First off… a semi-apology to those of you who are getting bored with the “inside baseball” academe stuff.

On to the point of this post. Assume for the sake of argument that my “dream job” is to teach at a liberal arts college (which may or may not appear on the Wikipedia list), and also assume that by the time I have to decide on a job offer, I won’t have any offers from liberal arts colleges.

Question 1: Would accepting a tenure-track offer at a different sort of college or university improve or diminish the chances of landing a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college in the future?

Question 2: Would another year here at Duke (which is by no means guaranteed as of yet), teaching more-or-less what I am teaching now (two sections of undergraduate methods a year and two other courses), getting a bit more research done, and potentially getting a publication or two, improve or diminish the chances of landing a job at a tenure-track liberal arts college in the future?

Question 3: Would a second non-tenure-track job at a liberal arts college improve or diminish the chances of landing a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college in the future?

Question 4: Assuming I don’t get a job at a liberal arts college this year, is there anything in particular that is under my control that would improve my prospects of getting a job at a liberal arts college? Things that are under my control: research, teaching evaluations, future course selection, attending the APSA Teaching & Learning Conference, etc.; things not/no longer under my control: whatever my letters say about me, where I went to school (i.e. not at a liberal arts college), my past experience, etc.

Anyway, I know at least some of my readers are at liberal arts colleges, so I’d appreciate their feedback in particular—informed speculation from folks at other types of institutions may also be helpful, though.

Last but not least: if you are on a hiring committee at a liberal arts college that happens to have my file, you should also be aware that a tenure-track offer at a liberal arts college would “win” any competition with another offer, ceteris peribus.

Spending today listening to presentations at the Teaching and Learning Conference has reinforced my prior belief that I would be happiest teaching at a private liberal arts college—I was intrigued by the interesting (dare I say cool) things being done by professors of research methods at Birmingham-Southern and Richmond. It could just be coincidence; I don’t know. But in the absence of definite competing opportunities, I’d probably accept an offer from a different sort of institution, particularly one offering a modicum of job security.

As far as the competing offers question goes (a situation I have yet to be in), I still haven’t worked out for myself the transitive ordering between “one-year job at a liberal arts college, narrowly-defined*” and “tenure-track job somewhere else”; it’s something I’ve pondered before and not really gotten any good advice on.

At my first ever campus interview, the chair of a ninth-tier combined department once tried to sell me on the idea that any tenure-track job (versus a one-year gig) was a signal of status to other potential employers—I don’t think he was reading my mind (in which admittedly I was simultaneously plotting the quickest exit possible from the godforsaken place, trying to forestall a panic attack); he just was probably used to giving the speech—but somehow I doubt that’s really the case except when comparing among fairly similar institutions.

A commenter asks:

Care to share any sage advice on the dissertation process (how to get it done, considerations in selecting an outside committee member, etc)? Since you’ve already gotten the Ph.D. I thought maybe you’d have some good insights…

There have probably been dissertations written about writing dissertations; Getting What You Came For is a fairly standard reference, and one I recommend. That said, specific advice from my little corner of the universe follows:

• Getting it done: there’s an adage that once you really start working on the dissertation, it will take six months to write. I wasted most of the latter half of 2001 (from my comprehensive exams in September/October) and early 2002 putting together what may be the worst dissertation prospectus known to man. I then fiddled about with a conference paper or two that would eventually comprise the substantive dissertation chapters for about a year. Finally, in May 2003 the catalyst arrived: I went to a family reunion and decided the collective prodding of the PhDs in the extended family was enough to make me write… and so it was; I defended the first week of December 2003, and my PhD was conferred on the 13th, the day before my birthday.
  On days I decided to write or do data analysis—and this happened in fits and starts—I would go and make myself work in the library to minimize distractions, even if I was only going to play with R or Stata. Most people recommend formally setting aside time to write, and it’s something I agree with—and wish I did more of now.
  I also think you need to be in the right psychological state to write. Even if you’re not prone to psychological disorders (and a friend of mine who’s a psychologist says that really smart people are particularly prone to these problems, for reasons not fully understood), a bit of therapy during the writing process—if only so you have someone neutral to complain about your advisor to—is a good thing.
• Outside member: I lucked into a good choice by happenstance: my final semester taking classes, I had a multivariate stats class in the pharmacy administration department and met a prof over there with whom I established a good rapport. He turned out to have valuable comments on my work, even though it was pretty far afield from him substantively. Having an outside member who you can trust is a nice security blanket. Don’t do what Frequent Commenter Scott did and end up with some externally-imposed outside member who you have no prior relationship with. I don’t have any experience with having someone from the same field but a different institution on the committee (and I’ve never served on a committee in either capacity), so I can’t speak to that.

On the prospectus itself, I’d recommend having a clear idea of what you’re doing and why before writing it. In my case, I put together a half-assed cut-and-paste job from the lit reviews of some papers and it showed—the fact that nobody bothered to tell me what they wanted in the prospectus was no excuse for me not finding that out for myself. If I’d had a clearly thought-out prospectus, I’d probably have finished much earlier. Admittedly, in my case, I was still young when I got done, but it would have been nice to be younger. Oxford’s nice enough, but getting out of there a year earlier would have been helpful (for my wallet, if nothing else).

Last, but not least, expect things to change throughout the dissertation process. Originally I thought I was going to do an experiment in one chapter and focus more on heuristics throughout the dissertation; in the end, it ended up being more about information processing and cognitive sophistication and their roles in attitude formation, opinion articulation, and behavior, which turned out to be a far more interesting topic and one that seems relatively underexplored in the literature, although a lot of really smart people seem to be getting at the edges of these questions—I like a lot of Alvarez and Brehm’s work, as well as Jon Krosnick’s. (But I digress in a very political-sciencey direction.)