Going on the Market

Probably my most popular publication is the handbook called "Going on the Market: An Affable Guide" that I started work on over fifteen years ago, at first in collaboration with Jacqui Sadashige, a graduate student and then assistant professor in the Classics department at Penn.  Long before it became fashionable, Jacqui was keenly attuned to professional socialization, especially the habits of confidence and self-presentation that often accompany gold-plated educations like the one I was lucky to get.
In terms of background our cohort at Penn was a pretty varied bunch, as Classics departments go: among us were students from Brigham Young, Penn State, and the University of South Carolina as well as Princeton and Oxford.  Class, race, religion, the proportion of family members in academia, and how these things affected our career prospects were frequent topics of discussion among us.  We generally agreed that students from less privileged economic circumstances (today we might say the 75%) as well as students of color -- and in our small field, even students who didn't go to an Ivy League-type school -- sometimes hit the wrong note with faculty and other students because they followed a different social rulebook.  We weren't talking about not knowing about opera or fine wines so much as the ability to grasp academia as a hierarchical network, with rules about whom to know and whom to know about, and with codes of dress and deportment that seemed more constrained than we expected.  Intimate knowledge of the field comes most quickly from personal mentoring by people at the center of it, and students trained in small programs where faculty published relatively little felt out of the loop.  And though this was not a major issue at Penn, where faculty had (and have) broad tastes and an egalitarian style, at conferences and dinners with guest lecturers, it seemed clear to us that the opera and fine wines mattered too.
On top of this, the unwillingness of many academics to talk frankly about the concrete details of making a living -- how much salary to expect and ask for, how to ensure getting fair letters of recommendation, what to expect at a job interview -- meant that even "pedigreed" students, especially shy ones, found themselves at sea when it came to getting a job.
Never one to sit back when she could actually do something about a problem, Jacqui wrote a short handbook about writing cover letters and preparing for interviews at the APA annual meeting.  She circulated it around the Penn department, and if I remember correctly, it got passed around to other graduate students in the area in xerox copy -- this was before email!  When I left Penn for the University of Washington, Jacqui was moving onto other things, and I got her permission to develop the handbook.  It ended up over twenty-five pages long, and was posted at the Women's Classical Caucus website and (for a while) at the APA website.  Today I gave it a much needed update.