Tag Archives: job search

The Cruel Lure of Academia

22 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Rihanna as Medusa, GQ Magazine cover, December 2013. (http://pinterest.com).

Twenty years ago on this date, I took the call that would help define my last two decades professionally. It was a call from Teachers College, Columbia University. I had made a final cut of interviewees “out of more than 300 applicants,” for a tenure-track assistant professorship in the history of education, the administrative assistant to the ed foundations department chair’s office had told me. It was my first post-PhD job call, one at the time that I hoped would be the only one I’d need.

It wasn’t my first interview for an academic position, though. That distinction went to Illinois State University, in April ’94. Two of their history professors were at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting in New Orleans, screening applicants for a lecturer and a non-tenured assistant professor position. I dared not tell my advisor Joe Trotter or anyone else about the screening invite. I went, I met the two youngish professors, both of whom told me to finish my PhD before applying for another job, because they thought my work “too promising” for non-tenure-stream positions. I had also interviewed for two education nonprofit positions, both in Pittsburgh, and both only offering me only a few thousand more than the US Postal Service offered me in ’92, when my name for a job finally came up.

Burned out 40w light bulb, April 27, 2010. (http://www.iamtonyang.com).

Now I had gotten a call from one of the most prestigious education schools in the world. A school within the same university that wanted to hire a private investigator ten years earlier because they didn’t want to give a poor Black kid a four-year free-ride. Despite the irony, I was happy, nervous, and apprehensive. I was happy for the opportunity, nervous about my prospects, and apprehensive about the possibility of moving back to New York. But, most important, I was also burned out emotionally and psychologically from the dissertation process, though not as burned out as I would become in the six weeks that followed.

The interview itself three weeks later was one of the best I’ve ever done for anything. I gave my job talk on multiculturalism and Black education, and for once, professors and graduate students in the audience didn’t look at me like I was speaking Vulcan. I actually had fun on that eight-hour interview day. As much fun as eight hours of scrutiny and answering the same questions over and over again could bring.

But, I remained apprehensive. Because I knew that I had a lot of big decisions ahead if I didn’t get this position, and just as many or more if I did.

Could I pay rent or eat through the summer if I didn’t get the job? Should I go groveling back to Carnegie Mellon, so that I could teach the required World History course for the 1997-98 school year? Could I pick up an adjunct gig at Pitt, Duquesne, or one of the other universities for next year, or what if it’s already too late to reach out? Could I get help from Bruce Anthony Jones, or beyond my dissertation committee, people like Barbara Lazarus, in securing my future? These were the normal questions that an army of PhDs in fields like history faced every single year.

For me, though, the idea of being an assistant professor twelve miles from where I grew up and thirty blocks from one of the buildings I helped my alcoholic father clean made my brain twist in knots. Heck, Teachers College had put me up at the Hotel Beacon on Broadway, between 74th and 75th Street, just three blocks from a high-rise me, my older brother Darren, and my father had cleaned the carpets and floors of regularly between 1984 and 1986. Did I really want to go back to a place with so many bad and embarrassing memories?

Plus, it wasn’t just my past I worried about. Living in subsidized faculty housing wasn’t ideal for me and my soon-to-be-wife. My younger siblings could reach me by catching the 1 or 2 train, and with the recent fire at 616 and the trauma that had caused, their visits were likely to be a regular part of my routine. I had given Mom something like $5,000 in the three years before the possibility of this job, as a graduate student. As a professor, she would likely expect me to do so much more.

Charging Bull of Wall Street (or a false god), cropped, January 19, 2016. (Sam Valadi/Flickr, via http://www.atlasobscura.com/)

Looking back, if Teachers College had offered me the job and I’d of course taken it, I likely wouldn’t have earned tenure. Oh, I would’ve been a fine classroom professor, and most of my students would’ve liked, loved, or learned from me. But between me having not dealt with my Mount Vernon/NY past, my Mom and siblings and family issues, and trying to turn my dissertation into a book and churn out academic pieces, I would’ve needed psychotherapy after three or six years. But Teachers College rejected me two months later. It supposedly came down to me and one other person.

This is what academia does to its own. With too few tenure-stream jobs and way too many qualified candidates, each job interview or job earned becomes magnified, to the point where taking a position can close as many doors as receiving a rejection for a job. Combine that with the false gods of meritocracy and academic freedom, and you have a recipe for a world of competitive disappointment. Academia is a world full highly educated people working for working-class wages but with elitist expectations of themselves and of those lucky few with tenure-stream positions. Add race, class, gender, family, and intersectionality to this brew, and it’s a wonder more of us don’t experience depression or some other mental illness.

