Well, it seems like I’m not an entirely hopeless case. I got a request today from one of the schools to which I applied for a writing sample. Seems they’ve done their initial review of applications after last week’s deadline, and they liked my cover letter and CV well enough to want to read part of my dissertation. Progress is progress.
It’s encouraging as well because the department in question cast a pretty wide net in its advertisement for this position. In other words, it’s not a job specifically asking for someone who does East-Central Europe, but rather is open to all European fields except Britain, Germany and Russia. I’m hopeful this means I’ll be competitive for many of the jobs out there, if I can stand out enough in this expansive a search. Of course, it’s hard to know how much I might be helped by the fact that one of my committee members knows the chair of this department and has put in a good word, but, still, if I was a hopeless case, that probably wouldn’t have been enough to get them to request work from me.
Still, without having inside knowledge of the search, it’s hard to gauge my chances. I have a vague recollection of the search committee I was on a couple of years ago. I think we ultimately received somewhere north of 60 applications, decided to request additional work from maybe 15 or 20, then did phone interviews with perhaps half of those before bringing four people in for campus visits. If I had to guess, I might speculate that this committee requested writing samples from 20-30 applicants, but, again, I have no way of knowing, and couldn’t even guess at how many applications they received. I did hear by coincidence how many people applied for a European history position with an open specialization at another school where I also applied, since I ran into the retiring professor and he said they got something like 250 applications.
So, even if this is only the first cut, it’s good to have made it. At this point I expect they might decide in a couple of weeks who they want to interview at the upcoming AHA convention, since that’s the weekend after New Year’s, though I suppose they might first request more of my work, possibly all of my finished chapters.
And speaking of chapters, I’m still slogging away at Chapter 4. In reality it’s going to get split into two chapters, since I’m currently up to 63 pages and still have probably 15-20 pages to go. I’m pretty sure I know how I want to divide it, and I think I can do so in a way that makes sense. But I’ll be glad once I can get through the current draft, then tear it in two. That’ll put me up to five chapters plus the preface, with two chapters and an epilogue to go. I think I can get Chapter 6 done by the time I get back from the holidays in early January, and hopefully I can crank out Chapter 7 by the end of that month. I think I’m going to have to keep revising my timetable because things just seem to take longer than I anticipate, but I maintain my guarded optimism that I can finish a full draft by the end of Winter Quarter.
The other good news on this front is that I’ve had very good feedback on my first three chapters, and have already made most of the revisions based on the comments from my committee members. If I can keep this pace (admittedly a big if), I shouldn’t need to make major changes from the first full draft to the final version I defend. Of course, I also haven’t yet settled on my third committee member, which poses a potential wild card. Then again, the third member is likely going to defer to my main adviser on most matters, so it might not be too bad.