She's perfect for the job--how to convince them of that?
August 4, 2010 7:23 AM   Subscribe

How to land a job as an English professor at a community college?

I have a friend who has a recent PhD in theater, and has extensive teaching experience at the high school and college level. A full-time position in the English department at a community college has opened up, and she's going to apply for it. I think she's an extremely good match for the job, despite not having her doctorate in English specifically (the job posting asks for people w/ English or "related" degrees). I'm trying to help her think about how to land this job. So, academics and people involved with community-college hiring: any insider tips? How can she up her chances of at least getting an interview?

Thanks!
posted by aka burlap to Work & Money (13 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I would query the department about whether or not they consider theater a "related" degree, because they may mean rhetoric & composition, linguistics, and/or creative writing.

Having done that, she might want to start reading Dana M. Zimbleman's articles on applying to CCs in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's the first one.
posted by thomas j wise at 7:33 AM on August 4, 2010 [3 favorites]


Assuming that community college is like the one at which I earned my AA, most of the courses taught by the English faculty are in composition. As such, if she's able to demonstrate prior experience in teaching grammar and writing, this will likely be to her benefit. Perhaps it would be a good idea for her to put together a syllabus for a two-semester composition course, which she could then include or make reference to in her dossier.
posted by mllrstvn at 7:34 AM on August 4, 2010 [1 favorite]


Depending on what region of the country your friend is in, the accreditation agency may require that she have a certain number of graduate credits (generally 18) in the subject she's going to teach.
posted by hydropsyche at 7:41 AM on August 4, 2010 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Thanks for the answers so far. She has taught >10 composition/rhetoric courses, so I think she has pretty solid experience there.
posted by aka burlap at 7:59 AM on August 4, 2010


Let me begin to state that I am still jaded from my own academic job search, but here goes:

The academic job market sucks. Even community college jobs are competitive right now. (Your friend should be spending time in the Academic Job Wikis for her field.)

- You don't know if she'd be a good match because you don't know what the search committee is looking for (chances are they are looking to fill a particular course or maybe the need someone that can cover Early American Literature or something.)

- If 45 people with actual degrees in English apply, your friend may be at a disadvantage.

- She JUST got her PhD? There may be people with more experience than her applying.

- You're in Austin? That's a desirable place to live.

- In what I've heard about community college jobs, there is frequently an adjunct or part-time person whom the search committee already wants to give the job too. Community colleges are full of people teaching 1 or 2 courses for them and are looking to move up the ranks (around here that could be current grad students, PhDs that wanted to stay in town, etc.)

Sorry to be a downer, but this is a much nastier "how to get a job" situation than laypeople know.
posted by k8t at 8:01 AM on August 4, 2010 [3 favorites]


Following K8t, I would say that putting together a job dossier for one single academic job sounds like a way to lose a bunch of time-- it's not just writing the job letter, it's also assembling a cv, sample courses, teaching philosophies, letters of rec... It's not really worth your time unless you are applying for several jobs at once, over the course of a year, or unless you already have most of your dossier ready to go. When I put mine together, it was to apply for more than forty jobs. To do this for one job, in Austin of all places (the Rhetoric and Composition Programs at UT churns out acres of PhD'd, excellent English teachers every semester) just doesn't seem like a good use of time.
posted by pickypicky at 8:17 AM on August 4, 2010 [1 favorite]


Good point picky picky. It is incredibly time consuming to put this stuff together.
posted by k8t at 8:24 AM on August 4, 2010


Best answer: I'm a chair of a community college English department, and I answered a similar question a few year ago here.

Honestly, I think the chance of her getting the job are slim. At our cc, we'll hire instructors who have other graduate degrees as long as they have 18 graduate credit hours in our discipline. But these are usually adjunct positions. Whenever we do a full-time job search, we are able to get plenty of applicants who have the specific degree we're looking for and, perhaps more importantly, have taught classes and/or done research in our field. We never hire anyone full-time who doesn't have significant experience teaching English, preferably comp instead of literature, and preferably at the community college level. Whether your friend has these qualifications, I don't know.

