It’s the night before one of his big job interviews at the Modern Language Association meeting, and Javier Jiménez is in his hotel room, getting ready.
The 35-year-old graduate student, who is scheduled to earn his Ph.D. in comparative literature this spring from the University of California at Berkeley, is trying to ward off anxiety and abdominal pains.
“My worst nightmare is that I’ll be in the middle of my interview and get diarrhea, and I won’t be able to play it off,” he says.
The mystique of the MLA, the biggest and most prominent literary-studies conference in the United States, heightens his anxiety. Not to mention, there are hundreds of people vying for the limited number of jobs in his field.
The MLA recently projected that about 2,400 jobs in English and foreign-language instruction would be advertised with the association this academic year, a 5-percent increase over last year. But the overall number of positions remains near the historic low for the disciplines, and the uptick in openings is too modest to make much of a dent in the backlog of people with Ph.D.'s looking to land a tenured or tenure-track job.
Mr. Jiménez should actually be more relaxed than many of his peers here. He is one of the few who have arrived at the conference with a job offer already in hand; just two days earlier, he was offered a tenure-track position at a liberal-arts college in a small Midwestern town.
In today’s market, many people struggle to even land an interview. Yet here, Mr. Jiménez has won interviews with two other small liberal-arts colleges, one for a tenure-track position in the Chicago metropolitan area and the other for a two-year position at an elite college in the Northeast.
“I’m definitely interested in the job I’ve already been offered,” he says, “but the other schools are offering a different kind of fit and experience.”
Mr. Jiménez faces a conundrum. He has only a few days to let the search committee know if he’ll take the job. He could say no and risk being turned down by the other colleges. Or he might see if he can prolong negotiations while the other colleges decide if they’ll invite him to the next round of campus interviews.
Tonight, he says he won’t think that far down the road. Instead, he’ll try to stay focused on the interviews, not driving himself crazy, and doing some “manscaping” to make himself feel and look confident but not cocky.
Trying to Fit In
“Preparing for the MLA is insane,” he says.
The MLA interviewing process is a high-stakes performance that requires a great deal of preparation. Applicants face a “cattle call” atmosphere at a meeting like this, cycling in and out of a main interview room in a conference hotel, where candidates first meet their prospective employers amid rows and rows of tables of other people also interviewing for jobs. Other candidates, like Mr. Jiménez, experience the weirdness of meeting with strangers in individual hotel rooms set up for these conversations.
This year, 274 academic departments from 222 colleges checked in with the conference’s job center, according to the MLA. The main interview area was used by 67 of the departments; the others conducted interviews in hotel rooms.
At 7:20 p.m., Mr. Jiménez carefully arranges his clothes on the bed in his room at the Hyatt so they don’t touch. His shoes sit on the floor, neatly aligned below the legs of his gray Calvin Klein slim-fit suit that he purchased on sale at Macy’s. Next to his jacket are four folded dress shirts, three ties, and two pairs of colorful striped socks that he has chosen to add a touch of flair. A black leather briefcase that his brother-in-law gave him as a Christmas gift is on the chair by the door.
On his laptop screen is a document with notes that he’ll print out in the morning on the way to another hotel, a few blocks away, where the interview “gantlet,” as job prospects call it, is being held.
Mr. Jiménez selects a shirt, then a tie, and tucks them under the steamed lapels of his jacket. “I think this will be my power suit,” he says.
Stepping away from the bed, with one hand on a hip and the other cupping his unshaved chin, he stares down at that bodiless suit. It is a stark contrast to the man standing above it wearing black skinny jeans, fun socks with red heels and toes, an untucked checkered shirt, a square, chunky watch, and a bracelet made out of lots of big, shiny safety pins.
“For the MLA, you have to present a different image from the usual one,” he says.
When Mr. Jiménez teaches his undergraduate courses at Berkeley, he often repeats his outfits because he has little money for new clothes.
