go west, young lady!

I thought that I could handle back-to-back campus visits for several weeks on end. Turns out that it can be kind of tiring! One thing that keeps me energized, though, is the opportunity to see new places and learn more about different parts of the country. I had become so accustomed to the drab landscape of southeastern Michigan that I was just floored by this view:

This is the view from the Salt Lake City airport. I literally stood in front of a window, gazing hungrily at the mountains, for ten minutes after I walked off the plane. I had forgotten how inspiring mountains can be! I then flew to Oregon, where I was just delighted to see this store:

Pendleton is the hometown of one very special reader of this blog, Katie H.! Thinking of you, my dear!

When I arrived in Portland, I was exhausted, nauseated, and strung out from the stress of anticipating important phone calls. I felt rejuvenated, though, by a plate of the best Japanese curry I've ever had (not that that's saying much – I've only tried it in Ann Arbor). I then made the obligatory pilgrimage to Powell's Books!

I considered buying a tote bag, purely for the approving looks I'd get from those Ann Arborites with NPR bumper stickers on their Volkswagens. Too hypocritcal, even for me, though. Instead, I browsed the shelves, acutely aware that my jeans weren't skinny enough for me to look like a local! Then I walked back to my hotel in the rain.

expectations

All my friends, faculty, and family are constantly asking me, "How did it go?" As I discussed earlier, I think it's nearly impossible for the candidate to know how she is being appraised. Most of the time, I reply with a shrug, "Okay? Pretty well? I guess?" Then there are visits where I can be pretty sure things did not go okay, pretty well, I know.

Last week, I visited a small liberal arts college in the Northeast. I am a finalist for a campus-wide diversity fellowship; I am up against 3 other finalists, all from different fields across the college. The Classics department is tiny, so they are thrilled by the prospect of having another faculty member to offer a few courses and raise the profile of the department among their colleagues. All this to say: it's in their interest to help me get this fellowship, right? Which would involve clearly communicating expectations, right? And yet, I didn't find out until I had arrived on campus for the interview with the fellowship committee that I was being pitched as someone who could also cover for Art History and whose courses "deal substantially with post-Renaissance Western art, literary studies, and film studies." Excuse me? I mean, yes, I would be more than happy to incorporate those fields into my classes – but you probably should have warned me ahead of time. So that, when I'm asked about how I would use films in my class on Heracles, I do not respond with Disney's Hercules and Arnold Schwarzenegger's great classic of cinema, Hercules in New York. Only half of the fellowship committee came to my talk, which is just as well: two images miraculously disappeared from my powerpoint presentation, so I had to act them out with my body. Academic dignity may have been lost, but surely I earned a few points for enthusiasm.

Then there are schools that clearly communicate their expectations, but they are surprisingly specific. From a research university in the south, I received this email today: "[Your job talk] should be pitched to the faculty and should represent your original contributions to scholarship. It should be not less than 49 minutes and not more than 51 minutes. There will be a question period after it." My talk, as it stands, is not more than 44 minutes, and not less than 42. At least I know how to edit it now!

adventures in academia

I'm three weeks into my whirlwind campus interview stage, with about two more weeks to go! So far, so good. I'm learning so much at each campus – about what it means to be an academic, the state of Classics these days, what makes me a strong candidate (and likewise, weak), and what my own expectations for my career are. I'm not ready to make a grand summary, but so far, a few observations:

Sometimes, the hotel with the best view:

(Hartford, CT)

can also be the most "creative" in finding solutions to broken hairdryers:

Texans really ARE serious about their beef:

And their bears! This is a terrible picture, but try to spot two pairs of fuzzy ears in the center:

This is where they live, right in the center of campus:

More seriously: I'm coming to understand the way in which academia CAN be divided into "winners" and "losers" (and how important it is to be in the "winners" camp), but also the way in which academia is much "flatter" than I had imagined, with much greater equality across different kinds of schools. On the one hand, I'm extremely grateful to Princeton. There are so many ways in which my Princeton education helped to position me for success in graduate school: it was at Princeton that I learned about Dumbarton Oaks, the American School, the Latin/Greek Institute – all things that perhaps distinguished my CV from others'. Let me not neglect to mention the strong training I received in the languages, which gave me a head start in grad school and helped me impress the people who are now writing my letters. I hardly ever talk about Princeton while I'm at Michigan, but on the job circuit, I've talked about it many times – with the many academics who did their graduate and undergraduate training there, with committees wanting to understand my intellectual trajectory – and it always reminds me of how fortunate I am to have gotten my start there.

On the other hand, my time at Princeton gave me a very skewed idea of what it means to be an academic or what the broader field is like. When I was an undergrad, I thought there were only 3 schools of import (and you can probably guess which ones those are). But it turns out that brilliant and successful academics end up everywhere – big schools, rich schools, poor schools, in glamorous and remote locations, with amazingly accomplished students and the poorly prepared. Yet in many ways, their lives seem the same: they struggle to produce and publish while teaching; administrators want to see more Classics majors and minors; committee work is a drag; students are inspiring and terrific, as well as difficult and unmotivated. There is one school where I'm truly terrified of ending up at, and it's a replacement hire for a retiring scholar whose article on Euripides' Heracles really shaped one of my chapters. Who knew? And so much of where you end up is based on luck: who is hiring this year, what they're looking for, and whether you can fool them into loving you and your work.