I wouldn’t have been able to write this twenty years ago, even if I subconsciously suspected or consciously knew this to be true. I was tempted by the brass ring, only to find it was really a rusty old nail bent to look like something valuable.

Aside

Past Labor’s Opportunities Lost

07 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Title page of the first quarto of William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (1598), uploaded May 2, 2011 (Tom Reedy via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Title page of the first quarto of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598), uploaded May 2, 2011 (Tom Reedy via Wikipedia). In public domain.

One of the more gut-wrenching periods of my career began right after Labor Day 1995. In some respects, that period of my career has left a stain over the past two decades. Not so much in terms of what I have done or in what I’m doing now, as much as in setting limits on the range of possible outcomes with which I could’ve begun my career.

Right after Labor Day, I saw an ad in The Chronicle of Higher Education for an open-ranked (tenured or tenure-stream) position at NYU’s school of education in US education history. I hadn’t thought about teaching in a school of education before, but after meeting my friend Cath and having received my Spencer Foundation fellowship, I understood that this was likely a better choice for me than a history department. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. My department chair Steven Schlossman had received a letter and a telephone call from his equivalent peer at NYU asking if there were any graduate students in the pipeline who could apply for the position. Schlossman apparently told that department chair about me and my multiculturalism dissertation, and caught up with me that same week to give me a copy of the letter and encouraged me to apply for the job.

I was two-and-a-half chapters into my planned eight-chapter dissertation, and I still had some US Census data to look at and interviews to conduct as part of the process. I knew that my advisor Joe Trotter wouldn’t be happy about the idea of me applying for a job so soon into the process, but Schlossman and I also knew that the job — if I somehow got it — wouldn’t start for eleven months. That was more than enough time for me to write, revise, revise again, polish up and defend my dissertation. I was on a Spencer fellowship, after all!

A defensive pass interference penalty not called, Detroit Lions v. Dallas Cowboys Wildcard Game, January 4, 2015. (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2319198-refs-pick-up-flag-after-pass-interference-on-cowboys-in-4th-quarter; FOX Sports).

A defensive pass interference penalty not called, Detroit Lions v. Dallas Cowboys Wildcard Game, January 4, 2015. (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2319198-refs-pick-up-flag-after-pass-interference-on-cowboys-in-4th-quarter; FOX Sports).

Of course Trotter thought otherwise. He was incensed that Schlossman had discussed the NYU job with me, that I hadn’t talked with him about the position first. Of course Trotter said that he needed to “run interference” on my behalf, to protect me and my career. By “running interference,” Trotter meant that he would not write a letter of recommendation on my behalf. He told me to put the job out of my mind, to focus on my dissertation, and that we could revisit the prospect of apply for jobs when I was much further along.

A few months later, in February ’96, I saw another job ad in the Chronicle, this one for a history of education assistant professorship at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Schlossman saw that ad as well, but I was still the dutiful ABD student with Trotter as my patron. I decided this time to approach Trotter before meeting with Schlossman about the job. Trotter flipped out again, telling me, “you’re not ready,” that he had seen too many of his own peers not finish dissertations when taking jobs, only to end up unemployed. Keep in mind, I had written six of my eight chapters at this point, and had started working on number seven that month.

Trotter’s “you’re not ready” pronouncements rang even more hollow in March, when I requested a letter from him to apply for a post-doctoral fellowship in African American Studies at University of Maryland, College Park. He refused at first, then agreed, with the caveat that he would write in his letter his belief that  I wouldn’t complete my dissertation in time to begin the fellowship at the end of August ’96. With that kind of endorsement, of course I didn’t apply!

When we finally had our blow-out argument that April 4th, I was frustrated, he was actually angry, for reasons I didn’t put together until I considered my age and his HNIC status and age later on. Most of Trotter’s stonewalling occurred after he found out that I was still only about to turn twenty-six at the time of the NYU job prospect. Between that and the limited mileage remaining in his proletarianization hypothesis, I was working for and with an advisor who was giving me mixed signals and mediocre advice. Both were based in part on jealousy, and in part on Trotter’s own bad experiences at University of Minnesota and on the job front in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Danger Bad Advice Ahead fake sign, September 7, 2015. (http://wordspicturesweb.com).

Danger Bad Advice Ahead fake sign, September 7, 2015. (http://wordspicturesweb.com).

Trotter didn’t understand that in blocking my first attempts to begin my career, he had helped set up a struggle for me to have even a semblance of a career before I had completed the first draft of my dissertation. As it was, I finished the first draft in June ’96, the second at the end of July, and polished it up before Labor Day Weekend ’96. That fact that I was done with all major revisions to my dissertation in time for any job that year made ready to strangle Trotter at that point.

