Topics Profession

Question I have a question which many grad students probably ponder: what's important when it comes to getting a job as a philosopher? Please can you rank, in order of importance, the following: Where you received your degrees from. Who your supervisors were. Who your references are. What area(s) you specialize in. How many publications you have (assume that they are not in obscure journals). How many professional (i.e., not grad) conferences you have spoken at. Results from BA and MA degrees. Teaching experience. Awards. Interpersonal skills. Activities (i.e., organizing conferences, founding societies). Who you know. Please include any other criteria which you think I may have failed to mention. If you are aware of any difference between what employers from the UK or USA may be looking for, please could you mention them.

Accepted:
June 16, 2006

Comments

Ranking these dimensions is impossible, I believe. You cannotcompare dimensions as such, but at best only specific differencesacross dimensions. Consider, for example, whether teaching experienceis moreimportant than awards. Well, a large advantage in teaching experiencewill outweigh some small advantage in awards, and a large advantage inawards will outweigh some small advantage in teaching experience. Inorderto compare advantages across dimensions, we would need a metric withineach dimension as well as a standard of comparison across thesedimensions. We might then be able to conclude that, say, teachingexperience is more important than awards in the sense that a smalleradvantage in teaching experience outweighs a larger advantage inawards. But such a conclusion presupposes cross-dimensional comparisons ofmagnitudes.

There are two further difficulties. First, dimensions that receive a lot of attention from some mayreceive very little attention from others or none at all. Employers have quite diverse needs, interests, preferences, andpredilections -- a small liberal arts college will give greater weight to teaching relative to publications than a major research university. In the same vein, hiring decisions are often made by acollective consisting of people who vary greatly in what they pay attention to and in how they then form theirjudgments.

Thesecond further difficulty is that someone on a hiring committee will adjust the weight sheassigns to specific pieces of evidence according to the other evidenceshe has. The weight she will give to an applicant's grades may dependon how she assesses the school he attended, for example, and the weightshe will give to his conference appearances may depend on how pushy shetakes him to be. Like a juror in a criminal trial: One assigns acertain initial credibility to the various witness testimonies andpieces of evidence; but one then adjusts such initial assignments up ordown depending upon how each testimony or other evidence fits with therest. These adjustments are case-specific.

This brings me to your question whether there are criteria youhave failed to mention. Yes! You have failed to mention what (for me atleast) is of the greatest interest: the quality of the applicant'swriting sample(s). If the applicant's writing shows that s/he cannotwrite philosophy or think philosophically, then all the rest of therecord cannot really make up for that. (By contrast, if the writing issuperb and the rest of the record mediocre, one might suspect that theapplicant got rather too much outside help with his/her essay.) You also fail tomention the content of the references. It's not the name and fame ofyour referees that will get you a job, but their assessments of you inconjunction with their reputation for honesty and good judgment. (Somevery famous people are well known for their grotesque exaggerations, andreferences from them consequently carry very little weight.)