I mentioned some of my interview experiences in my recent post titled "118." But here are the two broad formulas for the 20 or so interviews I've had. Model 1 You'll be asked 4-6 scripted questions followed by 5 minutes for you to ask questions of your own. 1-2 questions will be about your research. 1-2 questions will focus on your teaching and often specifically about courses mentioned in the job ad. 1 question will ask about something department specific: the most common one I've been asked is what I'd do to help recruit majors in a small program, but a close second is what I do to promote diversity in the classroom and/or on campus. Finally, 1 question will be completely random -- probably something you've never been asked before and/or something that is not obviously relevant to the job. These interviews are usually 25-30 minutes and more common at teaching schools. Model 2 You'll be asked 3-4 scripted questions and a number of unscripted followups. Usually, a set portion of these interviews will be devoted to teaching, then a separate portion to research, and then a few minutes left for you to ask questions at the end. So a 45-minute interview might have 20 minutes devoted to teaching, 20 minutes devoted to research, and 5 minutes left for you to ask the committee questions. Followup questions will usually pertain to your particular research program or your teaching experience. Because of this dynamic, these interviews have much more variability in their structure and can feel a lot more like a real conversation. Interviews with this format are usually 40-45 minutes and seem more common at research-focused schools.

"on the jyerb market" mentions departments that give you info about the questions they will ask in advance. I do think that makes things easier in some respects, but I will mention one case in which this worked against me: I was told by the search committee chair that the focus of the interview would be on my teaching and in particular how I could teach the courses specified in the job ad. So naturally I prepped for that. When the actual interview came, I was asked 6 questions. Only 1 of these questions was about teaching specifically, and none of the questions pertained to how I would teach the courses mentioned in the job ad. Needless to say, the interview did not go well. So, if committees are going to do this, be truthful about what you're actually going to ask the candidates. I'd also highlight the need for transparency with the process. Keep us in the loop regarding your search -- don't make us send you awkward followups 1-2 months after an interview or wait 4-6 months for a form letter email rejection. Also, don't just flake out and not notify candidates at all, which has happened to me with roughly 40% of my job applications. In the age of mass email, it's unacceptably lazy. It's also disrespectful to candidates (because of the time it takes them to apply), and it causes job candidates unnecessary stress since they often don't have a clear picture of their situation.

Anon -- First, many of the jobs I screened out were jobs exactly like you described: Open jobs at distinguished schools or jobs with a wide assortment of AOSs and little evidence that they were really looking for someone with my credentials. Second, I never applied to a single job that was nearly the stretch you are talking about -- that is, applying to a political philosophy job with an AOS in logic. I agree that would be a waste of time. My biggest stretch was applying for some philosophy of technology jobs, and two of my interviews were for positions like that, so it clearly wasn't a waste of time. I don't think you're disagreeing with me or Michel on these matters. Perhaps you're underestimating how many jobs there are in ethics and applied ethics compared to some other areas of philosophy, though I'm not really sure. Third, the marginal costs of applying to additional jobs dramatically decrease once you hit a certain threshold because you'll have drafted cover letters for so many different job types that making additional revisions takes very little time. You mention a job app taking an entire afternoon of work, but very few apps should take that long once you've got a dozen or so under your belt. (The cover letter is often the only thing that's different across applications, after all.) I agree that there are some psychological benefits to scaling down one's number of job market applications, but the odds are stacked against you so much that cutting your application total beyond a certain point just makes it that much more difficult.

