Shadow CV

Here is what’s sometimes called a “Shadow CV” or a “CV of Failures” or an ““Academic Failure Bowl”. If you’re feeling like you’re failing an inordinate amount click away! You’re not alone. Please note I’ve failed so much more than this, but 4 single spaced pages is enough to give you the idea. If you need more tales of failure, I’m happy (er…”happy”) to expand on the list in person.

I advise students in cognitive science, philosophy of cognitive science, phil psych, or phil mind. I have advised social and cognitive psychology students and would again for the right sort of project (i.e., one that aligns with my knowledge base). Same holds for epistemology. But that’s really it save for some edge cases (e.g., you’re working in moral psychology, but its empirical moral psych).

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Publishing Advice

Do you have to publish as a graduate student in order to get a job*? No! Some people can get away without it. More power to them. However, odds are you are not one of them. For the vast majority of people, you’ll have to publish to get a job. An excellent overview of reading about publishing as a graduate student is over at Eric Schwitzgebel’s site. Read that! It’s great and I agree with pretty much everything he says. What I’d add to it:

1) As with everything (in the market and beyond), don’t just take our word for it. Everyone (who is trying) is doing their best to guess what matters. But we are taking the intentional stance at a solidly non-intentional mess. Publication is like the job market—it isn’t random, but there’s a lot of noise in it. So you are bound to get some conflicting advice about pretty much everything: whether an article is ready to send out, what journal to submit it to, how to deal with an R&R, and whatever else. I hate trusting my gut, and would prefer base rates. Base rates are available for some of these qs (such as: should I publish?) but not others (such as: is this paper crap?). There’s no sidestepping your gut. Which is sorta cool: you gotta believe in yourself at some point.

Conflicting advice will be a problem throughout your career, in pretty much every aspect of it. When I was a grad student I wanted to write on a topic that no one was writing on. I didn’t because I was told I wouldn’t get a job working on that. By the time I finished, a bunch of articles on the topic had begun to come out. Thankfully I liked what I was working on instead but if I didn’t it would’ve been career suicide—you can’t write on something you don’t care about.

More to the point of publication, when I was a grad student Fred Dretske took me aside and told me to stop publishing. He said if he was still chair at Stanford he’d pass over my application because I had too many papers (I had something tiny, like 3 or something, which makes this all feel so quaint). I loved Fred and respected his opinion more than pretty much anyone. (He still serves as the prototype of academic integrity to me in large part because of how he dealt with counterattitudinal evidence. Counterexample his view and he’d say “Wow that is a tough counterexample. I don’t know how to deal with it. I can’t give up my view at this point so maybe you can help me figure out how to deal with the problem?”) Similarly years after he gave me the publishing advice (which I ignored) he told me he was wrong—nowadays you have to publish.

2) In general, here as elsewhere in life, assume you’ll be judged by your worst moment. Best of all possible worlds! Don’t throw something out there just to get a publication. If you publish in the Journal of Last Resort, well, you’ll be seen as the sorta person that does that because you know, you did that. (Please do not consider me a snob about this! I think pretty much all journals publish some crap and all journals publish some good stuff and randomness of reviewer dictates the majority of what ends up where. I’m just telling you what I think your average search committee member will think. (Your average search committee member will also not be able to read all, most, or maybe any of the writing samples so will use journal reputation as a proxy). To be more concrete if person A has published in a top journal and person B published in a top journal and a 4th tier one, person A looks better even though B has more work and has done everything A has.

Don’t know what journals are good? Go ask your more junior profs. And here, as with everything, get a second (and 7th) opinion. Most of us know shockingly little but think we know a ton about this. The effect is stronger the more senior you are (because you used to know a bunch so you think you still do even after things have changed). Dunning-Kruger comes for all of us.

3) Good god do not think you are “Writing for History.” When I was a grad a prof told me that I shouldn’t worry about some annoying criticism as I am the sort of person who should be <insert echoing ominous whooshing sound> Writing for History. This isn’t the sort of thing that made me do more, or better, work. It just made me (more) neurotic, wondering if this paper is really good enough to be read by post-human civilizations. This is the dumbest way to live your life. But even without that sort of dumbassery, enough reads should uncover at the very least some ambiguities and you’ll have to decide: leave them or perhaps over explain. If you overexplain, then it’s a turgid article; if you don’t disambiguate, you court misreadings. You can get trapped in these situations—you can’t disambiguate everything in a 8k word article so, maybe you just…don’t send the paper out and instead sit on it. And sit on it. And then you’re graduating and have no pubs. Not ideal.

