New Media Working
Group
Professionalization
Workshop with Gail
23 October 2014
ANSWERS
Managing Stress
 From Your Heart’s Desire by Sonia Choquette (yes, a
psychic):
 Rule #1: Travel Lightly.
 “Don’t burden yourself with useless notions, secondhand
opinions, or ‘reality’ as other people have explained it to you.”
 Rule #2: Take Responsibility for Your Dream.
 Decide what you are going to create. Your creativity has made
manifest many things in your life already.
 Don’t waste your emotions (worrying, being upset). Don’t
surrender your creative power to others (anger, blame, etc.).
“They will not use it to make you any happier.”
 The worst case: “Even a horrible scenario holds the potential for
you to tap the most profound genius in yourself.” Believe that
you will figure out what you need to do.
Managing Stress (cont’d).
 Rule #3: Don’t Be a Control Freak!
 There can be no guarantees ahead of time. “The kind of
assurance the control freak wants is an earned gift, the
product of courage and risk, which cannot be attained in
advance.”
 “Wanting the promise of a certain outcome means that you
limit what you give and in turn diminish what you get. Finally,
avoiding disappointment means avoiding life itself, because
disappointment is a necessary teacher to let us know when
we fall off our path and need to take a new direction.”
Managing Stress (cont’d.)
 Physical exercise: yoga, walking, dance
 Reflection/Connecting with yourself and higher spirit:
journaling, meditation, prayer, retreats, travel
 Connecting with others: Tell your partner(s)/friends wht you
really need. Be honest with yourself and them.
 Build skill in experiencing your emotions, setting healthy
limits (this includes finding balance), and getting perspective
 Gail recommends:
 EBT and Wired for Joy! by Laurel Mellin
 Loving What Is by Byron Katie
Managing Your Time and
Multitasking
 Research First.*
 Acknowledge the priority of research mentally.
 Give your research all of your time when you can.
 Even when you cannot give your research time, give it your focus.
(Do “everything else” using 10% of your brain power/energy.)
 Research Always (in little bits, if need be).*
 If you have 5 minutes on BART, good. If you have 10 minutes
between meetings, great.
 “I touched my project for 30 minutes today.”
 #writingsprint
 writing groups, support groups
*Applies only if your true Heart’s Desire is an R1 job, which it may not
be. However, you are at an R1 institution now and doing great
research and scholarship is your priority now.
Managing Your Time and
Multitasking
 Balancing and managing your tasks and your
brainpower/energy and the different arenas of your
work (research/teaching/service) may mean
understanding the two Quadrants.
Stephen Covey’s Quadrants
of Time Management
The Quadrants of Mastery
Publishing Your Work in
Journals
 Famous journals
 Respectable journals
 Legit publisher (univ. press preferable but others also ok)
 Famous editorial board members
 Probably journals in two fields
 CFPs
 Network
Service, Conferences, and
Networking
 Do service. Service is very, very important.
 Interview like an Assistant Professor.
 At the least, help yourself by building your service skills.
 Organize talks/visiting lectures/conference panels with your
favorite scholars
 “I’m a huge fan of your work. I’m using your idea/theory of X in
my dissertation chapter on Y.”
 “I’m writing about Z right now. One of my major inspirations is
your work on A.”
 Publishers who want to meet with you at conferences: BE
CAREFUL. Do not sign any contracts unless it is your
dream press.
Which Conferences?
 Film Studies, TV Studies, Media Studies, New Media
Studies: SCMS, [MiT]
 TV Studies, Fan Studies, Cultural Studies: Console-ing
Passions, Flow, [Transmedia: Hollywood]
 Digital Humanities: HASTAC
 English, Comp Lit, any language/literature department:
MLA, ACLA
 Theater, Dance, Performance Studies: ATHE, PSi
 How to pick others? The other people going (senior
scholars or a great network).
