Advice
Be well organized and ahead of the game! Get your job-seeking materials ready early. Don’t ever have to ask people for letters, or advice, or to contact hiring departments, or for other favors, at the last minute. They may be out of town or otherwise unable to do the favor if you wait too long to ask them. A person who is a strong job candidate on paper may forfeit a significant amount of that strength (or even all of it) if they can’t get their act together (or get their recommenders moving) in a timely fashion.
Being on the job market is stressful!
Looking for a job often feels like a full time job. Applying for academic jobs, and perhaps even more, getting ready to apply for them during the summer, or the entire year, previous to the year when you will be on the market, is a lot of work. It draws upon your other work (especially your dissertation work) but it goes way beyond that and often interferes with work on your dissertation. You have to write and send out letters of application, craft a CV whose ease in reading is often inversely proportional to the effort required to design it, consult frequently with your dissertation director, other members of your committee and the placement director, prepare the best writing sample you can, spending weeks and weeks revising and revising again in order to put before search committees the best work of which you are capable, all the while hoping against hope that they will have even ten or fifteen minutes to spend reading it and the intelligence to appreciate it. You have to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, presenting yourself to prospective employers in the most impressive and attractive way you are able. And after that, all you can do is hope, with no guarantee whatever, that all your efforts won’t be totally wasted just because of other people’s ignorance, stupidity or carelessness.
Even apart from all the time they have to take to do these things, people on the job market often find that just being in the state of looking for an academic job is very distracting. The distraction is often one they can ill afford, since they are trying to complete their dissertation and prepare for an important transition in their lives. Anxieties and self-doubts of all kind can play with their minds, get in the way of their work and make it difficult to think about philosophy at all. If this happens to you, try to be psychologically prepared to combat it, and above all don’t think you are the only person to whom this has ever happened. Probably only a tiny minority of people in your situation have been exempt from it. Be aware that your dissertation director, the other members of your committee, and the placement director, know what you are going through and are sympathetic -- indeed, they very likely went through something very similar themselves at the same career stage. It is not out of place for you to share your worries with them and let them help you distinguish the real issues and problems in your job search from the 3 am Freddie Krueger type fantasies. Above all, don’t be surprised or ashamed about being driven to irrationality, because, contrary to what everyone seems to be assuming --
This is not a rational process. All the time, through all the stages, you (and your recommenders, and the placement director) are doing everything they can to persuade potential employers that they should hire you because you, and your work, meet certain high professional standards. The hiring departments are for their part doing their best to see to it that they hire people who meet such standards. So on all sides, everyone is pretending that the outcome will be rationally governed by objective professional standards. But come on, we know that is not true. Despite what economists’ theories may say, in the real world markets are not rational. Whether you get hired will very often depend on how a department is being treated (or mistreated) by its administration, or on power struggles within a hiring department over something that has nothing at all to do with the merits of your work or your merits as a philosopher. Even when the outcome is not dictated by such accidental external circumstances, hiring departments, even with the best of intentions and with every effort to apply the right professional standards, simply make mistakes – as judged by any professional standard that anyone could name – much more often than we professionals (with our vested interests in the process) would ever care to admit.
So try not to let it get to you. It is all the more important to keep this in mind because the truth of the matter is much easier to assert on the abstract intellectual level (as I’ve just been doing) than to accept at an emotional and experiential level. Some people will benefit from the market’s irrationalities; many more people are hurt by them. If you do well, rejoice and feel good about yourself. If, however, life deals you the queen of spades, then you should not let it get to you any more than it absolutely has to. Keep working away at philosophy, and try not to let it get you down. The external circumstances of our lives may be at the mercy of this absurd system, but we should do everything in our power not to let it get inside our heads and set up its mindless hegemony there too.
