripts from job candidates. Fair enough, though I'm still not shelling out for official ones

If You Put Me to the Test, If You Let Me Try

Ask and you shall receive. Lots of useful responses to my post yesterday about why some departments don't allow some of their students to apply for the best jobs. There seem to be a couple of themes in what people are saying, so I want to try to address those.

First, I'd been assuming there'd be no downsides to sending applications to the best departments, but Robert's pushed back on that assumption. Maybe sending out less-than-outstanding applications can hurt candidates the way giving mediocre presentations or publishing mediocre work in mediocre journals can hurt people. Maybe, but how exactly? Especially if your department's not pushing your application very hard at that top school, it's going to get looked at for a few minutes by one, maybe two people. Maybe they'll read your writing sample, and maybe, to push this line a little harder, having the best people in the field see your underdeveloped work could hurt you. Again, maybe. But will it hurt so badly they wouldn't give your work another look after you'd got in good enough shape to appear in a decent journal? Which, remember, is what you'd have to do anyway to have a real shot at getting so much as a flyback from their department?

To take the opposite view, there are senior faculty in my department who say it can hurt to not apply to the best departments, even though we have no chance at getting those jobs. These profs' thinking is, it can hurt a candidate with middle-tier schools if it somehow gets around that the student's department didn't think they had a shot at the top-tier.

In any case, I need to think about the possible harms of applying a little more. As of yet, I'm not convinced.

Another idea people have is, somehow limiting the jobs students can apply for will help them get jobs. Anon. 7:43 is dead-on right about the importance of a very hands-on placement process in getting people jobs. But after people have been mentored throughout graduate school about producing good work and worked their way into the profession with presentations and maybe a publication or two, after they've had their CVs, writings samples, abstracts, and teaching portfolios vetted by the relevant senior and junior faculty, after even their letters have been vetted by trusted senior faculty, and after their profs have made calls to all the friends they honestly think should give their student an interview--if they've done all that hands-on stuff, what's the extra help of not letting students apply to Princeton?

John T. has a different take on how limiting the schools students can apply to can actually help them get jobs. One idea seems to be that departments can better influence another department's search process if they present a unified front with respect to a student's candidacy. But as Anon. 2:51 points out, besides offering honest assessments of different students' work, profs can tell their friends about the differences in students' interests and hope one or another candidate will appeal to the search committee as a possible fit for what they're looking for.

But John T. and others also have something else in mind, something about the psychology of search committees. John talks about a department wanting to be taken seriously when they tell a top-tier department, "This is the best student we've had in a decade." Fair enough, they should want to be taken seriously. But it seems like the best way to do that would be not to say a student's the best in a decade unless they're actually the best in a decade. Problem solved.

Along similar lines, Anon. 9:25 asks why anyone should expect their letter writers to say they're qualified for a job at a top-tier school. The answer is, of course, no one reasonable should expect that. But there's no problem here unless there are profs who tailor-up dishonestly inflated letters specifically for top-tier schools. If a prof writes a letter that just gives a useful description and honest assessment of a student's work, where's the problem?

I feel like I must be missing the thrust of what John and others were talking about with this business about being sensative to the psychology of the search committee. I have to admit, I'm somewhat suspicious it has something to do with a willingness dishonestly to inflate assessments of a student for some audience but not for others. If it's not that, I'm all ears as to what it really is.

And I Am So Ordinary

Not too long ago, I learned something I didn't know about how the placement process works in some places. I caught wind of it from one trusted friend, but couldn't quite believe it, so now I've verified it with a couple others. (Reporting!)

Some departments in philosophy won't let their students apply for really high-powered jobs. The departments insist on approving their students' list of jobs to apply for, and even if someone's AOS is in philosophy of mind and AOCs are language and logic, the department won't let them apply for, say, a top-10 job for an AOS in mind with AOCs in language and logic.

This seems like a bad idea for at least a couple of reasons. One, we all know people who've got interviews way out of their league. No, they didn't get the jobs. But the interviews sharpened them up for other interviews, the ones that did get them jobs. Why the fuck would you rule out the possibility of your candidates getting that experience? Two, I know search committees have to wade through a swamp of applications, and they might appreciate having fewer to go through. But really, if I were trying to make a hire, I'd want that decision to get made by, you know, me and my department. If anyone knows a good reason for this practice, I'd like to hear it.

But it's not just that this seems like a bad idea. I haven't been able to put my finger on why exactly, but something here disgusts me. It makes me want to fucking puke. Look, we all know most of us have exactly no shot at those jobs. We know that. So you might say, "No harm, no foul," right? But that's not the fucking point. The point is, what does it say to your students? It says you'd rather their CVs never got seen by anyone you think is really great. It says they're like that girl you were sleeping with who was cute enough to keep your bed warm in the winter, but too dumb or déclassé to meet your colleagues or friends. It says they're like your kid when you wouldn't let him try out for soccer, because you think he's too small to be any good.

