10 Tips on Academic Job Hunting

Last week I had a conversation with a colleague that turned to how she got her current teaching job. Shortly after that, someone emailed me about advice on applying for a teaching job in biblical studies. Since we probably have a decent number of readers who are in PhDs or thinking about one, I thought it might be worth sharing what advice I have.

Disclaimers: I don’t have any particular expertise on this other than I got a job (for which I’m very thankful) and I have had a number of good friends also go through the ringer application process and get jobs. I can primarily speak from and for my own context of American evangelicalism. Jobs in U.S. state schools, research universities, non-confessional liberal arts schools, and overseas schools can be different animals and others are better equipped to talk about those. Finally, I don’t have any jobs to offer. Sorry.

1. Identify your real competition. The job market can often feel daunting because there are so many well qualified applicants out there, especially in NT. But the reality is, you aren’t actually competing with everyone for every job. You also aren’t competing for every job. In some cases you won’t be competing at all! The sooner you realize who your real competition is, the better. This advice comes from John Stackhouse and it helped me when I was thinking about doing a PhD. It gives some needed perspective.
2. Expand your networks now. Go to ETS. Go to IBR. Go to SBL. Meet with people at those venues to connect about their research and yours. The more people who know you, your gifts, your research, etc., the better. Who you know matters far less than who knows you. Yes, networking can be crass and shallow, but it doesn’t have to be. Learn to do it well.
3. Start applying now. It’s almost never too early. Even though many won’t consider you without a PhD in hand, it’s still helpful to get started on the process. It can be exhausting so starting early helps build up endurance for what may be a long haul.
4. Publish now. This is tricky because you want to put most of your energy into writing a great dissertation. But I think it can be very helpful to have an article or two under your belt when you send out an application. At the very least, you should present your research in academic forums.
5. Identify your “pluses.” This one comes from my boss and I think it’s increasingly true. Many schools today are looking for a professor+, someone who can teach plus do x, y, or z. That plus could be additional skill in marketing, enrollment, admin, advancement, online ed, library staffing, etc. The point is: think about what you have to offer beyond teaching. If you’re lucky, you won’t have to teach+, but more and more, teaching+ is going to be key.
6. Read The Professor Is in: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. into a Job. It’s mostly geared at secular teaching jobs, but it’s still helpful. Especially the part on writing a cover letter.
7. Know what matters in an interview. I know when I was job searching, I was most worried about whether I measured up academically. The reality is, if you get to the interview, they are probably not concerned at all about that; they want to know about your theology, your personality, your family, and a host of intangibles. I would also add, make sure that you interview your interviewers. You should be looking for red flags, rifts in the institution, financial woes, etc. If they ask if you have any questions for them, make sure you do. Read this from Mike Kruger for more on this.
8. Identify the unwritten doctrinal statement. This can be tricky if you don’t know someone on the inside, but I always say there is the written doctrinal statement and the unwritten one. The unwritten one is where a school puts its theological emphasis. Ask if they have a separate teaching statement or set of white papers or any other kind of clarifications for their faculty that you need to be aware of. Many confessional schools do and it won’t hurt to ask. Even if they don’t, you can bet they have things they care about that aren’t on the homepage. Try to identify those as best you can before taking the job.
9. Serve others. If you’ve finished a PhD, you’ve worked really hard and probably made a lot of sacrifices along the way. Especially if you did your degree to serve the Lord, it can be crushing not to get the teaching job you always wanted. If you’re not careful, it can make you bitter—at God, at the church, at your family. To avoid this, you need a robust theology of grace. God doesn’t owe any of us a job. It’s a gift that we have the ability, time, and resources to study. If we get a good job, that too is a gift (cf. 1 Cor 4.7). If your dream job is an undeserved gift, treat it that way now. In all this, be like Jesus: For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10.45).
10. What would you add?

Congratulations to Troy Griffitts!

Good news out of Birmingham today.

ITSEE extends its warmest congratulations to Troy Griffitts, one of its most longstanding doctoral students, on qualifying for the award of PhD.

Troy began his studies in Birmingham in September 2010, researching the development of collaborative online frameworks for volunteer contributions to scholarly datasets, with a particular focus on the New Testament. A year later, however, the opportunity arose for him to move to ITSEE’s collaborator, the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster, to become lead developer of the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NT.VMR). Troy continued to work on his doctorate as a part-time, split-site and latterly distance-learning student. His thesis describes the development of NTVMR 2.0, and the independent scholarly editing environment to which it has led, the freely-available Virtual Manuscript Room Collaborative Research Environment (VMR CRE).

Troy’s thesis, entitled Software for the Collaborative Editing of the Greek New Testament, was examined by Dr Dirk Jongkind of the University of Cambridge and Dr Andrew Davies, Director of the Edward Cadbury Centre at Birmingham. His supervisors were Dr Hugh Houghton and Professor David Parker. Following the successful completion of his doctorate, Troy continues to be active in supporting the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room, as well as the Museum of the Bible Greek Paul Project in the USA, the Coptic-Sahidic Old Testament Project in Göttingen and other teams using his software. He also remains a director of the CrossWire Bible Society.

Congratulations, Troy! Thank you for all the hard work you put into these digital tools.

Thinking of doing a PhD in Germany?

The following came in an email from jobs.ac.uk (emails which I now have to read avidly), and looks very useful. Peter Head. Germany has over 140 doctorate awarding higher education institutions, many of which don’t charge tuition fees, and numerous prestigious and well-equipped research organisations. To help you explore the opportunities in Germany, jobs.ac.uk is holding a FREE 60-minute live video event via a Google+ Hangout on Air called ‘PhD Options: Doing a PhD in Germany’.