Dissertating
 Research First
 Finding the cutting edge: try your “pitch” out lots of
times
 Dissertation vs. publishing articles
 Don’t publish too much of the diss
 Aim for two publications, at least one in a peer-reviewed
journal, besides the diss
 The diss is the main thing the job search committees will
look at
 But articles can be great second projects
 AND you need to publish something
 Book reviews can be good but don’t count as journal pubs
Managing Up
 Be a buzzing bumblebee, not the quiet mouse hiding in the
corner!!
 How good are they at managing their time and tasks?
 Ping them
 Weekly/Daily reminders for deadlines
 Ask your diss advisors how to progress from lit review to
interesting/important/new/original intervention.
 For that matter, ask them how to do an effective lit review.
 For that matter, ask any time you have technical questions
about your research and writing, as well as when you have
ideas to bounce around or writing to show them.
Handling/Navigating Writing
Critiques
 Read Ann Patchett’s This Is the Story of a Happy
Marriage (the chapters about writing).
 Hard to hear feedback when it’s you, easier to learn from




others getting feedback
Learn when to listen and when to ignore feedback
Develop your internal editor’s eyes, ear, and voice (use
this voice only after you’ve completed some writing, not
before or during writing)
Develop your gut instinct about what to change and what
not to change, what advice is worth following and what
not
Writing projects always feel better as ideas than as
writing. When you write something down, you kill the idea
and make something real. This can feel very, very hard.
Learning to write good/great
scholarship takes time and
frequency and practice:




Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours.
Yoga
Ann Patchett’s story-due-every-week
It’s not about your innate value or your moral worth. It is about
mechanics. When you have the mechanics in place, the art
comes.
 Turn down commitments, protect your time
 Short bursts whenever you can, long stretches whenever you can
 Every day
 Accountability
 Where do you write well?
 “If you are going through hell, keep going.”
 What is your process? (Mine is usually: two drafts and then a LOT
of rearranging, and then revision.)
Choosing & Positioning
Yourself for Future
Departments
 Probably pivoting between two major fields
 Does not mean that you will get a job in a department
with these fields’ names in its title
 Deciding and naming QE fields
 Defining yourself through conferences/journals
 Affiliation with senior scholars
 Recommendations
 Or simply your own genealogy, the “school” you are working
in
The Academic Job Market
 Chronicle.com, H-Net, HASTAC
 Gail’s rules:
 You and your partner(s) rank jobs independently of one
another
 Custom job letters (not scattershot approach)
 Managing up in terms of letter writing
 Prep intensively for, and role-play, your interviews
(Skype, in-person prelim, campus visit)
Jobs Outside Academia
 Think about non-faculty jobs inside academia, also – or research
jobs at not-for-profit institutions
 HASTAC, Indeed.com, LinkedIn
 TBH, a Master’s would suffice for most
 You cannot prep for both at same time but you can keep a hand in
a former life or cultivate professional network and skills in a future
one
 Weekend and summer jobs
 Consulting and project-oriented work-for-hire jobs
 More school (I know, I know)
 Be the A+ person, that means hunger
 OR get “just” the paying gig and work towards your dream job
Academic Jobs
 Adjuncting/lecturerships are not the end of the world anymore
 Road to T-T
 Permanent lectureship
 SLACs can be hard
 R1s can be hard
 The best would be a postdoc, but could mean 2 or 3 moves
 Why people don’t get tenure:
 No book (quantitative underachievement).
 People don’t get your work, don’t recognize/value its importance
(qualitative underachievement).
 You definitely have to want it more than anyone wants you to have it.
(They may want it for you, too, but not as much as you want it for
yourself.)
 The Hollywood movie star thing.
Motivating Yourself
 Personal mission, calling, destiny
 Yoda
 Mantras, prayer, creative visualization, Heart’s Desire, theme songs,
name your journey
 If you fail, so what?
 Milton’s failure
 The lesson of life disappointments
 But if you fail to fulfill your personal mission, it’s far worse. (Not
everyone’s mission is work-related but you can’t do a job that you
despise forever and ever.)
 When you succeed at your personal mission, there is nothing better.
(It’s never easy, but it can be good and hard.)
 Think about that a**hole from Harvard interviewing for the same job
as you: Don’t let him get your job!!!