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"Mentoring in the professional neoliberal workplace of is one of those classic words that can be used to invoke or simulate institutional benevolence when there is actually a waning of reciprocity in the employment relation. "
"Since an article consists of about forty 40 paragraphs and you should be able to write a paragraph about something you know in about 30 minutes, you should be able to draft a journal article in around 20 hours."
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- Specific writing projects with deadlines for completion, submission, and revision
- Graduate program deadlines for exams, proposals, and defense
- Major conferences with deadlines for submission of abstracts and proposals
- Job market deadlines
- Major funding deadlines, including both small grants to support short research trips, and large grants to fund dissertation fieldwork.
- Networking goals, including reminders to get in touch with certain individuals related to emerging new research or writing projects
- Teaching dates
- Submission dates for awards and honors
Things that were on it included:
"I am somewhat.. persistent.. in my efforts to get every single PhD student I meet on, and using, Twitter. Surprisingly, although my generation is labelled as being, 'social networkers' the vast majority of people I know and meet are not on Twitter. Facebook yes. Twitter no. Twitter is for weirdos and celebrity stalkers. "
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After you get the a few leads, this is what you do:
Get a CV: The best way to get a CV or list of publications is, imho, to google “[name of professor] department” or “[name of prof] professor department”. Googling for ‘CV’ will get you the CVs of everyone whose committee your prof was on. Googling ‘anthropology’ won’t work because often these people aren’t in anthropology departments. Sometimes ‘professor’ won’t work for non-US schools because they might be ‘senior lecturers’ or something like that.
Download Orgy: download every article and publication, conference paper and report. Often the shorter informal pieces are better because they get to the point quickly and give you a sense of the person. This phase is enjoyable because you have the illusion of making progress merely by right-clicking. Find everything. The more obscure the better. Never give up, never surrender.
"This study offers an important policy lesson. Training more Ph.D.s in some targeted areas might fail to improve research output in these areas. In this instance, supply-side economics fails. It might be preferable to create new research jobs instead and attract the Ph.D.s with better salaries."
"Making revisions in response to referees' comments can be challenging and sometimes discouraging. A pragmatic step-by-step approach can help overcome barriers."
"I would say that Deans tend to fall into three general patterns in terms of interactions with job candidates—the explanatory pattern, the budgetary pattern, and the intellectual pattern. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive."
"The first question in the phone interviews asked how I would assess a course. The second asked how I would incorporate assessment in curriculum development. I’m reproducing my responses below because I think that it would be helpful to blog readers to have a response ready should similar questions be asked of them."
"So, let's take stock. Is there a crisis? Not in the usual definition of the word, no. But, there are serious issues that we should consider, and these tap deep into both the mission and purpose of higher education and its relationship to society as a whole."
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The good things for society about the current system are that the over-supply of PhDs produces a steady stream of highly educated people for other industries and government to use. The over-supply means that low-quality departments will tend to improve over time because they can hire better people than their peers tend to produce. The over-supply also means that the best or most desirable departments will also tend to improve over time because they can select their new hires from the very best of the very best. For scholarship in general, this is a good thing. The over-supply means that academia has a large supply of low-cost skilled labor (graduate students) for producing research, educating younger students, etc. And, the over-supply means that academia has an adequate supply of potential faculty to facilitate restructuring needs, i.e., responding to the changing demands from society and the changing roles of universities.
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The bad things are that the over-supply is a colossal waste of human potential for people who aspire to be faculty but who ultimately fail to find employment. For instance, many very talented individuals will spend substantial time in low-paying, low-benefits temporary employment (graduate students, postdocs, adjuncts, research faculty positions, etc.) only to discover years or decades later that these years are now counted against them on the job market (and not just in the academic market). The over-supply makes the individual experience of finding a job fairly brutal and with a high error rate (many people who should get faculty jobs do not [13]). Success also comes with a cost in the form of moving a very large distance (the faculty job market is one of the few truly national labor markets). The over-supply has made it easy for susceptible colleges and universities to slowly replace their tenure track faculty with non-tenure faculty with less autonomy, less security, lower pay and lower benefits, which ultimately means these institutions basically abandon one of their missions: preserving human knowledge. It also makes the institution less democratic, which likely has a negative impact on the campus culture and the educational environment.
"If we are going to be serious about helping the academic humanities survive into the 21st century, we need to make the dissertation (a little) less rigorous, but make graduate schools harder to get into, by cutting the number of slots, even of entire departments. That way, only the very best students (ideally) will pursue PhDs, but those who do will likely finish and may actually have tenure-track jobs awaiting them. The most committed and most talented students will get a greater proportion of the financial and faculty support universities can provide. Fewer students will be around to teach, but since there will be fewer programs, they will congregate around top faculty, creating very high level intellectual communities. Yes, it’s elitist and “meritocratic,” insofar as any of this is meritocratic and not purely subjective (another debate altogether). But I can’t think of any other good solution."
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Take every opportunity available to present your work publicly. While I emphasized the importance of national conferences for reputation purposes, actively pursue every possible local and regional opportunity for experience purposes. Public speaking is one of the core skills of an academic career. Make your mistakes in graduate school, where the stakes are low, so that you are a master of the podium when the stakes are high.
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Cultivate a letter writer who is not from your Ph.D.-granting institution. Having all your recommendation letters come from your own committee or department is the sign of a relatively immature candidate. It is not a death knell in your first or second years on the market, but be aware that the strongest and most successful candidates will have a recommendation from an influential senior scholar from outside their home department who can speak to their standing in the field (and not simply to their performance as a graduate student in the department).
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"That’s why I have a large poster of James Franco up next to my computer; to remind me that no matter what enticing career paths may arise in the short term, its vital to keep on the path and complete the PhD.
No, seriously, that’s really why I have a poster of Franco next to my computer…."
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