From the Health Maintenance section: ‘Realize that failure to get a job might be due to bad luck and has nothing to do with your expertise. The hiring committee members are not only looking for a researcher or teacher, but also a good friend who might be around for the rest of their lives.’

In other words: don’t worry, it’s not your research skills, it’s just your personality!? Thanks, Hanti!

I couldn’t tell if was for real or a parody, like someone had written a “Tracy Flick’s guide to grad school.”

“The main purposes of presenting a paper in a conference:

to impress people,
to earn your reputation,
to find people to write recommendation letters for you.”

To learn from others? Get feedback on your work? Discuss important philosophical issues?

As a grad school applicant, it seems more and more that “The search for truth” has been divested into a kind of omnipresent careerism. Where’s the room for exploration, mistakes, uncertainty? I always loved my philosophy classes because they made room for *thinking*. It seems to my amateur self that there is no longer room for thinking–only room for publishing. Not that the two are mutually exclusive. But it does not seem to me coincidental that Heidegger and Wittgenstein, likely the two most influential 20th Century philosophers, published relatively little.

I share Rambler’s sentiment, but not in a hostile or (I hope) uncharitable way: that is, I think Lin’s advice is (almost all) good, but I wish it weren’t. I wish it weren’t wise to really think about marketing yourself & enhancing your reputation for the job market, but it probably is.

To offer something constructive, though: I think the document might present too limited a picture of the good post-talk question. That is, even granted that what you primarily want is for your publicly-asked question to enhance your reputation, it needn’t be “killer” to be good. You can show that you’re a good philosopher (and, even, a good philosopher to have around!) by asking questions that aren’t just polite-but-devastating objections, but instead do something more constructive, like suggesting applications/extensions of the work, or historical figures who might be interesting/relevant, or suggesting a buttressing line of argument, or another way of seeing the importance of the work, or….

I realize there’s a standard vision of Q&A as a gauntlet, but it needn’t be so. Not that my opinion matters a whole lot, but when I think more highly of someone for asking a good question, it’s at least as often because it was perceptive & helpful (& succinct) as because it was devastating.

I found this comment in the “Mental Health” section to be somewhat misleading: “Realize that there are good jobs you could find if you have to leave academia.” I would ask, good by what standard? Equivalent pay? Equivalent workload/off time for philosophical reading/reflection? Equivalent intellectual stimulation and reward? And who can find these jobs? Disaffected PhDs with undergraduate degrees in STEM fields from nationally reputable R1 schools to augment their PhD? Or, PhDs with undergraduate degrees in the humanities, or from less reputable schools? And where can these people find these jobs? And how many of these jobs are there to be found (as opposed to the number of people looking for them)? It seems to be an increasingly common trope that philosophy degrees are in growing demand in the marketplace, but while this may be true for undergraduates it does not pass the eyeball test for philosophy MAs and Phds. If it were the case that there was a plethora of “good” jobs for philosophy PhDs in the private sector (jobs with equivalent pay/intellectual reward/workload, that did not require lengthy retraining or acquiring another degree), one would expect to see some siphoning off of applicants from the academic job market (assuming baseline self-interest and rationality). But, in fact, the opposite is happening. There is more competition than ever for tenure track and post-doc positions on academic market. Finally to say that one “COULD find a job” is trivial and vacuously true. One COULD also become president or win the powerball, but that does not make either modality a realistic prospect to be pursued.

I apologize for not being clear: I second Roger Clarke’s statements–viz., I grant that Dr. Lin *does not endorse* the careerism as a desirable state of affairs, but rather accepts it as a necessity. And in fact, I sincerely appreciate his efforts, as I will likely follow his advice if and when I attend grad school. I only wish it were not the case that pedigree of program matters as much as it does, that ‘publish or perish’ seems to be the norm, and that philosophical dialogue takes on instrumental value in service of ‘networking’. I think the field loses something crucial in this environment.

