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VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with a GC graduate about their career path, the ends and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning and Professional Development. 

MISTY CROOKS, HOST: In this episode of Alumni Aloud, we present a conversation between three Graduate Center alumni about attaining a tenure-track academic job. This talk was recorded in May 2023 as part of our virtual panel “Getting on the Tenure Track.” Our panelists are Dr. Allison Guess who earned her PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences and is now Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College, Michèle Duguay who received a PhD in Music Theory and is now Assistant Professor of Music at Indiana University Bloomington, and Agustina Checa who earned a PhD in Ethnomusicology and is now Assistant Professor in the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theater and Dance at Lehman College.  

To start with, we asked each panelist to describe the hiring process. Doctor Checa starts us off, followed by Dr. Guess, and then Dr. Duguay. 

CHECA: I applied for this job October 31^st, 2021, and then in January they asked me to submit more materials, pieces of my writing and my research. They talked to my references. I think I needed to include either a teaching statement or a diversity statement. In February I had an initial interview, like a 20-minute Zoom interview with just three kinds of questions and no more than that. And then after that I had, in March, my campus visit, which was online, even though I was in New York. After the campus visit, I got my offer around April. 

GUESS:  Williams’ deadline was in November. Eventually, I had my first-round interview. It was very short. I think similar to Agustina it was about three to five questions, about 20 minutes. And then a couple weeks later I did the final interview, and what Williams had us do, and the Africana Studies Department, was to engage in the interview and then also submit our job talk. The job talk—we had to record it at our location and then we sent it in, and then we came back at a later portion, and we did a teaching demo. We had Q&A for the job talk. So, the job talk was circulated around the college for colleagues to look at and view and evaluate. We came in at a later time, and we answered those questions. It was great because you did have the opportunity to answer questions and have that interaction with the audience, but also a very different format. Having to send in a prerecorded job talk was not something that I was necessarily accustomed to. But after that, around March, mid or late March, I got my offer and then negotiated, and then I signed a contract. 

DUGUAY: My timeline is similar to the two of you, especially Allison’s because I was also applying in the 2020-2021 academic year. So, I applied in November or December. I got a first-round interview which was, like the two of you, also 15-20 minutes on Zoom. Eventually in late March, I had an on-campus interview, but that was actually held on Zoom over three days. There were different events, including a job talk that was live, teaching a grad seminar, and also guest teaching an undergraduate class, meeting with students. And after that I heard back in late April. The negotiation process took a little while because my partner is also an academic, and we were trying to negotiate a position for him. We ended up being able to do that, but that took some time and effort. I ended up signing in May. 

CROOKS: Our next topic is negotiating a salary and benefits package once you get an offer. Dr. Duguay answers, followed by Doctor Cheka, and then Dr. Guess. 

DUGUAY: I think in general for negotiating, it helps to pick a main thing that you want to negotiate for. You can either talk about the partner hire, about wanting a raise, or maybe research funds. So, I did not mention my partner at all during the interview process. I mean, it’s a small field. Maybe some people knew about him, but that was kind of the process. And once I got the offer, I said, “yes, my priority would be to get a tenure-track position for my partner.” They couldn’t do tenure-track, so they ended up giving him a one-year visiting position. We were like, “OK, well, we have the next year figured out.” So, we moved to Indiana and what ended up happening is that year he got a tenure-track position elsewhere. Now I’m there visiting for the year. So, we’re still figuring it out, but yeah, there’s ways to do that.

CHECA: I focused on getting more startup/research funds. I said, as an ethnographer, I made it very clear that I’m not just a regular music hire. I’m not going to need a piano, but I do need to travel for extended periods of time and maybe bring a camera and a microphone, and do these kinds of more in the field. So, it’s very important to my research. Part of my negotiation was: I don’t have to move, so you don’t have to give me any of that funding for moving, for example. So, maybe instead you can just give me more research funds (which I ended up getting). It’s like a little dance that you do with the Dean, or whoever it is that you’re talking to, because they want you, but at the same time they have these things that they can offer you. You need to be strategic about it, as Michèle said. But yeah, after the offer is done, there is some extra stuff that you can also get, and I think that is important for people to know. 

