The job hunt

Finding a job. Finding a job in academia. Finding a job in academia in this economic climate. All powerful statements, each with their own dilemma. I thought I could take just any job. I figured out this week I was wrong.

The first - just finding a job - feels akin to finding one's mate. I am not a youthful figure for whom any job will be an acceptable fit to get my foot in a door. My working life span has an expiration date, so to speak, and it is much closer than most of those in my graduate student peer group! Fitting into a job that I can grow and stay in is vital to me. I don't have the benefit of time left in my working life to bother with just any job or one that will move me up a proverbial ladder. Nor do I feel I want to be climbing some ladder somewhere! So there are two issues rattling around in my brain when considering marrying my next job. First, what is it I truly want from my working life the next twenty years? Second, what concessions am I willing to make to be happy doing what I truly want from my working life in the next twenty years? Not easy questions to figure out an answer to, even if you aren't new to a profession.

The next - finding a job in academia. A strange land, this place of academia. It is so much different than other kinds of educational interviews I have been a part of in the past. I wonder how ANY professor ever got a job after having sustained only four months of searching for a tenure position! Certainly, there is also a smaller cast of characters in contrast to the past jobs I have sought. Rather than playing the Kevin Bacon game, I can insert just about any professor's name into the game and play it with any other academic and find the next relationship right in front of me. I thought that was an incredibly helpful thing. Turns out it also carries tremendous responsibility and weight with it. It is not something I use as a machete in an interview to cut through the maze of questions being tossed in front of me, but a gift of sorts that I must protect and use with caution. I daydream, likening myself to a kind of King Arthur, pulling Excalibur out of the stone...much better that way! I would probably cut myself in the process of using a machete.

The last - the economic times in which I search for the academic job. Alas, if finding my perfect partner in academia isn't difficult enough, in a place where I can live up to the names I carry with me out into a different glass tower world, in a world filled with card-carrying stone throwers, now I have to be sure that my partner is not a pauper hiding in royal clothing! North Carolina state universities will take a 12% pay cut across the board for the next budget year. Looks like if the republicans have their way, the cuts we will see will be deeper and much more painful than any of us have anticipated. What will that mean to me, the 'new' kid on the block? What will that mean to the plan to pick up the retirement savings that I put on hold four years ago? What will this mean for my future as an educator at all?

And so I search. And apply. And wait. And plan. And dream about being in my own classroom. And wonder for the very first time if this risk I took will play out sooner rather than later. And wait some more. Patience should become my best friend, and yet impatience ripples through me almost daily looking for answers that I still do not have. Not to mention the other stresses that accompany any change of this magnitude!

And for the first time, I consider that I may need to rent those robes that I have dreamed about almost as long as I did my wedding dress.