The Grad School Diaries: Rapids Ahead

If touring a school during the application process is the bend in the River of Time that leads into the Graduate School stretch of the river, then job talks must surely be the rapids that signal the end of the passage and the bend leading to your next stop. It’s a short address – usually 60 to 90 minutes, depending on the discipline and the department – during which an active job seeker can tell the assembled faculty (and whoever else had time to show up) about the research he or she is doing, the broader implications of that research and its importance to the field, and possibly even how that research draws from or is related to work already being done by members of the department. In some cases, people will attempt to address a major part of the field that is not represented by anyone currently on the faculty, while in others people will attempt to recruit new scholars who will be able to work collaboratively with the existing faculty…

Of course, there are persistent rumors of other schools considering other factors, such as number of publications, amount of grant money you control, teaching expertise, or reputation in the field, but most of the doctoral students dismiss such ideas as mere fantasy – and irrelevant in any case. We are months or years away from such performances ourselves (most likely three years in my case), and our attendance at such events is more a matter of learning our profession and being polite to our visitors than anything else. The faculty will ask our opinions, of course, and will probably listen to them, if only to get a wider perspective on how the job talks were received. But the simple fact is that all of us are here only for a short while, whereas our faculty will have to live with whoever they hire for a six-year tenure cycle at the very least, and possibly for the rest of their lives (if the newly appointed Assistant Professors are granted tenure)…

Due to scheduling conflicts (I am teaching in the mornings this semester, and I’ve got several after-work commitments) I was only able to attend two of the six job talks held this fall, and only one of the evening receptions held for the visitors giving the talks. Still, it was an interesting experience, and I find myself wondering how well I will do, three or four years into the future, when I’m out in the world doing these. Not that I have a problem with public speaking, of course; I’ve been teaching and presenting results to groups of clients for years now, and this past year I’ve been teaching at MSU itself. And I’ve had more job interviews, both as an applicant and as an interviewer, than most people ever will, due to my hopscotch career path and some of the rather odd things I’ve done for a living. But this process seems less like an interview, or even an audition, and more like a chess game where you can’t see the board and no one will tell you the rules – and I’m going to be a dark horse regardless…

I’m older than any of the candidates giving job talks this semester by a decade or so; the more experienced applicants who will be presenting over the winter are closer to my age, but still younger than I am. I’m less mathematically oriented, and possess much less training in statistics or research methods, than anyone in the applicant pool, and that isn’t likely to change much when I’m on the other side of the table. I’m still going to be older, less capable, more qualitative and less quantitative, and more oriented towards the practice of management than the study of management than our department (or any others like it) would be willing to even consider. And, to be honest with you and myself, I don’t believe that I care…

I didn’t take on this oddball quest to compete with the best and the brightest – many of whom are on this journey with me; our doctoral corps is one of the best – anymore than I did it for prestige, fame, or adulation. This is an opportunity to find out what I’m really made of, and if I am especially lucky, to find out a few things I’ve always wanted to know and help train the next generation of both managers and management scholars. It may be that my contributions to the field will be small; it may be that I will never measure up to the applicants we’re watching give their job talks today, let alone the august personages who will evaluate them. But I expect to leave the field just a little bit better than it was when I found it, and more than that no man can ever really ask…

Always assuming I can make it through the rapids, of course…