GUESS:  Yeah, my experience is quite similar to what Michèle and Agustina laid out. You can try to think about streamlining your negotiations. I was really excited to have the opportunity to negotiate. There really are many things that you can think about asking for if it’s something that’s necessary for your household or your position as a researcher, scholar, and a person who will be living in a new area. For me, I was interested in negotiating a higher salary, but also for research. So, I was on the market in 2020 and then was negotiating in 2021. That was also the quincentennial for the rebellion that I was researching, and studying, and writing about. So, all the work that was going into commemorating the 500-year anniversary of the rebellion was also happening in that time. So, I emphasized that a lot in order to negotiate more research funds. And that was something that I think people should think about, the specificity of their research, and where they intend to go, and what it might require. Also thinking about: could there be an ethnographic component to it was something that I was really interested in. So, site visits and going abroad and also thinking about putting the context and relationship to other places. I would have to go to the Caribbean to do a lot of this research and a lot of these site visits and also to the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal. Conferences are typically in other locations, so if you know of particular conferences, you know of particular archives or museums or sites that you want to visit, those are things that you can mention. 

CROOKS: Next, our panelists discussed the job talk, how to plan and prepare. 

DUGUAY: It was about my dissertation, but the advice that I got was to frame it more about broader questions that my research asks, and the dissertation is a kind of case study. So, my dissertation is about, “Oh, I’m going to analyze the voice in pop music.” But my bigger question is what does gender sound like? I’m interested in that broader question. I’m interested in writing a book about it and doing this other project, but here’s my dissertation that talks about it. Of course, that’s a bit difficult to do if you’re still writing the dissertation, because you’re trying to finish it while also positioning yourself mentally in a place where you’ve done the dissertation. So, you have to extrapolate a bit from what you’re doing at the moment. So yes, it’s dissertation research, but framed within bigger questions that you want to see yourself asking. And the other advice that I got is don’t be afraid to position yourself front and center of the talk. I find I might have a tendency to really position myself within existing literature and cite a bunch of people to say, “look, I did the reading. I know where I fit.” But really the job talk is about you, and it’s fine to make it primarily about your ideas. 

CHECA: I want to build on what Michèle was saying. I had the same kind of advice for preparing my job talk. The same applies to when you have questions about your research on your interviews. Try to go beyond what you’re right now working on in your dissertation and see what are some journals that you’re going to publish. Is your work multidisciplinary? What are the broader topics and themes that your work is conversing with? Of course, in the job talk, when you have very limited time to bring in all these ideas and show yourself as a promising scholar that has a lot of potential writing publications, and a book, and etc. that people are going to read and cite. But don’t be afraid to use the same kind of logic for what comes before that—that is, your interviews. The 20-minute interview is going to have a little question about your research. Your campus visit is going to have a lot of questions about your research. Don’t be afraid to always think about it in those broader, bigger terms like what is the significance of what it is that you’re bringing to the table? 

GUESS: Yeah, your job talk should have your research questions, right, those broader questions. You should also talk about the theories that inform your work and at the same time attending to the balance of, really, what are the interventions that you’re making as a scholar, who has put forth this work as well. You should be thinking about broader impacts and interventions of your research. You can use the time to even talk a little bit about future research. I think that’s something that a lot of people on hiring committees and institutions like to see and know is that you do have a plan for future research, and they want to know a little bit more about that as much as they want to know about your current research. So, I would say it’s a mix of all of those things. It’s a broader introduction to your work overall, so you shouldn’t be afraid to really show yourself as a full scholar capable of doing work in the present, and the past, and presenting on that, but also in the future. And I think primarily what a lot of people are really evaluating the job talk on is, first of all, does your work sync together, which likely it does if you’ve gotten a PhD. You wouldn’t have defended if that wasn’t possible, but they’re also looking to see how you engaged the audience. They’re looking to see how you are as someone who engages in public speaking. These are all of the kinds of questions and considerations that they might also be taking into account as they’re evaluating your candidacy. 

