First Person

A Short, Strange Trip

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By Andy Jackson

If you're lucky, a subtle transition begins to occur near the end of your search for a tenure-track job: The head of the search committee suddenly starts responding to your e-mailed questions with alacrity. Committee members volunteer information about their personal lives and offer to discuss child-care providers or the housing market. And departmental staff members process reimbursements for your travel expenses with an efficiency that defies standard bureaucratic logic.

Slowly, you realize that you are no longer a wallflower pining away on the fringes of someone else's dance party. You grow more confident, more hopeful, and spend more time reading up on the various cities where you've made campus visits. One day, you even forget to take your cellphone to work.

When the phone does ring, it's obvious that a complete transformation has occurred: "Well, I'm delighted," you find yourself saying. "Of course, I am interested. ... I'm tremendously excited that the committee has agreed that I'm their first choice for the job. ... I'm eager to review the offer. ... How soon will you need to hear back from me?"

You take your cue from the numerous interviewers with whom you've interacted over the past months. You are warm but noncommittal, encouraging but professionally distant.

Or so I attempted to be when I received a job offer this spring, although I felt anything but noncommittal. Fireworks were going off inside and I was instantly drafting a mental note of the family members, friends, and mentors who needed to be informed immediately about my incredible good fortune.

After very little hemming and hawing (I'm a rather poor negotiator), I accepted my first tenure-track offer and withdrew from the other searches. In the fall, I will be an assistant professor of English at a state college in the same system where I earned my master's. It is a decidedly mid-tier institution, much like the one where I did my doctoral work, and exactly the sort of place at which I hoped to find a job.

While I will teach undergraduates in the majority of my classes, I will also teach some graduate courses with students who will be in much the same position I was 10 years ago. While this outcome is exactly the one I described as my dream job in my first column, the path I've taken since then has been nothing like what I would have predicted.

For one thing, my new job is only 25 miles away from the university where I did my doctoral work. So much for the "national" job market I've been avidly monitoring for the past 10 years, not to mention the housing-market envy I've developed for university towns in the Midwest.

I had feared that my candidacy would be rejected as a result of my past teaching positions at obviously Christian colleges, but I've experienced nothing but collegial respect and diplomacy. The committee members thoroughly interviewed my references and were genuinely interested in the administrative skills that I had honed through jobs and committee experiences that I had left off of applications for more narrowly defined positions elsewhere.

And despite feeling like "a hacking, gasping middle-aged jogger" after my MLA interview for this job, I went through my campus visit feeling more like a courted guest speaker than a harried interviewee.

It's hard to believe that I could have been so wrong at every stage of the process and still have ended up with a job. In the words of the immortal bard Isaiah, "Who'da thunk it?" (64:4, paraphrased).

That is not to say that I won't afflict other aspiring academics with self-righteous advice about the value of working hard and being a nice guy, or that I won't some day look back on the hiring process as a vindication of the meritocratic ideals espoused by many in academe.

There's no stopping the human tendency to take credit when fate deals a good hand or passing the blame when fate makes us fold. Consequently, I will attempt to summarize some of the lessons I've learned from a process that is both impersonal in its machinations and individual in its effects.

Lesson 1: Have a good backup plan. That plan kept me sane and balanced in the midst of a dizzying array of possible futures. No matter the result of my academic search, my family needed to know that the penury and endless deferral of a settled home life would end soon. On some days, I fantasized about a high-powered government-service career. On other days, I investigated the starting salaries of university administrators, and yes, the grass is much greener on that side of the fence.

Lesson 2: Cultivate nonacademic friendships and activities. I've benefited tremendously from relationships that aren't based on my academic ups and downs. Although Fantasy Football always comes around at an inopportune time, I've never regretted the hours spent hashing it out with friends and relative strangers over the Internet.

Lesson 3: Set many accomplishable goals while you search for a job. Meeting those goals is the best way to give yourself a much-needed shot of self-esteem. For me, getting in shape was an important confidence booster. I never went to an interview without maxing myself out in the push-ups and situps department. I'm still a skinny academic, but I feel lean and mean on the inside.

Lesson 4: End things well where you are. I've had the opportunity to do this so many times in my life that it has become a familiar, if unwelcome, refrain. I spent a lot of time this academic year auditioning for a permanent position with my current employer, but withdrew from that search early enough to have been able to participate in the selection of my successor.

Part of my pleasure in moving on comes from knowing that I have not left my colleagues here in the lurch or shirked my responsibilities as a teacher and departmental citizen. In truth, I think that they are "trading up," but I'll keep that opinion between me and the cozy community of readers of this column.

Lesson 5: Retain some secrets. In every interview, I quickly dispensed with the standard secrets -- marital status, number of kids, geographic concerns related to family. But anything else that wasn't on the CV, I felt, should wait until the interviewers became colleagues or friends. So I didn't tell them about a certain part of my wardrobe that I only wear on occasional weekends (it's not women's clothing or anything like that, but I'm not going to get specific because, hey, it's a secret). I didn't mention that my wife and I were expecting our third child around the same time as we hoped I would get a job offer. And I also neglected to tell them about these columns.

Now that the offer has been made and accepted, I've shared the news of our family's new addition with my future colleagues, and their responses have been warmly congratulatory. Since I'm no longer a job candidate, I can see more clearly why, given what I know of these people, that was always the most likely response.

As for the rest of my secrets, I think I'll wait till after I've had a few drinks at the proverbial faculty mixer in the fall before choosing when and with whom I'll share them. Like anyone who has been happily married for more than a few years, I know that a little mystery is good for us all.