“For the MLA, I was advised to get a nice suit but not too nice,” he says. “You want to fit in, so having too nice a suit may read wrong.”
Worrying about how to project the right combination of competence, enthusiasm, and confidence to persuade a search committee that you will “fit in” as a colleague is typical at the MLA. But Mr. Jiménez’s experience is also atypical because of who he is.
Mr. Jiménez is 6'1" with salted black hair. He is trigueño, which in Spanish means “wheat colored.” He notes that in his native country, the Dominican Republic, “nobody wants to be black because that means you’re Haitian. So there’s like 15 government categories for racial designation. But I don’t have a problem with being black or being thought of as Haitian.”
As he says this, he selects another shirt-and-tie combination and rests it on top of his suit. “Wearing Nautica shirts makes me feel like a member of the African-American elite,” he says with a chuckle. He then glances in the square mirror, gently scratches his stubble, and says he’ll shave in the morning.
Mr. Jiménez, who came to the United States when he was 10 and spoke no English, is openly gay. Micah, his currently unemployed Jewish boyfriend, finished his master’s degree in education at Berkeley in December. The couple have been together for seven-and-a-half years.
One great perk about Mr. Jiménez’s current job offer is that it includes health insurance for domestic partners. But he worries a little about how a brown-skinned, gay immigrant with a Jewish boyfriend will fit in at a college in a small Midwestern town. Added to his worries is finding housing and whether Micah, who has reservations about leaving the Bay Area, would find work.
“There’s not really a rental market there,” Mr. Jiménez says. “Everybody has a house. We don’t even have enough money for a one-percent down payment.”
He also wonders about the potential effects of moving and the change in his employment status on the couple’s relationship.
“Micah is happy for me,” he says. “But he’s only known me as a grad student. To him, my life has seemed calm, free, and bohemian. I’m about to transition from a grad student into a human being with an office, meetings, and daily responsibilities.”
Sitting on the bed with his legs crossed and his hands forming a teepee over his knee, Mr. Jiménez is not worried about being read as gay by interviewers.
“I mean, I’m not going to wear a rainbow tie,” he says. “But I wouldn’t want to work some place where my sexuality is a problem.”
The large numbers of predominantly white job seekers he sees at the MLA seem to “stress about what they’re going to say during the interview,” Mr. Jiménez says, but candidates who are gay, lesbian, or of color also “stress about whether we belong.”
From Welfare to Ph.D.
Mr. Jiménez grew up in Massachusetts, where his father supported a family of five by working odd jobs, including as a substitute teacher and store clerk. He felt looked down upon in school for being an immigrant and had an intense fear of being left behind.
He knew he wanted to go to college and landed a scholarship to attend Columbia University. In his last year as an undergraduate, where he majored in sociology, he says the last thing he thought he wanted was to get a Ph.D.
“Grad students seemed so sad and bewildered. I knew I didn’t want to be like them,” he says. “They were also super poor. Growing up as an immigrant from welfare to Columbia, why would I actively choose this path? Then there was also the social awkwardness and general weirdness of academics, of whatever rank, I met.”
After Columbia, Mr. Jiménez moved to San Francisco, in 2000, where he worked in a temporary job in the student-financial-support unit of the president’s office at Berkeley. Despite his qualms about graduate education, he decided he wanted to “see if I could do the academic world” and began a master’s program in English literature at San Francisco State University. After earning a degree, he played with the idea of teaching high-school English or studying law. His thesis adviser encouraged him to apply for a doctoral program.
“After finishing my master’s, I realized I could stretch myself academically,” he says, “and grow a whole lot more than I had imagined.”
And so he went to Berkeley, where he specializes in Spanish, Caribbean, and Brazilian literature of the 19th century. He focuses on antislavery texts, including those by Cuban writers like Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Cirilo Villaverde, that grappled with questions about what a nation like Cuba would be like without slavery, and how former slaves, particularly those of mixed races, would fit into a society in transition. Mr. Jiménez examines the intersection of beauty, politics, and ethics in the Cuban novels he studies. His adviser is Francine Masiello, a well-known specialist in 19th- and 20th-century Argentinean and Chilean literature.
