Javier Jiménez, the graduate student profiled by The Chronicle last month at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting, has made a decision about where he will work this fall. Mr. Jiménez’s story illustrated what it is like to be a graduate student navigating the job gantlet at a prestigious academic conference.
Back in early January when he was at the MLA, Mr. Jiménez was weighing some tough decisions. Unlike many of his peers, he arrived at the conference with a job offer for a tenure-track position already in hand, plus he had interviews for two other positions, one on the tenure track and the other for a two-year position.
Mr. Jiménez, who expects to earn a Ph.D. in comparative literature this May from the University of California at Berkeley, had only a few days to let the search committee at the college where he had an offer know if he would take the job. He worried that if he made the wrong decision he would end up at the wrong place, working as an adjunct, or without a teaching job at all.
This week, after nearly a month of negotiating, stalling, and anxiously waiting for his contract to arrive by snail mail, Mr. Jiménez has accepted a tenure-track position at Marietta College, in Ohio.
Speaking by phone from his apartment in Oakland, Calif., he shared how he mustered up the courage to negotiate for a better salary and benefits, something that doesn’t come naturally to most people, let alone graduate students. He also spoke about how he assuaged his fears over whether he, a brown-skinned gay Dominican, and his Jewish boyfriend, Micah, would fit in at a small liberal-arts college in a Midwestern river town where the nearest big city is a few hours away.
Mr. Jiménez said that this final leg of his graduate-student journey taught him lessons that he could not have learned in the classroom, about his own worth and about how to be astute in dealing with the outside world.
Weighing His Offer
Unlike most job candidates who leave a conference after a big interview, Mr. Jiménez did not find himself on pins and needles, waiting to hear if he would be invited to campus for the next stage of the interview process.
“My stress level wasn’t so high because I had an offer in front of me,” he said. But he was curious to find out if the other colleges where he interviewed would call him. They never did.
Mr. Jiménez said he met with his dissertation adviser to discuss his job offer and scheduled a campus visit to Marietta. They talked about how he would ask for a higher salary and ask to reduce his teaching load because his position would also require him to direct a new Latin American Studies program. He also wanted to ask the provost to help connect Micah, who earned a master’s degree in educational leadership from the University of California at Berkeley, to resources to help him find a job.
At home, Mr. Jiménez told his partner that he was satisfied with his performance during his interviews at the MLA, and they talked about what it would mean for him to accept or decline the offer from Marietta.
“Even though the employment was for me, the decisions involved the both of us,” he said.
Declining an offer to stay close to a partner has risks, he added. “It may mean saying ‘no’ to the profession, and you go back to zero. If you graduate, some parts of your profile might be improved. You’ll have a Ph.D., but that does not guarantee that you’ll get job interviews in the future.”
Two weeks after the MLA conference, Mr. Jiménez and Micah boarded a plane to Columbus and drove two hours to Marietta’s campus. They spent two days filled with coffee, lunch, and dinner meetings with his potential colleagues, and tours of the campus and nearby rental properties.
“I wanted Micah to get his own take on the people and the community,” he said. “We genuinely felt welcomed. As we explored the town, our eyes were open to the possibilities.”
Mr. Jiménez said that, based on the feeling he got from the campus atmosphere and his interactions with the faculty, he felt it would be a “given” that he would fit in if he took the job. Unlike at the MLA, he didn’t feel pressured to prove himself or to put on a performance to impress people.
Discovering His Worth
The biggest issue for him was the uncomfortable task of asking the provost for more money, especially at a time when the academic job market is so bad. He knew he had to negotiate in a professional and respectful manner. Articulating his worth, he discovered, first required self-reflection.
“Graduate students often feel reticent about asking for more or for the things they want,” he said. “You feel weak as a grad student. Fellowships are told to us. We are never in a position to negotiate how much we make as grad students. It’s a given, and so asking for a higher salary seems out of bounds.”
By trying to negotiate a higher salary, the worst that could happen was that he would be told “no,” Mr. Jiménez kept reminding himself.
“During my meeting with the provost I pointed out the things I was bringing to the table and told him that the job requires me to do a lot of things typically not required of junior faculty,” Mr. Jiménez said. “He wasn’t hostile. He said he would check his budget and told me that he was expecting me to ask for a higher salary.”
Mr. Jiménez received a modest salary increase, some course relief, and a personal commitment from the provost that he’d help Micah find employment.
“I learned that advocating for my own worth is something that is new to me,” he said. “My perception of what I can do and ask for after getting an offer did not match the reality. You have a lot more agency than you have ever really considered.”
Mr. Jiménez said that while he was at the MLA conference he felt that he and other graduate students were like ghosts, there but not visible to others because they are not faculty members. Now that he has a job, he feels validated.
“In many ways, this new job confirms for me that I am a real person outside of my small grad student world,” he said. “I am a ghost no more. I’ve thickened up. I am flesh and blood.”
In fact, he added jokingly, “I actually need to go to the gym because I’ve put on a few pounds from stress weight.”
His signed contract is now winding its way through the mail, and he feels relieved. “A huge weight is off my shoulders,” he said.
Now he’ll spend the next few months focusing on finishing his last chapter in his dissertation, which is titled, “Regarding American Customs,”, finding a new home, and starting the next phase of his academic career: the tenure process.
Correction (February 10, 2012, 11:50 a.m.): The original version of this article incorrectly named the institution where Javier Jiménez’s boyfriend, Micah, earned a master’s degree in educational leadership. It was at the University of California at Berkeley, not at that university’s Los Angeles campus. The text has been corrected.