To be clear: I have a paper graveyard. I think it’s healthy to have one (more on this below). Not every paper you write should be published just because you wrote it (think of all the songs and poems Leonard Cohen wrote and didn’t record or publish.) But don’t hold off on sending something out because it’s not quite perfect, or because you may be embarrassed by it later. If a prof reads your paper and says it reads like a seminar paper, or is a piece of juvenilia, ok consider that as a reason to maybe put the paper aside for now. But if you’re just worried about the possibility of it, you gotta push on. John Fahey discounts all his early records, but they’re amazing. You can write things that are good and worth publishing even if later on they might make you cringe. But who cares! Who reads their own work anyway besides egomaniacs? I imagine Kanye may solely listen to Kanye records but everyone else avoids their own work. Just do the best you can and send it out when you thinks its good enough and are getting marginal returns on your effort. It’s super hard to know what other people will find as educational. At a certain point you just gotta open yourself up to the world. Let the future generations snicker, and take solace in the impending heat death of the universe.

4) R&Rs: they are a huge pain. But they generally make your papers better on the whole. My main advice: do not wait on responding to these! Procrastinating on R&Rs has some bright sides: you me be ashamed enough that you’ll get a lot of other work done to make yourself feel better about not working on it (if you must procrastinate, why not check out my friend Andrew’s book on it. It’ll at least make for fun procrastinating).

Don’t put off dealing with R&Rs! For a lot of reasons. The main reason I’ve, um, heard that people do this is because it’s painful to read referees’ (often flip, often unthoughtout, sometimes downright mean) criticisms. OK sure. But that’s the job. You’ll remember the paper better—and your refs will too—if you respond quickly. If you wait too long you run all sorts of risks—the journal might no longer accept it, or the refs might no longer agree to referee the revision, or the editors might have switched or…just don’t procrastinate on it. Send it back in 2 months no matter what. That’s more time then you need.

I once had a student ask to meet me about his R&R. It had been over a year already and I was the first prof he wrote to about it. Don’t do that! We met out at a coffeeshop-like place and I said we weren’t leaving til we went through and figured out responses to everything. It took like 2.5 hours. I still do this with friends, colleagues, and students. It’s just way easier to have someone else help you walk through the comments with you. Even if you can’t make all the changes then you can write the cover letter together which will serve as the roadmap for your changes.

Don’t know where to start? Reach out to a friend, or a prof. A good friend will work through it with you. Only the most self-focused profs will ignore your request. It’s the best request to receive! A first year grad student recently wrote me to work on her first R&R. We didn’t know each other very well but I was psyched that she took the initiative to write (I’d have never known about her R&R otherwise). Now we know each other much better, having worked through it together, and she has a kickass pub in an excellent journal as a first year.

(Lastly, in the spirit of openness: I just took 9 months to R&R a paper that the journal took 1.5 years to get back to me. But you know amid pandemic, NYPD madness, fascist coups and what not, it was a banner year for not getting stuff done. Doesn’t really excuse the journal taking 1.5 years but what can you do. More in the spirit of openness: that paper went to a top journal but it took me forever to send it there because I shared it with one famous prof who shrugged at it. Then I sat on it for two years only sending it out to avoid focusing on other impending dooms. So please don’t confuse me with some paragon of efficiency).

5) Tip: don’t send the same people the same paper over and over. People could be a little more considerate on this front. I’m generally anti-psyched to read the same paper multiple times. If you’re my advisee, OK that’s what an advisor is for. But for anyone else I’ll read your paper once and give you comments. If you haven’t gotten comments from me it’s not because I didn’t like it and didn’t know what to say. I will absolutely not pull my punches. It’s that you are on a list that is many papers deep of people asking for comments and no one jumps the list except for advisees. It’ll often take me months to get back to people. So don’t send the paper for comments until you want them on this draft. Advisors and friends will help you bake ideas. Other people you send it to should be at a firmer stage in baking.