Anon -- My Google Spreadsheet actually contained 196 jobs that I had flagged. That means that I reviewed and screened out 77 jobs as being too far outside my research and teaching areas. (The Tulane job that I mentioned in the post was just a missed deadline.) I'm not sure how many of these jobs had an "Open" AOS, but most of them were ethics and applied ethics jobs and those are my specialty areas. (There tend to be more jobs in ethics, applied ethics, and political philosophy than elsewhere; I'm pretty confident you couldn't plausibly apply for 118 jobs with a metaphysics or epistemology AOS.) I should also add that it's hard to know whether you're a "good fit" for a position in the abstract because job ads are vague, and it's impossible to know a search committees particular desires. Here's something to think about: of the three positions that I was offered, two were focused on bioethics (Lawrence University and OSU) and one was focused on teaching a unique introduction to philosophy course to lots of undergrads (Stonehill). My core AOS is environmental ethics, and yet I only interviewed for 3 positions where that was an explicit focus (Hamilton, Minnesota-Duluth, and Colgate). So I'd say it was a very good thing that I cast a wide net: if I hadn't, I'm not sure I'd be in academia right now. Also, as a gut reaction, I think 30 applications would be way to low to have a reasonable chance of success. I do know some people who did well filling out "only" 60-80 applications, though.

KF -- Yes, I recall one of my old grad student colleagues who hypothesized that I would have been more relaxed at the event than usual and thought that may have helped me. Regarding the hotel lobby, it would have been too noisy to conduct an interview there, and as you imagine, there would have been a million distractions in the background. My second choice (if I hadn't gotten decent internet in the room) would have been a downtown coffee shop.

Philjobs is probably the best place to get data on this topic, but it's a sure bet that there are going to be limitations about what you can infer from the information that's on there. A lot of schools -- especially community colleges -- do not advertise on Philjobs, and those colleges do have tenure-track positions (or the equivalent). The trends of who they hire could be different than what's listed above. Also, I think this graphical representation is not as useful as strict percentages would be. It looks like about 1/3 of TT jobs in the data set are taken by people fresh out of graduate school, 1/6 by people who have been out of grad school for 1 year, and the rest by people who have been out of graduate school by two years or more. This graph also creates the impression that your circumstances become more hopeless the longer you are on the market, but I think that inference should be resisted. People often go off the market after a few years because they get tired of moving around the country, they want to start a family and need greater financial stability, they grow weary of academia, or some other idiosyncratic personal reason. In all such cases, they might eventually have success if they keep at it, but circumstances make it impractical or unwise for them to do so. My suspicion is that the distribution is caused in large part because there are so many fewer people on the market 3+ years post-PhD than those who are fresh out of graduate school.

To clarify (since I realize now that recency bias also has a meaning in economics that is very different from what I said above), what I meant by "recency bias" is the tendency for people to recall things that happened more recently with greater clarity than those that happened further in the past. This is one of the two components of the "Serial-position Effect." The first of these is the primacy effect (which Marcus mentioned in his original post), and the second is the recency effect (which is what I was alluding to). People remember items that are first and last in a sequence the best.

This question came up at a postdoc meeting I had last year. While it was interdisciplinary across the humanities, I was struck that there was no consensus. Some thought it might be advantageous to apply early; some thought it wasn't advantageous at all; some even thought it was better to apply later in the process. Those in this last camp essentially appealed to recency bias (though they did not use that term): if you have a standout application that arrives to the committee rather late in the game, that will resonate more strongly with them than the standout files they may have looked out weeks (or months) ago. In most cases, these decisions are made over a long period of time, so there's definitely a chance that committee members will partially forget the strength of a file that they read weeks before the deadline. For what it's worth, my sense on this whole matter is that it's just a crapshoot and not something that applicants should worry about. The better reason to apply early is so that you don't get overwhelmed by, for instance, trying to submit 10 applications in a 2-day span to beat a cluster of deadlines.

Teaching-focused job applications will usually require sample syllabi, teaching evaluations, or a combination of both. Syllabi for courses you have actually taught are going to be more polished and valuable than merely hypothetical syllabi (for a course you might teach), and teaching evaluations for your own courses are vastly more valuable to search committees than assessments of how well you can lead a Friday discussion section. So, in general, the solo teaching experience would be more valuable. But if the person in question already has significant solo teaching experience and wants to use this GTA position as a chance to familiarize the professor mentioned with their teaching -- presumably so that this person can write the teaching-focused letter in their future job market dossier -- that might be the one scenario where it could be more beneficial to take the GTA position instead.