CROOKS: Our panelists discuss in detail how to find academic job postings. 

GUESS: I applied far and wide. I primarily found most of my positions through the Chronicle of Higher Education, and also H-Net was really great for me as well. There’s also listservs throughout the Graduate Center that you might be on some of those, and some of those jobs are posted and reposted. So, I applied to a little over 30, and I got about 12 job offers, and that also included some postdocs as well. Primarily, I would say, if I could recommend a number one place to look, for me it was H-Net. Twitter is also a really good place. You’ll see a lot of job postings since a lot of academics use Twitter, so that’s also another place where you might find available positions. 

DUGUAY: I use the listserv that’s specific to my field, and a lot of the jobs get sent out on that. If you belong to an academic society, sometimes they have a page with job postings. There is also, and I hesitate in recommending that, but there’s the Academic Job Wiki. The reason that I hesitate is because it’s crowdsourced, and often you might hear that you did not get a job because someone got it and then posted it, so it’s a bit soul crushing to go there, but it does have up-to-date information. The other thing I’d say is, so I was an international student and was applying to mostly jobs in the US, and it’s not all jobs that can sponsor a visa. Because of that I was a bit limited to tenure-track positions and some post-docs. So, that’s something to also look into. 

CHECA: I got to this job via either the Wiki or someone sent me a link. My story is a little bit weird because this is the first job I ever applied to, but that’s how I found it. 

GC STUDENT: I would love to hear how you all went about preparing for the interview and any standout questions that were surprising to you in in your initial interview. 

GUESS: I mostly prepared with some of my closest colleagues, job talks in particular. We formed a little circle, and we would do mock interviews with one another, watch and critique each other’s interviews. We would ask mock questions, and we would coach each other and practice before our interviews. So that’s how I went about preparing. A few years prior I worked at Baruch College’s Schwarz Institute. That was really grounding for me because a lot of the work I did at the Schwartz Institute was about coaching undergraduate students, and embodied speaking and public speaking, so I had a lot of that skill set. I also have another colleague that had also had that same internship, and so that meant that we had a lot of the knowledge in terms of how to coach our other colleagues and also how to receive feedback and information and modify. I would say my main mode of preparation was through community. Advisors are really great for that as well, they were often a part of that process also. 

DUGUAY: Totally agree on meeting with people and doing mock interviews and rehearsing questions. In terms of preparation the date of, don’t be afraid to ask for breaks. Sometimes they’ll send you the schedule in advance, and it’s like, oh you know, you have a lunch that’s actually an interview, and then campus tour and then a job talk. And it’s fine to ask, “Can I have like 15 minutes in between?” So bring granola bars, some fruit, some water, comfortable shoes that you’ve already broken in (I learned that the hard way), and Advil or something. So yeah, just, you know, bring stuff, to stay comfortable and hydrated. 

CHECA: I will say in terms of preparing, I talked to Emily Seamone and Don. They gave me questions that I could prepare. Don mock-interviewed me, and it was awesome. So, that was really helpful. These are people who are there to help you and you should just reach out. 

And then I want to speak from another perspective now that I am now actually part of the hiring committee of a lecturer position. I have been learning about this internally. There’s a lot of things that when you’re going through all of these dozens of cover letters, you can tell if someone took the time to just Google this department and see what they’re about, and what they need, and what this position is about. And the same goes for the interview. When you have those 20 minutes of an interview, if you can leave in a little bit of, “yeah, I know that your department has this thing. I know that you recently started this new minor or major. I think I will fit well in this thing that you guys tried out last year.” It does really make a difference for a hiring committee. It shows you’re doing your research and you really care about this job. So, I would say as you prepare, do some research about this job in particular and about this department that you may be joining, and other people that are working there and that’s gonna make you stand out as a candidate. 