@Justin/8

I think you’re overlooking the points these posters were making. As I get them, they just were bemoaning the fact that Lin’s interpretive framework is appropriate for getting a job in the first place. So I don’t think that just saying, ‘Well, wait a second, all Lin is doing is talking about getting a job in academic philosophy; his comments aren’t to be taken to extend to all aspects of doing philosophy’ is a good response. The whole point they’re making (again, as I get them) is that the strategies Lin outlines for getting a job in academic philosophy have less and less to do with, and perhaps are even in competition with, these other aspects of doing philosophy.

Note also his secondary explanation for the same thing – are you really sure you wouldn’t take the job if it were the only one offered?

I think this sort of project provides two worthwhile services to the profession. First, although it can’t improve the overall job situation for new PhDs, it can at least equalize access to information about what the job market is actually like for those who are not getting good, frank advice from their advisors. But second, it should serve as a useful tool for any prospective graduate student, or for any current graduate student or PhD who is reevaluating how much of themselves they want to invest in this career path.

Hanti Lin says @14 “But I did most of the things I mentioned in my notes, for the sheer reason that I really love philosophy and really want to make it my life-long career.”

But why is a career in philosophy – given that this is what such a career looks like – the best way of incorporating your love of philosophy into your life. Is the “philosophy” that you love really identical with the “it” which you’re trying to make a life-long career? Please note that I don’t mean this as a personal question to Prof Lin. This is the question that we should all be asking ourselves.

@Derek King Bowman: I hope that a career in academic philosophy doesn’t look much like the job market. I really, really, *really* hope I’m done with the job market. Really. (I gather getting tenure is like being on the job market, but we don’t have it in here the UK.) Am I naive to think a career in philosophy doesn’t look like what Hanti Lin describes, once one has a job/tenure?

(This is not to deny that we should be asking ourselves the question you pose. You’re right, and it’s an important point.)

I think some of this advice is useful. The most useful thing in Lin’s advice, I think, is the suggestion to start working early in graduate school on having good, polished work that you can present well. Keep in mind you will need, on the market, both a writing sample and a job talk: both of these should be very good work. I think, as Marcus points out above, that some of this advice, simply as advice meant to increase your chances of getting a job, might be somewhat off-track. So people should read Marcus’s post, and it helps for us to have research like Marcus’s. I like Hanti Lin’s suggestion that more recent grads might put together additional guides like this. Guides from people in positions at SLACs or at community colleges might be useful. None of this, however, is a substitute for a good placement director at your graduate program. Preferably, you should have a number of people on your committee who have experience placing students in tenure-track jobs. They should be actively involved in giving you advice and helping you get a job. If you do not have support like that from your PhD program, your program is doing you a disservice. Before accepting entry into a philosophy program, I would encourage students to get an idea from current students in that program what support for placement is like there.

Three quick points I’d add (I think these notes are great.) First, there are other countries with developing hotspots of analytic philosophy besides Singapore, Hong Kong, etc…

Second, and more importantly, though I am a huge believer in Hanti’s rule as rule of academic writing, experience shows that even otherwise virtuous people are impressed by useless formalism, centered formulas, and middle school algebra. Insofar as you’re already willing to make use of rhetorical tricks to make yourself look better…in for a penny, in for a pound, eh?

Third, for God’s sake, don`t get interested in more than one topic at a time. This is the WORST THING you can do for yourself as people on hiring committees want to slot you as the-person-who-does-so-and-so. So, if you float between two fields, or worse, work independently in both, then you need to explain at a minimum why they are connected. But better not to do this at all so as to make yourself more categorizable. Never mind that almost no even mediocre philosopher on your shelf worked in a single topic or that the resulting work is bland, tedious, and generally an articulation of the narcisus. Search committees want to see you as a person with a dedicated SINGULAR research profile. Save your other interests for after the job. (I wish someone had stressed this to me more when I was a graduate student.)

In response to anonymous 25, I thought I’d point out that while it isn’t for everybody, Hanti was able to do original work on multiple topics, formalize all of them elegantly, and make connections between them in a unified project. I say this having written a positive report for one of Hanti’s publications, and having heard a major figure say that a problem he had posed decades ago had just been solved by Hanti.

