This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large.

It’s been a few years since we first rounded up our recommendations of academic job boards for active searchers–and a few years more since we updated that list. Time flies when the Internet is innovating! Our previous suggestions are still golden, but we thought we’d add a few, just in case one of these turns out to be the place where you find your next position. 

Econjobs.com: For economists looking for jobs inside and outside of academia, this specialized academic job board is a gold mine. One helpful feature is a widget that allows you to see which jobs are trending on the board; which are popular; and which have deadlines close to the day you’re looking. Another is the ability to program alerts to let you know when certain types of jobs are posted. 

UniversityPositions: This EU-specific academic job board allows people who plan to work in the European Union to narrow their searches down efficiently. The site offers a newsletter–an easy way to keep track of updates without visiting again and again.  

EducationJobSite: If you are thinking of going into K-12 education after graduate school, this job board aggregates ads for you, from schools across the United States, and is a good way of figuring out what might be available in a given area. 

AirJobs.com: If you are interested in parlaying your hard-won research skills and trying for a job in the field of institutional research, this job board is for you. A bonus is the depth of information on the website, beyond the academic job board, about what “institutional research” means within higher ed, and what the field offers. 

AcademicPositions.com: One more academic job board that’s general and broad, to add to this list of niche candidates, is AcademicPositions.com, which does offer some humanities jobs but seems especially rich in STEM fields. The site pulls from higher-ed job listings worldwide. 

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of Interfolio.

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large.

“Here’s an unpopular opinion,” wrote Viet Thanh Nguyen, professor of English, American studies, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California, in the New York Times in February 2021. “I like teaching on Zoom.” Although many professors were nervous about moving online in March 2020, after a few semesters of teaching through the Internet, reports are in, and they’re much less catastrophic than some people predicted. Here, from faculty with a few semesters under their belts, are a few key upsides of Zoom.

Human connections are different, but for some people, easier

Vikki Katz, a professor of communication and information at Rutgers University, surveyed thousands of undergrads about their remote-learning experiences and found that what was the most important for students trying to learn online was the accessibility of the faculty. “Whatever you can do to reduce that sense of distance…and keep the connection strong between you and them,”she said to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “is going to pay dividends.”

Liza Kaufman Hogan, a journalism professor with online teaching experience who wrote an essay to encourage colleagues new to the art at the beginning of the pandemic, said that although it was hard at first to connect with introverted students, “I looked for ways to connect with all the students on a personal level—and it paid off.” She described her efforts to engage with a particular student, who she thought ended up speaking “more in class than she might have in an in-person course.”

For some shyer students, the occasionally asynchronous nature of online connection, a mode they are accustomed to from their non-academic lives, really worked—especially when professors came up with creative ways to make it happen. Law professor Julian Davis Mortenson recommended on Twitter “asking students to record intro videos at the start of the semester.” He used “goofy ice breaker questions” that he also answered in a video, then left the option to respond open to those who were interested. “The results,” he wrote, “are delightful.”

More students may participate.

Nguyen mentioned that in a lecture he taught online to a hundred undergrads, he helped break up his lectures by asking six students per class to serve as his interlocutors during each class section. They’d be prepared ahead of time to speak, and he’d ask them questions throughout. “It turns out that the students are much less shy speaking on video than they might be before a live audience,” Nguyen wrote.

Then there’s the Zoom chat function. Veterans of workplace meetings that are silent on video but have lively chat rooms will recognize the advantage Zoom holds for online teachers who have students who are shy about speaking, but happy to type. This textual backchannel gives students a place to ask questions they can draft ahead of time, and allows professors the chance to respond to feedback as they go.

Breakout groups are better.

Students and professors noted that the practice of putting together “breakout groups”—little pods of five to ten students who exit the larger class to address a specific question, discuss a document, or do some finite amount of work—is much better online. In a big classroom, people must shift around physically, and then the room is full of the noise of other breakout groups. In Zoom, a small group is easy to form, and discussion can be clear for all to hear.

Guests can come from anywhere.

Money for flying in guest speakers to your average lecture course can be scarce, and it can be awkward to ask a subject-matter expert to virtually “attend” a live lecture, where they might be projected as a giant talking head on a screen to a room of restless people. On Zoom, for an online-only class, everyone is a head on a screen. The expert, who can appear between other obligations with minimal need to arrange time away from regular life, can relax a bit, and the playing field is leveled. 

Although many campuses are back to in-person instruction this fall, given how uncertain everything remains, it’s good to know that teaching on Zoom is not only possible, but sometimes—given the right combination of students and professors, and everybody’s willingness to play along—better. 

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of Interfolio.

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large.

Grad students have trouble with mental health, and if you’ve been one, you know it—which is why sociologist Katia Levecque’s work on high levels of risk for psychiatric disorders like depression in Ph.D. students went viral in 2017. The part where you work really hard for low pay for years is bad enough, but when you’re on the job market, looking for a place at the bottom of the academic ladder as one of hundreds of applicants for scarce positions—all while trying to establish a rooted life as a (maybe not-so) young adult—the feelings of precarity can be overwhelming.

What can be done? As Levecque said in an interview with “Science” this year, the problem is a complex one: “It’s not all the fault of the academic structure and culture, and it’s not all the fault of the individual.” We should all advocate for better working conditions and employment terms for early-career researchers. But working on an individual level, here are some things that you can do to manage the flood of feelings of uncertainty that the job market can bring.