GUESS: I’ll definitely second what Agustina said. It’s super important that you look as if you’ve done your research. There are tons of people applying, sometimes hundreds of people applying to the same position, so it’s important that you know who’s there. Any new initiatives that are happening at the department or institutional level, those are things you want to remark upon. Sometimes it also could mean that it plays into your job talk as well. If there’s something that’s happening, or has happened, or characteristic of the institution that your work can speak to or could further illuminate—people on search committees want to know about that because that shows them a bit more about how you might engage students in the classroom. And so you want to make sure that it’s abundantly clear that you are the best candidate for the job, and one of the ways that you do that is that you need to perform knowledge of the place that you’re entering. 

DUGUAY: To build on that, something that helps in tailoring a bit, your application and your interviews is you can ask who’s on the search committee once they invite you for a Zoom interview. Sometimes they just say, “Oh yeah, we would like to invite you,” but you can ask with whom are you meeting and then they just send you the list. You can look them up, you can look what they’re teaching this semester. So that way you don’t say, “I want to offer this class on X” and then so and so on the committee is doing that. It also helps in feeling a bit less nervous if you have a sense of who the people are that you’re talking to, what they’re interested in, what they might find interesting about your work. 

GC STUDENT:  You’ve mentioned the teaching demo. Can you walk us through what you mean by that? Is it teaching a live class and getting evaluated, or is it something else more broadly? What was the campus visit experience like? 

GUESS : The teaching demo, the first time I was asked to do it was when I interviewed at Williams. The teaching demo that I did was on Zoom, so my entire campus visit was on Zoom. I actually accepted my offer at Williams without ever visiting physically in-person and never saw the place until I accepted it and I showed up for orientation many months after. The teaching demo, I didn’t really know what to do or how to do it. They didn’t give a lot of information. I don’t think that it was with any particular class in mind, so I just thought, OK, I will teach an intro to Africana studies course from my disciplinary perspective as a human geographer. And they said that’s exactly what they typically do in a department because Africana studies and Africana Studies departments are often interdisciplinary, so everyone kind of teaches that intro course from their vantage point and discipline. It was on Zoom, so I just did it as if I would do any other PowerPoint presentation. Students have an opportunity to ask questions, so it was kind of like a Q&A afterwards as well. So that was my experience with doing the teaching demo. I went on other interviews that I did have in-person visits, and I will say they are both equally exhausting. I think the assumption is just because you do it on Zoom, you can do it from the comfort of your home or a hotel room or another mutual space that, for whatever reason, it’s easier. It’s just as exhausting and draining, and that primarily is because you have to have the discipline of staying in one place and answering questions. You’re still exerting a lot of energy and inertia to answering and meeting an array of people. It’s really just the same, you just don’t have the same kind of embodied moving physical component, but you’re still very much embodied in the process in terms of just being present. People often describe the campus visit as a marathon, and with that analogy, you should think really critically about, and really take Michèle’s advice. Bring snacks. Don’t go to do your campus visit in a way that you won’t be comfortable. Make sure that when they give you the schedule, you do ask for the breaks when you think it might be appropriate, and even sometimes on the spot if you feel like you would need one, because it really is physically exhausting. So, you want to make sure that you’re staying hydrated and that you’re keeping yourself fueled appropriately. So, it’s long and grueling even if it is entirely on Zoom. Wear your whole interview outfit, don’t just do the top just because of Zoom. Wear everything really. Really take command of being in an interview and take it really seriously because when you exude that confidence, then I think that it helps you in the long run, of course. 

