[Grace Kao] The long and winding road to becoming a professor

As we approach the Thanksgiving holiday and the end of the fall semester in the US, it is also a time of anxiety for Ph.D. students on the academic job market. Many more people with Ph.D.s aspire to be professors than there are positions. The road to becoming a professor is arduous, even for students at Ivy League institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, where I taught for 20 years, and at Yale University, where I’ve taught for eight years. All of us with tenure-track or tenured positions in fields like sociology have gone through what I’m about to describe. It is remarkably similar across multiple disciplines at research-intensive universities.

This career path is not for the faint of heart. The job market cycle spans an entire year. Keep in mind that students near completion in a highly-ranked Ph.D. program have already been through a rigorous selection program.

In our department, most Ph.D. candidates will enter the job market in the sixth year of their graduate studies. By this point, they have completed their coursework and field exams as well as written and defended a dissertation proposal. They have likely written much of their dissertation, which is an original body of research in the form of a book. They have attended weekly workshops and learned to critically assess research during their graduate training. They will have served as teaching fellows, helping professors with their classes. While it is not a requirement for graduation, they will have certainly attended many academic conferences and published multiple peer-reviewed journal articles. Journals have acceptance rates in the single-digit to 10 percent range, and it sometimes takes 1-3 years to publish a single peer-reviewed paper.

To prepare for the job market, sometime in the summer, job market candidates will begin writing a cover letter as well as research, teaching and service statements. These materials are written and revised many times by the students and their professors. Students have to solicit letters of recommendation from their committee members (people like me). They need to prepare their writing samples. They then scour job listings for jobs in the US and sometimes all over the world. There are single deadlines for the year, which may be Sept. 30, Nov. 15, etc. In the sociology job market this year, there may be dozens of tenure-track jobs (yes, you read that correctly) in the entire United States for a beginning assistant professor. I would advise my students to apply for all the ones that may fit their expertise and that they can imagine accepting if offered the position. The odds that they will be interviewed for any particular job are near zero, as a single position can solicit hundreds of applications.

Once they apply and send their materials to the application portal, the waiting game begins. Meanwhile, they will give practice job talks — these are usually 35-40 minute presentations about their research with a 30-minute or so “Question and Answer” session. Other Audience members of professors and students will ask difficult questions about their research, and they must practice how to respond to them. Poor responses to questions, even after a great talk, can end a job candidacy.

In our discipline, some schools might conduct zoom interviews with candidates first before inviting them to campus interviews, while others skip this step. Typically, three candidates are invited to a campus interview for one tenure-track position. What is heartbreaking is that despite the many practice job talks and preparations for the job market, some Ph.D. candidates or Ph.D. holders will not receive an invitation for a job interview.

Every graduate student I have ever met spends time grappling with existential questions about whether they want to teach at a small liberal arts college or a research university; whether they would like to live in an urban area in the Northeast like New York or Boston or in the West Coast like Los Angeles; and whether they are willing to live in a small town in the South or a mid-sized city in the Midwest. I tell them all of this is irrelevant because no one has offered them a job yet and they have no choices to make until they successfully get a job offer. This is a lesson that they will not quite understand until they are actually on the job market.

Ph.D. candidates can also hope to obtain post-doctoral positions, but these are less common in the humanities and social sciences than in STEM fields. Still, these can be excellent one to two-year positions, where one can spend additional time conducting research and building one’s curriculum vitae. However, the supply of post-docs also leads to a more competitive supply of job candidates, because new Ph.D.s and Ph.D. candidates have to compete against them.

If you have friends or family members who are currently enrolled in Ph.D. programs and hope to become professors, be kind to them. Don’t ask them why they are in school for so long and if they have yet received a job offer as a professor. It’s a bit like asking a K-pop trainee if they have debuted yet.

Grace Kao

Grace Kao is an IBM professor of sociology and professor of ethnicity, race and migration at Yale University. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.