I'd recommend two of James Lang's books: _Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning_ and _Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty_

I think the bigger concern with the "10 papers under review" standard is that most people will not be able to juggle 10 publishable ideas at the same time. I know plenty of people who publish a steady stream of work but very few who have that many works-in-progress at the same time. It takes a long time to nurture an idea into a paper that stands a real chance of being published, and I worry that aspiring to have 10 papers under review at all times will lead people to pursue a quantity-over-quality strategy that is counterproductive. Often, a more balanced approach -- one that involves consistently submitting material for review but also investing significant time in revising and polishing work -- will yield better results overall. Also, there has never been a point in my career thus far where I have simultaneously had 10 papers in my possession that were all worth publishing. Some ideas just don't pan out, and others wind up failing to advance the literature in a meaningful way. If you only have 4-6 publishable ideas on tap at one time, you're not likely to be throwing 10 papers at journals.

Thanks for your note, Suzanne. I hope your daughter is able to pull out of the spell in the same way that I did, but it takes time. Tough to climb out of that pit once you've fallen down so far.

I think the student posing the question should be aware that the harsh realities of the job market and the isolating, difficult nature of graduate work could destroy their love of philosophy. Or it could send them on a collision course with mental illness. The sad truth is that a lot of people in academia are not very happy, and should this student find themselves in a position where they are no longer enamored with pursuing professorial life, they will need to guard against the sunk cost fallacy and other factors that could make it psychologically difficult for them to alter their career trajectory. For this reason, I think part of managing expectations is not getting too attached to pursuing an academic career and going to graduate school primarily for the experience of doing so rather than for the potential career that may (or may not) follow.

Whether or not one decides to share their recent work on social media, I think it's definitely worth your time to create multiple ways for people to find your work once it's published. Maintain an active PhilPapers profile and make sure your submissions are indexed properly (e.g., proper keywords, full abstract, accurate citation). Upload penultimate drafts to to academia.edu. Have links to your published papers on your personal website. Just increasing the accessibility of your work goes a long way toward getting others to engage with it. That being said, I also think notifying other interested scholars of a recent publication is perfectly fine. Doing it too often can certainly seem self-aggrandizing and desperate, but I think you'd have to be doing that an awful lot or doing it in a particularly narcissistic way to get under others' skin.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. It's sad that this is such a common experience, but it reiterates the need to speak up about the matter and thinking about the ways we can create a supportive environment for those in need.

If you administer assessments through Canvas, Blackboard, or some other online system, there are usually ways to design certain assessments (or portions of assessments) to be auto-graded by the system. Granted, not all instructors may be fans of multiple choice questions, true/false questions, matching sections, fill-in-the-blank questions, etc., but in certain contexts, these questions can give you some useful insights about what students know. That's especially true if you're good at writing distractors -- wrong answers that sound plausible to those who aren't super familiar with the material. For large classes, auto-graded assessments can save a LOT of time, and they can be given fairly frequently without burying you in additional work.

I think this is definitely something grad students should bear in mind. They should also be aware that it's possible for their Plan B to result in a dead end. In my own case, I was taking some advanced statistics classes on the side toward the end of my graduate career to facilitate a career alternative, but in the second of these courses, I discovered that I absolutely hated doing it and wanted no part of a career focused on that subject area. At that point, I dropped the course and focused on my dissertation for the remainder of grad school. That being said, I also had a Plan C based on my study of technical communication that I did between getting my B.A. and starting a Ph.D. program, so I wasn't banking on statistics as my sole avenue for non-academic employment.

