Drinking Coffee

At the 2007 CCCC I went to the exhibitors' hall on the last day and scored myself some free books. One of them was a short story collection by ZZ Packer titled Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which I finished reading...finally, just a few days ago.

The collection is wonderful, and I hope you get to read it one day if you haven't already. Please don't think that it'll take you nine years to finish it—once I got started, I was done with it in just a few days.

The titular story is about a woman who enters an Ivy League school as a freshman and learns—and is made to reaffirm—all the injustices tied to being black, female, and queer (though she doesn't identify herself in all of those categories).

AAA #1: 7 Considerations for the Application Stage of the Academic Job Search

This past year I had the chance to serve on a search committee for a tenure-track position in my department. I learned so much in the process, that I wanted to write a few posts about the experience before I forgot about it.

Thus the start of a new series, American Academia Awesomeness—because, you know, at some point I have to leave my Grad School stage behind.

Whatever I write, as always, is my personal opinion—from my perspective, my department, my college, my university. But if any of this is helpful for people, that would be great.

This post is about the application stage in the academic job search process. I'll write posts about other stages later.

Here are my personal thoughts about how people submit applications to academic job searches—as well as what might go in the content.