Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization

Planning Campus Visits and Preparing Job Talks

So you’ve weathered the mid-list, made it to the short list, and now have to prepare for an on-campus visit. Although there’s often variation in what happens on each campus, there are some general trends. Across the last four institutions I’ve been a student or faculty at (BGSU, U of Minnesota, Wayne State and UCSC), the same general components are part of campus visits, although they’re done in a different order on each campus. Visiting job candidates meet individually with most of the faculty in the department and the dean, meet over lunch (or tea) with graduate and undergraduate students (usually two separate events), give a job talk, and eat dinner with department members (usually some mix of faculty and graduate students). It usually means two very full days — often starting at the start of the school day and running through the end of dinner. It’s sort of like running a marathon, and like that, some advanced work goes a long way to making it through. I’ve broken the following up into three sections — preparing for the visit, preparing a job talk, and what to do while on campus. I’m happy to take questions in the comments section.

I should also add that there are really three reasons for campus visits: First, faculty want to make sure that you fit into the environment. The discourse of fitness is pretty expansive, and can mean lots of different things depending on the institution, but basically it means that you share concerns with the faculty and that you fit in socially. Secondly, they want to know that you’re a collegial colleague. Any tenure track job hire potentially means hiring a colleague for life, and people want to make sure that they’re hiring someone they can see working alongside for the next 30+ years. And, finally, they want to know that you would take the job if it were offered to you. If you’re visiting an out of the way college town (see below), it can really help to show people that you’re interested in the region and city as much as the university and the prospects of a job. If you’re visiting campus, it means that you’ve met the minimum requirements of the position, and it’s basically your job to lose. And if it isn’t you that gets the job, it’s more likely one of these campus-visit concerns than your work itself.

Planning for a Campus Visit

1) Familiarize yourself with all of the faculty’s work. It can be a huge task, but it’s the most important thing you can do: read something from every faculty member, and try and read as much as you can from each of them. The reasons are many.

A huge part of discussions about job candidates is their ‘fit,’ or how they articulate with the rest of the existing faculty. If you can get enough of a sense of other people’s work that it comes through in your discussions with them, they’ll leave those conversations with a good sense of what kind of colleague you’ll be. People won’t want to sit around and discuss their work with you in depth — the visit is about you after all — but knowing who you’re talking to is vital in coming across as a conscientious colleague.

It can also help you finely tune your job talk. Knowing my audience at UCSC (an anthropology department founded on feminist scholarship in the 1980s-90s) led me to make explicit in my job talk what’s normally implicit in much of my work, namely that feminist medical anthropology is the basis for much of my work. It probably didn’t get me the job, but it helped convey to my audience that I understood how I fit into the department.

And, finally, you never know who has the power of persuasion or sheer voting power in a department. One very eloquent faculty member can lift or sink your fledgling boat, and you want to make sure that you leave everyone with a good impression of you and your work. In a discipline like anthropology, a department can often be divided between its subfields, so it’s especially important not to ignore the work of people outside of your subfield — they want a colleague too, and it can make all the difference in the world if you’re fluent in their work and are able to have a conversation connecting your interests with theirs. Added to this, if there are subfield groups (e.g. a few archaeologists), they may vote as a block. If you can get the support of them as a unit, it can make a huge difference in the final departmental decision.

2) Know your path to tenure at the institution. Take a look at the profiles of associate professors in the department and try and reverse engineer their paths to tenure — did they need a book? a bunch of articles? a huge outside grant? Looking at a variety a profiles (and you might need to look at other departments as well) should give you a clear sense of what the institution expects of its tenure-seeking professors. When people ask you about your current and near-term work, you should be able to put it into these kinds of institutional objectives so that they know your path to tenure.

3) Prepare six classes to teach based on the school’s curriculum. One of the things that every job candidate gets asked in one form or another is what kinds of classes he or she would like to offer in the department he or she is interviewing in. If you’ve been professionalizing yourself throughout your graduate studies, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But there are some things to keep in mind. First, be sure to know how you would teach classes related to the job search — if it’s a search for someone in the anthropology of North America, you better have a survey class of North American anthropology prepared. It’s also a given that people will ask you about ‘service’ classes — introductory classes and other classes in the requirements for the major in the department. You might never be asked to teach these classes, but knowing how you would tackle a beast like Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (or any other Intro to a Discipline) — and doing it with some innovative flare — can really set you apart from other candidates. It’s also important to know what’s already being taught in the department: you don’t want to poach some other faculty’s course or appear ignorant of the curriculum. And it can be nice to build synergy; if other people are offering classes like the kinds of stuff you would teach, think about how they might build into a mini-curriculum.

