Get a Job

Looks like I got one. Yay! More details after things are signed and official, but most of you probably already know that I've had a series of interviews for a temporary position. I finally got a tentative offer for it today.

Woo hoo!

Interview

I had a phone interview yesterday for a temp assist prof job. I think it went pretty well, but I was way unprepared. It's been like 10 years since I had to interview for anything at all and doing it over the phone added a dimension of unpleasantness.

The faculty were all quite nice, but I could never tell if they were agreeing, getting bored, wanted to talk, whatever. I only ended up talking over them a couple of times.

The questions were pretty predictable I suppose, but I hadn't prepared for them. What exactly do I think a student should get out of an undergraduate education in anthropology? And what were my best and worst teaching moments?

It also turns out that the class they want me to teach is different than the one I was prepared to talk about. They just said "North American Indian Cultures" so I emphasized contemporary issues rather than a living relics approach. But they offer a contemporary issues course and really want someone to teach basically ethnohistory and government relations contact to early 20th century. That's ok, because I could also do that and had a few ideas at the top of my head.

So all in all I think I did fairly well. And I don't think the applicant pool for this one is too deep. That's the variable that will make the difference I suppose. They asked if I could visit campus some time soon so that's a good sign, but no definite dates or invitations yet.

Fingers crossed.

Dimming Light

'Tis the season for committees to make their decisions about jobs, fellowships, post-docs and various other forms of funding. The thin envelopes have started pouring in. I finally tabulated the official rejections that I've gotten and the picture is actually not that bad - you know, all things considered.

So:
This year I applied for 13 jobs and one post-doc.
Of those, I've gotten official rejections for five of the jobs.
I know who has been interviewed at four others (and I'm not one of them) so I can assume they are all negatory.
I don't have any official rejection letter for two, but I'm pretty confident that they're no-gos.
That leaves two jobs that are still on the table and the post-doc, all three of which I think are slim-but-real chances.

The light at the end of the tunnel is a little more dim, but at least it isn't a train. The three outstanding applications are the only three that were realistic from the start, so the light really isn't that much dimmer either.