Someone asked this today: Are PhD students who get faculty job offers usually the most popular and well-socialized PhD students?
Let me start by saying I think this probably varies by field. I’ve only been part of hiring for a handful of divisions (English, Art, Interactive Media/Games, Political Science, Psychology), but I can say without a doubt that yes, the more “popular” students tend to do better. And there are reasons for that:
- They get better mentoring. It’s sad to admit that as a person who works in the academy, but I’ve seen it over and over. Senior faculty pick favorites, and they work to get those favorites ahead. Likewise, if you’re working with a faculty member that others on the faculty don’t like– and I learned this first hand– you will take on their grudges. So being one of the popular, beloved PhD students in a program will get you help from within.
- The second reason is that academic interviews— in spite of what many will tell you– are awful indicators of job performance, but there’s such a tradition involved in doing them a certain way that being popular/able to master small talk (and being known from events and conferences as someone who is social and jovial) will help. It will also help if you can be super-chill and engaging during a meal wearing a suit and tie (or if you’re female, wearing professional clothing). If you’re giving a teaching model, you’ll need to be able to look like you’re doing solid teaching to a class you don’t know with a lesson you built with no real indication of who would be in the room. Your job talk will be you trying to be interesting while you act as smart as possible and try to talk over people’s heads (and then you defend yourself from the faculty members who just see a job talk as their chance to grill someone, or the people who want someone else to get the job). Nothing in this process is very much like what actually doing the job will be like, and nothing the committee finds out really helps them to know how well you’d do as a faculty member, but you will most certainly do better if you have strong social skills and charisma. If you, for example. have social anxiety, you will suffer in this process greatly.
- In the end, many academics who serve on hiring committees make their decision about a potential new faculty member based on how well they like the person. This is, to a certain degree, the most fair of the things that happen during the hiring process, because you do not want to be on a faculty that doesn’t like you. When you have to do the day-to-day work of being an academic, you have to be able to get along with your colleagues.
You might have noticed a unifying factor in what I’ve said so far: the academic hiring process (at least traditionally) has very little to do with actually finding the best person to employ and has much more to do with finding a person who impresses the department socially/seems dynamic.
There’s a second, more menacing thing at work, too: white men do far, far better than women and people of color in academic hiring. Part of the reason for this is that the process is really designed for a white man with a sense of entitlement. You’re expected to be self-aggrandizing and to take control of every situation. You’re given points with people for talking someone down or speaking over someone’s head. Your style and the way you eat food matter. If you have any sort of cultural tendencies that aren’t white, it becomes “off putting” to many committees.
I once had a committee tell me that they chose not to include an African American scholar as one of their finalists. Their reasoning– two of them explained to me– was that he was too “aggressive” and spoke too loudly. He spoke– I pointed out to them, to their horror and disbelief– like a black southern preacher (like MLK) because he was raised by a black southern preacher in a black church. His diction was entirely culturally informed (and he was actually quite compelling; I was blown away that he didn’t make their pick list of finalists).
I had the chair of another committee tell me that they chose not to bring back a scholar from Hawaii (indigenous) because she “seemed really disengaged and had to be probed to talk.” If you know that culture, it’s very much like my native culture, and people aren’t supposed to make themselves the center of attention. It turns out that no one on the committee had tried to draw this scholar out. They just bowled over her at meals and Q&A sessions. This is something to know– you’re going to meet the strongest personalities in a department as part of the hiring process (usually) as the people with their nose-to-the-grindstone who aren’t as social and want to do work will avoid being part of hiring while the more social, outgoing people enjoy the dinners and the job talks.
None of what I’ve said here is fair. In fact, much of it is awful.
As I work now on hiring committees, I actively counter these things at every turn, and I’m in a program where everyone else feels the same way. There are people who are actually looking for the best people to hire. Many people understand what a university needs. I don’t mean to cast a wide net with my “negatives,” but I’ve seen so much of it that I don’t want to downplay it because anyone on the market WILL see it.
I could write a book about all my interviews and all the odd things I saw or was asked, and I could probably write a separate book on all the things I’ve seen as the grad student or non-tenure faculty on hiring committees. Now that I’m TT myself, I can take some level of control over what happens. I try to work against these things. But honestly, the mood one of the committee members is in when they read your application could get you tossed out of the process. It’s a highly subjective and sometimes mind-boggling experience to go on the academic job market. You have to have thick skin, and you have to make a decision between trying to look like the best candidate or whether to actually be the best candidate you can be and hope that people see that and see who and what you are.
I once had someone on a hiring committee tell me that I was the top choice of all but one member. That member ranked me last. Because of the school I attended. The person didn’t even bother to read my materials once he saw where I was from.
I had one Skype interview where someone said “oh, is this the fat guy?” as they were loading in.
It can be something that simple.
But have faith and realize it’s a process. Everyone who deserves it eventually lands somewhere and works their way up, I think. The start can be endlessly painful, though. And it’s not going to be fair. And it’s not going to make any logical sense. You just have to do the best you can and realize it’s out of your control.