planning your academic mobility
This post is about moving up in the academic system. A few disclaimers: First, I speak from the view point of someone who has been very lucky. But still, I think I can offer some insights because I’ve been hiring and grad school recruitment committees. I’ve also had my own successes and failures. Second, the current job market is very hard for people. Not only are we still in a recession, there is a backlog of applicants. Third, I’m a measured optimist. I don’t believe that everyone will magically get an amazing job. But I do think that hard work does yield results over your career.
Each stage of your career entails different mobility strategies. So let’s go through them:
- Undergraduates: At this point, you can’t change where you went to college and you can’t fudge your GPA much. However, there is one low-cost strategy that boosts your chances – master the GRE. You can study for it and you can retake it. And yes, it costs money – but you should learn some cost-benefit analysis. Getting into a decent graduate school can lead to a life time of guaranteed earnings. $160 per test is a pittance. A few hundred bucks for tests, prep and reports in exchange for a career worth about three million bucks is a no brainer.
- MA stepping stone: Students with not so great GPAs can spend a year or two in an MA program. Many have excellent reputations and placement records.
- Graduate students: If you are at a low tier school, you can transfer should you be focused on mobility. Also, a relentless focus on publications is important. Most “move ups” in the job market go to students with published articles, often to those in top journals or primarily authored by the student. In most disciplines, dissertations don’t carry much weight.
- Faculty: Once again, it really boils down to publication. Yes, sometimes people move based on personal connections, or luck, but the typical move up is due to spending the time to get articles through the review process. Key phrase: “What have you done lately?” Caveat: What counts as “good” depends a lot on subfield and personal trajectory.
In all stages, I strongly recommend the strategy of large N. Undergads should apply to many schools. Graduate students should apply to many jobs in many regions and in many fields. All scholars should produce a healthy number of manuscripts and send them to many journals/publishers.
If you have experience, please post your comments.
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orgtheory.net 
Hi, What advice can you give to someone like me: a late entrant in the academia, turning 40, just finished PhD from a good Australian university (in org studies), and currently working at the entry level in a business school of a South East Asian university! I am really worried about my career, even though I courageously jumped ship when I was making a career change. Currently under tremendous pressure to establish a line up of journal papers for publication. I think a bigger issue is finding a research area where I can contribute, rather than focusing on the final outcome of that (i.e. publications). Once a specific domain is found where I can make a contribution, publications should not be a problem. Regards, T. Khan.
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T. Khan
February 27, 2012 at 12:12 am
I would like to add to point number 2: Try to apply to MA programs strategically. Look for programs that have faculty who:
1) are well-connected in your sub-field of interest.
2) hold degrees from the kinds of Ph.D programs to which you plan to apply.
3) have published with scholars who are on the faculty at Ph.D programs to which you plan to apply.
I am currently finishing my MA in Sociology at UNC-Charlotte (a real diamond in the rough), and they have done very well by me as I will be enrolling in the Sociology Ph.D program at Stanford this Fall. A member of my cohort is currently in the enviable position of deciding among three top 15 programs.
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pretendous
February 27, 2012 at 3:08 am
I keep telling myself “long-term benefits!” as I pay for GRE prep and the test itself
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AaronM
February 27, 2012 at 3:55 am
how much will strong GRE’s make up for poor GPA? I had poor undergrad GPA and decent M.A. gpa, but my GRE scores were always very good (660 verbal – 94th%, 760 quant – 84th%, 5.5 analytical – 96th%)
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andy
February 27, 2012 at 3:55 am
@T.Khan: Experiment. Since I don’t know Asian universities well, I won’t give specific advice. But it sounds like it may take a bit to see what area fits. Good luck.
@pretendous:A lot of good people @ UNCC, visited their once – you are lucky to be there.
@andy: The very top programs may be finicky, but once your get around #20 or lower, you’ll likely see some action. At IU, we only had a handful of consistently strong GREs and they were all seriously considered.
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fabiorojas
February 27, 2012 at 6:33 am
Cross cultural comparison: for the UK most of the early advice is irrelevant (We wouldn’t know a GPA or GRE if it came up and bit us) while the later advice is spot on.
You will need a good UG degree to get funding for a PhD: where you do your PhD is less important than the US (from what I can gather).
