1) Publications: Articles and even book reviews help in establishing your commitment to the profession and serve as an important form of outside validation. Whenever you persuade someone outside your own institution or field that you are good, you will impress potential employers. This doesn’t mean you should publish simply for the sake of publishing, since it will hurt you if you publish a poor piece of scholarship, or spend so much time writing or revising an article that you delay completing the dissertation in any significant way.
2) Grants and fellowships: The money is nice, but even small grants are significant in setting you apart from other candidates and making clear to potential employers that you impressed people outside your own university. Be imaginative in using the web to search for sources of funding.
3) Conference appearances: These likewise serve as a form of outside validation and help you establish important networks. If you are putting together a potential conference panel keep in mind that program committees generally: a) prefer whole panels rather than partial ones, although if you lack a chair or commentator that can be fine—it gives the committee a chance to tinker; b) dislike papers that appear to be recycled from other venues; c) mistrust anything resembling a panel in which everyone comes out of the same institution or has exactly the same perspective; d) prefer gender integrated panels; and, e) sometimes want a mix of junior and senior scholars.
Timing:
It usually is too early to go on the job market if you do not have a realistic completion date prior to beginning employment. You can try a two-year strategy by looking selectively the first year, when you could, with great effort, finish the manuscript in time. If nothing else, the practice can be beneficial and if you land a job, you have done well. If you don’t, you will have a more polished manuscript and better chances next time around. There can also be serious advantages to going out a little early in order to take a post-doc or a one-year position, which provides money, outside certification, and time to revise the thesis without a tenure clock running. But it’s also worth noting that you’ll have much better chances at top-notch jobs if you go on the market as a Ph.D. (and having a good job is far, far better than having a bad one).
The dissertation:
A first-rate thesis does not ensure getting a first-rate job, but it is by far the most important determinant of your career. A few things to keep in mind as it nears completion:
Be shameless in asking other people to read it (and patient with those who can’t drop everything to do so immediately). There comes a point when you simply cannot edit your own manuscript, especially if you feel blocked or otherwise perceive a problem that you cannot solve. Even if a chapter is not complete, you can save yourself delays by taking it off your desk and putting it into the hands of someone else for advice.
A dissertation is not a book. While there is no hard-and-fast rule about when to consider a thesis completed, it is counterproductive to take too much time polishing and fine-tuning. If it is coherent, addresses significant issues cogently, and if there is no serious possibility that unexamined data exist that might refute or seriously modify it, the dissertation is done.
It is absolutely crucial to have chapters ready to show potential employers, preferably at least one polished chapter. It is also important to have an introduction or chapter outline to help readers see where these fit in the overall structure of the manuscript. It’s even better to have a completed ms.
Preparing the dossier:
Most advertisements specify three letters of recommendation, but having a Placement Service dossier gives you an excuse for sending more. It’s a good idea to have a range of letters; don’t be afraid to solicit ones from people who know only part of your work or who are in other fields or even other universities. Such letters—particularly when coming from people in other disciplines—do not have to be glowing to be effective. They certify your versatility and range.
Give the Placement Service permission to show your dossier to your advisor or another faculty member whom you trust. It is important to have someone review your file, not to weed out negative letters (you probably won’t have any) but, instead, to make sure that it represents you fully. In some instances, for example, a file does not have enough on teaching, emphasizes certain strengths at the expense of others, or has letters that describe you in rather different ways. If that is the case, you usually can make the dossier more effective by adding a letter to redress the imbalance or having your advisor can shade his or her letter differently.
Applying for jobs:
Cast your net widely. Check the American Historical Association’s listings, the Chronicle of Higher Education, H-Net, and other electronic job postings, but also think about job listings in other fields if you are truly interdisciplinary. Communications and American Studies departments, for instance, occasionally hire historians, as have Business, Journalism, and Education Schools.
Take great care in writing your letter of application. Make sure that you touch all concerns. Be especially certain that you speak about the larger implications of your work. If the institution is advertising in your field, it’s unlikely that anyone reading the letter will be particularly familiar with your topic. You have to frame it in ways that will appeal to a more general audience of historians. You may also say a word or two about possible future projects to give a sense of where you see your career going.
