How to Become a Professor (When You Don't Know What You Are Doing): Lesson 2-- Work Ass-Backwards

While it may be true that one needs a PhD to become a professor, it is also true that one needs to become a professor to get a PhD. I realize that in saying this I'm speaking from the privileged position of someone with a tenure-track position lined up. I don't want to come off as an asshole who is nonchalantly joking about a system in which most graduates end up jobless. I just want to draw attention to the fact that "normative time" for finishing can certainly vary, depending on the particular standards of your committee members, which are subject to change. While I'm sure my committee members wouldn't have signed off on my dissertation if they didn't think it was good enough to be filed, I also discovered that they weren't nearly as picky about my work after I secured my tenure-track position. Which makes sense-- There's no sense in delaying my graduation and keeping me around if I have a job lined up. But a part of me also wonders if they would have signed off on anything. As my dad likes to joke, "Your degree doesn't count!"

The thing is, finishing a PhD can take a really, really long time. Even if everything goes well-- if you have plenty of funding, your health is good, your family isn't overburdening you, if you know what you're doing-- your advisors could still stall your progress by making you revise revise and revise. My dad told me that when he was a graduate student, a classmate of his got so frustrated with his chair's refusal to let him graduate, that he shot the guy and then shot himself. I've never felt that level of frustration with my committee. (Actually, I complain more often of them not pushing me enough.) But I do have a committee of perfectionists whose level of excellence is something I feel pressured to emulate, even if they don't necessarily impose it on me. And this is why I'm surprised that they so quickly signed off on my dissertation. I was expecting that they would have me take the spring quarter to revise the entire document several times.

So really, the biggest factor that enables you to finish your PhD is to get the job, which is something I'm experiencing now as both a lecturer and someone with a t-t job lined up. Unfortunately, getting the job and teaching are two of the biggest timesucks that can also stall your progress.

The academic job market for literature folks goes like this: Starting in the early fall, schools start posting their job listings (onto databases like the MLA and the Chronicle of Higher Ed), and you look through them all. At the very least, you have to prepare a writing sample (usually a dissertation chapter or a journal article you've written), a cover letter (the most important document you'll write in your entire life), a C.V., and letters of recommendation from at least three advisors (your dissertation committee). Some jobs will ask for more documents, like a teaching portfolio, a dissertation abstract, and a research plan. You send out these documents to all the schools you're applying to. Sometimes you have to cater your documents to different jobs, especially if you're trying to market yourself in different fields. (I applied to positions in Ethnic Studies and English. For English positions, I applied to Ethnic American literature, Asian American literature, 20th Century American literature, and Postcolonial literature positions. So I had several versions of my cover letter.) From August to January, you're constantly visiting the job listings and sending out more materials. If a school puts you on their short list of about 8-12 candidates (out of several hundred), you get a call to meet them at the MLA conference in late December, during your winter break. Until then, you prep for your interview, practicing how to answer all sorts of questions that hopefully your advisors will supply you. You fly out to wherever the conference is taking place that year and do your interviews. If you make it to the school's list of top 3 candidates, you get a call a few weeks later with an invitation for a campus interview, which you then have to prep for. For the campus interview, you get flown out to the school, meet with the faculty, staff, students, administrators. Generally you have to do some form of a presentation, though the particular form varies-- Some schools ask for a research talk, some a research talk and a teaching demonstration, some will ask you to come into someone else's class and teach for the day. When your campus interview is done, you go home and bite your nails until you get a call again. Hopefully, it's a job offer. If it isn't, then you either plan to do this whole process all over again in the next fall, or your start looking at the spring listings and do this process all over again. It's kind of a ridiculous amount of work for a job that you might end up hating. Needless to say, I didn't get much of my dissertation written during the time that I was going through this process.

Teaching generally takes up a ton of time, whether you're doing it as a full-time or part-time employee. These last few months, I've been teaching two very different courses at two very different campuses, one of which is a class I had never taught before. When I'm teaching a class for the first time, it's not uncommon that I'll spend 5 hours of prep for 1 hour of class time. And one of my advisors tells me that I'm in good shape-- She'll take 10 to 1. This is why graduate students are not encouraged to teach-- It takes too much of your time, and ultimately what determines your career is a finished dissertation. But fellowships become more of a rarity, especially at public universities that are experiencing budget crises. I have had to teach or work for the university in some other capacity every quarter that I've been a graduate student. And I've been asked to teach classes that professors typically teach, from large GE classes to upper-division. So I've basically worked as a professor that the university can hire for cheap.

Which brings me back to my first point: One must be a professor in order to get a PhD. And I don't mean in the sense that teaching helps you become a better scholar, though that is indeed true. I mean being a professor means that you are no longer a student.

Because I had not quite finished my dissertation by the time I secured my t-t job, and because the budget problems in my university and the scarcity of funding opportunities have determined that advanced graduate students can no longer teach at the university after a certain number of quarters, I had figured that I was going to have to go on filing fee for the spring quarter. (Filing fee means that you have nothing left to do but finish your dissertation. You pay a modest fee instead of your tuition, but it also means that you have no access to the school's facilities or employment. And you have to buy your own health insurance.) At the very end of last quarter, though, the Asian American Studies department, where I've been teaching for several years now, asked if I could substitute for a professor who is taking a sudden leave of absence. As a student, I would not be able to get this gig-- I had exceeded my teaching quarters, and was told that my appeal for an additional quarter was going to be denied. Going on filing fee would have meant that I could not be employed by the university. So my only viable option was to graduate so that the department could hire me as a lecturer. I knew I would need the income, so I pushed for this.

I wrote to my committee members about my situation. Because they had already deemed my dissertation good enough to be filed, they had already supplied their signatures. But they still preferred to have more time to review my entire document and give me comments before letting me file. Fortunately, they're also very sympathetic individuals who didn't want to deny me a source of income, so they agreed to let me file and give me comments afterwards. That is how I ended up finishing my PhD during what just might be the busiest time in my life.

I do feel good about the document I ended up submitting. But I also recognize that there's a whole lot that could be improved. That's always going to be case, though, which is why finishing a PhD takes a really, really long time.