and Julie Miller Vick's excellent book, The Academic Job Search Handbook (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992, 1996).
Then Ms. Mentor will advise them, as in the following exchanges.
Wow! A Clown!
Q: I've been told that vitas and job applications need a “WOW” factor—something with a unique flair. My grad school classmate who wrote her dissertation on the Marquis de Sade plans to wear leather to interviews; another who wrote on menstruation swears she'll have the nerve to wear a white dress with red spots.
My dissertation, though, is just on Elizabethan comedy. I've been a school grind and library rat all my life, except for the crazy summer I spent as Bozo the Clown at an amusement park, where I learned to smoke marijuana and finally got fired when I was found half-dressed and dazed underneath the Thunder Coaster.
How can I wow a hiring committee?
A: Ms. Mentor would say that you do have a wow factor, right under your nose (right where you wore your Bozo honker). She suggests that you delete the part about the dope and the Thunder Coaster, but keep the rest: it's the funny little bit that will make your application letter stand out.
Hiring committees these days have to be ruthless. With five hundred to a thousand people or more applying for each spot, the first screeners—who may be temporary contract employees—have to throw out the dull, the unsigned, the misspelled, the mal-addressed, and the indecipherable, as well as the cringing, the flaky, the morbid, the fanatical, and the psychopathic.
Then hiring committees start their serious reading.
They're hoping desperately to be entertained, entranced, or tricked out of the misery of reading hundreds of letters that sound alike. “I am applying for…,” “I have studied…,” “My dissertation attempts a synthesis…,” “I argue that, contrary to previous theorists…,” “I would be happy to meet with you….”
And so Ms. Mentor advises you to announce early in your letter that you have a special something for the job. For instance: “My field is Elizabethan comedy, which I've studied in theory—through my academic work—and in practice, in my summer job as Bozo the Clown. I've found that being Bozo helped me understand the performativity…” (“performativity” being one of the chic buzz words for the lit crit crowd…).
You can state that playing Bozo the Clown taught you about teaching, which is, after all, a lot like standup comedy. Through your Bozo work, you learned a kind of public polish that aided you when you taught first-year composition…And helped you with acting out scenes when you taught Introduction to Literature…. (Did it help? Well, say that it did: you'll sound like an engaging teacher.)
A good application letter is a performance with one goal: seducing your audience into interviewing you. Candidates who've sent letters on perfumed or hot pink paper or with words cut out of the newspaper also do get attention—but they're often regarded as unprofessional, and their efforts get posted on mailroom bulletin boards. (Some are even turned over to the police.)
Your letter, though, has a good chance of getting you the coveted interview, whereupon Bozo will help once more. Most academic interviews can be dry: “Tell us about your dissertation”; “What would you like to teach at our university?”; “What are your research plans?”; “What do you see yourself doing five years from now?” Especially after a day of convention interviews, hiring committees will be wiggy with fatigue—at which point someone who can make them laugh may make them weep with relief.
You can be the dashing-but-dignified young woman who amuses and delights even the most jaded codgers with tales of Bozo, the commedia dell'arte, and Shakespeare. And be sure to mention A Midsummer Night's Dream. To most English Department academics, the character Bottom represents their greatest fear as they stand before a class of adolescents, trying to teach: What if they notice that I'm wearing the head of an ass?
In short, Ms. Mentor congratulates you on having a genuine wow factor, on being able to produce the humor and entertainment that are so lacking, and so wildly appreciated, in these difficult academic times.
Were Ms. Mentor on a hiring committee, you'd undoubtedly be her first choice.
That Old Soft Shoe—Will Nothing Else Do?
Q: Once I finish my Ph.D. (in the social sciences), I figure I'll have spent twenty-two years in school, working up to a first job as a university professor. Yet most hiring is done first by letters (most candidates are screened out), and then with half-hour interviews at our major organization's annual meeting.
I figure I can write a super standout letter that can nab me an interview. But then my whole academic future—including whether I even have an academic future—hinges on my “performance” for, say, twenty-eight minutes. Isn't this like being a standup comic (or a bank robber)? Is this the way to run a knowledge industry—making us flit and swoop and strut our stuff like Fred Astaire or Madonna?
I almost wonder if I shouldn't just mail off a videotape of myself dancing, singing, and spieling on my own behalf.
A: What you describe is, indeed, the commencement of a professorial career: the new Ph.D., fresh from the rigors of intellectual competition and bursting with new ideas and enthusiasm for teaching and learning, has to perform a successful dog-and-pony show for half an hour in order to get her foot in the door.
If she fails her audition—and most of those interviewed won't get the role—then it's quite possible that the career and the life she's worked for through all the years of straight As and honor rolls and scholarships and fellowships may all wither, turn to ashes, go down the tubes. (Ms. Mentor's readers may supply their own favorite metaphors.)
Is this fair? No.
But out of injustice, says Ms. Mentor feebly, can sometimes come opportunity.
Not getting an academic job is not the end of the universe as we know it—although after twenty-two straight years of schooling, you may think so. If you'd asked Ms. Mentor's advice much earlier, she would have told you not to leap from college into grad school. Ms. Mentor feels it is much wiser for everyone, even valedictorians and summas and magnas and dean's listers, to dip at least a toe into the Real World. Scholars need the experience of full-time wage earning, office politics, handling bureaucracies and paperwork, dealing with impossible or good bosses, as well as car owning, cat feeding, apartment renting, cooking and cleaning and being adults.
In short, Ms. Mentor would have preferred that you do a real-life research project—“What do I want to be when I grow up?”—rather than plowing straight on through school.
But that is all water under the widget. Now your hurdle is the interview—your audition.
When Ms. Mentor first surveyed the field some fifteen years ago, there were over one hundred fifty books on interviewing, but very few on how to be interviewed. More useful, Ms. Mentor found, were business management texts that told candidates the power spot to sit (to the right of the most powerful person in the room); the best time to schedule one's interview (between 9 and 10 A.M. on the second conference day); and odd pitfalls to avoid, such as invading an interviewer's space by placing a handbag or coat on his turf.
Most helpful, though, are advice books for actors on how to audition. Much of what they say about body language and eye contact and firm handshakes applies. Smile; sit comfortably but neither lewdly nor nervously (wear a longish skirt); look directly at everyone; don't fiddle with jewelry, clothes,