6) Paper graveyard: it’s not a bad thing! I find it very strange that some (most??) people publish everything they write. I publish maybe 20% of what I write (I know, can you imagine how shitty the other 80% is?). This isn’t failure, it’s curation. There are two reasons to put a paper in the graveyard, one endogenous and one exogenous. Endogenous: it just doesn’t feel right! Totally normal. Put it aside and come back to it. Exogenous: the world is telling you to let it go for now. This can come in multiple ways. I had a student who sent a paper out to ~15 journals. It was rejected from all of them. Then he put it in the graveyard. That seems fine to me too (and maybe too low? He said that he only cared about those 15 as a venue for this paper. I don’t know what the right number is). My advice: once a year open up your graveyard folder and give something a read. Trade it with another friend’s graveyard papers. Read one when you’re sad, or uninspired, or drunk. Check back in sometime but otherwise don’t be ashamed to have a paper graveyard (and make sure that not all your papers end up there—send some out).

*—job=academic non-community college job. So 2 big caveats:

1) getting jobs in community colleges is a totally different ballgame. In my (extremely limited anecdotal) experience those who get these jobs were adjuncting there before landing something more permanent. Eric Schwitzgebel (who gave me helpful comments on this and wrote his own, more fundamental post on this—again read his article, linked above) tells me that he’s seen people get jobs at CCs without having adjuncted there. But they had adjuncted at other CCs, showing that they had relevant CC experience. Long story short: if you want to get a job at a CC, best to talk to people who have worked at CCs.

2) I cannot stress this enough: there are non-academic jobs! In general they are waaaaaay better than academic jobs. You are not a failure for leaving academia. The happiest people I know left academia. You’re not worse for leaving academia. You didn’t fail if you don’t get a TT job. Academia is backwards in a million ways. In general those that leave are brave, and the timid stay. Do you see how many miserable people are around the academy? You don’t have to be one!

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Primer for Working with me

What does working with me entail?

Nothing in particular! For some grad students I set up biweekly advisory meetings. For others we just get in touch whenever they have work they want to discuss.

How should I go about getting a letter?

There are a lot of unwritten norms about letters. Let’s make some of them clearer.

You need a letter for something. I get it! But here’s what I need:

a) At least 4 weeks advance notice.

This is a regular courtesy I’d recommend extending to all your writers (and giving them 6 weeks). Do you know what else your writers have? A lot of other stuff that they left to last minute or got dropped to last minute. Your job application, fellowship application, law school deadline etc has been well known far in advance. They don’t just creep up on you. If you are telling me day of for a letter (sadly not a hypothetical) you might as well be saying ‘hey you don’t do anything with your life except wait around to be my letter butler?’ Which brings me to…

b) Don’t ask for a letter of recommendation, ask someone if they can write you a strong letter of recommendation. A letter of recommendation written under duress, because someone keeps pestering you and it’s the only way to get them to stop asking you about it, will not be a good letter.

c) Your letter writer needs to know your work! If you’re an undergrad ok, there’s less of it; ditto for an early grad student. But there still should be some work! A letter that doesn’t discuss your work is an absolutely worthless letter. Do I know your work? If not, why are you asking me for a letter! If I don’t know your work, I cannot write you a good letter. It doesn’t matter if I say you are the greatest living mind, without discussing your work its all airy bullshit. (And tbc, when I’m reading a letter from someone who just fills it with adjectives and no description of the work, then I think they are trying to hide the fact that either the person doesn’t have any work, or that the writer doesn’t know or like it).

d) Make a cheat sheet. Your letter writers—like the rest of the universe—don’t remember everything about you. Your cheat sheet should

1) Stress your accomplishments. Don’t be shy! Tell us what you want us to stress/what we might miss otherwise. Your CV is probably big and you’ve definitely done things to help other peers/students/the broader academic community that your profs don’t know about. It’s not because we’re ignoring you or don’t like you! So remind us of the main accomplishments.

2) Keep a list of the jobs you are applying to/deadlines/places to send the application (assuming that you’re not using an application manager, which you probably should bc then you just send one request + an extra ad hoc one or two for places that demand it). If you’re not using it you run the chance of people missing a deadline. That’s not meant to be judgmental, it’s just the way things are. To put this in perspective right now my gmail inbox refreshes within a day, sometimes multiple times a day. And that’s without having any spam or undergrad emails sent there. If you send me a random request from a uni for a letter, it probably will get buried right quick.

3) Give a description of all of your work. A 1 sentence summary of your each paper/project, followed by an additional paragraph on each paper.

So to summarize: ask at least 4 weeks in advance, for a strong letter, and when you ask have a cheat sheet with all your accomplishments, abstracts, and dates for submissions ready. If you can’t do this you are not ready for the market. For graduate students on the normal job cycle, that means you want to ideally be done by September 1