Wherever You Go, There You Are

Keeping in mind that anonymous graduate students who don't have jobs might not be the best people to get advice about where to go to grad school, I just wanted to toss something out there. Insofar as you can, it seems better to go to a grad school that is generally strong in your interests rather than one that is more Leiterific.

If you're lucky enough to finish in 5 years, two more gourmet reports are going to come out before you go on the market. If you're not looking at a department in the top 10, you're department may well bounce around the rankings. In the 02-04, 04-06 and the current report some of the school rankings have really fluctuated. For example:

U. of Miami: 46 - Honorable mention for the top 50 - 32

Arizona: 8 - 16 - 13

Boulder: 28 - 38 - 32

U. of Minnesota: 32 - 36 - 44

Given how much the rankings can change over a short period of time, it's better to try to focus on who you will be working with and the general strengths of the department. In part this insulates you from potential changes in the faculty. Also, if someone comes to your department and raises your program's rank, my guess is that hiring committees don't care unless you work with that person. All that is to say, the rankings give you a general sense of how different departments are perceived overall, but each student is (probably) going to be assessed by who she works with rather than the overall perception.

-- Second Suitor

I can't be right all the time..

I know something is wrong with the following thoughts:

1. Where someone goes to grad school has a significant impact on her job prospects. After all, right after getting the PhD we all tend to have very similar CVs (a conference or two, maybe a publication) which will naturally make the school we go to an important part of our application.

2. Prospective students do not have much information about the different graduate programs (props to Leiter for trying to help with this). After all, most people applying to grad school have only been doing philosophy for 1-2 years. This is hardly enough time to figure out which philosophers are alive, much less to figure out the strengths of different departments or a particular person who you want to try to work with.

3. Students are largely admitted to graduate school after 3 years as an undergraduate. When determining who to admit it may make more sense to take people with MAs since they've already decided not to quit, but at least a good portion of us seem to have come straight from undergrad.

This makes it seem like there may be a fairly strong tie between someone’s semi-informed choice of where to go to grad school where her options depend on her potential as a junior in college and her job prospects upon receiving a PhD. Am I just grossly overlooking the importance of dissertation projects or something? I’d like the think my progress as a philosopher’s going to matter in the fall..

-- Second Suitor

I'm Still Not Sorry

I promised a post about a drunk asshole, didn't I? Way back in the summer, I mentioned my department was going to be having a speaker who'd interviewed me at last year's APA, and who I'd spent a good chunk of time talking to. His department (like everyone else's) didn't give me a flyout. I was going to have to go out to dinner with the guy and make with the chit-chat, and I was worried it'd be weird or awkward or humiliating or annoying. I know, I know--this sort of thing goes on all the time, and it's no big deal. But still, I'd never actually done it before and I wasn't sure what to expect. It wasn't something I was looking forward to.

I had nothing to worry about. The guy remembered exactly who I was and what I worked on, he was as personable as I remembered, and he very kindly and very discreetly complimented me on my work but explained (what I, of course, already knew) that his department decided they needed someone with a totally different set of AOSs than mine.

Actually, no, I just made that up. Although still, I had nothing to worry about.

I got to the restaurant about fifteen minutes after this guy, who I'll call the Drunk Asshole, and by that time he was already finishing his second drink. He wasn't really interested in talking to anyone at the table besides a cute VAP, who's a good friend of mine, and who's young enough to be the daughter he decided to have relatively late in life. Appetizers came, and before they were done, there were a couple more empty glasses beside DA's plate. And all the while, he couldn't take his eyes off C.VAP. Seriously. There were more than half a dozen people sitting at that table, all asking him questions about his talk, but every slurred syllable that came out of his mouth was spoken to her.