If nothing else, I think this blog has helped a lot of grad students who simply don't have realistic expectations about the job market, the dissertation, professional life after grad school, etc., to get a better handle about what they will need to do to complete their grad programs and have a non-negligible chance on the job market. That, at least, is how I perceive my own contributions. I write primarily for people who need accurate information about these matters so they can decide whether the pursuit of a long-term career in philosophy is right for them. I also basically agree with Dr. Job Seeker above that the standards for the job market had already been elevated dramatically long before the Cocoon existed. I was being advised in 2009 that if I went to grad school, I should expect to need publications to secure a job afterward. The Cocoon came around in 2012. The other factor is that lots of the advice offered is easy to understand but hard to execute. For instance, lots of grad students want to publish articles and are trying, but acceptance nonetheless eludes them.

I want to echo Michel's comment that the best sources of information about the quality of advising in a program are the advanced graduate students. Either strike up a conversation with them during the visit or send them emails after your visit has concluded. (Usually, you'll have to do some of the correspondence via email because you'll only meet a fraction of the grad students on your visit.)

One complication to these structured interviews is that you can be asked questions that seem pretty far out of left field. In every interview of this type I've had, there have always been 1-2 questions that I have never been asked before and that don't turn up on the typical "common interview question" lists. It can be hard to prep for those situations. There have also been several where there are technical problems with the connection, which has affected how the interview proceeds and how I have to moderate the time I take to answer questions. (In each case, it was something on the hiring committees side that was amiss.) That's also pretty hard to prep for.

It's also worth noting that you can partition at the level of your weekly schedule rather than your daily schedule. I recall completing my MA thesis primarily by designating Thursdays and Sundays as writing days. I work on the thesis for 6-8 hours those days and do virtually no other work. This was a very effective way to lock down on that project since I found it difficult to make any substantive progress in 1 or 2 hour blocks. Obviously, this kind of partitioning is harder to do after graduate school (when you often have a heavier teaching load), but if you luck out and have all your teaching scheduled on just 2 or 3 days a week, then it's still possible.

When I receive an R&R, I make changes based on all of each reviewer's individual concerns -- regardless of the reviewer's overall verdict -- unless (1) the reviewers contradict one another or (2) the comment relies on a gross misinterpretation of my argument. With regard to (1), I explain which reviewer I am siding with and why. With regard to (2), I explain the misinterpretation and (if possible) alter the manuscript to make the contours of my argument clearer. Thus far, this strategy has been successful for all 6 R&R verdicts I have received.

This reminds me a bit of Cal Newport's material on this subject. (He teaches computer science and runs the popular blog "Study Hacks".) Cal is also a big advocate of structured daily planning. Here's one representative post about the subject: http://calnewport.com/blog/2015/09/29/deep-habits-three-recent-daily-plans/ Personally, I've never been able to hold fast to a rigid daily plan, but I certainly endorse the first two features of goal-setting that you mention. Vague goals that are very far off in the future don't tend to be motivating. They need to be concrete (so that they have clear conditions for failure and success), and they need to be relatively short term so that you don't keep putting off progress. I will add that imposing artificial deadlines (for example, by targeting a CFP for a journal or conference) can aid in staying on task with various projects in the absence of a rigid daily schedule.

Thanks, Michael. That's very helpful.

Hi Amanda, So first, the letters that I wrote as a grad student were not for philosophy graduate school. In fact, I have never been asked to write a letter for a graduate philosophy program. Letters I wrote as an ABD grad student were for (1) jobs the students were applying for, (2) applications for scholarships or other academic awards, and (3) law school. Some of these job and scholarship apps were successful. The law school letter was written for the best student I ever had: he had taken multiple courses from me, and I wrote a very detailed account of our interactions and the skills he had that would not show up merely in his transcripts, LSAT scores, etc. Anyway, that student got into a bunch of excellent law programs and later listed me as a character reference for the Bar Exam. Maybe my letter made no difference to the outcome, but the evidence would suggest my letter didn't hurt his chances either -- it's not clear to me he would have been better off with a far less detailed letter from a faculty member that barely knew him, and he told me as much in person when we discussed the matter. By "best results," I just mean that the letters do not read like great endorsements. If I were reading them, I would think that they sent the subtle message that the student wasn't a great pick -- since letters of rec are often embellished, "decent" letters come across as being weak.