Try to reach out and touch a world that’s not academia.

If you are overwhelmed by the prospect of putting together an entire second job search for an alt-ac position (fair!), do some small things that can connect you with a non-academic career. Follow professionals in the field on Twitter, and eavesdrop on what they’re saying about the ins and outs of their job. (They may also share ads for positions in the field, which is a bonus—you can see what requirements are de rigueur, and try to tailor your resume to fit.) Asking some of these people for informational interviews can be another good option; as the blog Beyond the Professoriate says, such chats are lower-stakes, and they can be “a fantastic way to stay motivated during your job search.” 

Go on a walk.

There is apparently science behind this common prescription for relieving stress. When you are anxious, and don’t know what’s coming, you become afraid, and your vision gets narrow; when you’re walking, you’re naturally scanning the horizon, and that side-to-side action of the eyes calms your brain. This isn’t about endorphins (though those help) or vitamin D from sunlight (that’s good too); it’s about forcing a reorientation to your situation. 

Don’t overdo it.

As Anna Meier writes in a blog post about being on the academic job market, you may have many opportunities extended to you to practice your job talk or have your materials reviewed by others in your program or university. Try to figure out which of these artificially imposed external deadlines will be helpful in developing your material and nailing your presentation, and which will not. “Do things that scare you a little,” she writes. “Don’t do things when you know they’re going to send you into an anxiety spiral and not actually help you.”

Try super hard to resist projecting outcomes.

As a friend said recently of her husband’s academic job search (which will affect her future town of residence): “I can’t seem to keep myself from hitting Zillow every time he gets an interview at an institution.” This kind of projection may be difficult to avoid, and some of us are better at compartmentalization than others—but try. As Tal Yarkoni wrote in 2012 about his strategy for staying on track while on the job market: “Spending as little of my time as possible thinking about my future employment status, and as much of it as possible concentrating on my research and personal life.”

Envision a long-term project outside of work.

In a new book, Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing, civic advocate Pete Davis argues that long-term happiness for people, and health for their communities, becomes possible when people commit to projects for decades at a time. He calls these people “long-haulers.” 

One reason an academic job search is so dispiriting is that many people who enter Ph.D programs intend for academia to be their “long-haul” project. Look at the CV of somebody who got a good tenured position a few decades ago, was supported in their research and is now in their sixties; that person is a long-hauler. That’s the kind of CV that inspires committed grad students who love academia to go for it. But when jobs are so scarce, academia may not be able to serve as your long-haul project.

One way to maintain mental health during an uncertain job search is to re-invest in other things that you plan to do your whole life long. Cooking, gardening, writing that’s not related to your Ph.D research, spending time with children you plan to see grow up (plus these other COVID hobbies)—these are all long-haul projects that can bring you solace, when the job market goes up and down. 

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of Interfolio.

This post continues our series by a onetime academic job seeker, now academic-at-large.

Christopher L. Caterine, who has a PhD in Classics from UVA, left academia for the corporate world after he and his wife, also an academic, decided staying together in the city of their choice was more important to them than pursuing two elusive tenure-track jobs. In Caterine’s new book, Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide, he tells us how he did it. The book is written in an engaging style; it’s forthcoming, incisive, and specific.

Here are a few high points of Caterine’s advice that might convince you, the prospective alt-ac job-seeker, that this one’s the book for you.

Success may happen slowly.

Caterine writes that his search took two years, and “meetings with more than 150 people,” before he found the job that was his first step out of academia. He had the time—he had what he calls a “‘good’ visiting assistant professorship that only carried a 3-3 teaching load,” when he undertook the search—so this wasn’t a disaster for his finances, but the details of his story show how winding the path to external employment may be. Takeaway: If you think you may be on your way out of academia, start sooner, rather than later.

If it feels hard, that’s because you’re leaving a vocation, not a job.

Caterine is especially attuned to the emotions that come along with abandoning the hope of an academic position. “In a very real way,” he writes, “we worry that we don’t know who we’ll be if we cease to be academics.” The emotional turmoil he felt throughout his search is well-described; the story of how he and his wife decided she should forgo a chance at a tenure-track job in an undesirable location hits especially close to home. “Like most academics,” he writes, “we’d been acculturated to think that significant life choices were outside our control.” Once they stepped out of that paradigm, they started to see how much they had been sacrificing.

Informational interviews can be simple.

Caterine demystifies the process for academics, who are highly unaccustomed to seeking out these kinds of informal professional contacts. He includes good questions to ask—two are, “What skills do you wish you had before you started in your current role?” and “What have people gone on to do after holding your position?”—along with descriptions of the way these questions helped him understand new industries during his own coffee chats.

Networking isn’t bad.

“I long considered networking perverse—an attempt to use people for personal gain when they should have been befriended for joy and companionship,” writes Caterine, voicing the thoughts of many purity-minded academics who think of non-academic hiring as somehow less meritocratic than what goes on inside academia. After a while, he writes, he figured out that building professional connections is a practice that benefits not just the job-seeker, but everyone who participates.

Reframe your academic work for public consumption with one easy trick.

I joke, because Caterine’s advice is more subtle than this, but this one recommendation from him really helped: “Emphasize how you study, rather than what you study.” He includes several examples of ways you can circumvent discussions of subject matter in favor of a focus on methodology, when framing your academic experience for resumes,