4) Look around the university’s website. Some of the key things to look at are grants for junior faculty, faculty housing, the faculty senate (or other form of faculty governance), the breakdown of academic divisions and departments, the structure of the academic calendar, and orientation materials for new employees. This stuff isn’t vital to conversations while you’re visiting campus, but it can give you a really good sense of the institution, and as people tell you about things during your visit, you’ll have a sense of the context. Some campuses post the minutes of their faculty senate meetings, and looking at these can give you a really clear sense of the campus climate and what is currently being debated by the administration and faculty.

5) Figure out who the people you’ll be meeting are. You’ll almost definitely have a meeting with the dean, and most deans will have academic profiles somewhere on the university website. Getting a sense of where a dean is coming from — discipline-wise — can ease your conversation with someone who has the potential to approve the department’s decision to hire you.

6) Get a sense of the region and what it has to offer. Most universities are in university towns — not small, not large, and usually only semi-cosmopolitan. And most faculty know it. Getting familiar with the region — look at the weekly independent newspaper, real estate websites, tourism websites, etc. — can help you find things that will make the area more appealing. It also helps show to your interviewers that you’re taking living in this particular area very seriously and that you know what you’ll be getting into if you make the move.

7) Just try and think of it as a colloquium talk and the chance to get to know some colleagues. There’s no doubt that a campus job visit can be a nerve-wracking event. The best thing you can do is just approach it like you’re getting to know some colleagues and they’re getting to know you. You might get a job out of it, and you’ll definitely expand your social network and get some feedback on your work while you’re there. Being too nervous can come across negatively; being a good colleague and a considerate and curious visitor is usually just what a department wants.

Preparing Job Talks

Here are some suggestions regarding job talks, which I think work with colloquium talks too. First, though, be sure to clarify departmental expectations about how long the talk be — 2 minutes of speaking time generally translates to 1 page of double-spaced text. Most talks are 45 minutes long, but some departments expect longer or shorter talks. (And some might replace a job talk with an in-class presentation on your work!)

Beyond that:

1) Give people one big idea to think about, one of the key ideas from your dissertation or current work. A lot of talks suffer from trying to do too much, and to impress everyone on every page. One tightly focused argument centered around one novel contribution is enough. Also remember that people phase in and out of attention, and if you’re skipping all over the place, they’ll lose the thread.

2) Start your talk with an illustrative example from your research. Anthropologists love their opening anecdotes, and while there are other ways to grab an audience’s attention, a good example from your fieldwork gets people thinking. And it shows what your fieldwork was like. But your first example should only be 1-2 pages long, and it should set up the problem that you’re going to explore in the rest of the paper.

3) Keep your literature review short, and focus on your contributions. No one wants to hear a summary of Foucault’s thinking on governmentality or similar — unless you’re doing something really novel with it. Instead, move quickly though the most immediately relevant literature — the stuff that people know you should know — but don’t go into too much depth in discussing other people’s arguments or research. This is your show after all, and people want to know what you think and are capable of.

4) Use content from throughout the dissertation or your current work to make your point — from various fieldsites, from various empirical sources — so people get a sense of everything you do. Over the course of the paper, you should probably have 3-5 examples from your fieldwork, including the introductory example. Given that many current anthropology projects are multi-sited, and sometimes textual- or archival-based, it’s a good idea to give your audience a sense of what all you can do and what the research looks like. Following from this…

5) Don’t be too data-driven: too much focus on data doesn’t breed very compelling Q & A sessions. With each of your examples being 1-2 pages long, it doesn’t allow for tons of depth for each of them — which is a good thing: it provides people with easy things to ask questions about. Overlong examples tend to lose people’s attention, and the details that are salient to you aren’t always important to your audience — most of them won’t be specialists in your area after all.

6) If you want to use a Powerpoint presentation, keep it simple. It can be great to give people something to look at other than you, and moving between slides with text on them gives you a chance to pause and have a drink of water while your audience reads. Slides can be helpful to convey basic information to your audience that would otherwise eat your talk-time — like geography & maps. I also find it really helpful to put long quotes from respondents or texts on-screen so that the audience can tell the difference between my voice and the voice of my interlocutors.

7) Close with a conclusion that reminds people of all the points that you’ve made in the paper. It’s always a good idea to recap your argument and revisit your examples again — it doesn’t need to be long, but it primes your audience to have a conversation with you.