(For the record, I have been very successful publishing in two to three very separate areas. I have a bit of a pet peeve about this, as I get typecast as one of them (which depending on where))

In fact, to use your example, I have a friend doing philosophical logic and aesthetics who got a job at a university which wanted exactly that. I had previously interviewed there without the aesthetics and failed.

I understand. I really did not mean to offend. However, the one resounding comment I have gotten after the market is that I am too X-y (for one of my areas) or Y-y (for another) for a job—and that it would behoove me to concentrate on just one area. Which, to be honest, I have no intention of doing. I like all my areas and, as I said, I publish in top places in all of them. But whatever, your mileage may vary. Advice always to be taken with a pinch of salt.

And anonymous 32. Whatever, good for you… Go soak your head. Without more information, I have no idea whether you are a counterexample or merely annoying (for example, if you work on ethics, epistemology, reasons, basing-relations, and assertion norms, then you are hardly spreading your wings, eh?)

Anonymous 33, no need to be a jerk about it. You gave very strongly worded advice to readers without providing evidence the advice is correct. I gave counterevidence. Also “if you work on ethics, epistemology, reasons, basing-relations, and assertion norms, then you are hardly spreading your wings, eh?” This does not describe me.

The author of 1 seems to be a bit confused about what follows from what Hanti said regarding luck. Nonetheless, I have heard it said on a number of occasions that the idea that personality might play any role in landing one a job is somehow immoral or unacceptable. I confess, I have just never understood why – and I’ve really tried to. (I’ve also been told that it’s people like me who are part of the problem.)

By the time people have campus interviews – or whatever the equivalent is, depending on which system you are in – there is already something like a consensus on the part of the search committee that the person deserves a job. You don’t get to final round interviews without having seriously demonstrated that you are a very promising academic. Once an enormous pool of candidates has been whittled down to a final few, other factors come into play. Ideally, assuming that the position carries a teaching load, it will matter how effective the candidate is – or appears to be – as an educator. Faculty also have all sorts of service requirements that involve being on committees, attending meetings, negotiating with administrators, amongst other things, that involve interacting with people across different departments, schools and so on. And of course there is what one needs to offer to one’s home department.

It has never been clear to me how character, or certain sorts of human factors, could fail to matter. Students won’t enroll in classes if the lecturer is unpleasant/disengaged/rude/tardy/disorganized/unable to communicate and so on. As a person who will be representing the department/school/university surely it is alright to hope that your new colleague isn’t rude/difficult/unpleasant/uncommunicative/tardy and so on. There is *always* work to be done within a department, and surely it is alright to hope that your new colleague is going to be willing to carry their share, without complaint, be pleasant to deal with and so on.

More broadly, I really don’t understand what is immoral or unacceptable about wanting to like the person you may well be passing in the hallway every other day for the rest of your professional life. No one is suggesting that a department give a job to the guy at the coffee cart because he makes the chair laugh on her way to work every morning – and who cares that he doesn’t know how to do research. But to think that character shouldn’t matter when it comes to hiring choices is, in my view, to fail to understand something about what it is to have a job.

(I am not suggesting that interviews are the right way to get an accurate gauge for someone’s character but that is a different matter.)

If you have had a look at my Notes, I highly recommend that you also have a look at the feedback from Eric Schliesser:

http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2015/02/against-philosophical-zombies-on-lins-getting-a-job-in-philosophy.html

Eric makes a good point: “But many of the checklist of skills that Lin mentions, which, in turn, track proxies and heuristics used by hiring departments, can be traced to substantive views (note plural) about the nature of excellence in philosophy that we ought to try to aspire to. To decouple those skills/proxies from those substantive (perhaps incompatible) visions is to confuse means and ends.”

I agree, and this helps to cancel some unintended implicatures of my Notes.

“Schliesser’s impression of what X said was that P” does not entail that “X unintentionally implicated that P”.

