50+ applications, too many unsuccessful interviews, nothing in hand. I got narrowly beaten out for the tenure-track job at the school where I’m a VAP, and I’m starting to think that if I can’t make it here, I’m not going to be able to make it anywhere.
Horror story #1: Friday campus interview in a remote part of Michigan, connecting flight in Chicago. Initial flight, on Thursday, cancelled because of weather; I get booked onto an earlier flight, find a film to keep my freshman comp class amused, and drive to the metrotrain station in the middle of an ice storm. Flight leaves four hours late. By the time I get into Chicago, the connecting flight has been cancelled. Airline puts me up in a hotel at the “distressed traveler rate.” (“You sound distressed, all right,” said the search chair when I called him.) I get onto the morning flight to Michigan as a standby passenger and call the search chair again to tell him the news. Turns out that the entire campus is closed because of the weather – can I stay over the weekend and interview on Monday? Sure. What the heck, I’ll treat it as a mini-vacation. Nothing like a long weekend in Michigan in the snow. The department helps me treat it as a mini-vacation, taking me out to several nice restaurants and a rock concert, so I can’t really complain.
I interview on Monday, and everything seems to be going fine until early afternoon, when the chair calls me into his office and points, wordlessly, to the American Airlines web site. My flight is cancelled. Again.
I spend the night in Flint, the nearest city with an airport, frantically e-mailing my freshman comp students to reschedule the next day’s conferences. And after all that? Two months of silence from the department and, finally, a rejection.
Horror story #2: One-hour teaching demo followed by an immediate interview with the department. The entire department. For an hour and a half. By the end of it, I’m exhausted, shaking from low blood sugar, and I desperately need to pee because they gave me a bottle of water before the teaching demo and I, in my nervousness, drank it all. The search chair’s interviewing tactics are, moreover, bizarre. Mostly, they consist of quoting excerpts from my letters of recommendation and asking me to react to them; there is NO gracious way to handle this, and since rec letters are supposed to be confidential, I’m not even sure it’s ethical.
Finally, he asks “One of your recommenders describes you as an ‘intellectual gadfly’; can you please give some examples of exactly how you have been a gadfly?” I veer between hysterical laughter and helpless gibbering for a few minutes, and finally say point blank that I’m really uncomfortable with the question and not sure how to answer it. Bzzt. I haven’t gotten the official rejection letter yet, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that I screwed it up. When I saw one of the committee members at a conference last weekend, he wouldn’t even look me in the eye.
AARGHH. I’m exhausted and demoralized, and I really thought this was going to be my year. Now that I’ve got a couple of publications and a year as full-time faculty under my belt, I think I’ve got to accept that it is my personality and interview skills that are killing me, and not any weakness in my application materials, so the rejections feel worse this time around. (By the way, is anybody else really SICK of being told “Just be yourself”? What if your true self happens to be a socially awkward freak? What then?)
Um, yeah. Thanks for giving me a place to vent. I think I needed one.
