One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can think out loud. The drawback is pretty much anyone can stumble by and read your thoughts, and given my current situation on the job market, it is in my best interest for everyone to think I’ll leap at the chance to take their job offer (which, given that I have fairly transitive preferences, is emphatically not the case).

Nevertheless, I feel the need to ponder aloud. One of the faculty members I was out to dinner with tonight (at a pretty good Chinese restaurant—I guess I should have picked something else for dinner last night, since this was my second dinner of fried wontons and beef fried rice in two days) mentioned that his son is studying for the computerized GRE. The GRE actually has an interesting structure; in the olden days, you answered a block of N questions per section, and everyone answered the same N questions. Now, you answer M questions, and the test is adaptive—if you get questions right, it gives you harder ones, and if you get them wrong, you get easier ones. Thus, it is important to do well early—if you blow the first few questions, there’s almost no way to score in the 700s, because you’ll never get back to the hard questions that allow you to get such a high score. In other words, there is path dependency in the GRE: past actions dictate the range of choices you have available.

One suspects the job market is the same way. Aside from Overby’s career-improvement maxim—generally quoted as “any job is better than no job” (and, its corrollary, “never have an unpublishable thought”)—some jobs are better than others. Course load, service requirements, pay, appointment length (tenure-track versus non-tenure-track), location, and prestige all have effects.

Funnily enough, I think I’ve made my decision, more or less; there are basically two jobs I’d say yes to (one of which I’m pretty sure I’m not in the running for), two I’d have to seriously think about, and one I’d reject outright (there’s also a possibility in reserve which I’m not counting yet). Now I just need to find out what my options are, and react accordingly.

(I promise I’ll stop being so cryptic once I have signed a contract for the fall.)