If you think your own students are shit, that's your problem. N years in school, a dissertation and a PhD are enough dues paid to earn us the right to fail on our own fucking terms.

I Jump Through Hoops and Loop De Loop

Following up on yesterday's post about transcripts, people's comments really get to why it's so totally bewildering for us to have to send them with our applications. What exactly are transcripts supposed to show? That I took a lot of classes with random course numbers and super-informative official titles like "Topics in Value Theory"" Or that I, like every other grad student who didn't get disappeared from their program, got As and maybe a B+ or two?

Anon. 7:40 suggests that maybe they're just supposed to verify that people who claim to have their degrees in hand really do, which might make sense. But shouldn't people's letters make that sort of thing clear? And then Anon. 8:34 reports that their department really did seriously look at the GPAs of their job candidates. That astounds me. What possible interest could those grades be when you have CVs, letters, and writing samples to get a sense of who people are?

Now another theory, and one I think might bear out in a lot cases, is that transcripts are required by human resources robots, to borrow Sisyphus's phrase. I have a growing appreciation for the way HR people fuck this process up for pretty much everyone, but I'll leave that for another day.

In the meantime, let me just pass along Inside the Philosophy Factory's suggestion that people send along a note with their unofficial transcripts saying they'll be happy to send official ones if they're needed.

I Can't Afford You In My Life

My research statements are starting to fall into place, which means I'm getting closer to having the whole application package put together. Good.

Anyway, my office mates and I were talking over the lunch table about something I've mentioned before--schools that want transcripts with our applications. There's even (at least) one department in the JFP that's asking for undergrad transcripts. Sweet Jesus, that's idiotic. Some people in this Chronicle thread say we should suck it up and send official transcripts.

But fuck that. In philosophy we apply to a fuck of a lot of jobs. Ethics and social/political people have over 100 jobs to apply for in this year's JFP. But official transcipts cost money. Sending them to every school that asks for them would mean spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars. And that's not going to happen. Crappily printed copies of the webpage that lists my grades are going to have to do.

And I'll Gamble Away My Time

I've been hammering trying to get all my application crap ready to go out in a binge of mass-mailing, but work just sort of came to a standstill today. I meant to write two different versions of my statement of research interests, and I managed to write one paragraph of one. That took me close to three hours. And it sucks. Relatedly, I suck.

That, screwing around with the little bits of job market bullshit that never seem to end, and a couple hours dealing with a floundering fall semester freshman who's freaking out about writing the first essay in her life that's actually hard--all that, and a day goes by without me getting more than a single sucky paragraph closer to putting shit in the mail.

In happier news, Beirut's new album is living up to the hype.

A Dollar When I'm Hard Up I

Here's another thing I wish someone had told me about before the job market last year. It costs a fuck of a lot of money. For about two months last year, my spending was relentless. On a grad student's stipend, it feels like you're giving a pint of plasma a day, every day from the middle of October to the middle of December.

I don't know the exact figure, but I know I spent over $800 on the whole process last year. I know I dropped way over $300 on postage. That was over 80 applications sent, way too many of them sent late at night by priority mail. I also had to get a sport coat, since the only one I owned was this tan ultra-suede jacket from the 70s--a sweet, sweet jacket to be sure, but not exactly right for the semi-conservative job market. Throw in a new shirt, since I knew I'd sweat through my only other one, and a tie to go with the jacket and shirt, and that was another $250 at a Thanksgiving week sale. Then close to $150 for three nights at the hotel in DC during the APA--that was splitting the room three ways at the "cheap" graduate student rate. Then there was getting to and from the APA. And then all the little things, like APA fees and envelopes and labels.

I want to spend a lot less than that this year. I don't need another jacket. And I really, really don't want to send so many applications at the last minute.

But still, the costs are already adding up. Between some criminal fucking postdoc application fees and the postage costs of not being ready well in advance of a handful of early deadlines, I've already spent $132.22.

Get to the Point of It

Commenting on my bitching about how ads are written in the JFP, Anon. 7:24 points us to the Baruch College ad. It's #2, right there at the beginning of the Northeast section of the JFP, so you can go check it out for yourself. It's amazing. You need to read 243 words before it says what job's being advertised.

Also, Rob Helpy-Chalk responds with,

Why would the APA spend any time making life easier for people who are powerless? What are job candidates going to do, post grouchy blog entries?

Well, yes. That's exactly what we're going to do.

