FIRST PERSON

Adventures in (Inter) Disciplinarity

Two Ph.D. candidates in the humanities chronicle their search for their first tenure-track jobs

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By ANNE GALINA and LYNN ELLIOTT

We are friends and colleagues from different doctoral programs at different universities in different states. We met at a 2007 seminar, drawn to each other initially by virtue of intersecting research interests and by a happy accident of seating. In the year since, we have found much in common, personally and professionally.

Despite our many similarities, however, we have one substantial difference academically: Lynn has a discipline, and Anne does not. Or, more precisely, Anne has many.

While Lynn took the path of disciplinary certainty and has spent her career exclusively in English departments, Anne has followed a more avant-garde approach and will earn her Ph.D. in an interdisciplinary program in the humanities. Yet we are both peering over the same professional precipice — preparing ourselves and one another (and our loved ones and pets) for our first ventures onto the job market in search of tenure-track jobs.

You meet our heroines as the summer before the job search draws to a close ...

Day 1: Lynn learns that her search will begin in earnest in September, when the Modern Language Association will release its "Job Information List." She highlights the date on her calendar and returns to her research.

A few states away, Anne passes the afternoon compulsively pressing "refresh" on the myriad Web pages she has been trawling, looking for suitable job openings.

Day 3: Lynn daydreams about what her life would be like in different towns and at different universities. The possibilities are exhilarating.

Meanwhile, Anne interrupts her refreshing to phone her friend to discuss the job search. Although cheered by Lynn's enthusiasm, Anne hangs up wondering if nine months before defending her dissertation is too late to flee to a more conventional field of study.

Day 7: Anne is finding it hard to muster enthusiasm over her once-beloved dissertation, wondering where it will lead her, if anywhere.

Lynn's advisers have warned that despite the rather rigid progression of the job-search season in English, individual hiring processes can be highly arbitrary and the results are not necessarily reflective of her value and potential as a scholar. Accordingly, she fantasizes about alternate careers as a taxi driver, a blues singer, and a freelance photographer.

Day 12: Lynn reserves her flight for the MLA convention in December. She explains to Anne that the meeting is where the first round of interviews typically happens, and that campus visits would follow.

Anne is awash with envy over so systematic and predictable a job search, but she decides to stop moping and start getting organized, transforming her collection of job announcements into an orderly spreadsheet. Her spirits are buoyed by the task of developing an unnecessarily complicated system.

Day 13: Coasting on the momentum from yesterday's sorting and color-coding, Anne discusses her situation with a trusted mentor, and asks him how she got herself into this intellectual mess. He responds by observing that she simply decided to pursue the subjects that she finds compelling. Anne's rejoinder is an unlovely snort, but he is right.

Day 14: Lynn also reminds Anne of the value of an interdisciplinary perspective. Lynn has worked to position herself as an interdisciplinary scholar within literary studies and hopes that her approach to her well-defined subfield will offer her some flexibility when responding to job ads. Perhaps she will not be entirely limited by the national and temporal boundaries by which most jobs in English are customarily defined.

Spreadsheet perfected and existential purpose confirmed, Anne gets to work. She calculates that she already plans to apply for jobs in more than a dozen different fields. In addition to managing the widely varied preferences of search committees, she will also have to reflect her competency with a disparate collection of epistemological perspectives, methodological orientations, and institutional values. Good thing she likes to write.

Day 18: Anne realizes that she might not like to write quite so much as she initially thought, and begins instead to develop templates for all necessary documents that could be tailored to each job. That will streamline the process somewhat, but results in a cover-letter draft that looks like a Mad Lib.

While plotting ways to pirate Anne's spreadsheets, Lynn cruises the Web for fairly standard, discipline-specific models of application letters and abstracts on which she will rely. At this point, she has only seen one job opening that suits her skills.

