I did a little detective work yesterday to find out who got the job I interviewed for back at the beginning of April. I knew that the school's board of governors had to approve new hires, so I looked up the agenda for their May meeting. There were three positions at the school, and all three went to current faculty. They have all been adjuncts there for six or seven years, and one has a Ph.D. With that competition, I completely understand why I didn't get the job. The school already knows those people, and they have more experience (and one has more education) than I do. When I looked up that information, I was hoping to find what I did. The odds were against me to start with, and I figure I would have had to completely blow them away with my interview and teaching demonstration in order for them to decide to hire me instead of their local folks, so it doesn't mean much against me that I wasn't hired.
If anything, it's a good sign that I was interviewed at all since I also found out that they had ninety-seven applications. I don't know exactly how many people were interviewed, but I doubt it was more than ten or twelve. So the fact that I made it to the top few out of nearly a hundred seems like a really good sign. They spent several hundred dollars to fly me out there, so they were at least considering me somewhat seriously even if they ultimately decided to go with people they already knew. So the good news is that my application materials must look decent since I'm getting interviews, and I don't feel like I'm doing something major to shoot myself in the foot when I interview (although, obviously, I could have done something better to impress them enough that they would hire me instead of their local folks).
But the bad news is that this experience reiterates how hard it is to actually land a full-time job. After all, the people who got the job had been adjuncts for four or five years longer than I have been before they finally managed to land full-time jobs. For one job posting, there were ninety-seven applications. For another recent job for which I got a phone interview but not an in-person interview, there were 125 applications. (And for the Wisconsin fellowship I didn't get, there were five hundred applications for six fellowships). To actually land a job, I need to be the top choice, not merely qualified or pretty good or in the top ten. I need to be in the top one percent or fraction of one percent. And that's tough.
Growing up, I was a top student. According to GPA, I graduated in the top three percent of my high school class. I'm a member of Mensa, which means I test in the top two percent of the population for IQ. I made it to grad school twice. I had a 4.0 GPA for my time in my MFA program and nearly that for all my other schooling. According to standard measurements, I'm very intelligent and capable, and I'll be a top candidate for various positions throughout life. But my guess is that I look pretty much the same as the other applicants for any of these jobs. One doesn't get into or through grad school in the first place unless one is highly intelligent and capable. Obviously, the school chose to interview me, so maybe I looked better than eighty-five of the applicants. But it's quite possible that I'm never going to be the number one guy, and with this kind of competition, even if I'm number two, I don't get the job.
The same thing is true for publishing. It's not enough to be good or decent. One has to be the absolute top in order to get published. One's story has to be better than the other hundred or five hundred or thousand stories that the magazine is considering. The odds are stacked against ever breaking through. It's not impossible, of course. People get published. People get jobs. And certainly there is the possibility to get lucky. Maybe a magazine will need to fill a few more pages before going to print, so they'll accept something halfway decent just to finish up. Or a school might have their first few choices turn down job offers and hire somebody they aren't quite as impressed with. But to really succeed it's not enough to be in the top ten percent or five percent or two percent or maybe even one percent.
And, of course, the reality is disheartening. When it comes to writing, I feel confident that my writing is good. The fact that I get personal feedback from journals is enough to indicate that I'm not completely deluding myself that my stories are well written. But that's not enough. I'm clearly not the top one in a thousand. Maybe I'm in the top five in a hundred, but so are thousands of other writers, who are also getting rejected. When it comes to teaching, I suspect that if I just keep at it long enough, I'll someday be the top candidate; eventually my experience will build up to the tipping point. But it's tough to think about continuing to work part time and make so little money and have no benefits for another five years.
2 comments:
Yeah, it's kind of depressing sometimes. This is one of the things that I don't like about teaching, that getting a full time job is highly competitive.
I think, though, that as far as writing is concerned, there isn't really a top one person out of a thousand or whatever. I think all there is are the people who are good enough to be milling around at the top, and none of them are really much better than the others (it's so subjective, anyway, that the one who would be number one in one editor's eyes might not be in another's). It's just that some of them have gotten lucky and caught their big break, and others haven't yet. Whenever I start feeling discouraged I just try to focus on the small successes - those personal rejections, the acceptances, contests you've won, etc - and I remind myself that only someone whose work was good would have gotten that far. Really breaking through, though, probably just comes down to luck.
I agree with that. It is subjective, and a lot of it comes down to luck. And that's why we should keep trying, right? We'll never get that lucky break if we give up. Sometimes I definitely need a reminder of that, though, as well as a reminder of the successes I have achieved already.
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