Job Market Mentoring: Interviewing Strategies

The DoD is delighted to announce its second installment in this year’s job market mentoring workshops.  As ever, our sessions focus on how to secure employment as a Deviant in a world gone Normal.  Our second session will feature mock interviews and we are delighted to announce that Professor Pierre Menard has agreed to reprise his now legendary performance as That Guy.  For those who missed last year’s rendition, just a few teasers:

That Guy will ask whether, despite your deviance, you can talk to Normal people, in their language and non-disruptively. 

That Guy will want to be reassured that while you will eagerly teach every single last thing not addressed in the Normal curriculum (preferably in a single course), you have no designs on the curriculum itself and are happy to have nothing you teach be required. 

That Guy will want to know whether anything you study is actually intelligible, because he read something once and didn’t think it was. 

That Guy will have some pet theory he’ll want to pursue with you, whether it be benign explanations of an exceedingly narrow canon or stories about how non-white and/or non-male people have lots of better things to do than study Normality. 

That Guy will want to make sure that if you are non-white and/or non-male, you’re not, like, an angry revolutionary about it.

That Guy will unironically free associate about your subject matter while also opining on the critical importance of high standards of rigor.

That Guy will somehow slip into conversation the fact that “not everyone” in the department is convinced they need a Deviant.

When he’s not actually talking, That Guy will doodle on his notepad while occasionally sighing theatrically. 

We can never be sure just what That Guy will do and this uncertainty is only half the adventure!  The rest of it is figuring out how to respond while neither laughing nor crying.  So, come to this session and marvel at That Guy while also learning valuable techniques of self-control and tactical conversational evasion.  

Job Market Mentoring: Sit, Stay, Roll Over Edition

It’s that time of year again, that time when senior deviant graduate students everywhere must begin to prepare their job applications.  We here in the DoD are acutely aware that our graduate students lack “pedigree.”  While we would revel in a world populated by a happy chaos of mutts, alas, we are not in charge.  We recognize that mutts too need to eat.  And so we are doing our level best to help them find jobs that will pay for groceries and even vet checkups. 

To that end, we are offering job market mentoring, the first session of which happens this Tuesday.  This session will be devoted to problems arising when one lacks Kennel Club recognized lineage. 

We will address how to appear non-threatening and well-behaved, even when your scrappy ancestors were not.  Students will thus learn how to judiciously measure exposure of their deviance so as not to alarm the pure breds.  We will also talk about how to make your coat shinier and glossier than anyone would expect of a mutt.  Some say that a mutt who can simply walk upright will impress, but this is likely not enough to win a job in the present market.  So we’ll discuss how to perform elaborate tricks sure to pleasingly shock those who expect little of you but soiling carpets.  Finally, we will conclude with a heartening tour through tales of mutts-made-good, detailing exemplars of the type and sussing out just how they managed to win their jobs.

New Graduate Student Recruiting Initiative Arrives at DoD

We here at the DoD have somehow secured funding for a new effort at marketing our graduate program.  The university, as many know, has recently stepped up its own marketing efforts, the finest result of which is the new university motto, appearing on t-shirts, beer cozies, and stationary everywhere:

Out Standing in the Field of Excellence

It’s true that the English Department was dismayed by the inadvertent error in rendering outstanding as out  standing.  But we here in the DoD are enamored of this pithy accidental poetry and indeed often find ourselves out standing in fields of all sorts.  We doubt we have ever stumbled into the field of excellence, but we do live in hope.

Taking our inspiration from the university and taking the money they offered too, we have resolved to up our own game at marketing the graduate program.  We hired professional academic motto consultant, Stephen Ellis.  His sartorial choices – overalls that had seen better days – immediately convinced us that here was a consultant we could trust.  And indeed, Ellis delivered the goods.  The motto, like ourselves, manages to be happily wordy and yet indefinite all at the same time.  We are pleased and offer it here for your delectation:

We would like to think that we’re not so closed-minded

as to screw up our graduate students in the usual way.

The DoD has begun inscribing the motto on anything that does not move.  Physical plant is unhappy with our use of Sharpies to write it all over the bathroom walls, but we are undeterred in our efforts.  The DoD has also, naturally, notified the Grad Studies Committee to brace themselves for what will surely be a flood of applications.

DoD Institutes Musical Path to the PhD

Stephen Ellis, a prominent deviant in a Top Department Elsewhere has observed that the DoD is unclear about the guidelines for its graduate students.  As well as woefully, inexplicably without any music.  Seeking to kill two birds with one stone and also keep too many Grad College cooks out of our kitchen, we have devised the following musical plan toward the PhD in Deviance:

Admission to Candidacy will occur upon public performance of “Drop Kick me, Dogen, Through the Goalposts of Grad School” (to be sung to the tune of “Drop Kick me,Jesus”).

As Ellis notes, PhD committee composition may prove tricky.  Owing to the permeable boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, and all of that, we think it best if graduate students break into song.  And be on their own committees.  Specifically, they shall sing “I Am My Own Outside Member” (to be sung to the tune of “I am my own Grandpaw”) both upon formation of the committee and any time their confidence wanes.