On the Market: Surviving the Academic Job Search

by Victoria Olsen, Christina Boufis, V. Olsen

Book Overview

A collection of essays by new Ph.D.s explores the problems in the academic job market from a wide variety of viewpoints, offering strategies for getting recommendations and performing well at... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573226262
• ISBN13: 9781573226264
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Length: 381 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Should be required reading

For those who are weary and sick at heart over the long, impoverishing, and brutal academic job hunt--for friends and family who are having a hard time understanding just what you are going through--for tenured faculty who need to know what is happening within their profession--this book is an important find. It reminds the frustrated academic job seeker that he or she is not alone, not a loser, and not doomed to failure. It also conveys a real sense of what the academic job search means on a personal, professional and political level; thus, even if you are not searching for a job as a professor, if you care about someone who is,or if you are already a professor who cares about what your students are experiencing on the market, you may want to read this book in order to better understand what they are going through. Oh yes, and it does INDEED contain hopeful, reflective and intelligent essays on job opportunities outside of academia.

Enlightening, and very sobering.

There's something for everyone in this volume. Virtually every job search experience possible is found here -- everything from whether or not to establish a gender identity to whether a tweed skirt is appropriate attire. A must-read for ANYONE involved with the Academy, whether searching for a position or not.

I highly recommend this book

A very well-edited collection of essays from various people in academia--those lucky enough to have full-time positions (yes, you learn just how lucky they are after reading this book), those part-timing, those still looking, and those who've given up. An enlightening, frightening, and at times comforting look at what lies in store for those of us "on the market."

Important, excellent, terrifying

This book about recent PhDs' experiences on the job market calls attention to a tremendous problem: over-production of PhDs and universities' increasing use (some would say exploitation) of adjuct faculty. Excellent as the book is, I am not sure that I would recommend it to someone about to begin a job search, because it is so terrifying and potentially demoralizing. I would recommend it to anyone in any other stage of academic life, including professors, administrators, students considering getting a PhD, and especially to someone who has already been demoralized about the market and needs to know that (s)he isn't alone. The authors constitute a diverse group, with different writing styles and opinions. One particularly interesting difference was authors' conflicting claims to being members of groups discriminated against in the job search process. For example, one author lamented his position as a straight white (American) male, while other authors wrote about difficulties they faced for being queer, foreign, or female. There were some limits to the authors' diversity. Specifically, there was little racial diversity among the authors, and there was no information about engineering, not even an acknowledgment that the engineering market is better than those described in the book.