Next Year's Plans

So the way it works in philosophy is that if you apply for a job and you're already teaching, one of the first things the search committee does is they look at where you're teaching now. More prestigious schools mean more attention, naturally. And when you apply to work at your first school, one of the first things that search committee does is to look at where you went to school and who wrote your letters of recommendation; and the more prestigious your letter writers and the more prestigious your degree-granting institution the more attention you'll get. And in order to get into a prestigious degree-granting post-grad institution with prestigious recommenders, one of the first thing the application committee looks at is how prestigious your under-grad institution is. This is the prestige game.

The prestige game is actually really understandable. Schools are motivated to protect and improve on their reputations, because that's what keeps the money rolling in. That means the school's relative prestige (their selectiveness, respected faculty, etc) is a measure of a candidate's own skill: both because schools are conservative about investing their reputation and resources, and because their greater resources are more likely to produce strong candidates for jobs or degrees. The problem I'm facing now is that I have zero prestige. Westminster isn't known in the field. My strongest recommendation comes from a man I look to as an advisor in life and a role-model but who long ago chose to eschew the research side of philosophy and instead focus on teaching. The small size of our department (two professors) also means that I do not measure up well against other candidates on some of the other standards that can compensate for a low level of prestige, such as breadth of training (in value theory, metaphysics, epistemology, and other important divisions within philosophy) or depth of training (I have not specialized in any particular problem or typical area of philosophy). So of the four schools I chose to apply to,  I've been rejected from UNC Chapel Hill* and the University of Arizona. I have received offers for the MA programs at both the University of Colorado and UNC Charlotte, but neither of these are particularly tempting. Colorado can offer me no funding and so I'd pay up to $25,000 for my MA, and Charlotte can only offer me a little bit of funding but is considerably more expensive to begin with. Plus I would still be facing the prestige game when I left Charlotte, as Charlotte's own prestige level is not able to help me. 

Andrew and Marina playing in the Soyuz Trainer at the Cosmosphere

My conclusion from all this is that taking a year, or more, off is my best option at this point. So next year I'll live in Columbia, MO with Andrew McHugh and Andrew Robertson as one runs his startup and the other takes a year off before med school. I've actually settled on this decision fairly easily for a number of reasons. This gap will help me gain experiences that could compensate in the prestige game, could help me find a more monetarily promising program, and help me figure out where I want to fall in the research/teaching spectrum. This latter thing is related to the prestige game: the best positions for professional philosophers are almost entirely research and zero teaching, while those positions with the lowest prestige are just the opposite. I think I would actually be happier in a teaching position, in part because I think it does a better job of engaging those problems which research positions ostensibly engage with, but I want to have that large expanse of knowledge the research positions engender. So I have to figure out how to find a school that won't be just research but will give me the opportunity to practice engaged or public philosophy instead of the usual "applied ethics"--a half-way house between the more distant work ethicists have traditionally done and the actual mess of a world to which philosophy means to refer to. 

In this meantime, I'll be looking for a job (at a bike shop, at a library, or wherever I can get hired, in that order), take free American Sign Language classes at the Missouri School of the Deaf, and read and write as much as possible to improve my 'canon' for if I decide to apply again. Other possibilities that I still have to consider include trying to get hired at one of the three colleges in Columbia in their disability services offices, getting a substitute teaching certificate, or even teaching English overseas. That third option is the one my international housemates are pulling for, although one reason Columbia is nice is that it puts me close to my friends, but not-too-far from the rest of the family. And if I apply to the University of Missouri, STL, which has a very prestigious MA program with good funding and would be a good fit for the training I do have, I would be able to apply for in-state tuition. In all truthfulness, it's an exciting future.

My belated birthday celebration, before leaving for Boulder

In other news, I've just returned from a trip to Boulder, Colorado with two of my housemates (Andrew and Marina) where we toured the city and I toured the campus and talk to faculty. By far the highlights of the trip were staying with Jeni, mother's best friend who lives in the area, and happening to be in one faculty office for the regularly scheduled "philosophy of distillation and fermentation" group, which meant that I, the faculty member, his wife, another faculty member, and six graduate students sat around and drank beer and talked. Not for that reason alone was he the coolest faculty member I met there; for example, he was also rocking red converse low-tops and bright orange socks. 

A sunny day on campus

The other big news before that that I haven't had much time to share was my trip to North Carolina over my birthday. It was a three day trip, that turned into a four day trip when North Carolina freaked out about snow. What I learned was that (1) the Charlotte airport is pretty nice, even when you have to stay there overnight, (2) US Airways offers generous refunds for missed flights, (3) sitting in a plane stuck on the tarmac is worse than being stuck in the terminal, (4) philosophy conferences are pretty boring, (4) the questions people ask you at a philosophy conference are usually meant as much to point out problems in your paper as they are to point out to everyone else how smart the questioner is, (5) Greenville, NC is a nice town as well, except for the whole monument to their dead Confederate soldiers... and (6) all the airports I've ever been in in North Carolina have had rocking chairs--which are awesome. Despite the hectic twist-and-turns of the whole experience, it was a good weekend!

And the memorial itself. NC was also in bloom

*the funny thing about this one is that I found out about Chapel Hill as a place first, then liked what I saw about the school and how involved it was, and only later realized I had applied to an institution in the top 10 for philosophy in the US.