I've been struggling along in the job market this year, and I'm an English proffie with 3 years experience running a small writing program at a 4 year school in California. We are in a terrible financial situation, however, and I have been stopped from doing much to improve things.So, I'm always interested to see job ads in my (general) geographic and disciplinary area.
Today, this UC-San Diego ad caught my eye. It's for a lecturer position running the writing program. The part below caught my eye because for a first round, it strikes me as an amazing amount of work.
Applicants should submit: (1) Letter of application; (2) CV; (3) Names and addresses of three referees; (4) Syllabi of courses the applicant has designed and taught; (5) Proposed syllabus or curriculum plan for a freshman-level writing sequence that addresses the Warren College Writing Program's goals (see web site) as well as the needs of a diverse group of students, instructors, and staff; (6) Article length writing sample (7) Summary of past or potential contributions to diversity in a personal statement.
Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 are all reasonable. 6 and 7 are best suited to a next step. 5 is ridiculous. You want me to propose a curriculum plan for your program? In the first step of a job application?
Now, I'm not saying I won't apply, but if I weren't quite so desperate I wouldn't.
Am I alone in thinking they're asking for too much, too soon?
- Modesto Marcus
#5 sounds like they're looking for good (free)ideas. Way overboard for the first round.
ReplyDeleteThat was what I thought, too (the free ideas thing).
DeleteThere's a certain large research university out there that used to advertise for the same two or three positions every year and sometimes requested writing samples from applicants, but never seemed to interview or hire anyone, just re-advertised the position the next year.
DeleteIt was heavily rumored at my school that they didn't actually have those positions and only advertised them to see what new trends were emerging and what direction young scholars were taking them in.
I always imagined their main campus looking exactly like the Death Star.
Yep. This happened to me. I interviewed for a position in which I had to propose two courses, one of which I was told I might teach. I didn't get to teach either of them, but the other professors ran with the ideas.
DeleteThis is for a lecturer (non-tenure track) position? I'd agree with you that it's too much, but you are in what is called "a buyer's market." Whether you or I think it's too much or not, they obviously don't.
ReplyDeleteThey will use #5 to winnow out people who are mass-applying for jobs (it happens). They will use #6 to weed out any who aren't capable of being up to their standards, and #7 to weed out people who don't know what diversity means.
Yeah, as BurntChrome notes, it is a big time buyers market. The institutions/SCs have us job seekers over a barrel. I'm still waiting to hear back from interviews I had months ago. And guess what, if they call tomorrow, I'm not going to say anything at all about it. I mean, it's not like care about that! I'm just a robot, without an increasingly irritated spouse or student loans or a goddamn mortgage payment. I'll just wait here in my windowless cube, counting the days until my postdoc money runs out or you get around to finally letting me know about the job I applied to in September of last fucking year.
ReplyDeleteThat's why I laugh long and hard when I hear about someone actually fucking over an institution or SC, by backing out of a contract for a better job, or negotiating just for a nice pay raise at the home institution.
That said, if the lowly academic job seeker were treated more like a human fucking being trying to get their career going rather then an annoying time-suck, maybe everyone would be better off and the process wouldn't be so deflating.
Yeah, I hated being a postdoc. What gets me is how people can treat fellow human beings in such a callous manner and still sleep at night. Hang in there!
DeleteIf it's any consolation, the tenured faculty at my university have told our new provost what he can do with his ideas, and are on the verge of striking. I hope it'll be the crest of the wave, to roll back.
I think this is a lot of work for someone who isn't what they are looking for. Their ideal candidate will spend an hour or so putting together the draft of a course specific to their needs, plus an hour perfecting a letter of application. The other requirements should be things you have already done, so presumably you are just hitting "attach." So if you are really the perfect candidate, this won't be too much work.
ReplyDeleteI already have a folder of "potential syllabi" that includes classes I've taught or designed, just in case this sort of thing comes up on a job listing. Also good to have on the side: teaching evals, stats, and philosophy statement.
This sounds to me like they want to hire an internal candidate, but they're being required to conduct a national job search anyway. Don't be surprised if this job turns out to be not real.
ReplyDeleteCalifornia is truly tea-partied, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteBecause California is California, I'd say "tea-partied" is one of the least-appropriate euphemisms for "fucked".
DeleteI'd say "gas-priced" would be exponentially more appropriate.
OK, this is completely off topic, but the US pays some of the lowest gas prices of the developed world. Here in Canuckistan, we pay at least a dollar above the highest prices shown on the link. I think the problem in California is the real estate prices that force long commutes just to be able to afford a home.
DeleteR & G nailed it. I commute 3 hours round trip to my job because I can't afford to move.
DeleteCalifornia is truly tea-partied, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteAhh.. the Communist Republic of California! I ran screaming from that place.
ReplyDeleteLest you think it's any better outside of academia, here's a little publishing misery for you: I applied for a position with my company's chief competitor last fall for which I was a perfect fit. I’m not kidding, the ad could have been lifted right out of my resume. Within a week I was called to interview with three senior team members including the division vice-president, who told me that if I was selected to advance to the second round I'd have to do a project. Sure enough, the next day the HR flake (who, incidentally, had retrieved me from the reception area fifteen minutes after the scheduled start time for the first interview and had failed to reserve a conference room) sent me an assignment to design a comprehensive hamster seeding initiative for a new hamster technology product, due in one week's time. I spent over fifteen hours on the project, knocked it out of the park, and got invited to a second interview, during which the hiring manager asked me many questions about how we do x, y, and z at my company, but said not one word about the project I had done. One week later I got a two-sentence email from the HR flake stating that they'd hired someone else who better met their needs.
ReplyDeleteYou know how this story ends, right? There was an internal candidate all along.
Ursula, your story mirrors a friend of mine's. She works in some specialized area of paralegal matters, so jobs are hard to find in the South. (It's apparently much more commonly used in the East, where she got her degree.) One of the few firms that uses people like her called her for an interview. They put her in an on-the-job experience for one day, giving her a project and asking her to use the day to plan out how it would work given the structure of their firm. She came in, did the plan, was told what a great job she did and how perfect it was, and then got a call the next day stating they'd decided not to fill the position.
DeleteI guess she gave them what they wanted. She says she will take welfare or unemployment before she'll ever work for free as part of a job interview again.
I, too, was thinking either "free consulting" or "inside candidate," even before I read the comments. But I think Monkey's point is a good one, too: if you're a good-fit candidate, this won't take as long as it sounds. If this is not only a job but a kind of job in which you're seriously interested, it might be worth the time to create the sort of updatable/revisable materials Monkey mentions, knowing that you may well use them again. However, if your interest is mostly geographic, well, applying for long shots doesn't really make all that much sense in this market.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds to me like someone is feeling a little self-important: "we're so damned special you'll just have to jump through whatever hoops we want." I suspect it might also be an easy way to cull out a huge number of applications.
ReplyDelete