| 179W | Copy Date: New Ads Received Until October 24 | Publication date: Beginning October 10 |
I'm already starting to get a headache thinking about tracking down the job ads that get received 2 weeks after we get the JFP.
Also, how does a publication date have a beginning?
-- Second Suitor
26 comments:
Repost from an older thread:
st. anselm said...
I think the strike through means that deadline for submissions has passed for that issue. It's for departments, not job candidates, that the strikethrough means something.
September 16, 2008 2:56 PM
hi SS,
The print JFP will be published on October 10. Then they will start publishing ads on the web as they trickle in, in the form of 179W, and they'll keep doing it until the 24th, when they start gearing up for the next print edition.
But this raises an(other) interesting question: why do it like that? Why publish a big print edition with lots of ads all in one place, then a few at a time as they trickle in, then another big print edition with all of the ads in one place again? Why not just put them all in one or two big places, or publish them all as they trickle in? WTF?
Just guessing here, but I'd say that the 'W' indicates an online, or 'Web' edition. That would allow the APA to keep accepting ads after 'beginning' publication. It would also make sense of the idea of continuous, rather than one off, publication.
It's not complicated or mysterious or sinister - 179W is the web supplement to 179. Publication is ongoing, beginning on that date. 179 itself has a strikethrough as the submission date has passed.
I believe the 'W' in '179W' refers to web-only ads. These roll out in batches, which is why they say that publication begins on a certain date.
I have been told by the apa that this indicates that they are no longer accepting ads to be included in the Oct 10 JFP. It does not mean that there will be no JFP.
The whole process is starting to become redundant. In the past couple years, right after the printed/online issue comes out, there's an immediate publication of more ads on the "W" issue. Because of the possibility of publishing on the "W" issue that follows, I can imagine that some departments don't feel the need to hurry things up. Regardless, why not just publish them as they are received all throughout the year, like the Chronicle does.
Perhaps there is some reason for holding them back and sending them out shotgun-style. Besides tradition, I cannot think of one.
No offense second suitor, but isn't this all pretty obvious?
No one has answered mr. zero's question. Of course, W means web, or whatever as others have explained. However, why does the APA keeps ads from candidates until some official release date - and then publish a few other ads in the W category - while holding back more ads from candidates until the next official release date, and so on? Why not just post all ads as they come in? There would be no need for the "W" category if all ads were posted as they came in. The answer, I suspect, is that this is a groundless holdover from before the interweb days when the print edition was the primary source of jobs. Back in those days before electricity, job ads needed to be submitted before a certain date in order to appear in the print/paper edition. However, now that we have running water and things like the internet, why keep to these deadlines and refrain from posting job ads until these official release dates? What's worse is that lots of these jobs circulate through old boys networks, leaving the rest of us in the dark.
Tracking down job ads is really not that hard. Just log into the APA website and click "Jobs for Philosophers". As you can see from last year, the Oct 10th issue is followed by a web supplement with ads that missed the deadline for the paper issue.
Also note that several 2009 jobs have already been posted for the last few months under "Summer web-only ads."
The confusing table you were looking at is for the convenience of those *placing* ads, not those looking to read the ads. If you want to read the ads, you need to log in.
Different topic:
Does anyone have any inspiring stories of the very end of their dissertation writing? I'm talking about those last few weeks, coming up on a huge semester deadline, overcoming all self-defeating psychological obstacles, and just slamming out all final revisions like a pro? I need inspiration!!
Some state colleges require that the job ad come out in print. This means they need a print edition. This is one reason to have multiple print editions as things go along. But I agree that they could just post the ads as the come in.
anon 8:03 (9.26) --
Umm, then you don't want to hear my story.
my unsolicited advice for those of you struggling with angst amidst looming semester deadlines for dissertation completion & defense is to let go of it. there are SO many things that can go wrong at the last minute that you are practically begging the gods for an anxiety attack by trying to push a dissertation through a university's bureaucratic hoops. Of course, YMMV, but I had to get over that ambition. a defense will happen when your dissertation is ready AND your committee can all find time to meet AND when important documents are signed by the appropriate people.
I realize this is probably not what you want to hear, but if things are looking tight for a fall defense, i'd start making mental room for a spring defense date.
just my two cents...
State colleges may or may not have crazy or implausible requirements. (Lots of better schools are moving further away from print/paper requirements for sake of the environment. The move to electronic mediums / publications is also better, I believe, for people with certain disabilities.) Why should the APA base their policies and activities on the requirements of state colleges that do not yet have running water? Still, the last post was correct: the APA could post new job ads as they appear, and still publish print editions at various intervels.
Does no one else have comment on the 9/25 11:01 AM post above?:
"No one has answered mr. zero's question. Of course, W means web, or whatever as others have explained. However, why does the APA keeps ads from candidates until some official release date - and then publish a few other ads in the W category - while holding back more ads from candidates until the next official release date, and so on? Why not just post all ads as they come in? There would be no need for the "W" category if all ads were posted as they came in. The answer, I suspect, is that this is a groundless holdover from before the interweb days when the print edition was the primary source of jobs. Back in those days before electricity, job ads needed to be submitted before a certain date in order to appear in the print/paper edition. However, now that we have running water and things like the internet, why keep to these deadlines and refrain from posting job ads until these official release dates? What's worse is that lots of these jobs circulate through old boys networks, leaving the rest of us in the dark."