Try to stand out from the pack in positive ways. When overwhelmed with applicants, committees look for excuses not to take applicants seriously. Don’t give them that opportunity and try to stress what is unique about you and your work. You want to be different from the hundred and fifty other applicants. Do absolutely nothing to denigrate yourself or your work, not even if you think you’re being modest or honest.
Represent yourself fairly, but in ways tailored to the job. Do your homework on the department, related departments and programs, and the institution; get a sense of the department’s orientation and needs. Show enthusiasm for the type of institution and suggest how you might fit into its program.
Don’t overwhelm the search committee with manuscript. Send whatever the advertisement requests, but if you have any latitude, make certain that you send a good, tight, brief summary of your thesis—speaking of its broader implications—and a table of contents so that readers will have an idea of the structure of your manuscript.
Keep your advisor and other sympathetic faculty informed of where you have applied. We can’t help if we don’t know where you are applying.
The interview and campus visit:
Be calm and rested. By the time you reach the interview stage, there isn’t much you can do by way of further intellectual preparation (assuming you’ve done your homework about the department and institution). It’s physically draining and I’ve known candidates who failed simply because they dragged through the campus visit and interview.
Dress comfortably and appropriately for the institution. While I am the last person to give fashion advice, I have heard instances in recent years where a candidate turned off some potential colleagues by over- or under-dressing for the institution. If this issue concerns you greatly, you can do advance planning by looking for photographs of the campus, as on catalogues or web pages, and by taking extra changes of clothes to give yourself a chance to make adjustments. Do everything possible to help you feel good about yourself and about how you represent yourself to others.
Have a good talk prepared well in advance of the interview. Remember that you have to make your work intelligible, interesting, and even exciting to people in other fields. If called upon to give a lecture in a preexisting course, find out everything you can about the students and the teacher’s approach to the material.
Be collegial. Departments are looking for a colleague, not a reformer or someone eager for the next train out of town. You can suggest directions in which you would like your teaching to go, and programs you might like to join or implement; but be clear that you would want to have a grasp on the department and institution’s needs before making firm decisions. In some kinds of institutions (notably small, teaching-oriented colleges) you will be looked on with suspicion as someone from a research university who will either want to change the character of the department or who will bide time until a better job comes along. Go out of your way to show an understanding and appreciation for what the institution does and for its strengths, which you will, of course, supplement.
Be flexible about teaching. If presented with a course outside your field, talk about ways of reshaping it to bring it more in line with what you think you could do. Don’t flatly reject considering it. (At least one of our PhDs did. He finally has a job.)
Be prepared to deal with awkward, maybe illegal, questions from potential colleagues: questions or inferences about sexual orientation, religion, and family are inappropriate and should not be tolerated. That, however, leaves open the practical question of how to handle them if they are asked. I regard it a matter of conscience, although my own conscience is flexible enough to suggest deflecting them by reiterating that, should you be hired, the department would be getting a fully committed professional historian. Keep to that point. I do think it is appropriate, if you have reservations about possible biases in the department, to seek out any faculty members with whom you felt comfortable and to express your concerns quite bluntly.
Have a mental inventory of points you want to make about your work and yourself over the course of the interview or the campus visit. Try to keep the conversation on those points, or bring it back to them. Don’t leave feeling that you’ve left important things unsaid.
Don’t act like a supplicant. In a nice way, ask about such things as support for research, leave policy, opportunities for creative teaching, travel for research and professional meetings, housing, the library, office space, retirement and health care benefits, and computer support. Unless you are overly pushy about it and are requesting things present faculty do not have, these questions won’t be offensive to your potential employers. In fact, asking them demonstrates your interest in the institution and your professional commitment. The stickiest questions are ones about opportunities for significant others. On that matter, I think you simply have to follow your own best judgment.