DUGUAY: With regards to the teaching demo, so I’ve done a few different interviews, and they were all different. Sometimes they give you a topic that they want you to cover. Sometimes they say, “oh, it’s just something for an introductory class.” Sometimes you were teaching a class that already exists. Sometimes it’s a kind of fake class that’s made up of the search committee, and like a few students. So, I just ask for information for what they want. And in terms of what I do for teaching, it’s a bit different than teaching an actual class in the sense that sometimes it’s shorter, and at the beginning you can give some sort of context. So, for instance, “OK, so I’m envisioning this class as part of this semester sequence in which we’re doing this, this, this. I’m assuming that students already know that, that, that.” And you can get into character and start teaching. Throughout the class as well, perhaps if I have some group activity or discussion activity that there’s no time to do, or the students don’t really know one another, or there are no students in the search committee, you can again step back out of character and say, “OK, so at this point in a real classroom, I would have students do this, talk about this, we would do that, but now, just for the purposes of time, I’ll pretend that we did this, and I’ll move on to the next part.” So, they’re more interested, at least, and this might be field specific, just knowing maybe how you would structure a class, how you’re interacting with the students. And in terms of the campus visit, what it’s like, I just fully agree with Allison that they are exhausting whether they are on Zoom or in-person. I find during the interview process you have a lot of adrenaline and I feel like, OK, this is going OK, I don’t feel physically stressed. But it’s like before it’s very stressful and after. I think, and I’m not exaggerating, I think it probably takes like weeks for me to recover in terms of energy and mental focus from an interview. They’re just very, very exhausting. During, it can be quite interesting. It’s kind of like a conference where everyone is very interested in your work, so it can be a nice opportunity to talk to people who are interested in what you do, but it’s also very tiring. 

CHECA: One advice that I got for my teaching demo that I thought was very helpful was to do my class not related to my research at all or to my area of expertise at all, so that I can show the breadth of knowledge or the breadth of the stuff that I can teach. So, for example, my area of study is South America and my research is on material culture. In the class that I taught, my teaching demo was on K-pop. The students loved it. It’s something that was current, and that they were very engaged with the lesson, but it had nothing to do with my area of expertise and at the same time I was trying to use this particular lesson to show different skills. For example, being able to offer something for all for the students, then using a little bit of more dance musical vocabulary so that the music people know that I know my music stuff. Trying to appeal to different audiences that you’re gonna have there. For my teaching demo, I actually went to the TLC and asked them to help me prepare it, and I ran my class to them and was like, “I’m thinking about doing this, I’m thinking about doing that, and etc.” And then it worked. Just like any other resource that CUNY has for you this is another one that you can use. In terms of my campus visit, it was absolutely, 100% exhausting. The actual campus visit, so that day I did my teaching demo, met with the committee, met with the Dean, etc., was all over soon, but it was equally exhausting. One thing that I did to keep my head fresh was to move to different parts of my apartment in between these sections. So, I took one in my office and then another one in my kitchen (not showing my kitchen of course) and me moving myself so that I didn’t seem like I spent the whole day just sitting at the same chair. And then when I came here, I came to Lehman and after I already had the job offer, and when I went to negotiate with the Dean. And it was also very exhausting because everyone wants to meet you, everyone is showing you around. And this could just be me hypothesizing on this, but I feel like after the COVID we have a quota of socialization that you reach earlier on than you used to and then you just feel exhausted. I don’t really know how to prevent burning out from socializing that much after COVID, I guess just be prepared and maybe take little breaks as you need. Take some time for yourself. 

CROOKS: The next topic for our panelists is how job candidates are evaluated by search committees. 

GUESS: I’ve served on hiring committees since getting this job at Williams and also served many years on admissions committee in the Graduate Center and the Urban Environmental Sciences program. There’s usually two to four students every year that are selecting our future colleagues in the field, so rubrics are very much a part of that, scoring is very much a part of that as well. So, when you have applicants come to you, if you’re on a hiring committee, there’s usually two camps that they will go in. Say you have 200 people apply for one position, for example, you will read all of those materials and applications. They will all be ranked and scored using some sort of internal rubric that would assess and ascertain how much your work and your application corresponds with the job posting, what the institutional needs might be. At that point you will go to what you call a long list or a short list, and sometimes it varies depending on the institution what exactly they call it. There can be anywhere from 9 to 15 semifinalists, and at that point you will do initial interviews with all of those people. So we’ve been talking about initial interviews that were about 20 minutes, 30 minutes—that’s the stage that you’re in. The next stage is you will try to narrow that list down from say, on a max of fifteen people down to three to four. When you’re at the three to four range, you are now considered to be a finalist, and that’s when you go to do your campus visit. You know, and it varies depending on institution and on program and department, but at that point, you’re really being evaluated and voted on. It could be by the department, it could be by the selection committee itself, it could be the broader campus. Say you narrowed it down from those 3 candidates, you have your top person at that point. Usually the department will make a recommendation to the Provost or the Dean, depending on how the institution is organized. Once they get that approval, that’s when you usually get your offer. 