After your talk, there’s usually anywhere from 15-45 minutes for you to field questions from the audience. If you’ve given people enough to think about, the conversation should lead itself — people will ask for more details about your research and thinking.

While You’re On Campus

The best advice I ever received about campus visits is:

1) Stay hydrated. You’ll be talking all day for a day or two, and it can really begin to wear on your vocal capacities. By the time you get to your job talk, your voice might be in serious disrepair. It’s important to keep hydrated — but not with anything caffeinated (you don’t want to come off as manic). People might be plying you with coffee and tea, but stick to water (unless you really need a pick me up). It might mean frequent trips to the bathroom, but if it means you can get through your job talk with your voice intact, it’ll be worth it.

2) Be a kind and gracious guest. I’ve heard tales of job candidates who were so focused on impressing the faculty that they slighted the administrative staff in the department. There’s a couple problems here: first, these are your potential support staff, and if they dislike you before you’ve even gotten the job, they have the power to make your job miserable. And, second, you never know who wields power in the department, and being rude to a staff person might mean that he or she communicates that to faculty, and suddenly you’re sunk. Beyond the staff, things come up and it’s important to roll with the punches unperturbed. I had a campus visit once in the dead of winter, and one of the faculty was unable to make it to campus due to road conditions — which I only found out after he hadn’t shown up to our scheduled meeting. He made it to the job talk and was effusively apologetic. I wrote to him after the visit and offered him the chance to ask his questions via email. It was frustrating at the time — being stranded in a hallway waiting for someone — but it worked out in the end, and leads to:

3) Bring something to read. Nothing pretentious or trashy, but something that can keep you occupied while you wait for meetings since you’ll never know who’s running late. Sitting in the dean’s office looking at your phone can both be dull and look less than professional. Grading a stack of papers is probably out too. But a novel or some slim academic book can help to fill waiting periods.

There’s probably a ton more to add, but these are the gross contours — ask questions in the comments (or post helpful anecdotes), and we can continue the conversation.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization

Professionalization Checklist/Timeline

Standard caveat: talk this plan over with your adviser and committee — everyone has different ideas about progressing towards being a professional anthropologist. That being said, as a general timeline, I think this works for most people, as it helps to introduce you to the many facets of anthropology as a profession.

I’m basing this on the current average time to graduation in anthropology, which is about 8 years. This means 1-2 years of fieldwork followed by 2-3 years of writing. If you’re moving faster than that, the post-fieldwork phase will need to be condensed appropriately.

Years 1-3

It’s assumed that for your first 3 years you’re in the midst of coursework, passing your qualifying or preliminary exams, and grant writing to support your fieldwork. While you do all of that, try and do these things too:

1) Attend a national conference — the AAA would be the most likely candidate. It’s really helpful to see what the various roles people fill while they’re there, and to get a sense of what conference presentations look like.

2) Attend a subfield or area studies conference — these tend to be much smaller (5-10% of the size of the AAA), and you’re much more likely to run into people who’s work you’ve read. Presentations can often be longer, and sometimes follow different generic formats, all of which is useful to experience.

3) Attend a workshop or small conference — this can be hard to pull off, in part because workshops are often only for the people presenting work, but if there’s one nearby and it’s public, it can be useful to attend one. They tend to favor much longer presentations, and have much more intense and detailed discussions. Since they’re very often comprised of specialists, it can be really helpful to get a sense of what people are talking about in the present moment.

4) Get started on your CV — it can be difficult to reconstruct years of your education and service if you don’t start your CV early. Since it includes things like awards, teaching assistant positions, and departmental service, you will start accruing content early, and it’s best to stay on top of it.

5) Take a stab at your future job letter — yes, your dissertation will probably look entirely different by the time you’re writing your actual job letter, but having a draft to work from can be really helpful. This is especially the case when you go onto the job market in the throes of writing your dissertation — sometimes the most difficult period to talk about what your research is actually about.

6) Sign up for listservs in your area of interest — you can find these on sites like HNET, and they’re a great place to eavesdrop on discussions by more seasoned scholars. They can also be a great venue to find calls for papers for both conferences and publications.

While You’re in the Field (or Similar Situation)

…don’t worry about any of this stuff. It can be helpful to attend a conference if it happens locally, but don’t go out of your way to do anything.