Ask about living conditions and about the area, if you are not familiar with it. The first years at any institution can be hard and lonely. Think about housing, potential friends, and activities that you find meaningful. You have a right to explore the kind of life-style you would have, should the job be offered and accepted. Like questions about support for teaching and research, such inquiries can be a sign that you are respectful of the institution and taking it seriously as a place you’d like to be. Just make certain that you do it in a way that doesn’t give the impression you think you’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere (even if you would). Don’t, in other words, ask too many questions about transportation out of town.
If you are being interviewed by a research institution, make sure that you talk about future work. At least some potential colleagues will want to be certain that you have more than one book in you and that, if your work is going to take a radically different turn, they know about it when they hire you.
Show interest in the students and talk with them–and learn as much from them–as possible. Also look for possible connections (intellectual and personal) in other departments. Try to get a sense of who potential friends might be. Do not, however, show so much interest in other departments that you raise suspicions that you’d be anything less than a full-time colleague in your own.
Negotiating:
I’m a terrible negotiator, and probably the worst person to give advice, but I think some common-sense rules apply: a) there are only a limited number of things you can negotiate, depending on the employer—sometimes salary or future raises are a bit flexible, a library or computer budget, and perhaps research support; and, b) don’t over-negotiate—you can create animosity among your future colleagues if you get goodies they lack; moreover, deans and departments have been known to let a new hire win the battle for a higher beginning salary, only to take the victory away by lower raises or slower promotion in the future. Take the attitude that you are a professional and want support for your work, but that you are also going to justify your hiring by your future achievement, for which you expect to be rewarded.
Thinking about the post-employment future:
In all likelihood, one of your first tasks will be to prepare the dissertation for publication as a book. It is often hard even to think about that during your first year of teaching, so it helps if, as you complete the manuscript, you can make a clear and reasonable list of what you need to do for it to be publishable. It is also useful to have conversations with potential publishers at a reasonably early stage in the process. Some will initiate contacts, and may already have done so. You can contact others in a variety of ways, notably through your mentor’s suggestions, by doing homework and finding out who is the appropriate editor at a publishing house you find appealing, and by conversations with publishers’ representatives at conventions. When you make the approach by letter again keep in mind that you have to convince a non-expert that this manuscript is interesting and worth reading. You should also give a table of contents and enough explanatory material to enable the editor to imagine your manuscript as a book, rather than a disembodied idea. It may also be appropriate to state why you think your work fits well with this particular publisher’s list. When it comes to publishing, however, a few cautions are in order. Do not pursue the first indication of interest simply because you want the manuscript in print. Do not let a publisher push you into revising a manuscript in ways you believe dilute it intellectually. And do not let visions of glory lead you into lusting after a substantial contract with a commercial house. These are few and far between in any event, especially for a first book. For the good of your career it is far more important to find a publishing house that will do a good job editing and marketing a book and that will keep it in print as long as possible.
If you are not at the kind of institution where you hope to end your career, several common-sense rules apply: a) don’t let it show—it will do you no good to be fired by Podunk U. while you wait for Harvard to call; it will do you a great deal of good to hone your skills, whether at teaching, research, or administration; b) keep active in the profession as much as possible through conference participation, publishing, and service in historical organizations; c) don’t lose contact with your mentors and peers; d) think about alternatives if you are truly miserable or ambivalent about teaching—there are many more exciting opportunities in publishing, public history, academic administration, archival work and for independent scholars than there were even a decade ago; e) remember that it is not a rational universe—employment below what you regard as your level of skill, negative reviews, and rejected manuscripts do not mean you are a bad person or bad scholar or teacher; try to learn from unpleasant experiences but don’t let them shake your faith in your ability or the integrity of your work; and, f) be clear and honest about your strengths and desires—the world probably needs happy people more than it does another historian; career changes are o.k. and life-style is important. You haven’t failed if you decide to make a change or if you don’t end up (or want to end up) at a research institution. Above all, don’t lose confidence in yourself.
Borrowed and slightly revised from a longer piece by Ron Walters of Johns Hopkins University