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Chapter 5

Building an Academic Network

A job search may feel like a lonely enterprise, but it is always conducted in the context of a web of social relationships. You work within a discipline with its own language, conventions, and structure of communication. Your own research has undoubtedly been strengthened by communication with other people; in some fields it has been conducted as part of a team. Your future includes leaving a department or lab with one social structure and culture to enter another. You will be explicitly recommended by several people, and those who are considering your candidacy may hear about you from others.

Whether you find these facts reassuring or alarming, by taking account of them as early as possible in your graduate career, you can strengthen your prospects in the job market. If you have not paid sufficient attention to them until now, it is not too late to focus on them. Networking is crucial, not only to get a job, but also to succeed at it and at your research. Some candidates are put off by the potentially exploitative aspect of networking; the goal is not to “use” people, but to engage in a mutually beneficial relationship. Scholarship benefits from exchange; your own work and ideas can be of value to others, even as you learn from them.

During graduate study it is critical that you change your self-concept from that of a “student” who primarily learns from others to that of a “colleague” who is actively engaged in his or her chosen discipline. If you view yourself merely as a job-hunting student, you will see networking as a petitionary activity, be hesitant to contact people, and perhaps run the risk of being bothersome. If you view yourself as an active member of your discipline, you will view networking more appropriately as an exchange of information, contact people confidently, and usually make them happy that they got to know you.

Advisors and Mentors

It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of an advisor in an academic career. When you enter the job market, and perhaps for years, you will often be viewed as “X’s student” or “Y’s protégé.” In some fields, the postdoctoral supervisor is extremely important. There are many things a supervisor can do to support you. You are fortunate if your advisor or supervisor is well known in the market you want to enter, thinks highly of you, spends time with you, is savvy about the employment market, and is enthusiastically supportive of your job search. Your first job search may well go more smoothly because you will be able to discuss your goals with your advisor, who will in turn perhaps reach out on your behalf to colleagues, paving the way to possible interviews.

While such a situation is generally enviable, you may also need to make a particular effort to distinguish between your own goals and your mentor’s goals for you, if you feel they differ. Making choices that are disappointing to an advisor will be particularly difficult. You also may rely too heavily on your advisor’s intervention and fail to master job-hunting skills as thoroughly as does someone who gets less assistance. If you are blessed with such an advisor, make a particular effort to learn from that person how best to make efforts on your own behalf. If you are doing postdoctoral research, your current supervisor can play a role in your search similar to that of a doctoral advisor. However, in addition to supporting your career development, a postdoctoral supervisor is also often dependent on your work to complete research. It may not be realistic to expect that person to enthusiastically support you for a position which would take you away before you completed the time you had committed to the postdoctoral position.

Dealing with a Difficult Advisor

You may have a less than ideal advising relationship. Perhaps your advisor is not particularly well known, brilliant but unskilled at interacting with other people, so formal and distant that you are honestly unsure what he or she thinks about your work, or, in fact, disappointed in your work and not hesitant to tell you so. Whatever the characteristics of this real human being, you can probably improve the relationship, profit from the individual’s greatest strengths, and, if necessary, find additional mentors.

If things are not going well between you and your advisor, your natural tendency may be to avoid talking with him or her. Resist this temptation! It is only through interaction that you can identify problems and attempt to address them. Arrange regular meetings to discuss your work, come well prepared for them, ask for as much feedback as you can get, take your advisor’s suggestions, and make sure he or she sees that you have done so.

If you sense that your advisor is not happy with what you are doing, but is not telling you why, ask more directly for feedback. You may learn that in fact there is no problem, or you may identify an issue you can address. View the immediate problem as an opportunity to learn more about how to manage conflict successfully, since you will encounter it again and again throughout your career. One of the most common problems people experience with their advisor is indifference or inaccessibility, because the advisor either is too senior to know how truly difficult the market is or does not support professional development for graduate students and postdocs. In addition, some advisors may believe that “the cream rises to the top” and that just doing good research is sufficient to secure a tenure-track position. If you experience these challenging attitudes from your advisor, you will likely need to be more proactive, possibly seeking advice from other faculty.

