Bibliography

[the_lady_lily]

Surviving Your Academic Job Hunt: Advice For Humanities PhDs - Kathryn Hume

Hume's main selling point for this volume is that she's targeting Humanities PhDs specifically - that is, she avoids the problem of some of these kinds of books in trying to give advice so general that it gets a bit meaningless, or in talking about things which are true for people in the sciences but total rubbish for humanities students. For instance, a lot of science people have to worry about the fear that their work will be seen as an outcrop of their supervisor's work, and have to prove that they are in fact capable of generating their own ideas, not just doing what their supervisor tells them. This, obviously, is less of a problem for humanities PhDs, as we don't have to find someone's lab and project to be attached to.

The tone of this book overall just feels very - well, bitter, is the best word. Some people might call it realistic, but I can't help but feel bitter is more accurate. For instance, there's the statement that one shouldn't expect to get any work done at all during job hunting season. While I can see that for people who are applying to sixty-odd jobs (and some people will be), the hunt shouldn't always be that consuming - at least, I wouldn't have thought so. Maybe this is just me thinking that everyone is capable of everything all at once - it's not to say that I've not found applications time-consuming, but with a bit of careful planning I'm still getting on with the research. Anyway. Realism. That's what it is.

Although the somewhat gritty tone of the book did make me blink in surprise a bit (and given how many of these I'm chalking up, that's saying something), there are some Very Useful Things here, most notably the almost exhaustive list of questions people might ask you at interviews so you can practice thinking about answers for them. This has been photocopied and will be forming part of my Useful Things folder, as will the corresponding list of questions one might like to ask the employers - you know you should have questions, but rarely it is obvious what they should be.

Hume's also does a fairly good job of describing the world of academic politics into which one is about to be plunged, and how to avoid looking like a Clueless Grad Student. I suppose it depends how your department goes about these things and how insulated you are from the proceedings that will determine how useful that is; certainly it filled in some interesting gaps in my own knowledge.

So, worth picking up, although be aware that the tone is honest rather than reassuring.

PS - I am also reading non-academic books. It's just they're going a bit slower.

Comments

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Bitter and honest seems like a refreshing approach, really. Of course, I'm not an academic of any kind, so my views on this may be irrelevant. But I really think people ought to write this sort of thing for other professions too - law and medicine easily spring to mind.

[whatifoundthere.livejournal.com]

For instance, there's the statement that one shouldn't expect to get any work done at all during job hunting season.

I don't see anything bitter about that statement. She's talking about how much time and energy (I would also add money) the job hunt takes. It's a lot. I think she might be overstating the case to say that you'll get no other work done while you're on the market -- I was usually teaching while I was doing it, and my lectures did get prepped -- but whether her statement is factually true doesn't seem to be the same as whether it's bitter or not.

Perhaps the original quote had a bitter tone? Because from what you're writing here, I'm just not seeing it. The job hunt DOES take a massive amount of time away from your actual work. It's just a fact. I would spend days in a row tweaking letters, assembling packages, hunting down referees, ordering transcripts, and so on. I didn't apply to 60 jobs a season, either, mostly because there weren't ever 60 jobs to apply to.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

I think it is the tone of the first chapter or so that I'm not quite catching here - it really was the way it was written. I found the first chapter very abrasive, but then either the tone modified or I got used to it. Not quite sure which. As I say, the facts she was imparting were honest and straight-forward, but something about the delivery jarred a bit.