CHECA: I wanted to stress that part because I don’t think there is a science of this person has more publications, so this person is going through, but more so there’s a constellation of aspects that need to be aligned that sometimes have to do with things like how is it that they will fit with what the department needs right now. There’s people who would just fit better with the people in our department, that would fit better in terms of personalities, that would fit better in terms of research prospects. 

DUGUAY: I haven’t been on a hiring committee, but this makes me think of our earlier conversation about also like knowing the type of institution you’re applying to. If you’re applying to a university that’s very research heavy, consider that in your application and the way you speak about your research. The same way if you’re applying to a small liberal arts college that has heavy teaching load and that’s very focused on undergraduate education, to think a lot about perhaps like where your research would fit within a liberal arts education, how you would like to relate to the students. So just getting a sense of what that particular institutions’ priorities are and thinking about where you fit in that. 

CHECA: What Michèle just said also fits into you putting together your cover letter, from the very beginning. Working with Emily Seamone with my cover letter, she was like, “OK, if this is a research-oriented institution, you put the research before you put the teaching, and then when you’re putting together your research statement, you make sure to put this thing before, and in your CV, this thing should come before, this thing should come after. If it’s teaching-oriented then there is a certain progression.” All of the processes tie together and they ultimately, they tie together, and again doing the research of what this job is about, and what these people are looking for. 

GC STUDENT: What has it been like establishing yourself as a new faculty member on your respective campuses? What has surprised you? 

DUGUAY: In terms of establishing myself as new faculty, it was very centered on the department. You know, longer term, I’d look to do more interdepartmental networking, but establishing would be like attending department events, not being afraid of asking questions sometimes, and it depends on the program, but they might assign to you like a more senior mentor. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Identify who are the people who can help you. A few things that surprised me: so the first was the amount of emails I kept getting. Allison, I don’t know if you got something similar, but I felt honestly, my first semester, I think I was just replying to emails like 50% of the time, and I couldn’t even tell you what they were about, just like from students from the institution, etc. So, I found I needed to figure out a way to control how much time that took in my day. It took me at least a semester to maybe get back into research after moving, getting used to new schedule, different responsibilities. One thing that surprised me is that students, both graduate and undergraduate, if you’re junior faculty, might tend to trust younger faculty and come up with like different like problems or challenges that they’re going through. And of course, this is something that I’m happy to be of support. But also at the same time, something that helps is to familiarize yourself with what types of resources the university has in terms of mental health, for instance, so that you can direct students to different resources. In addition to the research, and the teaching, and the service, there’s also a kind of behind the scenes mentoring that a lot of faculty do. 

GUESS: I would say as far as establishing yourself, for me I think it’s always a good idea to come into a place—I mean, this is part of the reason also why we’re hired to begin with—is to come into the institution with an agenda. And I realize that term typically has a negative connotation. I don’t mean it as such, but it does mean that you’re coming to the place with a sense of clarity as far as how you would like to engage, just goes back to knowing what the institution is about more broadly. To really come with a plan in mind, and that, I think, is one of the ways that you can help to get some footing in a new place and also establish yourself, even if that transition is more difficult than what you maybe previously imagined. And I think for me, one of the things that surprised me was just the way in which the informal network works here at a place like Williams. Williams is a small liberal arts institution. Here research is just as valuable as your teaching, but I think in terms of how it showed up for me in teaching was just that it takes time for students to get to know that you’re there and what kind of classes that you teach. So students use a lot of anonymous chat rooms like Yik Yak and Black chat, and so on and so forth. And I think that’s where a lot of their institutional knowledge is incubated. And so that also plays into the relationships that you have with students, and how students are responding to the courses that you’re offering. So, what surprised me is that it just takes some time and that it’s really word of mouth, like how students find out about your offerings. So, I didn’t really expect, you know, that kind of interaction from students. I thought, you know, maybe that they would just know where to find me, but it took time, you know, it took about a year before they realized what classes they like to take. 

