On The Hunt: Job Market

The search for employment has always been a strange thing to me. But my current search for employment is the most strange because finally school and work are no longer two entities, but school has become my work because I want to work at a school. I mean, I do already, but as a graduate student, which both doesn't make any difference but/and also make all the difference. I'm finally making the running leap off the educational ramp.

It's one of those things with too many resources; so much from so many directions and many voices directly contradict each other. It's funny to me, because while it is a necessarily complex process, it's precisely the situation all of us find ourselves in.

We all have the words that have been said about us, for us, and by us, recorded in all the documents of our academic existence. While this may not include piles of papers from terms passed, this pile of papers in PDF forms of CVs, teaching philosophies, research statements, teaching statements, research philosophies, and referenced letters of recommendation all belie the key part of application: the cover letter.

In a radically singular moment, these words I have written will reach the eyes of a few others across the world (exaggeration for poetic effect), and in each of those instances, my rhetoric will happen. Just as the rhetoric happens whenever anyone reads any text, when you're reading this right now, and when we walk in to the class tomorrow morning to figure out and teach how this stuff happens and why.

Some days, I think it fundamentally futile to try to account for the rhetoric in each of these indefinitely multiple, yet totally singular instances. But on others, I know that the lines we draw and the erasures we make of these specifics in their specificity are the only we can make and build something out of these words.

We might have plans and notes and strategies and guides and tools, but at each radically singular moment of rhetoric, in working words on others, it might come down to a chance blow, a small slip, or a moment of indecision and/or inattention: a viable candidate is tossed in the trash, an applicant advances to the next stage, a program loses their best chance, or a new scholar is given their first chance. A moment's long forelocks gone, his pate bald behind. Therefore, All I can do is fight my best, try my hardest, and let come what may.