Graduation -3 Years

7) Write a book review — journals often have books for review listed on their websites. Get in touch with the reviews editor and request a book or two — try and pick stuff that’s close to what you work on, but not too close. Often people return from the field and have a hard time getting back into academic production — this can be an easy way back in, or, at least a fairly straightforward way to start thinking academically again.

8) Develop syllabuses for general and topical courses — any academic job you apply for in the U.S. is going to have teaching expectations. Most institutions ask you to teach anywhere from 3-6 classes per year, and if it’s on the higher end of the scale, that generally means there is a lot of duplication, i.e. 3 sections of Intro to Cultural Anthropology each year. I cover this in more depth elsewhere, but for the time being, plan on 3-4 syllabuses, 2 of general interest and 2 in your area. Some good general topics are things like: Intro to Cultural/4-Field Anthro, Ethnographic Methods, and Anthropological Theory; good area syllabuses are things like: Intro to your Subfield, Intro to your Geographic Area, Intro to your Theoretical Concerns — so, in my case, Intro to Medical Anthropology, Intro to American Studies, and a course called The Biology of Everyday Life.

Graduation -2 Years

9) Write another book review — as above. You might stay with the same journal or look elsewhere. You can also choose your own book to review (i.e. not something that the journal has), and see if the reviews editor is interested in a review of it.

10) Prepare a short article manuscript for a subfield or area studies journal — I cover publishing strategies elsewhere, so I’ll keep it short here: identify a subfield or area studies journal that you like, and prepare a manuscript for them. Often, these are in the 6,000 word range, which is substantially shorter than the flagship journals. There’s no need to aim your sights too high, either in terms of journal or intervention. Prepare an article that adds a little nuance to already established subfield or area studies interests, and let people know what you do.

11) Present at a national & subfield or area studies conference — since you’ve already attended one of each, you should have a sense of what you’re getting yourself into. If you signed up for some listservs way back in years 1-3, you can find calls for papers there. For your first time out, send an abstract to someone who is organizing a panel — it’s less work than organizing one yourself, and has a better chance of making it into the conference than just submitting a solo paper. But if nothing seems to match your interests, you an always try a solo paper submission…

12) Revise your job letter — as you close in on going onto the market, take another stab at your job letter. If you’ve done all of the above, you should have some fresher material to update the letter, and if you take the time to look at some jobs ads, you’ll have a good sense of what market interests are in the present.

13) Get involved with a Special Interest section at the AAA (or similar) — many of the sections have graduate student essay awards, which can be a great place to send your first article manuscript. It might be nice to win an award, but just getting on the radar of people in your subfield or who share interests with you can be helpful in the long run.

Graduation -1 Year

14) Prepare a longer article manuscript for a general anthropology journal (but not necessarily a flagship journal) — again, I cover this in more depth elsewhere, but in short: prepare an 8,000 word article manuscript for a general audience — that is, if your first article is about something really subfield-focused, try out something more generally interesting to anthropologists . It’s probably going to take longer to develop, and once written, longer to get published, so it’s important to get this into your queue early.

15) Organize panels for a national & subfield or area studies conference — now that you’ve done at least a couple presentations, and have the start of a social network interested in your area, put together a panel for the AAA and a subfield or area studies meeting. You might present on it as well, or present on another panel, choosing to chair the ones your organize (or provide introductions to them). And try and get at least one discussant on your panel — someone in your area who you’ve had limited or no interaction with so far.

16) Present at a national & subfield or area studies conference — as above, although you may be presenting on your own panels. I make a goal of doing two panels at the AAA each year, one with people I know and have worked with before, and one of people who I know of, but have never presented with. It’s a good way to constantly be expanding your network, and many times people enjoy the opportunity to present on panels of strangers.

17) Apply for inclusion in a topical workshop — you’ll see calls for papers for topical workshops on listservs, and it’s worth applying to one in your area. The odds of getting accepted are usually pretty low — there are limited slots and lots of applicants. But if you do get in, it can be a great networking opportunity.

18) Get involved with a special interest group or subfield organization through the AAA — sometimes there’s room for a graduate student representative or other graduate student positions with special interest groups, which can be a great way to interact with senior people in your areas of interest.

19) Finalize your job letter, and start applying for jobs — I talk about this in depth elsewhere, but in your final year of writing it’s finally time to commit to applying for jobs (and postdocs).

