The 2007 Student Affairs Job Hunt

In Medias Res # 26- All's Well

My apartment is three quarters packed. There is something really depressing about living in a place with nothing on the walls, no books in the bookcase, no lamp on the night table. I am excited to move though, and I am ready to get out of Dodge as it were.

Today in an attempt to procrastinate I have been reading my old postings, and doing that most sacred of student affairs activities: reflecting. I keep getting asked if I am worried or nervous about moving to a new city. “Are you stressed?” My supervisor inquired last night at dinner.

Surprisingly I’m not. Looking back it is interesting to see how much enthusiasm I mustered for the wrong kind of job. To a certain extant back in January I was mostly romanticizing the notion of being done. I also had wildly unrealistic expectations about what moving to some of these campuses would be like. Somehow I managed to convince myself that working in a Residence Life department two hours away from a major city would provide me with plenty of opportunities to visit said city.

On the whole I am surprised how very often in my posts I am simultaneously peeved and excited. Mostly I just remember being stressed and cranky. This was a very rough semester for me. My course work got neglected basically throughout March and April (I was always on planes. I never had time to do reading). My social life was non existent. The few times I was in town for more than an evening I just wanted to veg out and of course, work on my applications.

In retrospect I learned a couple of things from this search:

1. If it feels wrong, it is wrong. My gut was right 99% of the time in this process. I knew who was going to call me back. I knew who wasn’t really enthused about my candidacy and I knew who I didn’t want to work for.
2. That said, I ignored my gut too often. I was doing first round phone interviews for positions well into April. I had some scheduled that I had forgotten about even after I accepted a position. This level of desperation was completely unnecessary. I wasted my time and I wasted the interviewer’s.
3. I have a lot more stamina than I give myself credit for. Maybe it’s because grad school was this warm and supporting environment, but I more than met the marathon challenge encompassed in two weeks of back to back campus visits. Although I don’t plan on normally working myself that hard, it is nice to know going into my next position that I have untapped resources.
4. I can actually get what I want, and more than that I can get precisely what I want. When I first started graduate school one of our professors’s asked us to write a letter to ourselves about our ideal position. Where would we be? What would we be doing? Looking back at the research project that spun out of that letter, I am pleasantly surprised at how much the job I have matches the job I wanted. Not just in terms of position, but also location, campus environment, and yes even salary.

Since I’m in a list making mood, here are some recommendations for people who will be searching next year:

1. If you can afford it, go to a placement. Lots of members in my cohort opted not to attend the Joint Conference because the assumption was they would not find their job there. Yes, placements are rife with Res Life jobs, but I’ve since learned that’s proportional. There are lots of great positions at placement in all facets of the university, and you do yourself a disservice if you fail to put in the face time. My position would have been basically unattainable if I had not attended a placement.
2. Find one person to vent to. Just one. Everybody’s search is different, and everybody responds to the stress of the situation in a unique way. Find the one person whose temperament is most like your own and share with them. It will keep you and your stress in check, and everyone else will appreciate you more.
3. Start early. Especially if you are a procrastinator start putting your resume and a cover letter together over Thanksgiving break. Even in you are not going to placement you never know when a job will pop up and it makes it easier to apply if most of the work is already done.
4. Start saving money now. Most of it you will get back in taxes if you keep your receipts, but doing a national job search can be prohibitively costly.
5. Figure out the essentials and stick to them. I interviewed out of fear with institutions where I would have been miserable. Stick to the essentials, and you will have fewer regrets.
6. Be flexible. Just because you’ve never heard of a school or a town, doesn’t mean that it’s not a fabulous institution. Although I didn’t end up there, there were lots of institutions not on my radar who ended up near the top of my list after a bit of exploration.
7. Don’t settle. It would have been easy to jump on the first good fit that came along, but I had my heart set on a position. I stretched everyone’s patience a little bit, but in the end I got what I wanted.
8. Be the best possible version of yourself. And you know what I mean. I met too many people in this process who gave into their baser instincts at times, and when you are trying to evaluate a position or a campus the baser instincts get highlighted in neon. Everything seems that much more unpleasant.

I move next week, so who knows when I will have the internet again. Assuming this is my last post (and it may not be) I just wanted to thank everyone who took the time out to scan my musings. I know a lot of this was redundant, but hopefully you found at least some of it amusing, dear reader. Shout out to Hirstin Moh for keeping me on track with the postings. Best of luck to everyone who is about to start a new position or who is still looking for one.

posted by StudentAffairs.com @ 11:21 AM