Even though advisors have considerable power, it is not unlimited. Most will respect you more if you think independently, respectfully express disagreement when it exists, present your ideas persuasively, and generally act as if you accept responsibility for your own career. Most advisors act responsibly; a few abuse their power. The latter are most likely to victimize those who are unwilling to challenge inappropriate treatment. If you honestly believe you are being treated unfairly or inappropriately, begin by learning what the norms for acceptable behavior are. For example, your advisor may be crediting your work appropriately according to standards in your field while you may feel it is being “stolen.” You can ask questions of other faculty members, graduate students, and postdocs; see whether your institution has formal policies and guidelines governing the relationship between advisors and students; consult publications of your professional association; and use online resources to understand how your experience fits into the general scheme of things. If you determine that you truly are being treated unfairly, it is usually better, although not risk-free, to seek fairer treatment, preferably with extreme deliberation and the guidance and support of a senior person who understands your department well.

Expanding Your Network

Whatever your relationship with your advisor, it is helpful to have as many senior people as possible interested in your success. Take advantage of every opportunity to talk to and get to know other faculty members in your department. Ask them for opinions, perspective, and feedback in areas where you genuinely value their expertise. It is not necessary or desirable to think of this interaction in terms of flattery. Research enterprises flourish on the exchange of ideas. Do not hesitate to develop mentors at other institutions as well, as their connections and influence can help you as an emerging scholar.

Your peers in the department offer another valuable source of perspective and lifelong contacts. Be realistic about the extent to which you will be competing with them in the job market; many candidates overestimate it. By and large, you have different strengths and interests. You will be far more successful if you exchange information and ideas with others than if you avoid interaction for fear of somehow giving them a competitive edge. In many ways you are “all in this together.” Beware, however, of becoming too involved in exchanging job-hunting horror stories. Every department has its share; some are apocryphal, and overindulgence in listening to and recounting them blurs your perspective.

The farther along you are in your academic career, the more important it is that you have established an independent network of colleagues and peers. If you are going on the market again several years after earning your final degree, some of your most important recommendations may come from outside your degree-granting department. However, if you have lost touch with faculty members there, before you begin a search is a good time to reconnect.

Professional Associations

The scholarly or professional association functions as the recorder and critic of scholarship in the discipline by producing one or more scholarly journals of refereed articles. It normally also holds a conference, usually on an annual basis, where the most recent research in the field is presented. There are many forms of conference presentations. Individual scholars, seasoned Ph.D.s, and advanced graduate students present papers they have prepared for the conference; groups of scholars participate in panel discussions; and individuals or research teams participate in poster sessions or other small group discussions of their work. Such conferences or conventions provide an opportunity for formal and informal communication on research and are crucial for keeping the discipline dynamic.

Ideally, even in the early years of graduate study, you have begun to participate in professional networks that extend beyond your department and university. Whatever your field, there is at least one, if not several, scholarly or professional associations devoted to the exchange of ideas. Conferences, social media and blogs, publications, and local and regional meetings are the most common means of exchange. Because of the importance of these organizations, they will be referred to again and again throughout this handbook. If you do not know those that are important in your field, ask faculty members in your department. (See the selected list of scholarly and professional associations in Appendix 1.)

Calls for papers are probably posted by your department, announced through print and electronic vehicles of your scholarly association, and listed in additional scholarly resources online. If you are early in your career and feel that publications in major journals or presentations at national conferences are slightly beyond your reach at this point, look for regional or local meetings of national organizations and respectable but less prestigious journals. Attend as many presentations as you can. In addition to learning and gaining ideas from the material presented, you can see how others present their work and form your own conclusions about the most effective way to communicate ideas.

