Entering the Academic Job Market: Dr Emma Cole's Perspective

Emma very kindly collaborated with Let's Talk Academia by allowing me to use her extremely helpful YouTube videos on the topic of entering the job market, where she talks about her own experience in the academic job-hunt process and offers some much needed advice along the way. These videos are a must watch if you're planning on staying in academia after your PhD and are keen to approach the academic job market. 

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Emma Cole is currently Teaching Fellow in Classics and Liberal Arts, and from August will be Lecturer in Classics and Liberal Arts, both at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on the reception of the classics in contemporary experimental theatre. She has previously published on the work of Katie Mitchell and Martin Crimp, and her co-edited collection Adapting Translation for the Stage is forthcoming with Routledge this July. She is currently writing a monograph for the Classical Presences series at Oxford University Press titled Postdramatic Tragedies, and her next research project will explore the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in the twenty- and twenty-first-century theatre industry. Alongside her research, she works as a dramaturg on new writing and classical adaptation projects. Check out Emma's YouTube channel here and follow her on Twitter: @Emma_Cole1 

I doubt that anyone embarks on a PhD expecting that entering the job market will be easy. However, I was certainly unprepared for just how hard it would be. I first began actively monitoring the job market in January 2015, in the final six months of my PhD. At this stage, I was targeting teaching fellowships and post-doctoral research positions in both Australia and the United Kingdom, and I had to wait until May before anything appeared for which I felt qualified to apply. Come July I had made it through to the final round for two separate positions, the interviews for which—just my luck—happened to be on the same day.

The two positions were in two different disciplines (my work bridges classics and theatre studies), and both required a presentation tailored to the teaching opportunities offered at the respective institution. I did one interview in person followed by a skype interview for the other position, and vlogged my off-the-cuff reactions to both, plus my reflections after the outcome was known.

Two years—and several more applications and interviews—later these videos still stand as a good overview as to how the academic job market works, the types of questions one might be asked in a humanities interview, and the dos and don’ts that I learnt the hard way. I hope you find them useful. Good luck with your own foray into the job market!