It’s Never Too Early to Plan!
Nicole Smolter (University of Delaware)
We are well into the job search season and even if you are not going on the job market this time around, it’s never too early to start planning and working towards your future career. Hopefully this advice will help you avoid some of the panic and stress that comes along with applying for academic jobs.
1. Publish Your Research
When hiring a future faculty member, departments want to know that you will be a successful school. However, in a competitive job market it’s important to demonstrate your scholarship before you graduate. This means you need to start publishing early in your graduate career. There is a lag between when you submit an article, when it’s reviewed and returned, and when it is actually published. This means you should start publishing early so that by the time you are ready to go on the market you have articles already published or in press.
This is sometimes a scary thought for graduate students but the reality is you need to publish to be successful, so you might as well get started now while you have supportive faculty and advisors to help you along the way. If you’re nervous, try working with a faculty member as a second or third author to see how the process works. Don’t let those papers you’ve written for classes go to waste. Don’t let your thesis sit in a folder. Don’t wait until you’ve completed your dissertation to start publishing from it. The worst that can happen is it gets rejected and you get some suggestions and you try again.
2. Teaching Matters
Most of us will be required to teach as part of our future academic careers and many of us will end up working at smaller teaching focused schools. This means you need to be working on your teaching throughout your graduate career so that when it comes time to go on the job market you are prepared. You cannot make up teaching evaluations a week before an application is due. You should be documenting your teaching efforts and collecting evidence of your teaching effectiveness along the way. Even if you are only serving as a teaching assistant see if there is a way to get feedback from the students you’ve worked with. If you aren’t going to have an opportunity to teach your own course try to find ways that you can start to demonstrate how you would teach. Can you give a guest lecture? Can you develop an assignment for a course you TA for? If you are teaching your own course make sure to keep track of assignments, syllabi, etc. and reflect on how they worked or didn’t work. This will be helpful when you have to submit a teaching portfolio or are asked about your teaching during an interview.
3. Use Your Resources to Get an Early Start
If your school as a Career Services Center or a Center for Teaching and Learning use it! This has been the biggest help for me as I’ve started the job search process. I have participated in several workshops and even a Higher Education Teaching Certificate program during my second and third years as a graduate student. This gave me the opportunity to develop my CV, sample cover letters, a teaching and research statement, evidence of my teaching effectiveness, and even a website. It is helpful to do this type of preparation while you have some extra time and not in the middle of applying for jobs and writing your dissertation. Since I’ve had all of these materials prepared I spent minimal time updated and refining them which has made my job search process much less stressful. It’s also helpful to get an outside perspective (instead of just your advisor or department) because you’re more likely to get extra attention and really thoughtful feedback to ensure that you have the best application possible.