CHECA: Some of the things that surprised me, it was surprising to suddenly be involved in a lot of departmental politics. Of course, departments have people that think different things, and they want different things, and etc. But then having to navigate all that, it’s kind of weird because you’re just like entering into this fishbowl, where all these fish have been knowing each other for decades. I think in that sense, mentoring, finding people that you can trust and connect with. In my case, for example, I connected a lot with the people that were part of my search committee because they wanted me there was because we had aligned visions to where the department is going. Another thing that was surprising to me, I didn’t have many surprises in terms of students because I had been teaching at CUNY, so I was familiar with the student body, I knew what they needed from me, so that wasn’t that unfamiliar for me. Something that I was not expecting was how quantifiable the tenure-track process is. There’s all of these digital metrics: What did you publish this year? What are your students’ evaluations? What is your teaching evaluations? All these need to go into your digital metrics. I was not expecting that that was gonna be the case. So now, you know, you’re thinking each of your student evaluations is a number that goes into this machine. What I will say has been the most challenging for me, adapting to my first year as an assistant professor is to find the time to do research. I went from writing my submission in a year to teaching three classes in a semester and that was a lot. So, my first semester was just surviving, again a waterfall of emails, just like Michèle said, and then in the second semester I found my footing. I know how to do stuff. I know people. I’m teaching a few classes that I taught last semester, so there’s less lesson planning, which means that now I feel guilty when I don’t have the time to do my research, and I feel bad about it. The main challenge has been that trying to put my research first, but it’s hard because there’s all these things that you need to do because that little machine towards tenure. It’s been hard to balance that out, like us having more agency than an adjunct, you can make change in these departments, right? And that’s really awesome. 

DUGUAY: Maybe just building a bit on what she said about prioritizing your own work, something that I find I’m starting to develop in like my second year is to figure out where I can cut corners a little bit, and it’s not the end of the world. So, for instance, maybe I don’t need to agonize about like where the exclamation mark goes in this e-mail so I don’t sound too blunt. Or it’s fine if a teaching handout is not perfect, and I spend that much more time on research. So, you kind of figure out what are the things that can be done instead at 100%, maybe like 85%, and it doesn’t really matter, they’re still done at the end. With a bit of experience, you get a sense of like what to prioritize and what can just be like done. 

GUESS: Just to add to all that, I think like your first and your second year are typically the years that I think you have to do more of the heavy lifting. And so in terms of how you prioritize your own research, there are ways to think really innovatively, like how can you bring that into the classroom and mesh that with your pedagogy. But, you know, even if that’s not what you’re doing, I think another way to think about it is just know that with time it gets a little bit easier, and that’s not just because you’re more experienced, but it’s also because you’ve taught this class before, so you likely you have your lesson plans. You like to prepare those, you have your slides and your lectures, so you can often just update those as needed. Certainly you want to make sure that your lectures and your plans are still relevant and fresh, so you don’t want to be using the same thing for like a decade of course. But every year just finding ways to tweak it in respect to just having to reinvent the wheel like you had to do the first time, so it gets a little bit easier as time goes on. And then also, you know, apply to outside opportunities in which you can take some time to engage your research more directly. I think that’s something that you can also do prior to getting tenure. I recently found out that I’ll be at Princeton University next year with an academic leave to do more of my research. So, it comes with time, but it does get easier as time goes on, so I just want to emphasize that the first two years are your most difficult years because you’re getting acclimated to being in the classroom. 

GC STUDENT: What skills did you develop and learn at the Graduate Center that helped you in your first years establishing yourself on campus? 