The UK doesn’t have such clear divisions between top and lower Unis (i.e. it’s perfectly possible for someone with a PhD from a less prestigious institution to get a job a top Uni).
But the point about publication is as important if not more so. UK PhDs are only 4 years long – people who publish a good number of articles (perhaps based on Masters work) in that time stand out. People who have published in major american journals (e.g. AJS/ASR) stick out like a sore thumb (in a good way).
There is a perceived lack of quant. expertise over here, so young scholars with a background in that would look very interesting from a UK sociology department’s point of view.
Because of external funding drivers, there is less emphasis in UK social science around publication of research monographs. Someone with a PhD in hand is better off focusing on producing a series of high quality articles than worrying about chasing a book deal to publish the thesis.
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adam hedgecoe
February 27, 2012 at 10:56 am
As a veteran now of the last three Ph.D. markets, my recommendation for grad students is to become an expert in a field (or two) for which there is great demand. They don’t call it a market for nothing. Especially in the current buyer’s market, hiring committees are more likely to get exactly what they want; which means that if you don’t fit what they are looking for, you are likely to strike out.
For example, there are virtually no hiring committees advertising for cultural sociology, despite it being apparently the largest section of ASA. By contrast, there are a tremendous number of jobs advertising for expertise in criminology, quantitative methods, health, etc. The reason is clear: because those tend to be popular majors and have wide availability of external funding.
So early in your career, start following the job postings on ASA, the Chronicle, etc. Adjust your activities accordingly so that you can “punch that card” and apply to those positions. Build a component that is relevant to one of these areas into your dissertation. Try to become a TA or lecturer for one of these types of classes. Take a prelim or qualifying exam in one of those areas.
Of course you should publish. But given identical journals, a publication on a marketable topic is worth vastly more than a publication on non-marketable topics. If you have research interests that are not in demand and choose to follow your interests nonetheless, beware: you will need 3-4 times the number of publications to make you competitive. No matter how smart you are or how brilliant your work is, it won’t amount to anything if there’s no market for it.
Yes, academia is a meritocracy. But only if you take into account who gets to decide what counts as “merit.”
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Market Veteran
February 27, 2012 at 7:09 pm
Market Veteran makes several good points. In the current environment departments are having a tough time getting lines for hires unless they can justify it with a specific teaching need. Much of the courses that need taught are not well aligned with what students on the job market are doing from a research standpoint. People in the areas of organizations, economic sociology, or culture seem to be at a disadvantage to people whose research could get them in a classroom teaching criminology, methods, etc.
Rather than change what you do research on, which I think is a really bad strategy given that it will suck the passion out of your career, I suggest positioning yourself as a robust teacher, i.e., someone who can teach a lot of different classes. I have a friend whose research is on social movements but who for years taught an undergrad course in race and ethnicity because that is what needed to be taught. Figuring out how to be versatile will give you more options.
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brayden king
February 27, 2012 at 7:40 pm
[…] Market Veteran wrote the following comment yesterday: For example, there are virtually no hiring committees advertising for cultural sociology, despite it being apparently the largest section of ASA. By contrast, there are a tremendous number of jobs advertising for expertise in criminology, quantitative methods, health, etc. The reason is clear: because those tend to be popular majors and have wide availability of external funding. […]
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who owns sociology? « orgtheory.net
February 29, 2012 at 12:02 am
I think another reason why “culture” doesn’t have a lot of job openings is because culture is kind of the air that sociology swims in. Culture is kinda taken for granted and is involved in nearly every subfield of sociology, so it’s a bit silly to have a job opening for “culture,” just as it is silly for a department to have a job opening that says simply “sociology.” Every sociology subfield is about “culture and organizations,” “culture and gender,” “culture and economic activity,” “culture and etc.”
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andy
February 29, 2012 at 1:38 am
Market Veteran: If undergrad courses such as Soc of Media, Pop Culture, Gender & Film, etc. are chronically under-enrolled, this would be news to me. Comparatively I have many more problems attracting Soc majors to my Economic Soc classes and Org classes (the courses don’t suffer from overall under-enrollment, they just draw from Econ majors as much as Soc majors, although this could certainly be an idiosyncrasy of my institution).