Meanwhile, C.VAP was doing her best not to puke on the table, which would have been a perfectly sane response to DA's bulgy-eyed stare, and she was shooting him these killer "Fuck Off, You Gross, Old Drunk Asshole" looks. (Presumably tenure means being able to say it out loud.) The looks were almost making it through his gin-haze, at least before he had more to drink. So at one point, DA wrenched his eyes off C.VAP long enough to peer at me, wondering why I looked vaguely familiar. "My chance!", I thought, and tried to introduce myself. But I couldn't get my whole name out before his eyes were flickering back to C.VAP, studiously avoiding her killer look by focusing well below her face. He asked what I work on (or at least, I assumed the question was for me, since he was speaking directly to C.VAP's top, which doesn't do philosophy, being, as it is, a shirt), but by the time I got through my AOSs, I gave up. There was just no hope that I'd get through a few sentences about how we'd met before, we talked about blah, blah, blah, and how was that project of his coming along? No hope at all.

Later on that night, after the senior faculty had all gone to bed, C.VAP, the Future Dr. Mrs. Dr., me, and some other people were drinking beer and making jokes at the DA's expense. And what I realized was, I can't really say I'm sorry not to be that guy's colleague.

--PGS

Hitting on the Moonshine, Rocking in the Grain

Now's a good time for a shout-out to another one of my office mates, who defended the shit out of her dissertation and earned, in the ancient scholarly tradition, a toast with expensive booze in plastic cups. She's moving on to much bigger and better things, which, by the way, she's going to rock harder than Zeppelin rocks the live version of "The Ocean" on How the West was Won. Yes, I mean it, that hard.

--PGS

I say good day sir (or 'mam as the case may be)

Not too long ago, I flew to a far away city to be on holiday. Being a friendly fellow, I struck up a conversation with someone else waiting for the delayed plane to arrive. When it came out that I was a philosopher-in-training, he indicated that he was familiar with academia and philosophy (but didn't say he was a philosophers so I'm guessing he was a professor in a related field).

All this is to say, he suggested that I set up meetings with a few memebers of the departments in the city I was visiting. I think the idea was just to get face time with some departments to help with things like the job market, and he was convinced it was a good idea. Now, I'm not particularly shy, but something about the suggestion just strikes me as odd. I think it's that I'm not focusing on the work of anyone in those departments so it isn't clear what I'd have to say besides "Hi, I'm a philosopher too!" I mean I don't think unsolicited visits are necessarily bad, but they also don't seem particularly helpful. Needless to say, I didn't visit the departments.

-- Second Suitor

Sunday Comics

Look, I know many of you are sick of this discussion, and as CW points out in comments:

"[M]uch of this discussion is being driven by people frustrated with the job market."

Meaning, I take it, that those making the sort of comments under consideration aren't blinded so much by poor, oppressed white man rage, but more by the infuriating beast that is the job market.

Yeah, fair enough; but fuck if I wasn't going to draw a comic about the implications behind this outpouring of rage, be it from indignation about one's lack of melanin and/or possession of a penis or the job market.

Enjoy and let's all play nice now.

--STBJD

(Click to make it big)

The Microphone Explodes, Shattering the Molds

Just as a quick follow-up on Thursday's thread, I wanted to pull out a couple of comments. These are really, really, really nice analyses* of how sexist assumptions operate in philosophers' thinking about the job market. You want to make a good-faith effort to make sure you're thinking about the job market in non-sexist ways? Print these comments out and tape them to your wall.

First up, the one and only Tenured Philosophy Girl:

Among all these people so excited to point out that the anecdotal evidence offered is not statistically rigorous (duh), there seems to be a VERY deep presumption that we should assume that men are disadvantaged on the market until thoroughly proven otherwise. This is simply an arbitrary bias, and one that no one who has argued against these folks has shown even once. Not ONE drop of evidence - rigorous or otherwise - has been offered to support the claim that men are disadvantaged. So why is that the presumption until proven otherwise? Seriously, why? What's the argument??

You just can't get away with this, guys. If you are going to reject all anecdotal and suggestive evidence as meaning nothing - even when it is VERY suggestive indeed - until we have statistically rigorous science at our finger tips, then you don't get to make one single claim about how you think men are disadvantaged until you hold yourself to the same bar.

