Late Season Stress

[a bit anxious]

It's the beginning of April. This is my second year as a VAP, my first with PhD in hand. In the last four years since I left the cozy confines of my grad school to finish my dissertation off campus, this is the latest into spring I've gone without knowing where (or if) I'll have a job next fall. I'm currently waiting to hear from three TT positions that recently wrapped up campus visits, and I have five more remaining VAP applications submitted to places where they apparently haven't yet started contacting anybody.

Best case scenario: I get a phone call next week that reboots my life with an ascending career path.

Middling case scenario: I find out sometime in late April or May that I have to move across the country this summer while preparing to go on the market again next fall and do this all over again.

Worst case scenario: I take some job outside of academia and struggle --- with the long odds against me --- to stay relevant within the discipline and hope to beg time off for interviews again next season.

That seems like a really wide and disparate range of future outcomes. I am naturally finding all of this a bit stressful. I know I'm not alone. The potential rewards here are great, but this waiting game really sucks right now.

(And do I feel better about writing and posting this? Not yet, maybe later. Like everything else, it seems, I just have to be patient and find out sometime down the road.)

[3?]

If you had 3 recent TT interviews, odds are you will get one of them (especially this late; where schools are more desperate and running out of candidates).

Of course, it's no guarantee. Good luck.

[a bit anxious]

I guess my main point was that the waiting is stressful. I know that everyone knows this, but it feels more intense now that I can't count on more opportunities opening up. And it's stressful to not know how long I'll have to wait.

Again, nothing earth-shattering here. Just needed to say it out loud to try to stop obsessing about it.

[Big picture]

It is very stressful, and the payoff, even in the best case scenarios, in my case, is likely to be just more stress (two-body problem when spouse already has an excellent position where we are), hence I've been thinking really hard about starting to look for local non-academic positions. A couple years ago, this would have been anathema to me but it's increasingly starting to look like the more rational path. So, I guess trying to say that I (and most of us here likely) really sympathize. And also, that when stressed and anxious it helps me to think in very concrete ways about what my options are if worst comes to worst; it turns out that, when thought about in relatively dispassionate manner, there always are some options, and they don't mean the end of the world, even if they aren't what I thought would happen or wanted to happen. In short, I find it healthy to keep the "big picture" in mind. But best of luck with those pending decisions!

[Agreed]

Waiting is hell, and anxiety unavoidable. I think distraction, along with "Big Picture's" point about working through concrete back-up plans, is all one can do. I was extremely fortunate not to have too long a wait myself, and frankly don't know that I would have been constitutionally capable of much more waiting than I had to do. I've now got that coveted TT job, but often remind friends with the two-body problem that I'd trade down--even out of academia--if it were ever a choice between career and partner/family, or even certain geographic areas I would be unhappy in. It's really easy to lose sight of what matters most and get caught up in the status game. Forgetting that there is more to life than just sociology. But here's hoping we all find a little bit of both.