Event Details When: Wednesday 25th November 2015 Time: 1pm GMT Time Zone Converter Length: 60 minutes Where: Online at the jobs.ac.uk’s G+ Events Page Register now

By attending this hangout you will learn: • What routes there are to doing a doctorate in Germany • How to find PhD opportunities and choose a supervisor • How to get access to a fully funded PhD • How to compose a good application • What the reality is like for PhD researchers in Germany including living costs, relocating tips and support networks Find out more

OT PhD in the Netherlands

Students often overlook the possibility of doing their PhD work at European universities with excellent funding opportunities.  Although British universities tend to use their PhD programs as a revenue source (in the case of non-European students, at least), those on the continent essentially pay their students salaries.  As an example, I cite the following opportunity which was recently posted on jobs.ac.uk and will last four years with a stipend of €24,000+/year:

PhD Hebrew Bible, Early Judaism and Dead Sea Scrolls 
University of Groningen - The Qumran Institute
We are looking for enthusiastic candidates with a Master’s degree or equivalent, in a (sub)discipline of religious studies or theology, or not-too-far-advanced PhD candidates. Candidates with a degree in Biblical Studies, early Jewish Studies, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, or Ancient History are encouraged to apply. The degree must have been obtained within a reasonable period of time and with results that justify the expectation that the student will be able to successfully complete the programme within four years. Admission depends also on the quality of your research proposal. An excellent command of spoken and written English is essential.

Another Successful PhD Defense in Cambridge

Yesterday, following in the footsteps of co-blogger Christian Askeland, our guestblogger Myrto Theocharous successfully defended her University of Cambridge PhD dissertation entitled "Lexical Dependence and Intertextual Allusion in the Septuagint of the Twelve Prophets: Studies in Hosea, Amos and Micah" (supervisor: Professor Robert Gordon).

CONGRATULATIONS DR. THEOCHAROUS!

During last year Myrto offered summaries and reflections on the eight essays in Internationale Fachtagung veranstaltet von Septuaginta Deutsch (LXX.D), Wuppertal 20.-23. Juli 2006 (WUNT 219; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).

Links:

Introduction to the volume/guest posts (Peter Head)

Karrer-Kraus (LXX 1)

Gruen (LXX 2)

Hauspie (LXX 3)

Kreuzer (LXX 4)

Muraoka (LXX 5)

Rosel (LXX 6)

Wright (LXX 7)

Joosten (LXX 8)

Juan Hernandez' Tribute to James Royse (In Search for a PhD. Project and Method)

Following up on yesterday's post on the SBL book review of Royse's monograph, Juan Hernandez contacted me and offered his full presentation to our readers. It may be particularly helpful for PhD. students in search for a project and method to learn more about Hernandez' struggle in this regard, before he found his "exemplar" in James Royse. Those same students may also want to read our post, "Where to do PhD".

Below is the introduction of Hernandez' presentation. If you want to read the whole paper you may request it from tomwas[at]spray[dot]se. In the future we may make this available on our related website (which has been "under construction" for the last years).

INTRODUCTION
It is an incredible privilege for me to be here tonight to honor Dr. James R. Royse and to offer a few reflections on what his work has meant to me. I will leave it to others on this panel and to history to confirm what I already know to be true: that this is a work of singular importance—extraordinary for its immense learning, comprehensive scope and painstaking detail. But perhaps more importantly, Royse’s work is an exemplar for all who aspire to do justice to the study of scribal habits. (Of course, the conclusions are also groundbreaking). I, on the other hand, hope to offer a glimpse of how one book made a difference to the scholarly trajectory and pursuits of a fledgling Ph.D. student, who was—essentially—at his wits end as to what to “write on.” I think it’s safe to say, that if it were not for Royse’s Scribal Habits in Early Greek New Testament Papyri, that my own academic interests, endeavors, and development over the course of the last few years would have been far different.

Where to do a PhD

There has been some lively and interesting discussion on the subject of where to do a PhD on Wieland Willker’s TC list. The message that started it all was one from someone at the Moody Bible Institute (here).

I describe my own view of the British situtation (here) and Bart Ehrman explains for us the ethos at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, initially responding to the suggestion of Malcolm Robertson that “I would not recommend any state/secular university esp and particularly the University of Chicago or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina USA.”

The whole correspondence is worth perusing, but I think that Ehrman’s exchange with Tommy Wasserman perhaps highlights an area where approaches to TC are diverging most significantly. The messages are: Ehrman, Wasserman, Ehrman’s reponse.

The messages particularly raise the question as to what are the most important skills and competencies for a textual critic to have.

In addition to the issues raised in that thread I want to raise a few more questions that are relevant to choice of a venue for a PhD:

(1) To what extent is it important to study in a confessional environment? The ideal learning environment may vary from person to person and may vary through the stages of life. All education models are imperfect and we are often looking for the least bad one. Confessional environments can sometimes create people who want to escape—they think the grass is greener elsewhere. If you’ve been trained in a non-confessional environment you are aware that it often isn’t.

(2) To what extent is the supervisor the person who should be helping an evangelical student think through matters in an evangelical way? In some settings it might be that an non/anti-evangelical supervisor alongside strong personal intellectual support from a local evangelical thinker might be a better route than simply to rely on an evangelical supervisor to get it right for you.

(3) People need to assess the relative importance of the institution and the supervisor since supervisors may move (or die or get ill or even get promoted into administration). If you go to an institution just for the supervisor, what would your experience be like if that supervisor were no longer available? If they only have one specialist in NT or OT then you may be in a difficult situation.