In turn, the market seems to be somewhat cyclical with regards to which subfields are “hot” at any given time. While tweaking one’s work to hit a “hot” field might make sense if one is on the front end of the wave and is willing to bet it will still be crashing four or five years down the line, for something like Crim which has been “hot” for some time now, a grad student tweaking some crim into their work in preparation for 2016 may end up without many prospects AND without a project that inspires her/him.
Fully agreed however that the number (and quality) of pubs is dependent on the market niche one is hoping to fill.
Andy: I think folks who are really in the Culture wheelhouse are rightly suspicious of people who claim culture but who aren’t engaging with any of the major players in the subfield. It’s a hopelessly amorphous and decentralized subfield, but it’s certainly a subfield nonetheless.
With regards to the lack of Culture jobs, I think there are a lot of factors (possibility for external funding being the biggest one, perhaps), but it’s also worth noting that with the Cultural Turn from the late 70s to late 80s Soc departments across the country filled a huge number of these positions. The vast majority of these hires are still active and still a bit off from retiring. There’s just a glut in the market and it could very well cycle into opening back up in five to ten years (…or not, given that pernicious “attractiveness for external funding” thing).
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Ben Collins
February 29, 2012 at 3:42 am
As I mentioned in another comment (in response to Fabio’s post “who owns sociology?”), the assumption that there has been a paucity of “culture jobs” in recent years is simply incorrect. Yes, most of the people hired (and there have been many) work at the intersection of culture and other subfields, but that’s true of most cultural sociologists (as @andy points out). And seeking to understand how cultural processes operate in a particular substantive domain in no way implies a failure to “[engage] with any of the major players in the subfield” (as @BenCollins argues), particularly given that most of the major players in the subfield do precisely this kind of field-spanning work. We could have a longer discussion about what that says about culture as an theoretical concept and an intellectual field, but that’s a whole other topic.
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BartB
February 29, 2012 at 3:05 pm
BartB:
For what it’s worth there were four jobs (one R1, three SLACS) that made any mention of culture in their calls this year. Agreed that folks expressly working in Culture (in intersection — we agree, but more to follow) seem to do fine on the “open” calls, and to secure those positions.
Two quick things:
My comment was in response to Andy’s statement that “every sociology subfield is about ‘culture and…'” which has the dual problem of making everything cultural (which it is not), and just not passing the basic smell test (there is no shortage of excellent scholars who don’t make any direct engagement with culture or with the folks who overlap in culture).
With regards to folks in culture spanning across multiple fields, I think this is surely right, but I don’t think it’s entirely a particularity of that subfield. Nobody JUST does Demography, and depending on his/her project a Race person is applying to Race jobs and any number of other calls (e.g. Political Soc, Nation/Global, Crim, Orgs, Economic Soc, Culture, etc. — although most likely never all of these).
With regards to this boundary spanning potentially being more prevalent in Culture, this could be a function of the amorphous nature of the subfield (which I think we both suspect it might be — Culture’s huge membership at ASA is also its curse), but it could also be an artifact of the job market and the paucity of jobs that specifically mention “Culture” as an area for hiring. people who primarily consider themselves “Culture” people aren’t just going to throw in the towel and go wander away from the discipline, they’re going to do what everybody else does: apply to all the calls that overlap with their work, if perhaps a bit more desperately and a bit wider, because the express calls for “Culture” simply aren’t there.
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Ben Collins
February 29, 2012 at 4:30 pm
No disagreement here, Ben. I too take issue with the argument that culture is everything and everything is culture — this position renders the concept meaningless and ignores the fact that plenty of people do great work without paying any attention to repertoires, schemas, boundaries, frames, etc. I read andy’s post as merely suggesting that one can study the cultural aspects of many domains of social life and as a result, cultural sociologists often occupy the the intersection of multiple subfields. This places them in a reasonably good position to compete for open searches and, sometimes, for targeted searches in areas other than culture. (Note that I’m not making any claims about whether this boundary spanning tendency is greater in cultural sociology than in other subfields.)
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BartB
March 1, 2012 at 1:37 am
[…] […]
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Safety School of Re-apply Next Year - Page 2
March 1, 2012 at 2:49 am