Speaker 1: Hey guys, what's up? It's Olivia. Welcome back to my channel, Olivia's Grad School Vlogs, where I like to share my experience as a MediaFX graduate student here at Penn State. This is Pebbles. It is the last semester of my PhD program. I am actually doing data analysis for my dissertation right now. So I decided to do a series of videos talking about some of the final year things. In this video specifically, we're going to be talking about the academic job market. In a separate video, I'll discuss the job application materials. So in this video, I'm mainly just focusing on what's the overview of the job market. A couple of things to note before we start this video. One, I am in Mass Communication. If you're in Humanities, this process might be different. If you are in STEM, this process might be different. So take everything I say with a grain of salt. All right, so first off, where do you even find academic job postings? There are two major places I recommend looking. The first is Higher Ed Jobs. What I like about this website is it is updated daily, and you can be as broad or as specific as you want. So I tend to only click Media and Communication and see everything that's available, but you can also narrow your search to certain regions of the country, or like a four-year institution versus community college, etc. Schools do have to pay money to have their ad placed onto Higher Ed Jobs, so this is definitely not a comprehensive list, but it's definitely a good place to start. The second place I recommend looking is at newsletters or job posting boards from major organizations in your field. So for example, in Communications, we have NCA, which is the National Communication Association, ICA, the International Communication Association, and AUJMC, which is too long for me to say, but these are our major organizations that have a lot of our journals, and they also hold the annual conferences each year. NCA and ICA have email newsletters with new job postings, and AUJMC has a web page where people can, again, pay to post their advertisement. People have also recommended to me looking at Chronicles of Higher Education. Personally, I find their website to be really confusing and not organized at all, so I haven't had any luck from that. Next, when do you actually submit job applications? So first of all, when you start applying in, let's say, September 2022, all the jobs you're applying for start in August or September 2023, so you're applying for things about a year in advance. Due dates are going to be centered around the 1st and 30th or the 15th of every month, so you're probably going to have three or more applications due on those times. Personally, my first application was due September 1st, the next one was September 30th, then after that it was the 15th and 30th consistently. Like I said, I'll make another video detailing what job application materials you might need to submit, but in general, you're always going to have to have a cover letter, your CV, which is the academic version of a resume, and contact information for three or four references. Now, with references, it's really important that you ask the person if they're willing to be a reference before you put their information down. You really don't want to tick someone off when you're trying to get a job. Alrighty, so you found the job, you've submitted your materials, now what happens? Typically, at least in my experience and all of my peers' experience thus far, the next step is a Zoom interview. The Zoom interview could be anywhere from 20 minutes to 45 minutes. It's typically with the members of the search committee. If when they're scheduling your Zoom interview, they don't tell you who the committee's members are, you are more than welcome to email whoever emailed you, typically an admin person, and say, hey, would you mind letting me know who is on the committee or who is going to be on this Zoom call? I'm going to make videos about the Zoom interview process as well as the campus interview stage after I have a signed contract somewhere. I am still in the midst of this process myself, and so I'm comfortable talking about some things, but I'm going to wait to talk about others. If you submitted your application, let's say they like you, you do a Zoom interview. If they like you from that, that is typically when I've heard they then will call your references, and if all checks out, they invite the top two to four candidates to an on-campus job interview. The on-campus interview typically starts in the evenings to go out to dinner, and then it's all day long, like eight to eight, and then the next morning there might be a little bit of an exit interview. After that, you'll find out whether you got the job or not, and if you did, you can enter the negotiation stage. The length of time it takes from application to Zoom, Zoom to on-campus interview varies. I know one person who submitted her application and two days later got invited for a Zoom interview and got invited for a campus interview, I think, two and a half weeks after that. I myself have experienced submitting an application and six weeks later being invited for a Zoom interview, which took place the next week, and then I'm still waiting to hear back for that one. I should hear back in the next week or two, so again, that'll be about a six-week lag if before I find out if I made it to the on-campus job interview stage. I also want to say jobs aren't necessarily going to tell you if you didn't make it to the next stage, so me and one of my friends, who actually he has already accepted a position, there are jobs we applied to in September, neither one of us have heard back from. This honestly just goes to show you that each school is on their own timeline, and so don't read into anything or take it too personally if you're not contacted. At the beginning of the first semester, or sometimes even the whole of fall semester, it's mainly R1 institutions, right, those big research institutions that know they have the budget to hire someone, so that is who is mainly posting in the fall. Once you get towards the end of fall semester and into spring, that is when maybe smaller colleges or schools that weren't sure if they were going to have the budget or not start posting, and spring is also when you're going to see a lot of postdocs come up because oftentimes in January is when researchers find out if they got an NIH grant or whatever federal grant they were going for, so it's going to take some time for those positions to be posted as well. In terms of my cohort, there have been four question mark people who have already gone through this process this semester and have accepted jobs. They were all in public relations or advertising, and then there's about I would say 10 of us who are still in the process, and we do everything from healthcom to telecom, journalism, journalism history, wide range. I will say for me personally, I started seeing positions that really fit me starting in November, so I had a November 1st due date, a December 2nd, and a December 19th for positions where I was finally like I would be a really good fit for this position. All that to say, if your friends already have jobs at the end of fall semester, please don't freak out because there is still plenty of time. Now to briefly just talk about my experience on the job market. So like I said, I started applying to jobs September 1st. I will say I did notice it was a lot of R1 positions, lots of advertising, public relations that I was trying to make myself fit into. There have been some general mass comm positions posted, so I have applied for those, and it's weird. On the one hand, I'm being selective. On the other hand, I'm like, well if it's a good school, if it looks like a place I'd want to live and I somewhat fit the call, I'm gonna apply for it. I've applied for I think 13 positions so far, and I just saw a postdoc posted that I'm probably going to apply for in the next week or two. I know of other people who have applied to 20 or more, but again they were in the ad PR field, which is what I felt was the only thing being posted last semester. People say the job market, being on the job market, is a full-time job. They are correct. It takes me probably a good half a day to get all my materials together for a singular job application, and then if you're prepping for a Zoom interview, that also is going to take a day for you to look at the program, the classes, really look at who's on the search committee, and then if you make it to the job talk stage or the campus interview stage, you have to give something called a job talk, which is usually a 45-minute presentation about yourself, about your research, and how you fit into that department, and so that takes quite a long time to prep that presentation, practice in front of an audience of your peers, and again learn everything you can about the institution for when you go down. My advice is to get as far ahead on your dissertation as you possibly can before you're on the job market, and then also if you can get like an easier assistantship your last semester, so maybe not teaching a large lecture hall class, that's probably going to help you free up your time a bit as well. All right, that is my general insight into the academic job market. Again, this is focused on my experience in mass communications, so take what you will from that. If you like this video, please give it a big thumbs up and comment down below. If you were to work at a university, what kind of university would you want to work at and why? And you know what, maybe your answer is Penn State because you want to work in the athletics department. I don't know. Let me know down in the comments. Thank you guys so much for watching. Hope you have a wonderful day. Keep dreaming out loud, and I will see you guys next time. Bye.