It's Hard to Read You, Like I'm Illiterate

I've spent the last couple of hours going over my spreadsheet of jobs and getting the various addresses in the right format to print them onto labels. (Or at least, I hope I've got the addresses in the right format. Last year, MS Word fucked up all my labels, so even though I'd told it exactly what brand of address labels I was using, I still to had to screw around with the formatting on each sheet of labels to get them to come out right.)

Anyway, one of my office mates and I were just talking about how unreadable the JFP is. It's a spectacularly badly edited document. First, there isn't a standard format for the ads. Yeah, I know total standardization would be impossible. But fuck that. Would it kill departments doing tenure-track searches to all start their ads with the ranks, AOSs, AOCs, and deadlines of their searches? In that order, and in a list rather than a rambling, relative clause-laden sentence? Look, it's easy:

Rank: Assistant professor (tenure-track). AOS: Open. AOC: M&E and History preferred. Deadline: Nov. 1, 2007.

Then the ad could say whatever else needed to be said, and no one would have to do a close reading of the whole 350 words to find the deadline. Wouldn't that be nice?

But even worse, have you noticed how there's ads doubled-up in the web-only additions? Take Cornell. It looks like they've got one job that's numbered both 55 and 444. Doesn't that shit get any copy-editting? Come on.

I'm a Loser, Baby

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I got caught up worrying about early deadlines in the JFP and I blew a postdoc deadline.

I'm not looking forward to telling the Professor about this.

Ginger

I'm still reacting to the the JFP here, so I'm wondering, did Baylor's med school ad seem weird to anyone else?

373. BAYLOR COLLEGE OF MEDICINE, Houston, TX. Baylor College of Medicine's Center for Medical Ethics seeks to appoint a tenure-track Assistant Professor to a hard-money position with a very competitive salary in a research intensive environment with modest teaching requirements.

My emphasis on "hard-money position." My emphasis, because what the fuck does that mean? Does anyone know what that means? Maybe it's just me, but I think it sounds like some kind of porn thing. "Lance, Hailee--you two ready for the hard-money position?

I Always Done an Honest Job As Honest As I Could

Everybody's had a day or so to start digesting the JFP, and people are starting to back off a little from positive first reactions like PGOAT's and Leiter's. Yeah, if you look at the numbers, it looks like there's a lot of jobs. But I only see about 50 so far I can apply for, down by about 20 from last October's JFP.

As commentors in Leiter's thread point out, when you start reading through the ads, you see things like eight or ten numbers assigned to general humanities postdocs, none of which will necessarily go to philosophers. And there seem to be a lot of ads for non-tenure-track jobs--both visiting and adjunct jobs.

It's pretty fucked up to see Marist College advertising in the JFP for ten--count 'em, ten--adjunct jobs. As Eric over in Leiter's thread says, "that's 10 of the positions in the issue which are nothing more than trolls for slaves."

My school's last president used to say the president is the CEO of the university. Now we're going to see just how much like a Wal-Mart a college can get.

You Been Bad to Me Woman, But it's Coming Back Home to You

Okay, I've gone through the JFP once pretty carefully, and I've managed to get a spreadsheet of possible jobs together. Not for nothing, I've also got my shit together, which is a nice change from yesterday morning.

One thing really jumped out at me on that first read through. A lot of departments look like they're doing the same searches they did last year, which I guess means they didn't make a hire. Some of those jobs are ones I applied for last year, and now it looks like I'll be applying for them again. I have to say, I really, really want to write a cover letter that says, "You fucked up when you didn't give me an interview last year, didn't you? Well, don't fuck it up this year. Fucktards."

I can see that letter having downsides, though.

Panic On the Streets of London

I saw PGOAT's post this morning when I was trying to get ready for class. I told myself I had time for a quick look over the JFP, but I hadn't counted on the time it'd take to go outside and sit on a bench until my shortness of breath stopped and I could start focussing my eyes again.

I was late for class.

And so it begins.

The new JFP has been posted online. Well, actually it hasn't been officially posted yet--there's no official link to it on the APA's webpage--but for those enterprising aspiring job candidates who are tricksy enough to look at old JFPs and figure out the super-secret pattern to the URLs, it's there for the finding. (Hint: change the edition number in the URL from 174 to 175. You're welcome, young paduan.)

(In any case, the official link is supposed to be going up today. And the hardcopies are probably already in the mail.)

An early bit of optimism: there are almost exactly as many jobs as last year. The doomsayers who've been predicting a crash in the job market--i.e., a big downturn in the number of available jobs--have been proven wrong for another year. Phew. Thank fucking god. I'm gonna need all the help I can get.

Could We Change the Subject Now?

I meant to get to this over the weekend, but I was busy getting a sack-beating from a postdoc application. Following up on Friday's post, the abstract I'm working on is supposed to be really short. It's supposed to go on the front page of my CV, and still has to leave room for all the other crap that goes there. I've got it down to 125 words, which I think is pretty damn good. In comments, Sisyphus says she's supposed to have a 50 word blurb about her dissertation. I think that's insane.

