Fear The Academic Application
There is something quite frightening about the paperwork that must come together when applying for a tenure-track position, and this from a man whose CV is relatively compact. Once everything is thrown together, it comes to twenty pages. It's true that three pages are letters of recommendation and another nine are transcripts, but three (two if I don't bother with the optional page) are good ol' fashioned application pages, and the rest are materials I have written.
I suppose, however, that all of this makes some kind of sense. A panel has to decide which applicants, out of a pool of hundreds, deserve interviews, and three pages of fill-in-the-blank just doesn't cut it when selecting someone for a position that involves managing hundreds of students every year, contributing to meetings that may well alter the way content is selected or delivered, and eventually taking leadership positions throughout a career that may well exceed thirty years in one location.
I would say I don't envy the selection committee its task, but I would be lying. I want that task, or at least I want the opportunity to have that task before me. The only way to do that, of course, is to prove what I already know: I'm the right person for the job. Somebody pass me a bullet for my teeth.
posted by Andrew Purvis @ 10:18 AM
7 Comments:
Good luck with this, and go for Winchester .45, 230 grain full metal jacket bullets. They calm your nerves yet leave your mouth feeling minty-fresh.
Hmm. I'm glad I pointed the bullet outward, though I should apologize to the owner of the Hummer that was...nah, it was a Hummer.
New post coming on this. I started and abandoned it yesterday, but it is, well, administrative.
Ok: CV, application pages, letters of recommendations, samples of research.
But transcripts? Do you mean transcripts of coursework Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of bizarre? Or are there places that think your GPA is a more useful measure of your capacity to be a scholar than oh, I dunno, your research?
It just seems dumb. I thought that was the whole point of getting a PhD: you are no longer a student and you are now loosed upon the far rougher judgement of your (scholarly) peers.
Paris,
Transcripts (unofficial) are required not for the GPA so much as an initial verification of the degree(s) or equivalence. In some schools or for some positions this may also help determine which candidate would best suit the purpose of the position.
In my field (I am an MA, btw, not a PhD), a school might want a Europeanist, but my graduate school transcripts quickly reveal that I am an Americanist. The school might prefer someone else. Given that a single position easily attracts 250 applicants, that level of screening can make the screening process far more fluid.
Ok, I've poked around your blog a bit and see that you are at a community college. I know nothing about the hiring process at ccs (while probably have to learn upon re-entry to the US), but it follows that the process is different.
But hopefully the Americanists are not applying for the Europeanist positions and visa versa.
I was half joking about Americanists and Europeanists getting criss-crossed. Still, hiring committee members have goals and agendas that may well extend beyond the stated and agreed goals of a community college. Actually, balance is likely to be the order of the day in the eyes of many such committees, though perhaps with an eye to one kind of course that the department might like to offer.
I am not sure how I missed it, but given the barrage of information and the rush I was almost assuredly in at the time of my last response, perhaps I may be excused. Research samples may be involved at 4-year institutions, but that is one thing we needn't supply in the community college application (mind you, I would like the chance to share, but that's it's own story for it's own blog entry).
The supplemental questions that some community colleges use force us to write mini essays, and that may well be a second-round screening tool (after minimum reqs). Many use something along the lines of "What do you think of the current debate over composition theory?" or "Explain your approach to teaching composition." True, the second one is not a question, but I won't edit now. I should peek into the process that universities use. I'd love to get a sense of how it differs.
Actually, you'd be surprised how many really inappropriate applications come in: Europeanists applying for Americanist jobs; Ethnic Studies folks applying for Asianist positions (and vice versa, on all counts); etc.
I've even seen applications that were sent to one committee when they were much better suited to another one at the same institution (in one particularly glaring case, it was two committees in different departments looking for scholars at very different career stages).
The first thing a search committee does is eliminate applications that don't meet MQs (Minimum Qualifications) and sometimes there's not much left....
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