Part 3 of this series focused on the problem of stacking commitments – the tendency for non-dissertation commitments to overwhelm one’s schedule in the final stages of graduate school as one tries to become a viable candidate on the job market. Now’s the time to consider the job market itself and how the initial run can impact your dissertation work.
First, let’s start with the ideal scenario. You manage to get a couple publications during graduate school, and the rest of your CV is pretty solid. You spend most of your summer finishing a full draft of your dissertation. Only revisions and the formal defense remain. You then devote the remainder of your summer and the first half of the fall toward job market preparation. You make sure all your statements are polished and that your writing samples have been thoroughly revised and edited according to feedback from your colleagues. You keep pace with the job market deadlines while making revisions to your dissertation manuscript and schedule a January defense, ensuring that your dissertation will be done long before you start your first job (if you're able to snag one).
That all sounds fine and dandy, but it’s pretty far removed from how things actually play out for most graduate students. In all likelihood, you won’t be so close to finishing your dissertation when your first job market run commences, and the stress and tedium of filling out applications will take a substantial psychological toll. Additionally, for reasons discussed in Part 3, it’s likely that some of your time will be tied up in outside projects during the last couple years of graduate school, which may impede your dissertation progress. Depending on how kind the peer review process has been to you earlier in grad school, you might also be trying to tack on another publication at the start of the fall semester.
In reality, the circumstances for your first job market run are not likely to be ideal, and you will probably still have dissertation progress to make while it’s going on. So how do you balance your teaching, dissertation work, side projects, and the 70, 80, or even 100+ job applications you will be submitting?
Frankly, there’s no miracle to be found here. Or at least not one that I’m aware of. One year ago, I had to postpone work on my dissertation while I prepped and finalized dossier materials (which took about 10 days of very intense work, in addition the initial prep I had done in the summer) and sent out the first major haul of applications. Even after that, the job market continued to suck up time. There is no rigid schedule for job postings anymore, which means that new ones appear throughout the winter and spring. You have to keep checking for new posts and submitting applications throughout the academic year (or until you get a job offer).
To make matters worse, many applications have unusual or idiosyncratic requirements that force you to construct one-time-use documents from scratch. For instance, as part of the application process for the job I currently have – a postdoc at the University of South Florida – I was required to include a statement explaining how my research fit into the university’s strategic plan for the next 5 years. That required me to read this strategic plan and write up something about it, and I didn’t use this material for any other of the 90 applications I sent out. This experience is rather common, especially for postdoc applications, and it means that even after the vanilla dossier documents are assembled and polished, you won’t be done creating content.
If you’re fortunate enough to get first-round interviews, these will also consume a lot of time. You’ll want to research the department and institution that you might work for, and you’ll want to schedule mock interviews to prepare. These interviews will, even if they go well, be very stressful, and most people who get these interviews do not get invited to campus visits afterward. The experience of getting an interview but then being eliminated from the search can be emotionally devastating: you get a flicker of hope, have a short time to nurture it, and then have it abruptly extinguished. It’s not a good time.
All this means that the job market will sap a lot of your time and energy. Theoretically, working on your dissertation during this stretch could function as a type of escape from the tedium of completing applications and the dismay of rejection letters, but it’s very hard to remain honed in on writing such a large project when your mental and emotional resources are so heavily invested in something else.
This probably doesn't sound like a pretty picture, but that's because it isn't. Grinding through the job market is brutal, no matter your career stage, and working on the dissertation at the same time makes it even harder. The good news is that this combination of dissertation work and the job market should only happen once. The best advice I can give is to just push through the 4-6 months that this lasts and then plan to take a significant vacation afterward to recharge (though not until after you’ve passed your defense and made sure all your graduation paperwork is in order). I’ve touched on the importance of vacations before, and there may never be a better time for one than after you have completed your dissertation and survived your first year on the job market.
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