However. I do have a blurb that's even shorter than that. It's not for the job market. It's not even really for academics. It's for the situations (which Dr. J aptly calls "quagmires") where civilians think politeness demands they ask what my research is about. The blurb I have for that? Seven words longs. I can bust that out and then suavely segue to more convivial subjects with nothing so much as a, "Could you please pass guacamole?"

But Baby I Don't Intend to Leave Empty Handed, Gimme Some Money

This is the postdoc application I wish I was sending instead of the application packages that chewed up another one of my weekends.

Maybe I could send this one to Bob Jones U.?

I've Got to Admit it's Getting Better

In an unwelcome turn, my favorite Mexican lunch place has stopped playing Mexican covers of Creedence and is instead playing crappy easy-listening covers of the Police. How Mexican is that, for fuck's sake?

So anyway, I had to get out of there after I finished my tacos, and now I'm stuck in a coffee shop trying to hammer out the three sentence dissertation abstract for the front page of my CV. Here's how the work goes. I work on a single sentence for half an hour, and then I e-mail it to my supervisor, the Professor. Then the Professor e-mails me back to tell me it blows and to start over. Then I start over. I work on the same sentence for another half hour and e-mail it to the Professor. He e-mails me back to say it blows less, but still blows, so I need to start over. Etc.

I've been working on the same sentence for about five hours now. But it is starting to blow less.

I See You Shiver With Anticipation

I'm living a sort of anachronism these days. Not so long ago, even just when I was a young punk in my department, people going on the market used to go insane waiting waiting for the JFP to come out in the second week of October. Even as a first and second year, you knew what day it was going to show up in people's mailboxes, because they were there early in the day, waiting for the mail to come in. Then people would spend the rest of the day with their faces four inches away from the newsprint, trying to see what jobs they'd be applying for.

Of course, some of that still goes on. Everyone's waiting for a big pile of updates to the APA's on-line job listings sometime next week. But already being able to see some job ads sort of takes the edge off the anxiety. People going on the job market are already thinking about particular jobs they're going to be applying for, and thinking about how to tweak their application packages for a few specific departments.

People, that is, except me. Why? Because I'm awesome, that's why. So awesome that until two days ago 'd totally blanked on renewing my APA membership. So now, my old password for the APA's website doesn't work and I can't see the jobs. Like I said: awesome.

So until I get my new password--which for some reason has to be sent by snail mail--I'm living like people did back in the day. Waiting.

Update: Um, it looks like I'm facing a serious threat of disrupted domestic harmony unless I add that, in fact, it wasn't me who took care of renewing my APA membership, but the Future Dr. Mrs. Dr. PGS. God knows, if I had to do it myself, it still wouldn't be done.

And It's Getting Worse

The Chronicle's got a piece by an English grad student about the need for persistence on the job market. Fair enough, I guess. But something jumped out at me.

This grad student starts of by considering the cliche, "Things are never as bad as they seem; they could always be worse." Now, the trick is, how are we supposed to read that little semi-colon? It's sort of inviting us to read it as an abbreviated explicative transition, isn't it? Or some sort of logical relation? "Things are never as bad as they seem--after all, they could always be worse." "Things are never as bad as they seem because they could always be worse." The first claim is the one that needs some explanation--because, really, things really do seem pretty bad, so why should I believe they're not that bad? So then the second claim looks like it's supposed to give just the explanation needed.

But it doesn't. The semi-colon's a total non sequitur. As the job market illustrates in soul-grinding vividness, things are as bad as they seem and it can still get a lot worse.

Too True to Say, Say, Say

Here's a little wisdom from the senior prof on his year's placement committee, PC Sr.:

Very stupid things will be said and done to you at all stages of the job market process.

I've never heard truer words in my life.

Rocking the Passive Voice XVIII

It's been too long, hasn't it? Take a look at this PFO:

We regret to inform you, however, that you did not make our list of finalists.

This sentence was constructed with stunning artfulness. It's as passive as any sentence with the passive voice. (Who's decision was it not to put me on the finalist list? Who's responsible for telling me to fuck off?) And yet the sentence doesn't actually use the passive voice. This could be a revolution in PFO style.

But then the letter goes and blows all that painstakingly crafted passivity, when it says,

We. . . . hope that our decision will not discourage you as you continue on in the job market process.

Their decision? You mean, it didn't just happen? How'd they let that tiny ray of honesty find it's way out of the letter?

Oh, and for the record, this PFO didn't discourage me at all. I mean, the other 85 pushed me into a months-long depression, but this one made me feel like a million fucking bucks.