What's goose for the sauce is a duck for desert, or some shit like that. Anyway, yes. Now, up next is Anon. 5:57:

Presumably the young man [and let's let this stand for anyone in the following situation, shall we? --PGS] with no offers who is blaming it on affirmative action is coming under fire because of his quick and unwarranted assumption that the women who beat him out for the positions must have been unqualified. (Not say, that affirmative action merely canceled out a pre-existing bias, but unqualified.)

He's comparing C.V.s. But we all know that's an imperfect indicator of one's job market performance and philosophical talent, and we can safely assume he wasn't present at their flyouts. Nor does he have access to their letters of recommendation or writing samples, nor does he know of how supportive/manipulative their departments were.

So on a small amount of available evidence, he's concluding not that someone women legitimately beat him out due to things that weren't itemized on the C.V., but that while the men who beat him obviously must have been more qualified, the women who beat him must have unfairly gotten the job because someone had a quota to fulfill.

Sounds like fairly standard set of sexist assumptions. . . .

Indeed it does.

Okay, I hereby promise a semi-funny post about a drunk asshole. But I haven't had my coffee yet, so it might be a few hours.

--PGS

*Analyses of patterns of reasoning, even. Philosophy!

I Was Just Guessing at Numbers and Figures, Puzzling the Pieces Apart

In comments, Rebecca does the math:

There was an exceptionally annoying and extended discussion a few months ago on this blog about whether being female gave you some big advantage on the philosophy job market.

With all the obvious caveats, I thought the following might interest PJMB readers. Leiter now has 96 comments on his hiring thread. I went through and counted how many of these jobs went to women and how many to men. I skipped a handful of names that were gender-ambiguous, at least to me. I did not bother to look at how 'good' the jobs were or whether they were postdocs or whatever.

Here are the current results:

85 jobs went to men
20 jobs went to women.
That's 76.5% of the jobs going to men.

There are no good stats on what percentage of philosophy grad students are women but the best figures I have read put it at about 25%.

So unless the original posters are willing to come out and claim that male grad students are just better or more qualified than their female counterparts, that seems to me to be very good evidence that it is no advantage to be female in this market.

Obviously, there's a lot more here we'd want to know. But just as obviously, this is pretty useful point.

--PGS

A flyout tale.

So, I had me a flyout or two this spring.

I'd thought things were going pretty well on one. And then came the teaching demonstration. No sweat, right? I fancy myself to be pretty engaging up there, generally speaking. Sure, you can't captivate every kid every time--oversexed, under-rested students have to sleep off their hangovers somewhere, after all--but I do okay.

As it happens, the kids in this particular class were pretty good. The problem was the chair of the department. He has me out to give a talk and a teaching demo because his department is thinking of hiring me, right? You'd think he'd, maybe, like, pay attention to how I was doing. But not so much. Dude was asleep. He slept through almost the entire demonstration.

Shockingly, I didn't get the job.

-- PGOAT

The concrete broke your fall

Having failed to read a single book not related to my dissertation in.. well I don’t think I read any non-philosophical books last year either.. I was looking around for something to read (incidentally, if anyone has suggestions I’m all ears). Meanwhile, I stumbled across an op-ed addressing the issue of being rejected from regular old college.

The piece talks about a different kind of rejection. Failing to get into college is not quite the same as failing to get a job you’ve trained for over the last 5-n years. That said, the take home message is pretty much the same. At some point you gotta get used to rejection. I just hope that I don't have to get used to this much rejection:

"You'll get tossed by a girlfriend or boyfriend. You won't get the job or the promotion you think you deserve. Some disease may pluck you from life's fast lane and pin you to a bed, a wheelchair, a coffin. That happens."

--Second Suitor

Morning after update: I've been trying to think of an excuse to link to this, and the discussion Second Suitor's started is just about perfect. Here's one question. If you were over at a date's house, what book on their shelf would make you break up with them? But, via Laura Rozen, David Glenn at the Chronicle's got a slightly different question. If you were over at a date's house, what book on their shelf from an academic press would make you break up with them?

--PGS