Mr. Jiménez says he is not exactly sure what made him stand out in this job market and how he has beaten the odds to end up with an offer and two interviews at MLA. His adviser’s name probably helps, he says, as well as his teaching experience. He won an award in the spring of 2010 that his department gives to an outstanding graduate-student instructor. He also believes his personality is a plus; he knows how to get along with people, he says.
Now, after all the anxieties, questions, insecurities, and fears of being left behind, he approaches the next leg of his academic journey.
The Performance
Mr. Jiménez gets up early Friday morning, eats an egg-white omelet, drinks coffee, shaves, moisturizes, and gets into his new suit.
“I have achieved the hotness status,” he says.
His interview, with the college near Chicago, is to begin at 10:15. He walks down Pine Street to the Sheraton, focusing on sticking out his chest and making sure his shoulders are relaxed. He tries to get pumped off songs by Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Nicky Minaj playing in his ears.
He arrives at the hotel with a few minutes to spare. He takes the elevator to the 30th floor and knocks on Room 3028. No answer. He knocks again, and again. No answer.
Mr. Jiménez “freaks out,” as he puts it, and curses as he reaches in his pocket for his cellphone. Fortunately, he has one of the interviewer’s cellphone numbers. It turns out that the hotel changed the room at the last minute.
With jangled nerves, he takes the elevator down to the 25th floor. When he arrives, about eight minutes late, the door opens, and he is greeted by a middle-aged French professor in slacks and a sweater who pronounces his name “JA-VEE-AY.” A female professor who is a Spanish specialist greets him with a genteel handshake and a flawless pronunciation of his name. The door closes and the interview begins.
Mr. Jiménez emerges from the room 30 minutes later. He lets the door close behind him. His legs are wobbly as he makes his way to the elevator bank directly in front of him. Once inside, the elevator doors yawn shut, and he looks at his reflection in the wall of mirrors.
“I wonder if I looked impressive enough in terms of my image and the content of what I had to say,” he says.
When he reaches the lobby, he tries to calm himself. As he puts on his coat he says he could really use a drink.
He recounts the details of those first nervous moments behind the closed doors, where they told him to place his coat, where he was supposed to sit, how he was offered a glass of water and accepted. “We engaged in pleasantries and laughed a little about the room confusion, which was a nice ice breaker,” he says.
The committee then opened with a battery of questions, asking about such things as when he’ll complete his dissertation (May) and how he would enhance students’ experiences (by exploring partnerships with cultural institutions focused on Latino culture). He says they seemed to care more about when he planned to finish his dissertation, how he approaches teaching, and how well he would fit at their college than about his research.
Toward the end of the interview, Mr. Jiménez asked his interviewers about their study-abroad program and the future direction of their department. He says he felt good about the replies. The interviewers were “honest and clear,” he says, as they worked to show him the virtues of their college.
“So much happened in a half-hour,” he says. “Eight years of work ride on a half-hour.”
He walks past the throng of other job candidates in dark suits, looking anxious and sitting in the lobby, waiting their turn to see if they are a good “fit.” Tomorrow, he will be back among them, preparing for his interview with the Northeastern college.
Mr. Jiménez likens his MLA experience to being a ghost. “As a grad student you are there,” he says, “but not visible because you’re not a faculty member at a school.”
He faces tough decisions in the next few days. He says he wonders about his future in academe, if he’ll “thicken up and become a person recognizable” to other people in his field, eventually flourishing at one of the colleges where he has interviewed.
He worries that if he makes the wrong decision, he’ll start his career down a wrong path and “fade away into the background completely.” He could end up in the wrong place, working as an adjunct, or without a teaching job at all, joining thousands of other hopeful, often desperate, graduate students who weren’t fortunate enough to even get an interview at the MLA.
