“Non-scholarly pursuits.” Destructive as they can be, we all have them, and we all seem to need them. One of mine, fortunately, is biscotti. That’s right, those twice-baked, chocolate-dipped cookies designed for dunking. During my third year of graduate school, when I should have been writing an 80-page literature review that was part of my qualifying exams, I taught myself how to bake biscotti. Those of you who have eaten biscotti from a coffee shop or (gasp!) a grocery store cannot begin to appreciate the true marvel that is real biscotti.
Unlike store-bought biscotti, my homemade versions are large, thick, crunchy (but never dry), and laden with nuts and chocolate. Years of experimentation have led to several variations on the traditional chocolate almond model, including pecan praline, chocolate mint chip, chocolate cappuccino chip, and my personal favorite, cinnamon bun, distinguished by a drizzle of white chocolate on top of a walnut-and-cinnamon cookie. After the 10th batch or so, I innovated a final flourish: my initials piped in luscious chocolate on each individual slice.
The crunchy cookies have become so beloved among family and friends that I even print labels -- “Aunt Karin’s Semi-famous Biscotti.” I stick them on the special wax-coated bakery bags (complete with little cellophane windows where I carefully center a cookie’s chocolate monogram) in which I pack the biscotti for shipping.
Shipping? Yes, I ship them out regularly, especially between October and May. No, I have not started a biscotti business in lieu of an academic career. And yes, I eventually did finish that Ph.D., and I am now an assistant professor of education. But I still make an awful lot of biscotti. I use biscotti as part of my job-search strategy. Call it cookie conditioning.
The first year I was on the job market, 2000-1, I was finishing up my dissertation. I decided to send a batch of biscotti to the people who were writing my recommendation letters to thank them for their efforts. It was a way of simultaneously expressing my gratitude and getting in some much-needed therapeutic baking for myself. While finishing an undertaking as mammoth as a dissertation, it is very helpful to tackle a project you can complete in just a few hours, and one that will earn you some much-needed praise and admiration to boot. After receiving the first batch, my adviser sent an e-mail: “I have never eaten homemade biscotti before. I thought all biscotti came from the same small village in Italy. Yours are buttery ... sinful ... delicious. Thank you.” No, thank you, Professor Pavlov.
A strategy was born, and it was simple: Send some recommendation letters for me, get some biscotti. I knew my letter-writers would send letters anyway, simply because I asked them, but I wanted them to be in a positive frame of mind about it. I wanted them to look forward to sending my letters. So, dozens more batches of twice-baked cookies were mailed to my mentors as I applied to jobs all over the continent.
Cookie conditioning proved helpful in other ways during the job search. I made biscotti for my downstairs neighbor who cared for my cats while I traveled to interviews and conferences. Biscotti were distributed to the people at my job to thank them for picking up the slack during my absences. I even served biscotti at my dissertation defense.
The best part -- it worked! I landed four interviews in three time zones and two countries, and was finally offered one fantastic job (albeit not on the tenure track but with a five-year contract, an increasingly common approach in education schools). And, it turns out biscotti can be an effective tool on the job as well as on the job market. This past year, I made biscotti for my new colleagues, as a “bribe” to get them to serve on committees for my graduate students. It worked extraordinarily well, not just in breaking the ice and persuading them to help, but in giving me a feeling of competence at something while I floundered through my first year as a professor. Baking biscotti boosts the ego.
But the cookie conditioning chronicle does not end there.
Back in 2000, I was dating a man who is also an academic, and in a field much more saturated by candidates than mine. My then-beau-now-husband is a scientist in a tiny subfield that usually lists only about a dozen suitable jobs in a given year. Most of those ads ask for someone who has multiple years of experience in a postdoc position, exceptional teaching skills, dozens of publications, and several large grants. In short, they want über-scientists.
And they can get them. Given the state of the field of science and its pyramid scheme of too many postdocs and not enough faculty positions, many such people exist. Two years ago he applied for a one-year sabbatical replacement job at a liberal-arts college on the West Coast. Through a colleague, he found out that more than 300 people had applied, including some tenured professors. You can imagine the level of competition for the tenure-track positions.
My field is education, and though it is competitive, especially at the top research institutions, it is a growth field in most places. So although my first year on the job market ended with the relative luxury of a long-term contract position as an assistant professor, for the past three years, he’s had to be content with a series of one-year appointments as a visiting assistant professor. Mercifully, these have all been at the same institution, and near the same city where I earned my degree and where I now teach. We had time together to strengthen and deepen our relationship, and we were married this past June. Despite our uncertain long-term job status, we consider ourselves very lucky. For the moment, we both have jobs and we get to live together.
Of course this means that last year, as I was trying to settle into my job as a new assistant professor, I was again mailing applications and homemade biscotti all over the country. I even sent a batch of biscotti to my husband’s letter writers, but perhaps one batch was not enough. We did not secure a pair of tenure-track faculty positions. So for the third year in a row, I will be approaching Professor Pavlov and the others, and asking for more letters. I can only hope that their palates have been sufficiently cookie-conditioned to make this idea a pleasant one rather than daunting.
This fall, when the weather turns cool and the job ads are lined up on The Chronicle’s Web page like slices of dough on a cookie sheet, I’ll begin firing up the oven to bake a lot of Italian delicacies. Fortunately, there’s a chocolate factory just a few miles from campus where I can buy chips, nuts, and wax-coated bakery bags in bulk.