A happy ending to a tenure-track job search

Note from Jeremy: This is a guest post from Greg Crowther.

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Previously I have whined about the difficulties of getting a good, stable college teaching job.  This whining is perhaps justified by the extremely low supply of these jobs relative to the demand.  But since almost everyone, including me, likes happy endings, I now wish to present a happy ending.  That’s right – I have received and accepted an offer for an ongoing full-time position.  At the age of 44, I have finally climbed aboard the tenure track.

It is tempting to tell this story as, “after my past job-search failures, I learned lessons X, Y, and Z, which I then parlayed into my present success” – so tempting, in fact, that I am going to do just that.  However, this simplistic narrative does NOT mean that my fate has been entirely in my own hands the whole time.  It hasn’t.  Luck (good and bad) has always been a major player, and contributed to the present success just as it contributed to the past failures. For example, my Ph.D. is in Physiology & Biophysics, which turns out to be useful on the job market because community colleges offer tons of anatomy & physiology (A&P) courses to pre-health (pre-nursing, pre-dental, pre-PT, pre-pharmacy, etc.) students, and thus need tons of A&P instructors. I didn’t go into physiology because of these market considerations; I just got lucky.

Luck aside, I like to think that I am demonstrating a “growth mindset” (a catchphrase from the work of psychologist Carol Dweck, but one with good research behind it) and am learning from my shortcomings.  One shortcoming that has probably hurt me in past interviews is that I don’t look directly at people when talking to them while thinking hard.  My family, to its credit, forced me to practice making better eye contact.  Thus, in my latest interviews, I appeared less shifty than I had before.

Another area where I’ve improved through recent practice is that of sussing out institutions’ specific priorities and signaling my compatibility.  The school where I was a finalist this spring wants to (A) reduce inconsistencies among its various A&P instructors and (B) decide whether to continue offering anatomy and physiology as separate courses even though most other schools integrate the two.  I discerned that the new hire would be expected to take the lead on these tricky issues, and I signaled my readiness to do this, asking relevant questions and offering possible strategies, while refraining from overt bragging about my leadership skills.

Another institutional priority of this school (and many others) is that of being available and engaging to ALL students (not just the motivated and assertive ones).  How could I address this in a 15-minute teaching demo on the function of nephrons (in the kidney)?  I devised a relevant, straightforward question with many possible one- to three-word answers: “What’s in our blood?”  Within one minute, I had gotten responses from each of the six committee members.  Everyone was welcome – everyone was participating – and off we went around the nephron together.

Despite my feeling that I was learning from my mistakes and doing my best, this spring could have been excruciating.  At one school, I made it to the semifinal round, but then had an extremely awkward interview in which the search committee and I sat at opposite ends of an enormous boardroom table; by the time I got home, I had received an email announcing my elimination. At another school, I was the third of three finalists to be interviewed; 10 days passed, and I started to lose hope; I was then invited to meet with the vice president, and did so; 16 more days passed, and I again started to lose hope; and then, improbably, I received an offer.

The thing that saved me from going crazy was having a good backup plan – teaching high school, in my case, toward which I had been working (via an online program) since the previous fall.

Last summer, before I had really embraced this backup plan, I had been a finalist in yet another search.  With my fall plans completely up in the air, I told the search committee, “I really, REALLY want this job!!!”  I tried to say it in a humorous way, and some people did laugh, but they may have sensed my underlying fear and desperation.  This time around, with the backup plan providing a sense of stability, I was able to avoid sounding unhinged.

And so – after dozens of unsuccessful applications for college teaching positions in the Seattle area (the only area where I can live, due to family reasons) over the past several years – I’ve been hired to teach human A&P full-time at Everett Community College.

I’ll start in January. It’ll be great!  And in the meantime, I can finally stop looking at job ads.