Search committees often get frustrated with applicants who assume that, without any coursework or experience, they are fully qualified to jump into an English classroom. Composition is its own discipline, and it takes time and practice to teach well. If the cc she's applying to is anything like mine, they'll want people who studied rhetoric/composition instead of literature. So tell her to emphasize any composition teaching, community college experience, and rhet/comp classwork. Otherwise, her resume probably won't stand out at all.
posted by bibliowench at 9:22 AM on August 4, 2010 [3 favorites]


Great answers here. I don't know anything about CCs but I have to say that if she doesn't read both the Chronicle of Higher Ed fora and her relevant job wiki then she's putting herself at a distinct disadvantage. Jobs are at an all-time premium right across the humanities. I'm not in English nor do I teach at a CC but I can tell you that another department where I teach did a targeted local search last year and got over 100 applicants. It's a desirable job, but this was not a national search so those are the kind of odds we're talking. In this situation anything short of a blunderbuss approach in one's primary subject area is most likely a waste of time.
posted by ob at 9:55 AM on August 4, 2010


Response by poster: Great answers, thanks. She actually does have quite a bit of experience teaching rhet./comp, as well as experience teaching "diverse" students, so I'll encourage her to emphasize that. Thanks, all! And good luck to anyone braving the academic job market these days. Sounds rough out there!
posted by aka burlap at 10:44 AM on August 4, 2010 [1 favorite]


If she wants a job at the cc level (or in higher education generally), she can't put all her eggs in one basket and apply for ONE job. I do know people who've been lucky (and outrageously talented, and I mean EXCEEDINGLY talented, the sort of people who are now chairs at prestigious universities) who got tenure-track (not adjunct, not part-time) academic positions having applied to a small handful of schools, but more typical is the person who has sent many--and I mean dozens, scores--of applications, and these people are not so naive to assume that they will get a GREAY JOB in a GREAT, PROGRESSIVE CITY where EVERY RECENT PHD WANTS TO LIVE AND WORK. You friend might find an academic position, but her chances of getting one in super-duper Austin (or San Francisco, or NYC, or Portland, etc) are slim to none.

She should be applying to jobs in the deep south, the Dakotas, the places where the competition isn't so stiff.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 11:25 AM on August 4, 2010 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: In response to the several answers urging her to apply to more than one position--she definitely is and has been applying to lots of positions. She's been working a pastiche of part-time/adjunct jobs for the past few years, too, and is continuing to apply to those kinds of positions as well as full-time ones. I was just trying to get some insight into the particular interests of CCs, since of course each application should be tailored to the specific institution and job.
posted by aka burlap at 12:07 PM on August 4, 2010


I work at a CC, but not as chair of a CC English department. From observation a few things come to mind. Firstly, each college maintains a farm league of adjuncts, many of which are keenly interested in such positions. Many unwritten rules appear to exist in this respect. Technically, an adjunct position is temporary and open to competition every semester. In practice, departments prefer people they've had experience with, in effect establishing an adjunct professor position. If you taught COMP 101 last semester, you'll probably be offered to teach it next semester. This behavior spills over into full-time hiring, which means when a position opens up, the committee probably has a few people in mind who've been adjuncting for years.

Secondly, CC isn't the same as Affluent Suburban High School or Regional Selective University. The students we get in often need help with spelling and grammar structure that you won't have to remediate in a High School AP English Class or Universities that require high written portion SAT scores. It's usually less reading Shakespeare and more writing persuasive essays (and hopefully resume cover letters). Writing and math are our bread and butter. We don't hire people to do research, so don't focus too much on a research agenda. Highlight classroom experience, and if classroom experience includes students for whom English is a second language, by all means mention statistics or anecdotes.

Does she have a chance? Maybe. Depends on what specifically that teaching in high schools and colleges was compared with what the position is being hired to teach (composition, most likely). I mean, if we were to ascribe a 1 percent chance to getting the job without the exactly matching PhD, it would roughly be on par with your chances with one. HR publications to the Board show our recent Chemistry Professor position had over 100 applications, for example. And maybe she's got good contacts with the department in question already, having adjuncted for that specific college in the past.
posted by pwnguin at 1:16 PM on August 4, 2010


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