[How to Get a Job] 5-Year-Plan and Good News

[Jessica Dickinson Goodman]

Dear Scholars,

Great job on the resumes so far. Below is a more detailed description
of the 5-Year-Plan assignment. But first the good news: after some
thought, I will not be requiring edited drafts of *any* of your
assignments. That's right--turn everything in once. I trust you enough
to turn in your best work to potential employers.

Ok, now for the assignment description. You can find sample
5-Year-Plans in my Application 4 folder, but what you turn in by
6:30pm on Wednesday should:

1) Includes a timeline of how you'd like the next 5 years of your life
to go. It should be focused on your career, but you can include
information about how you'd like to evolve your hobbies and
relationships.

2) Contain details about your goals and hopes. If you're planning on
being in grad school, list the research you'd like to do, articles
you'd like to publish, or professors at other colleges who you'd like
to get to know better. If you're planning on being in a job, list
project ideas for that job, professional contacts you'd like to make.
Again, it doesn't have to all be career related: I want to have a dog
within the next 5 years.

3) Be specific--you're writing a vision of what your life could be if
you chose a particular path. If you're future is unclear, you can do
what I did and write several. Just like you do on your resumes, try to
quantify your (planned) achievements.

(For folks following the action on the syllabus, this assignment is
fulfilling the "Career Plan" requirement of your final portfolio.)

If you have any questions or issues, I'm in the Career Center 11 - 1
on Tuesdays and 8:30 - 10 and 3 - 5pm on Wednesdays,

See you Wednesday!

Jessica Dickinson Goodman

[Jessica Dickinson Goodman]

PS: an additional cheat, if you're struggling to imagine what your
career might look like in your industry, is to LinkedIn-stalk someone
five years older than you. Here are a few profiles of CMU alums who
are 5 years or less out of undergrad:

Consultant: http://linkd.in/o6B7kN
Programmer: http://linkd.in/q9qn9r
Policy Analyst: http://linkd.in/okTrva
Engineer: http://linkd.in/oOktbf
Writing: http://linkd.in/pOOMKW

To find more, all you need to do is go to LinkedIn, search "Companies"
for a company you'd like to work for/university you'd like to research
with, then start reading the profiles of their current employees. You
can search just for CMU folks.

I hope you are all well!

Jessica

--
<My twitter>
http://twitter.com/JessiDG
</My twitter>

[Jessica Dickinson Goodman]

Dear Scholars,

To clarify. Due tomorrow are:

1) A complete job application and a description of the position uploaded to Google Docs by 6:30pm,

2) A 5-Year-Plan uploaded to Google Docs by 6:30pm.

A note about great reasons to miss class:

1) Religious holidays, like Rosh Hashanah.

2) Career-related events, like info sessions, interviews, or networking dinners.

As always, email me before class and well schedule a time to catch up. As we talked about, if you miss 5 classes for any reason other than those above, you'll fail the class.

On a lighter note, there's lots going on on the blog, but I wanted to bring this to you a few weeks early. For those considering careers as academics, or looking forward to graduate school, here's part of a post I think about regularly, by a current guest lecturer at Oxford and Stanford. For those of you who hate cover letter writing, or feel exhausted constantly tweaking your resume to make yourself The Perfect Candidate, he has some kind words. It's below:

Neither Markets nor Heirarchies: The Academic Job Search

OR WRITING COVER LETTERS for job applications. Like all postdocs, much of my time and energy each fall was devoted to scouring the Chronicle of Higher Education, professional newsletters, and electronic bulletin boards for jobs. Applying for jobs, I soon discovered, is repetitive, time-consuming, and emotionally draining. Not only does it take time to craft a cover letter, print out a c.v., select writing samples, fax advisors for recommendations, and send away for transcripts; there's no end of other things you can do to try to gain a tiny edge in the race. Researching schools and departments (most of us apply to at least one or two schools we've never heard of in a place we can't readily find on a map), collecting bits of intelligence about the competition, and reading between the lines of job announcements-- all are efforts to divine what the search committee is really looking for, so that through clever tinkering and self-fashioning, you can turn yourself into what the department might-- might -- think is The Perfect Candidate.

This is a process that consumes large quantities of time and energy, and it weighs even minor decisions with consequence. Is it better to have a four-line recommendation from Professor Big, or a long detailed letter from Professor Nobody? How long is too long? Will they be impressed by a binder, or is a file folder okay? Should I FedEx, or just airmail? Believing your future life is going to be determined by your choice of resume paper is more exhausting than you'd expect.

It also reveals a deeper, more fundamental insecurity. Worrying that a search committee is going to deep-six your candidacy because you sent a Xerox rather than a reprint of an article is a sure sign that your professional future is pretty much outside your own control. My experience on the market didn't encourage me to think otherwise. Each year I applied for lots of jobs, and never got more than one interview. By my second year at Berkeley, I was really starting to worry: What was happening? After doing everything I was supposed to, giving talks at conferences, winning prizes, producing articles, and even being able to claim ethnic minority status-- which according to critics of minority fellowship programs should have made me unbeatable, even had I been completely undistinguished-- I couldn't understand why things weren't working out. Jobs were even starting to go to people younger than me, with less experience. Maybe if I'd just published one more article, I thought, or taught a little more, or written a better cover letter, or done something different, everything would click.

This isn't an unusual reaction. Young academics all seem to go through similar phases of soul-searching. But even while I went over my c.v., looking for that weakness that search committees found unfailingly, my sense that maybe it wasn't all just my fault grew. It was becoming very clear in the early 1990s that the academic market, which everyone had predicted would be wonderfully rich when I started graduate school, wasn't turning out so great: university budgets were flat or shrinking, and retiring faculty weren't being replaced very quickly. I also discovered that history of science was a more marginal field than I'd realized (despite its self-image as bridging the gap between the sciences and humanities), with the result that it was extra vulnerable to budget cuts.

Finally, the more I saw of academic culture and the workings of search committees, the less I trusted the whole hiring process. I learned at an early age that academic decision-making had its flaws: my father had been turned down for tenure after publishing two books and winning teaching awards. But the incentives to believe that the system is basically rational are powerful, not least of all because it lets you justify your own movement up the academic ladder as a reasonable reward for talent and hard work. Now as a postdoc I was in a position to see faculty life at first hand, to hear about searches from friends serving on their first search committee, and to trade news about Bay Area developments with sympathetic (or frustrated) peers.

The signs weren't hopeful. Intradepartmental factionalism split some searches, so that the only candidate who could be hired was the person least unacceptable to all sides. In a culture that prizes civility and conflict avoidance above almost everything else, bullies could exert a disproportionate influence over colleagues who preferred appeasement to confrontation. Even a smoothly-functioning committee not only dissected the work and credentials of applicants with incredible fineness, but made decisions based on highly local criteria. The choice between a social historian of American biology or a cultural historian of Weimar physics could be decided by a calculus whose variables included the power of the Europeanist faction, the need for a good undergraduate teacher in social versus cultural history, or the desire of the senior Americanist to get out of teaching the bread-and-butter U.S. history survey.

This didn't mean that the incompetent got hired over the eminently deserving; I never saw that happen, though I definitely questioned a couple choices. But the definition of what constituted a good candidate was more contingent, and involved more things outside my control, than I ever imagined. This all meant that my friends and I could take failure less personally; but thinking of the job market as so irrational didn't make any of us more optimistic about the long term.

--

And that's just a taste. See you all tomorrow!

Jessica