It’s Okay To Romanticise The Small Things About Your Day-to-day Life. It’s Okay To Romanticise Sleeping

It’s okay to romanticise the small things about your day-to-day life. It’s okay to romanticise sleeping in, waking up to the sun tickling your skin. It’s okay to romanticise the texture of fingers against a page. Sometimes to save your day you need to romanticise sitting at a desk and working, or romanticise studying hyped up on coffee. It’s okay to picture yourself as if you were the mc in a movie. Watch yourself go through shit and know that it’s just the climax of your own story, and that while you sit in your room sobbing to sad songs, good things are just around the corner.

Sometimes to be okay or get through the day you need to romanticise the simple things.

Writing a job application in French!

Monsieur / Madame – dear sir / madam

Aux principaux concernes – to whom it may concern

Je souhaite poser ma candidature pour le poste de... – I would like to apply for the position of…

Je travaille actuellement pour… – I currently work for…

Je suis diplômé / diplômée en… – I am a graduate in…

Mes qualités principales sont… – my strengths are…

Mon domaine d'expertise est… – my area of expertise is…

Ma langue maternelle est… – My first language is…

Mais je parle aussi… – but I also speak…

J'ai une connaissance pratique de… – I have a working knowledge of…

Je suis un utilisateur confirmé de… – I am an experienced user of…

Je suis disponible pour un entretien le... – I am available for an interview on…

Veuillez agréer, Monsieur / Madame – Yours sincerely,

Capacité de communication – communication skills

Capacité de créativité – creative skills

Capacité d'encadrement – management skills

Capacité à résoudre les problemes – problem solving skills

Capacité à prendre la parole en public – public speaking skills

Compétences en organisation – organisational skills

Motivé / motivée - motivated

Travailleur / travailleuse – hardworking

Un CV – A CV

Une lettre de motivation – A cover letter

Une candidature à un emploi – A job application

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littlelanguagefox

6 years ago

How I prepped for the academic job market

I am by no means an expert on academic jobs just because I now (miraculously?) have one. But I have been told that I am organized, and, yes, that is because being an anxious person sometimes means having a system for everything. So before I totally bury all memories of the academic job market, I thought I would put together a timeline of some of the things I did to get ready to search for academic jobs…

My to-do list started very informally in the first year of my PhD program. I know that sounds over-the-top-early but the job market takes a lot of work. Checking things off one at a time helped me to feel in control. Here’s how I prepared for the academic job market as a PhD student:

Year 1

Do research that excites you: Enthusiasm for my research ended up being my momentum through a lot of the hard stuff that came later. Try to set yourself up to do the research that you want to do right away. This might include some trial-and-error and trying out different topics until you find the one.

Read The Professor is In: My MA advisor insisted I read this the summer before I started the PhD and, as always, she was totally right. When I told other grad students I had read a book about how tough the job market is they either said “I don’t need to read that yet” or “I don’t want to know how bad it is.” Ummmm…denial is not a good strategy. Knowing what you’re getting into is a good strategy. Even though the information about prepping job market materials was not yet relevant, having a framework for what would be evaluated helped me to define my grad school goals.

Year 2

Write papers that help you figure out your research area: I was pretty bad at this in my MA (I wrote papers about everythingggg). It’s ok to spend some time exploring topics, but once I had a topic area, I tried to use grad seminar papers to narrow in on that topic. This involved writing some papers that ended up being duds, and some that ended up being important parts of my dissertation. This leads to…

Ask about publishing: In seminars, I tried to have meetings with professors where I told them I wanted an academic job and needed experience publishing. They were usually willing to help develop seminar papers that had (somewhat?) original arguments in them, which is necessary for publishing. I was also not afraid to ask for lots of publishing help–how does it work? where should I submit this? can I use a cover letter you have written as a template? Publishing is confusing and took me a while to get used to.