Hanti’s publication record includes collaborative work, and I’ve seen job candidates lose out because they conceded an objection instead of disputing it. I’m not sure what Schliesser means by being a “collaborative philosopher” and avoiding asking “killer questions”, in his case this seems to involve maintaining a high profile internet persona making “killer” remarks directed at other philosophers for their professional or personal activities rather than their research.

My advice is to be yourself as much as you can. Conferences and formal meetings often force us to behave in not entirely “authentic” ways anyways, and the result is usually that we are less likable characters than when we go for a beer with a friend. To also perform all kinds of utilitarian calculations of the sort Lin mentions seems to me to be a recipe for really undermining yourself. People are not stupid and they can generally see if you are “acting” so as to impress (and once they do see this, few things are more off-putting). And if they fall for it, and then discover the real you – you will not score many friends that way. Btw. I have been on a few search committees – the funny thing was – the publication record of the ABD’s or very fresh PhD’s was ultimately of little consequence – in fact, prematurely published papers can do harm since you put your name behind something that is not really good enough even if it got published by luck. Dissertation is a promise of better things to come, your published work looks like this is what the final outcome will look like.

P @43 is right when saying that trying hard consciously to impress people will make one less likable, defeating the very action of trying hard to impress. And, continuing Julia’s point @44, this is a matter of implementation. I have to admit that my notes are incomplete in a way that is very unsatisfactory to me: I listed job-hunting related goals and sub-goals, but say little about implementations. I did not say (and I hope I did not lead people into thinking) that everyone should do utilitarian calculations at every moment during a conference. And I am still trying hard to figure out how to give good implementation strategies (which I hope I can include in the next major update). It has to be a list of conditionals. Let me give some examples.

1. One of the job-hunting-related goals of attending a conference is to impress people and to earn reputation.

2. No matter what, you should be a good philosopher before you can really impress philosophers. Learn from your dissertation adviser.

3. To achieve that goal, you need to keep that goal in mind throughout the whole conference if you grow up in a culture that does not encourage students to express their ideas or explain explicitly how good their ideas are.

4. To achieve that goal, you should just be yourself if you grow up in a culture that already encourages students to express their ideas and explain explicitly how good their ideas are.

5. …

There have to more conditionals. And the antecedents I just stated have to be refined. But let me say that (3) is one of the most helpful things that my PhD adviser gave me. My first conference presentation was at the 2010 Graduate Conference at the University of Western Ontario. After the last talk of the first day, I wanted to return to my room and just be alone, but people were thinking about going to a bar on campus. At that time I had never been to a bar except with my closest friends who speak Taiwanese Hokkien or Mandarin Chinese, let alone going to a bar to talk about philosophy in English with people whom I came to know on that day. In Taiwan, my home country, college students going to a bar will be regarded as “bad people”. What’s worse, at that time, I was still trapped in the Asian (or Taiwanese, anyway) mindset that it is usually (but not always) a self-humiliation to make myself in the following situation: I claim or defend something in front of people whom I do not know much, and those people disagree. Today’s Hanti would say: “Come on, this is what we love to do in a bar, because we are doing philosophy, and it is good and even fun to have disagreement and know what other people think of your ideas.” On that occasion I turned out to resist that Asian mindset because I was so lucky: my PhD adviser was the keynote speaker of that graduate conference, so he told me, at that moment, that returning to my room was “not an option”. (This is his exact wording). And, you know, according to the Asian tradition, I was supposed to follow every advice of my “master” or “sifu” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sifu) . So I forced myself to go to the bar with people and talked about philosophy after the last talk of the first day. But I confess that, when people drank enough and were talking about where to eat for dinner, I left the bar, bought two cups of instant noodles, and returned to my room to enjoy being alone.

Any concrete advice about how to overcome that Asian mindset? I am not sure. But the following is something I personally found very helpful: recall how much you love philosophy, and imagine how much fun and meaningful it must be to your philosophical life if you share your philosophical ideas with others, get critical feedbacks, and proceed to refine your ideas. I guess this might be helpful not just to Asians but also to, say, anyone who is shy.