Day 22: After experimenting with different fonts for her letter and CV, and weighing the merits of 20 versus 24-pound paper, Anne confronts the hard truth of her job search: Interdisciplinary programs are comparatively few and far between. Disciplinary programs are plentiful, but so too are the Ph.D.'s that those programs mint and hire. Her task, then, is to refute the conventional (if often tacit) academic wisdom that interdisciplinary inquiry results in scholarship that is scattershot, and that the people who produce it aspire to academic mediocrity — i.e., being pretty good at a lot of things instead of being really good at one thing. That means she will have to find a way to make her hard-fought credentials seem like more, rather than less.

As Anne comes to a truce with her situation, Lynn oscillates between near comfort and a strange suffocating sensation. Her able mentors have prepared her well, and she thinks she has fairly solid and accurate expectations for her job-market experience. She finally feels ready, more like a potential assistant professor and less like a graduate student. She is trained, she is fluent in the conventions of academic teaching and research, and she wants this. Her simultaneous joy and claustrophobia come partly from the disparity between the nearly set-in-stone timeline of the hiring process and the uncertainty of her future. No matter how good, how well prepared, or how precisely her expertise matches the qualifications for a particular position, Lynn knows that this time next year she may yet find herself without the lucrative job for which she has so rigorously trained.

Day 25: Sensing that her good friend might be as fatigued as she is, Anne calls a temporary halt to her CV polishing and teaching-philosophizing (and continued refreshing) to chat with her comrade, who wonders aloud about what Anne's interview process will look like. Anne answers with the verbal equivalent of a shrug, as she outlines the possibilities that successful letters could result in interviews at the meetings of any number of professional associations, or elsewhere, before leading her to the familiar terrain of a campus visit and a job talk.

Lynn continues to fantasize about alternate careers (dog trainer, pickle farmer, jingle writer). Although she lacks the experience required to be a successful pickle farmer, she nonetheless tries to distance herself from the dominant academic mind-set that dictates one lone path to success, however desirable it might be.

Day 27: A bout of optimism and an itch for retail therapy provoke Anne to abandon her writing for a trip to the mall to do some interview-suit reconnaissance. Lynn signs up for a Zumba class.

Day 29: Inspired by the possibility of an excuse to do some serious shopping, Anne has been writing and revising in a frenzy, thinking creatively (and with surprisingly little embellishment) about the connections between her skills and the expressed needs of the departments that she is courting. She can't even begin to imagine how all of that will lead to a job offer, but is animated by the challenge of presenting her research to so many different audiences.

Day 30: Anne mails her first batch of application materials to institutions with early deadlines: four applications, four different fields. She seriously considers beginning work on the next round of applications and promptly abandons the idea, wanting to celebrate this small accomplishment, which will be replicated dozens of times over the coming months.

With feedback from her committee members in hand and reference letters in the bank, Lynn settles into the new semester with renewed faith in the process and rejuvenated anticipation. The possibilities seem endless and exciting. As she scours the job list for vacancies that correspond with her goals and expertise, she gears up for a very busy fall. This glimpse of her future has also jump-started her writing, and she returns to her dissertation with a vengeance.

Afterword: Over a cup of coffee during a rare interstate visit, Anne and Lynn discuss the distinct advantages to Lynn's disciplinary conviction, which promises to make for a more efficient, manageable, and coherent job search than Anne could even dream of.

For Anne, the essential, stomach-knotting unpredictability of the job market is compounded by the fact that all of her routes to the intellectual paradise at the other end are shrouded in mystery. On the other hand, with the regimented hiring process in English comes limitations of choice and mobility that can feel incredibly stifling. And so, although Lynn wouldn't want to trade places with her disciplinarily promiscuous friend, she can appreciate the sense of freedom and possibility that inspire Anne's endless reworkings of her dossier.

Most days, our heroines push on, largely undaunted, inspired by their passion for their work and a sneaking suspicion that their good karma will prevail in the end, which is really just the beginning.

Anne Galina is the pseudonym of a Ph.D. candidate in an interdisciplinary program in the humanities at a research university. Lynn Elliott is a Ph.D. candidate in English at a different research university. They will be chronicling their searches for their first tenure-track jobs.