At Graduation:

If you follow these guidelines, at the time of your graduation you should have:

An up-to-date CV, a job letter, 1 book review published and 1 in press, 1 article published and 1 in press (or under revision), a few conference presentations under your belt, and 2-3 syllabuses ready to teach. You should be well on your way to establishing a diverse social network, which will help you in publishing, teaching, and presenting in the future — and might lead to job prospects. And this all means that you should be ready for the next phase… Graduation +1.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer Professionalization

Publishing Strategies (Generally)

I think it’s better to have a steady track record of getting stuff published in “respectable” journals than it is to have one piece in a flagship journal. There’s a few reasons for this:

The flagships have pretty high rejection rates, and because of the number of submissions they get, editors have less ability to step in and try and recover a rejection into a revise & resubmit. Subfield or area-focused journals receive fewer submissions, and editors are more likely to be able to see the innovation in a piece of work (even if the reviewers don’t). So whereas you might get very general critiques from a flagship journal, a subfield journal might yield more knowing and specific reports (which might also be a little more likely to be cranky — hence the need for editors to recover good submissions from their peer reviewers). So the acceptance rates at small journals can be a little misleading: If they revise & resubmit a lot, but get very few good pieces, they’ll naturally have a much higher rate than flagships which have to turn everything away.

In addition, the flagships have very long acceptance to publication times, due to the volume of stuff they agree to publish and their limited space — smaller journals are a little more hand to mouth, and
if you want to be able to send out offprints of articles, they’ll get your stuff to press more quickly.

The flagships are better off saved for your intervention into the field of anthropology, whereas subfield or area journals allow you to make more modest interventions into the subfield or area studies. So if you have something to say about theories of capitalism, globalization, secularization, etc., then send it to the flagships; if it’s about the social construction of a particular illness, subfield journals are the way to go.

Along those lines, if you don’t have a job, people don’t expect you to be shaking up the field of anthropology — hence no need to publish in the big journals yet. But they do want to see that your peers respect your work and that you steadily publish stuff — which is what the smaller journals are for.

And, lastly, any institution that gives you a tenure track position is going to diminish whatever you published before joining them. If you’ve published your two big early career articles before taking a job, they might not count towards tenure. If, on the other hand, you have a smattering of small pubs in small journals, you can write those off knowing that you have two or three big contributions to make in the six years before tenure review.

Some Other Things to Consider

Don’t publish in an edited collection until you have tenure. Often conferences and conference panels will lead people to thinking about publishing the proceedings as a collection, and while you might like all the people you worked with at the conference, there are a number of reasons why you shouldn’t publish in an edited collection early in your career: 1) The time to publication is much slower than an article in a journal. When you think about everyone involved in the collection, all the pressures they have and all the deadlines they face, it’s incredibly likely that one or more people will be behind deadline on the collection’s many deadlines. That means that they hold up the whole project. And if someone is holding up each of the points in production (initial submission, revised submission, copy edits, page proofs), the time to publication can easily be three to four years from when the idea first came up. 2) Book chapters aren’t always peer reviewed. If you’re publishing with a university press or an academic press, it’s likely that the book will be peer reviewed. And, if so, you should keep copies of the peer reviews as proof. But, if it’s a smaller publisher, it’s possible that the peer review will be perfunctory. As such, it might not end up counting as a publication in the long run. 3) Don’t bury your publications. Unless you know that there’s an ebook deal for the edited collection, it’s entirely likely that the circulation of the book will be meager at best (i.e. libraries only). Only people who seek it out will be able to find it. As a result, you may be burying a publication in an out of the way place, when you should be publishing your early work in venues where specialists will be able to find it with a minimum amount of effort. And, 4) A journal article is almost always worth more than a chapter in a book. The one exception to this is the occasional edited collection that brings together a number of luminaries, but that’s usually not the collection that freshly minted PhDs are invited to contribute to. Instead of an edited collection, try and propose a special issue of a journal — and an area studies or subfield journal (for all the reasons outlined above). It can still be slow to publication, but it’ll be faster than a book.

Don’t double dip. Sometimes you’ll have a great experience with a journal and want to send something else to them. That’s generally a bad idea, and mostly for the purpose of building an audience. If you consistently publish in one or two journals, your audience will remain relatively static. Instead, you need to be constantly widening your scope of readers, and the best way to do this is through publishing in different journals (even if they’re only slightly different in orientation). It can be fine to go back to a journal you have a positive experience with, but make sure that there’s at least two years between when the last thing you published with the journal appeared in print and the next thing you submit to them begins the peer review process. (I should also say that sometimes when people only publish in one or two journals it looks like cronyism, which is also worth avoiding.)

More to come… If you have questions, post them in the comments.