I can hardly believe it; after ten straight years in graduate school, I will be graduating. There were definitely times in my graduate career when I thought this day wouldn’t come, but it’s just a few short weeks away. Graduation is a special event that calls for a bit of preparation, including some things you […]
The academic job offer is the moment you’ve been waiting for; after working for who-knows-how-many-years, you’ve finally been invited to take a real, grown-up place at the academic table. Once you get an offer, you may be tempted to say “yes” right away-after all, negotiating the academic job market is a harrowing, stressful process which […]
Social media is often stereotyped as a frivolous, navel-gazing enterprise, and completely antithetical to the deep thinking and thoughtful questioning of academia. However, most gradhackers know that academia and social media are not at all incompatible. Used well, social media can be a vibrant and fruitful space for networking, exchanging ideas, and-dare I say it-building […]
The academic job market is a journey. A long, complex, stressful journey. I’m in the thick of this journey right now, having just arrived back from the Modern Language Association annual conference, where hundreds of scholarly hopefuls in English studies interviewed with search committees from universities all over the United States. Generally, the next step […]
If you’re on the academic job market this fall, chances are you will soon be facing the prospect of a phone interview. In my discipline, rhetoric and composition, phone interviews generally happen after a candidate has applied for a job and responded to a request for more materials from an interested program. The phone interview […]
It’s the most arduous time of the year-academic job market season. If you’re a grad student actively seeking academic employment now, you will need to secure those ever-important letters of recommendation in the next few weeks. For some folks, this is a terrifying prospect. It often feels like an imposition, a distraction or a drag […]
As a grad student in my last year of study, I enjoy a pretty flexible schedule and work environment. I work from home a few days a week, and conduct a lot of my research in online spaces, so being constantly connected to the internet is essential for me. However, this constant connectivity is a […]
I have a hard time working without music. No matter what grad school-related task I am working on, it just feels strange to be doing it in silence. In a world where a pair of earbuds are as expected an accessory as a pair of pants, it’s clear that I’m not alone in my need […]
I was without pets for the first years of my life. I did have the occasional goldfish, which lived in a large bowl in my parents’ living room for a few weeks before inexplicably committing suicide by leaping out of said fishbowl and into the radiator. When my age reached the double digits, I graduated […]
I was born logical and creative and comical and dark and practical and dreamy and compassionate and angry. I was born understanding myself as a whole; I never questioned my own composition. For a long time in my life, I believed that I could be anyone. But lives move forward in choices and in those […]