Network smarter, not harder: This was the year I realized that going to giant conferences and hoping to meet people who did similar things was just not working. I reassessed and submitted to several smaller conferences that had the explicit goal of having senior faculty mentor grad students. It was amazing! First, these conferences were genuinely helpful, second, they were genuinely…genuine. I didn’t feel that I had to do any super fake networking anymore because I was really there to have conversations that developed my research.

Year 3

Read job postings: If your discipline has a listserv, subscribe, if not, check out the InsideHigherEd job postings. Note any trends in hiring. I don’t think you can totally pivot toward every job (duh) but you can think about how to make your application more friendly to what everyone seems to want. In my case, people who teach organizational communication were often also being asked to teach several other classes, so I made sure to ask to teach one of those so it would be on my record before the job market.

Submit, submit, submit: This is the year I got the most journal submissions under review. Some got accepted, some got (mega) rejected. Most needed several rounds of hardcore revisions that took 12-14 months. Submitting in year 3 gave me time to do those revisions so that I could use the articles as writing samples on applications.

Year 4

Prep materials: I drew on as many resources as possible to prep my job market materials–career services helped with my CV, our graduate teaching program on campus helped me writing my teaching and diversity statements, I asked recent graduates for example cover letters, my advisor read and edited cover letters, my DAD read and edited cover letters (what can I say he loves helping with grammar). It takes a village. Use the village. Oh, now is also a good time to reread TPII book for tips on writing decent materials.

Get organized: I had a spreadsheet where I put all of the relevant job information, especially deadlines, keywords, and information about each department.

Ask your letter writers: I did this in August. I also made them all a “job application digest”–just a word document with all of the jobs I submitted to and some notes about what I had said in my cover letter, so they could tailor rec letters.

Throw yourself at your dissertation: Every interview asked how I was planning to finish the dissertation. Making real progress made this question much easier. I definitely lost myself to the job market for a solid month in November. Then, I realized that my dissertation was the only thing I had control over. So I got back to work.

And here are some other resources that I also enjoyed reading:

Thoughts on diversity statements: What the heck even are they?, plus thoughts on the hidden curriculum of college and designing inclusive teaching on campus (Ps don’t just use these to write a diversity statement use them to actually do work in your classroom and campus environment so that what you write on your diversity statement is genuine).

A breakdown on cover letters

Another great post on the job hunt

Campus visit small talk

This post originally appeared on my WordPress

OH MY GOD I DID EVERYTHING IN MY IMMEDIATE TO-DO LIST WITHOUT PROCRASTINATING AFTER CLASS!!??!! WHATEVER IT IS YOU GOTTA DO TODAY I HOPE THAT YOU DO IT AND FEEL HAPPY WITH WHATEVER YOUR ACHIEVEMENT IS TODAY LOVE YOU ALL BYEEEEEE!!!

HUGE news for researchers, writers and journalists! JSTOR drops paywall

JSTOR Makes Database Accessible to the Public

“The online academic resource has made over 6,000 ebooks and over 150 journals accessible without the need for an online login.”

“Online academic resource JSTOR has announced it is making its database accessible to the public, amid the widespread closure of universities across the world due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The database, frequently used by university students for research and essay work, announced on Twitter today that it has made over 6,000 ebooks and over 150 journals accessible without the need for an online login.

Previously, students needed a university login to access these resources.

This is the first time that the database has been openly accessible to non-subscribers.

The database is also working to expand on the amount of free content available online to students accessing the database through their subscribed universities.

In a statement on its website, JSTOR said that it has “an expanded set of content that is available to institutions where students have been displaced due to COVID-19 through June 30, 2020”.

“We are working with publishers to make more than 20,000 books available at no charge for JSTOR participating academic institutions and secondary schools that do not participate in our books program”, the statement said. “The number of books available through this effort is growing daily as more publishers opt in.”

Universities that previously only had access to some areas of JSTOR will also have unlimited access to the complete archives, at no extra cost.”