visualizing academic jobs

When I checked in with our Minnesota graduate students this spring, their first question concerned market conditions and getting good jobs. I started answering in terms of technical skills and economic conditions, but ended in visualization and bad poetry.

As a long-serving department chair, I've got plenty of advice about high-demand skills and high-impact publication. But most know this stuff already and there are real structural challenges and uncertainties in the markets they'll be entering. So, at the risk of being perceived as (even more) flaky, I doffed my chair hat and shared my own story.

The market was bleak when I attended grad school in the early 1990s -- not brutal like today, of course, but there weren't many jobs out there. Knowing almost nothing about academic life, I spent a lot of time asking what kind of job I wanted. I figured that if I could suss that out, I might be able to chart a course to getting there.

I thought of Minnesota, but I couldn't realistically envision myself landing a perfect job in my hometown. Then I figured another Big-10 (or Big-10-type) school would be great. I knew I preferred to be in a public research university and I truly enjoyed larger lecture classes. I didn't care much about status or pay at the time, but knew I'd need good colleagues and lots of mentoring. And there were a ton of great crime/law/deviance scholars in Big-10 universities, many of whom seemed like good people.

Still, "Big 10" was too vague to help me set course, so I started visualizing myself flying into a small airport to interview at a specific place -- the University of Iowa, where they had a great crim group. Then, on a perfect summer day after my second year of grad school, I looked out my window and could almost see myself readying to leave Madison -- cleaning out the shed, picking through stuff for a yard sale, and listening to an old radio as I slopped blue paint on our li'l east side house and jawed with my neighbor. I couldn't envision my dissertation or job talk at that point, but I could definitely imagine leaving our Second Street house to move to Iowa City. Since, I could see and hear it clear as day, I just wrote down what i saw and heard:

Paint Radio (On Leaving Madison)

Dusty flecks of has-been paint,
in ice-cream white and foggy blue,
thick drips of new stuff stuck fast,
to an outdoor radio.

I dig it from the shed we raised,
and plug into fat orange cords.
Tonight it hides with little-boy treasures,
old timing lights and fishing tackle,
else Friday sells for a quarter.

Brewers losing five to three,
still Molitor, Yount, and the rest
of this team belongs in slow-
pitch city league.
I heard Robin leg out a triple,
could see him rounding second,
weightless on the bases.
And Uke likes this kid Navarro,
up from Double-A El Paso,
another call-up with potential.

Smithereens on M.A.D.
play House we Used to Live In
so i keep it there and puzzle the move,
the longer drive,
the company of things familiar.
what do they get in Iowa,
Twins games?

The tired Ford whistles and creaks,
gently clatters over the driveway and onto the grass.
Rhonda's got paint with clean labels,
brown legs and tin buckets.

Climbing shaky ladders in the sun,
then Jerry yells from his window:
"Djou guys booked for next weekend?"
I laugh and he apologizes for his dog again.

To this day, I'm still much better at imagining house painting than actual house painting. But here's the deal with visualizing something concrete: once I had an actual place in mind, it was suddenly much easier to plan and make decisions about my graduate career (e.g., will taking on this project/class/meeting help move me toward a tenure-track job at Iowa?). I didn't get my hopes up about actually landing that job, but it helped put me on a path toward a similar sort of job.

The market had improved when I went looking for jobs in 1994-1995. Iowa wasn't hiring, but I did land four interviews -- three at big-10 schools and one at a Pac-10 school. So, did the visualization work? This isn't so much a story about the "power of visualization" as about specifying the mechanism linking where I was with where I wanted to be. Visualizing a concrete place and set of role expectations gave me clear directives to make decisions in day-to-day life. Over the course of a few years, with the help of some smart and caring advisors, the effects of these decisions cumulated to the point where I was a realistic candidate for the job I set out to get.