Signs of Intelligence in the Field

There may be some hope for my field after all.

I just sat down to put together my now-annual job application requirement spreadsheet that helps keep me up to date on what I need to send to each job. I'm hitting the market hard, it seems, as there are already 10 schools on the list. That does mean I'm being a little less selective, but not much. So far, every job is in or very near a place I feel like I could live (except one where the city is entirely too large, but the job was sent my way by my adviser, so...), and they range from SLACs to Research I's.

What gives me hope, though, is the number of schools who have reduced their requirements for an application. And nearly all of them - including places I've applied before - have gotten more specific when asking for things like "evidence of teaching effectiveness" (a phrase and requirement that are the bane of my job applying existence).

There are still a few that are insisting on interviewing at one of a number of conferences, and that's frustrating because there isn't the agreement in my field about which conference this should be and so it may well require applicants to attend multiple conferences in hopes of getting that first interview. Worse, I'm at a school that doesn't exactly hand out the travel funding, so getting to conferences becomes a giant expense that I have to take.

When I can find an application that I like for it, I'll add a section to the page to keep track of applications the way so many people do word counts in their manuscripts. I think it'll be interesting to see what the process looks like.