Someone called me from the Chronicle of Higher Ed the other day to ask me about blogging and job searches. Apparently they ran something on the topic before, and I responded to it, and she tracked me down. I don’t remember the post, or my comment, but I told her that I really don’t know how having a blog affects one’s chances of getting an academic job. I served as grad student representative on the job serach committee here at WSU once, but it was before the blog explosion. Some applicants had websites, but I don’t think most of the committee members bothered going to them. She asked me if I googled the candidates, and, to my surprise, I answered no. I google everyone. And everything. But I don’t recall doing that. If I had, it would’ve been for the people we actually invited to campus, but even so, I don’t recall having the time to do that. We were inundated with applications and it was all I could do to keep up with cover letters and writing samples, let alone blgos, websites and google searches.
I am aware, however, of the potential for a blog or other public document to hurt one’s chances at employment. This is one of the reasons I don’t put much personal stuff here, although I suppose you could piece a lot together between my flickr and del.icio.us accounts combined with links to and from this blog, but if someone’s going to that much trouble, they must be looking for something and don’t want me there anyway. Right? So, I don’t know. I’m tired of being cautious and worrying about the job market and whether this sentence here will eliminate me from a candidate pool or whether people will mistake this blog for real scholarship and think I’m lazy or unmethodical or something. This culture of caution wears me down.
In addition to that phone call (which I hope I don’t later regret taking), this Dilbert strip prompted me to blog about this.
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