Individual Contacts

If you are interested in the work of someone at another institution, whether you learn of it through a conference, a publication, or word of mouth, it is appropriate to approach that person, by phone, mail, or email, for a further exchange of ideas. You might wish to inquire whether your advisors have a connection and can make an introduction. Share your comments; send a copy of a related paper or link to an article you wrote. Ask questions. Suggest a meeting at a conference you both will be attending. It goes without saying that your comments and questions should be sincere and intelligent. By taking the initiative, you greatly expand the range of intellectual resources on which you can draw and develop a broad network of professional contacts with whom you can remain in touch throughout your career.

Social Media/Online Presence

In between meetings, social media function as ongoing professional forums with conversations similar to what may be found in the breaks between presentations at conferences. Your thoughtful participation in relevant groups gives you an opportunity to enable a large number of people to recognize your name in a positive way, not a bad thing when you consider that yours may be one of hundreds in a candidate pool.

Scholarly reputations are built by work people publish. Journal referees will prevent you from publishing anything that is libelous, outrageous, or just plain stupid. When you communicate online, you must be your own referee: consider that your potential audience is literally worldwide, that you reach it instantly, and that your communication is archived in ways beyond your control. Your scholarly presence will be enhanced if your online contributions are characterized by good grammar, graciousness and professionalism. It is prudent to look yourself up via a search engine to see what others may already know about you. You may also have concern for not precipitously putting out work that you plan to publish later, given how easy it is to appropriate material from the Internet. Include a copyright statement on all documents you post.

You impoverish your own work if you do not take advantage of the multiplicity of forums available for the exchange of ideas and of the personal give and take that turns a good piece of work into an excellent one. While you should not do so for this reason alone, as you establish your own network of communication, you also expand the range of people who are interested in your success in the job market. (See Chapter 11, “Online Presence,” for more on this topic.)

Conference Presentations

Conferences and conventions are a major means of scholarly communication. They also provide an opportunity to meet people who can hire you or refer you to others who can. By the time you are an advanced graduate student, if not before, you should begin to participate in these meetings, which are an important means of communication in your discipline. As you near the end of your graduate work and enter the job market, conferences begin to play a more formal role in your job search. They may offer a job placement service or give you an opportunity to gain favorable exposure through presenting a paper, and they always give you a way to network informally with others.

You should almost certainly plan to attend the national meeting of the major association in your field in the year you are on the job market. If you can arrange to give a paper or participate in a poster session, try to do so.

Each field has its own style for the delivery of presentations. If you are delivering a conference paper for the first time, ask your department what to expect and how to be prepared for it. Be aware of conference logistics, modes of talk delivery, and the types of supporting materials that speakers typically use. In addition, check with your professional association to see whether it provides guidelines that help you answer the following questions.

Mode of Delivery

• Do you sit or stand?

• Do you speak from notes or read a paper?

• Do you answer questions at a poster session?

• How formally are papers presented? Is any form of humor ever appropriate?

• How long will you have to speak?

• Will there be questions from the audience? Will there be a moderator?

Presentation Aids

• What kinds of technology or aids will you need to support your presentation?

• How large should a poster be?

• Should you prepare handouts?

• Will you use presentation software?

• Are you planning to show video?

• What kind of technological support will be available at the conference facility?

Practice your presentation before you offer it. If you can give a departmental seminar, so much the better, but, in any case, deliver the talk to an audience that will give you feedback. Ask your colleagues to question the vulnerable points in your thesis so that you can practice addressing challenges to them. As you practice, make sure to speak loudly enough to be heard, look at your audience, and speak rapidly enough to hold your audience’s attention but slowly enough that they can understand you. Most important, ensure that your presentation will fit in the time allotted for you.

