The American Studies Association (ASA) Annual Meeting starts today in Washington, D.C.; it has been my primary professional society meeting since graduate school. It’s the meeting where I get to have reunions with my grad school cohort. When we were still grad students, we would start checking in with each other on Thursday afternoon and night of ASA and we’d gather in one of our hotel rooms to catch up and assemble before going out to eat. It was so great to be back together.
ASA is not a huge interviewing convention, but there are always some interviews going on. The third year I was on the job market, I actually started getting convention interviews and so did my grad school buddies. As we gathered on Thursday afternoon and started catching up—finding out who’d been doing what, who was with whom, where we were teaching or what we were working on—we also started learning who had which interviews. And…through this exchange of information, we realized which jobs had already eliminated us from consideration, since our friends were interviewing with them at ASA and we were not.
I was shocked the first year this happened. I had not been prepared for the bad news and while I loved my friends, it was hard to be happy that they’d landed interviews I’d wanted and failed to get. What were those search committees thinking? That job had my name on it! We were all in the same boat. It hadn’t occurred to us that this is how we’d learn where we stood. It put a damper over the whole convention that year and took some joy out of getting to see each other and reconnect.
The next year, we came prepared. We gathered on Thursday afternoon, as we always did, and we exchanged information. But this time, we allowed ourselves a brief moment of disappointment as we learned where we’d been eliminated and then we started to share what information we had about certain schools and jobs, pooling our resources to support each other in whatever interviews we’d managed to land. This felt much better and more constructive than the previous year’s abrupt reality check and feeling out of sorts all four days.
If, like my cohort, you have moved on from your grad school campus, you’re on the market, and you’re all reconnecting at ASA or another annual meeting, you might want to prepare yourself for the good news/bad news share session. I think my cohort got it right after that initial exposure to the syndrome. These days, regular monitoring of the Academic Jobs Wiki may also spare you the pain of learning your status as your friends share their news. http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Academic_Jobs_Wiki
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