“I’ve needed to be a philosophy professor since I first took an Intro to Philosophy course my first semester of undergrad. I’ve labored tirelessly for 15 years towards this objective. There have been so many instances once I felt fully defeated, hopeless, on the verge of giving up. There have been a number of events when it appeared clear to that it simply wasn’t going to occur. I’m elated that it has labored out.”
Jeremy V. Davis is presently a tenure-track assistant professor of philosophy on the University of Georgia. It took him 5 years of making use of for educational positions to land that job. His intention in sharing his story is to offer a way of what it’s wish to be on the educational job marketplace for up and coming graduate college students. He says:
5 years isn’t an uncommonly very long time on the philosophy job market. I’m undecided of the numbers, however I’d guess it’s fairly near common—possibly somewhat on the excessive aspect, contemplating that many individuals depart for different careers after just a few years available on the market. Transferring round for years, residing in relative monetary precarity, always having to do complicated and time-consuming administrative paperwork in new locations, discovering new medical doctors, paying first/final month’s hire earlier than receiving the returned deposit out of your earlier condo, questioning whether or not you’ll ever be capable to discover longer-term stability in a spot, dropping and making new associates, and usually simply uprooting your total life (and that of your partner/companion/household): these are, sadly, fairly customary occupational hazards within the area.
However it’s not my intention on this submit to wax poetic about this journey, what I’ve realized about myself and my career, and so forth. My objective right here is moderately to light up a number of the extra particular parts of my job search that, in my expertise, stay comparatively opaque to those that haven’t already skilled it—significantly, graduate college students who’re planning to enter the career. In my case, whereas I knew that discovering a job in academia can be laborious, I didn’t have a transparent sufficient sense of simply how laborious it might be—and what, particularly, my very own trajectory may seem like.
The submit shares some particulars of Professor Davis’s job searches, with numbers and graphs:
Information from Davis’s final yr on the job market.
However he cautions:
Please don’t take me as providing recommendation right here. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m simply sharing my data in an space that I discover in any other case rife with opacity. That is meant solely as providing perspective, not any kind of roadmap for you…
I don’t suppose my journey available on the market presents too many classes that we didn’t already know; and when it seems like such a lesson is likely to be out there, I think it’s not very replicable—it’s too particular to my circumstances, the circumstances of the job itself/the committee/the college/the opposite candidates. The randomness of this course of is simply so pervasive.
And in a approach, that is kind of the rub: whereas I do know I labored so laborious to get right here, I don’t suppose I earned it in any actual sense. I, like each different job candidate, made a collection of decisions, over the course of a few years, that occurred to align in the fitting approach—in some sense higher than a enough variety of different candidates—with the wants and pursuits of a sure group of people that simply so occurred to be hiring that yr.
You possibly can learn the entire account here.