Your materials, including any slides, should look professional and be easy to read. Visual and oral presentations should reinforce each other. The point of both is to communicate clearly and well, while maintaining the interest of the audience. Consider carefully whether or not handouts will enhance your presentation. If you choose to use handouts, know their content very well, as your audience might ask you in-depth questions about them. Also, know that some people may spend the entire presentation time reading over the handouts and not focusing on what you have to say. These presentations can be excellent preparation for campus interviews, where you are expected to conduct a job talk about your research. (See Chapter 15, “The Campus Visit.”)

Networking at Conferences

Conferences vary in size according to your field, but they always offer you an opportunity to meet more people in your discipline in one place than you can ever encounter elsewhere. Even if they are not hiring, colleagues are a source of potential information about their institutions, their departments, and their research. They may share information or remember you when you later apply to their departments; they may be people you can later contact for information. But how do you meet them? Here are some suggestions.

Before the conference:

• Choose which conference sessions you would like to attend and determine some goals for the conference in advance to help you plan your time. For instance, perhaps you wish to meet particular people, attend specific presentations or discussions, and seek feedback on a topic connected with your research.

• Find out which faculty members from your department will attend. If there is anyone to whom you would particularly like to be introduced, see if they can help you.

• Plan some unscheduled time for chance meetings with other scholars. If you can afford to do so, stay at the main site for the conference. If not, spend some time in the main conference meeting area, thus giving yourself the opportunity to meet people.

• Practice introducing yourself and giving a brief introduction to your research.

During the conference:

• Wear your nametag, and do not be shy about introducing yourself. Don’t assume people will remember you.

• Participate in smaller interest groups which may have meetings apart from presentations. Some organizations, for example, have active women’s groups.

• Much information gets exchanged at receptions and informal social gatherings. Plan to attend these whenever possible.

• Attend sessions that interest you and talk with the speakers afterward, using your interest in their presentations as an icebreaker.

• Introduce people to each other when you have a chance.

It is appropriate to walk up even to well-established faculty or researchers and introduce yourself. Few people consider this an imposition. In fact, both established and less well-known faculty find it very flattering when less experienced people in their field introduce themselves and say, “I’ve looked forward to meeting you” and state why.

If you are shy, you may prefer to meet people in structured situations. Rather than letting yourself become nervous about meeting people, think about the links between your work and that of those you would like to meet. If it helps, think of meeting new ideas, rather than new personalities. If you are very outgoing, it may be easier to introduce yourself to strangers. In either case, remember that networking works only if you make a good impression. When you meet new people, your interest in their work, your work, and the field should dominate your conversation.

If you are seeking information, elicit it naturally in the course of conversation. If people feel that your main interest is to pump them for job information, you would be better off not speaking with them in the first place. Avoid being overly pushy with or fawning over established researchers. Courtesy and consideration are good guidelines. People who are considering a candidate for a faculty position are looking not only for someone who is creative and smart and has a great future, but also for someone who is going to be a good colleague, that is, pleasant to have around and work with.

Serendipity can play a large part in your career path, and being prepared lets you make the most of chance encounters. You may ride an elevator with or find yourself seated next to a luminary in your field, someone whose work you have always admired. Introduce yourself and state your interest in or connection to this individual and do not shy away from having a little conversation. You never know, but this person may remember you sometime down the road while serving on a search committee, on a review board, or in another professional context.

A conference mixes social and professional events and behaviors. As a job candidate, keep the professional aspect of the gathering foremost in your mind. There is the possibility that someone you approach may assume that your interest is social or romantic rather than professional. Make sure that your manner and attire convey a professional interest. If you are in doubt whether this is clear to the other person, stick to public settings (meetings and restaurants rather than suites or rooms), be extra cautious about your own alcohol consumption, and disengage yourself from anyone who drinks too much.

Participating in a professional network is a valuable activity that will help you, not only in your search for your first position, but throughout your career as well. From it come possibilities for collaborative efforts, invitations to submit papers, and professional stimulation. So it’s worthwhile to begin the process, whether it comes easily or with difficulty.