'Tis the season

I don't spend much time here discussing specifically academic issues, and that's definitely by design. But I thought I'd point both all my readers to a recent piece in the Career Network section of the Chronicle of Higher Ed: The 5 'Virtues' of Successful Graduate Students by Thomas Benton. Benton's an interesting read--perhaps I'm drawn to his accounts of our profession because he's also an assistant professor, even though he's in English, and I'm in a stand-alone Writing Program. A persistent theme in his work is the oft-heroic effort required to find stable work as an academic and the correspondingly unheroic rewards that wait for us when we do.

Anyhow, several of our graduate students here at Syracuse are going on the market this fall, and so I've kept an eye peeled for advice pieces. Benton's five virtues are discipline, networking ability, mental health, flexibility, and patience, and it's been interesting to me to contemplate exactly how many of them I believe I've taken advantage of. For example, I'd really quibble over the idea that writing for 20 hours a week is a realistic estimate of the discipline necessary, but then, the market is a lot tighter for literature students than it is for rhetoric and composition. On the other hand, as a single, non-property-owning male without real geographical preferences, I probably top out when it comes to flexibility.

I guess my overall contention would be that we tend to overgeneralize about the job market, in part to make our successes sound more heroic than they actually may be. I don't know what the market is like for historians, political scientists, creative writers, or philosophers, and so I'd be hesitant to make sweeping claims on behalf of the humanities, as Benton does. His advice is nevertheless sound. At the same time, though, there are a lot of concrete steps that graduate students can take, in addition to the virtues he discusses. And if I had to overgeneralize about the humanities, it would be to say that we've been astoundingly slow to provide support for graduate students in a depressed job market...