GUESS: One of the many things that we have working at our advantage is being students that matriculate out of programs at the Graduate Center is that we are typically amazing teachers. We have a lot of teaching experience, that’s not something that people across the board coming into tenure-track positions necessarily have. For some people, it might be the first class that they’re ever teaching, but for many of us, we’ve done it so many times before. So, I think it’s safe to say that you can rely on the fact that you’ve been trained and seasoned as a pedagogue. Go into the classroom with that confidence in knowing that. That gave me a lot of confidence and sense of pride. Like I knew I was a “good-ass” teacher, I knew that. There was no question about it, and I knew I had been trained. I knew I had extensive training from my own advisor, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who’s amazing pedagogy. Training from Monica Varsanyi, and also from Cathy Davidson working with the Futures Initiative that taught me how to do programming. It also taught me a lot about institutional structure and how to make change. Everybody who will listen and watch this panel today just be confident and know that you have an abundance of experience in teaching, and I think that that’s what sets us apart from perhaps other people applying to some of these positions. 

CHECA: As someone who has more recently been involved in conversations about teaching and about finishing your PhD at times where people are thinking about being anti-racist and, decolonial and you’re bringing all of this stuff to the table as well, and sometimes you’re joining departments where people haven’t been thinking about pedagogy or haven’t been thinking about how to make their assignments more inclusive or assignment design, more anti-racist and things like that. So, you also bring all of this important stuff as a new faculty, as a junior scholar that you don’t realize you have until you realize other people don’t have it. Being involved at the Grad Center and going to a lot of panels from the TLC, going to a lot of talks from the Grad Center, prepare you for being able to perform in these ways and, for example, when you do tasks for the department such as conducting yourself a teaching observation, you actually have all this knowledge of teaching in transferable skills that you didn’t even know you had, and you can just apply them for that, or for service. So, there’s a lot of skills you have already because you are finishing a PhD program. Sometimes those things happen, like when you realize, “oh wow, I actually know a lot about this. I’m actually very qualified to be in this job,” and that’s because of the preparation that you get at the Grad Center. So, my advice is: make sure that you use the resources that the Grad Center has for you, because they’re awesome and people like, as I said, Emily and Don helped me so much—forever grateful—reading my cover letters, my CV’s. People at the TLC, helping me with my teaching demo—these are all wonderful people whose job is to help you, and you can just use that. The people at the Writing Center, they helped me with my applications. They helped me with my dissertation. Finishing the dissertation in a year could only probably do it working with the Writing Center. The Grad Center has all this awesome infrastructure to help you with your job search, to help you write better, and teach better. If you’re still there, make sure that you’re using it because it will come really, really handy not only for your job application and your process of getting a job, but also once you’re in your job to just be good at it. My last other advice is what I said before about now being on the search committee—do your research and know what your department needs and what they’re looking for, and it’s going to make a difference in your application. And good luck! 

DUGUAY: Yeah, I really agree with Agustina to just, you know, take advantage of all the resources at the Graduate Center, whether it’s like centers, workshops, but also, you know, ask alums of your program, ask your professors, you know, it never hurts to just ask a question like, “hey, can I…do you mind sharing, like, a cover letter? Or here’s my teaching statement, can you look at it?” Just, you know, really, like, activate your network of people to talk to them. And the other thing, and this might sound strange given that it’s a, you know, workshop on like getting a tenure-track position and being on the tenure-track, but just wanna reiterate that like the tenure-track is one thing you can do with a PhD, but it’s not like the be-all-end-all. So, it’s OK to consider other things. 

GUESS: If I could leave some lasting thoughts, I would second all of the resources that you have available to you at the Graduate center. Use them. You’re in New York City, you have more resources than people in other places might have. Make sure that you’re taking advantage of the place that you’re in. At the end of the day, work together, share information, share job postings, work together on your cover letters. Don’t be competitive or antagonistic. What’s for you is for you. You should just know that, right? And if by some chance you feel like nothing came through, it’s because there’s something better that is waiting for you, right? And so just always know that in your heart and in your mind as you’re moving forward, but please do everything you can to support each other.