First Person

Rooting for the Competition

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines On Course Back to High School In a new book, an assistant professor of English finds radical new sources of inspiration for his discipline in K-12 classrooms. Career News Sensible Compromises So you don't have the perfect tenure-track position at the perfect college in the perfect town? Welcome to Earth. Page Proof Editing Friends How to avoid hurt feelings and battered relationships when friends turn to you for a close read. Career News Keeping Cutbacks in Check Most colleges are enduring the recession without layoffs or across-the-board hiring freezes. But the pain is being felt on campuses in other ways, a new survey shows. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Jonathan Malesic

I have this friend named Justin. We met several years ago when a mutual friend suggested we share a room at a conference. Because of him, it was a fun conference. Two years later, Justin happened to get a postdoc at the university where I was working on my degree.

Like me, Justin has a Ph.D. in religious studies. Like me, he focuses on modern Christian theology and ethics. Like me, he works at a research institute at the University of Virginia (a position I picked up at the beginning of the semester, and for which I am tremendously grateful.)

We share an office -- his office, which he generously volunteered to let me use. We play on the same softball team. We both have worked as parking-lot attendants (although unlike me, Justin did not have a Ph.D. when he sat in the booth). We both drive Hondas. No, we're not dating twin sisters. They're two years apart.

Although Justin has a bit of a head start on me in building his CV, we look similar on paper. We also have similar career goals. We've applied for many of the same jobs this year, and we've been playing a weird game of chicken lately, waiting each other out, to see who will call the other first to find out if he got an interview.

I like Justin. I want him to succeed. I want him and a few of our other friends to be the ones who will shape our field in the future. But I want a job, too. In fact, I want a job more than I want Justin to have a job. And since he and I are such similar applicants, he is my competition for a lot of positions, and I don't want him to succeed if it means that I have to fail.

I may have written a dissertation chapter on the need to give up self-interest in order to love your neighbor, but that doesn't mean I practice it. I wish I didn't feel like I was competing against Justin, because that feeling could hurt our friendship, and who wants to lose a friend in order to gain a job offer?

The competition for academic jobs is intense, and we job seekers want to feel superior to the other applicants. That is why we posture in the hallways of our conferences, trying to poke holes in other people's command of the literature or dropping the names of prominent intellectuals we pretend to know personally. "Well, as I was just telling Noam the other day ..."

We want to feel superior because we think that the competition for academic jobs is like other contests: The race goes to the swiftest, the bake-off to the tastiest, the spelling bee to the most accurate. Such competitions are meant to determine who is exceptional, and the prizes -- first place, blue ribbon, $50 U.S. savings bond -- go to the ones who most clearly merit them.

The academic job market, however, does not trade exclusively in merit. Many of us wish that it did, just to simplify things: The best candidate in East Asian religions gets the best opening, the second-best Ph.D. gets the number-two job, and so on. Candidates 11 through 104, try again next year, won't you? At least we would all know where we stood, and we could cling to that precious illusion of control.

But in many ways, it's good that our professional futures are not entirely determined by merit. You may have racked up a long list of publications while you were still in graduate school, won several teaching awards and a prestigious fellowship, and testified before the U.N. on your dissertation topic. Good for you; I didn't. But that doesn't mean that you will get the "best" job, or that I won't.

The awful truth? There is no best job. No more than there is a World's Best Parking Space. There might be a best job for you. And a best job for me. And more often than not, the best job for any of us is the one we are offered, because it -- and it alone -- allows you to grow into it.

If you are, or ever have been, on the academic market, then you have probably looked at a job ad and thought, "I am perfect for this! It's right in my area of research, I used to baby-sit the chair's kids, and I taught there as an adjunct two years in a row. It's almost like this ad was written for me!"

Hey, maybe it was; those baby-sitting connections are strong. But did you get that job? I'll bet not. That's because search committees are always focused on that thing called "fit."

As great a fit as you may have seemed when the ad was written, committees change their minds about what they're looking for all the time. Or maybe someone out there happened to fit the position and the department even better than you. In those cases, I think that search committees really mean it when they say that they regret the fact that there were "many qualified applicants" for a given position, even though it's cold comfort.

One time (and I swear, it was only one time), I wrote in a cover letter that I was "uniquely qualified" for a position. I arrogantly believed at the time that I was. The hiring committee had a different opinion.

The fact is, no one is ever uniquely qualified for an academic position. There are almost always at least two or three equally qualified applicants living within a few miles of each other. Sometimes, you share an office with someone equally qualified. I've even heard of people who share a bed applying for the same jobs.

So we try to make ourselves stand out as candidates. We add to a list of publications "in preparation," solicit a recommendation from a leader in the field whom we may not know well, fill cover letters with tales of tireless dedication to teaching. Ultimately, though, it's probably best to present yourself as you really are to the committee, since it's you they are considering hiring -- and not who you think you are on your best days -- and because you have no idea what they are really looking for. Even the committee members themselves may not know until the search is well under way.

I think that I do stand out as a candidate, but probably for some reason I'm not even fully conscious of. Same goes for you. And for Justin. I hope so, because my nightmare scenario is for the head of a search committee to tell the other panel members, "I liked the application of the guy from Virginia -- Jonathan Something. Or was it Justin Something? Anyway, let's get him for an interview."

If Justin gets a job, and I don't, it doesn't necessarily mean that I am incompetent. I can apply again the next year, and maybe fortune will swing my way. But if I get a job, and Justin, qualified as he is, does not, then I run the risk of developing the imposter syndrome -- and the crippling survivor's guilt -- so common among assistant professors.

Although our qualifications are very similar, Justin and I are different enough that we probably would not "fit" the same job equally well. Justin is from Florida and loves hot weather. I am from New York and thrive in the cold. Justin is Protestant. I am Catholic, and in the field of religious studies, those affiliations often matter. I would be surprised if we were chosen for on-campus interviews at the same places, though that is exactly what happened to Justin last year as he and another friend of ours were on-campus interviewees for a job that Justin thought he was perfect for -- he actually grew up across the street from the college -- but didn't get.

So I am rooting for Justin. I hope we both get more interviews than Denzel Washington does the week of a premiere. Even if we get a lot of the same interviews, I'm going to wish him the best of luck. I hope I get the chance to give him some advance warning about the questions I was asked, so he can prepare for them better. He would do the same for me, and if we're going to set the field's agenda for decades to come, then we're going to have to remain good friends.