One reason to support a firm date for an "official" posting (whether that's in print or only online) followed by a trickle of web-only ads is to give departments some encouragement to post their ads in a timely manner. I can only imagine how the entire timeline for getting ads out, etc, would start slinking closer and closer to the APA without the artificial constraint of the JFP ad date. Of course, there are practical reasons for hiring depts to avoid posting ads too late (such as their members having time to review files and get the best pick of interviewees). Nonetheless, academia in general and philosophy in particular are not exactly great wells of efficiency and promptness. (See all of the previous threads on journal turnaround times!) Having the deadline for the October JFP is a way of encouraging hiring departments the damn ads out so we applicants can start scrambling to get jobs for next year.
Posting job ads as they arise does not seem inconsistent with having firm deadlines for consolidation of those ads into organized volumes for ads submitted before that deadline, and sequential volumes for ads submitted after that deadline but, presumably, before another deadline, and so on. The question still seems to remain: if there are job ads that applicants could be preparing applications for, why hide them until some release date? Sure, keep your deadlines for ad submission, or whatever, but why not post job ads to the website as the become available?
From the other end of the picture, I think having all the print ads come out on Oct.10 (and not, as a general rule, before then) helps me as an applicant. Rather than wasting time checking the APA website incessantly, or wondering just what proportion of the total jobs for this year have been posted at present, I keep refining my dossier and know I shouldn't start worrying about the number of jobs until Oct.10. If any schools want to get a jump on the process, they can make their positions public through the usual listserves, as I'd say ten or twelve schools have already done.
One thing I would like to see on the web version is a mailing label type contact address for the candidate to use for mailing purposes.
For example:
Committee Chair
University that Won't Hire You
Philo Dept.
Shitty Place to Live, US 11101-1123
This would allow candidates to just copy and past addresses instead of trying to format crap for days and you would rarely get names and addresses wrong.
It's not like they cannot have a web form to format that stuff when the person submits the ad.
Just my two cents. But it really would reduce suffering in the world.
"Why not just post all ads as they come in? There would be no need for the "W" category if all ads were posted as they came in."
Short answer: money. An ad in the print JFP is $100 for the first 100 words and $.80 per additional word. Schools who elect to have the ad online also pay an additional $20.
"Shitty Place to Live, US 11101-1123"
I'm sure it was coincidental--but that's a NYC zip code!
I'm sure it was coincidental--but that's a NYC zip code!
Here's a map. Look at the street view. Looks pretty shitty.
I just typed some random numbers. I didn't want to go with the old 12345-1234
So, yes it was just moral, zip code luck.
Oh, and people really should be using the expanded zips. That's why I did that too.
Hey I work right there!!
but it is pretty shitty...
"Look at the street view. Looks pretty shitty."
Are you kidding? I AM Queens Boulevard!
I can't believe that I just read that post about why there was a deadline of Oct. 10, and that I'm now responding to it. I must be very bored. I hope most of you are posting out of boredom too...my worry is that the job market has made many of the people anxious and compulsive in a way that would place them along some clinical continuum. The job market SUCKS. My happy story for finishing my dissertation is not the great work that came close to deadline, but the three months of regularly remembering and even saying outloud to myself that I had actually finished the program. It was very awesome--phenomenologically like getting short flashbacks of a strong opioid drug. Everything before that, though, was for two years bad or terrible or sucky. Makes people who are confident to the point of unpleasant start to treat animals kindly, become so anxiosu that they lose a great deal of weight, develop self-effacing humor, and almost make you like them. Like Palin. I almost like her. Have you noticed that she is not hot anymore? Strange things happen when your spirit gets crushed, especially if you already don't believe in spirits on account of their failure to meet any reasonable standard for explanatory potency. Speaking of entities you rejected as a teenager on grounds of parsimony, you will likely try out an abortive prayer or two in the final weeks of your defense.
If you get a good VAP job, which I did, you might surprise yourself by being happy. I did at least. If I had had to jump around for several--or even two, who knows?--years as an adjunct it would probably lose its charm. But for a while there you feel like a professional, and, in the context of grad life and debt and collection agencies, rich to the point where you think you might donate some of that extra cash to Oxfam, and then don't.
Final comment: many grad programs are a racket, and are exploitative. I very much disliked about half of graduate school, but there were many times--far away from dissertation defense time and the JFP and so on--that I couldn't believe I was getting paid almost a living wage to do something I would have otherwise wanted to do in my free time.
No moral--just some reflections on a mixed experience that, I know, if often not nearly as leavened as mine has been by fairly pure enjoyment in the subject itself. If I had the anxiety problems that all of you seem to have, I probably wouldn't have liked grad school as much as I did. I went on antidepressants very early, though, as a prophylactic to the misery I saw coming.
Sorry, I bet I made those who were previously anxious bored. Read it again maybe before your defenses for its anxiolytic properties?
I doubt the previous poster's enthusiasm for the field. Who knows, but for me and everyone I know who doesn't quit early on in a grad program philosophy is not a fun or enriching activity, but a socially almost-acceptable form of expressing a pathology. Makes sense why you needed prozac or whatever. Religious rituals like rosary beads and daily prayers at time and in direction x and unchanging liturgy is how some people indulge their anxiety--I'm tired of thinking I'm healthier than that for discharging my ticks in the hallowed grounds of the academy.
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