Still, it would be only fair to say that my career moves — good and bad, smart and stupid — have mainly been of my own making. It would also be unfair to blame Trotter for any moves that I have made or didn’t make that didn’t work out after 1996-97. But every career has a beginning. And in the beginning, Trotter was there, making a mess of my first steps. It took until the spring of 2000 before Howard University offered me a tenure-track position in Afro-American Studies, to which I did say no. I didn’t need any more Joe Trotter’s in my life at that point, and working in the nonprofit world paid my bills better than teaching at that time.

My overall advice would be to make damn sure that you choose an advisor who cares about your whole career and about you as a person. Don’t choose someone to advise and mentor you out of convenience, and make sure that your advisor isn’t someone who just wants to mold you into a mediocre version of themselves. After all, it’s not their career trajectory or reputation that’s on the line. It’s yours.

Where 1 PhD = A Second High School Diploma

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Absurditty (or an Absurd Ditty, deliberately misspelled), where $100 = 2 quarters, May 14, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

Absurditty (or an Absurd Ditty, deliberately misspelled), where $100 = 2 quarters, May 14, 2014. (Donald Earl Collins).

I could’ve just as easily titled this post, “Road to Boy @ The Window, Part 5: My Mother and My Doctoral Graduation.” Precisely because any chance I had of immediately getting over the psychological and emotional hump of finishing a doctorate while dealing with the betrayals of an advisor and dissertation committee was gone by the end of my graduation day, the third Sunday in ’97 (anniversary number seventeen, just four days away). That process opened me up to looking at my past, to figuring out how someone like me could go on to do a PhD, to teach, to write, to learn, all well beyond the expectations of my parents and my classmates.

The process of feeling uneasy about my relationship with my Mom, though, had begun the day after my interview at Teachers College. That Tuesday, May 13th, I left the Hotel Beacon, made my way down to the 66th Street stop, and caught the 1 train to The Bronx and Van Cortlandt Park. I then caught a Westchester Bee-Line Bus up Broadway and crossed the Yonkers-Bronx border, where I got off to walk up a one-block-long hill.

I arrived at my Mom’s temporary place on Bruce Avenue. This was where she and my younger siblings had been living since the end of ’95, as a result of an electrical fire that swept through two floors of 616. Not to mention, an incompetent Mount Vernon Fire Department that did more damage by flooding two of the three buildings on the property in the process of putting the fire out. It was a sparse place that made 616 look like a luxury high-rise by comparison. There were holes in the walls because my younger siblings Yiscoc and especially Eri had punched through the cheap plaster and nonexistent sheet rock in their teenage anger and rage.

Front door of 85 Bruce Avenue, Yonkers, NY (screen shot), taken in October 2007. (Google Maps).

Front door of 85 Bruce Avenue, Yonkers, NY (screen shot), taken in October 2007. (Google Maps).

It was in the midst of all of this that my Mom was finally graduating from Westchester Business Institute with her associate’s. I was happy for her. The only thing that concerned me was the kind of work she could find with the degree. I was willing to help her in any way I could, including coming up and spending a few days in Yonkers to attend her ceremony in White Plains that Tuesday evening. I wanted to continue to provide my Mom the emotional support that I thought she wanted.

That began to change the morning after her graduation ceremony. We were sitting down at this cafeteria bench that served as the kitchen table, with her drinking cream-infused tea from a chipped white flower mug and eating a piece of toast while I contemplated walking down the hill for some yogurt. We’d been talking about looking for work, about her moving out and finding a place in White Plains, or even moving back to a fully renovated 616. I brought up the real possibility that if I got the Teachers College job, I would move back to the New York area (though not Mount Vernon — out of the question).

This was when my Mom said, “You know, you were in school so long, you could’ve had another high school diploma.” It was out of the blue, and caught me completely off guard. It was quiet for a moment, with me in a deep frown, and my Mom sitting there for a few seconds. Then she forced a laugh. “It’s a joke,” she said, as if I was supposed to be oblivious to the nonverbal displays of disdain for nearly a decade’s worth of my work. And, what was the joke? My degree, or the amount of time and energy I spent in earning it?

I sort of ignored what my Mom had said at first. But really, how could I? Mom had told the lamest of jokes over the years — like about how diarrhea “was like ‘dying in the rear’,”  she’d say as if she heard the joke from someone else. But no matter how I looked at it, comparing everything I went through from August ’87 up to that point to a diploma that I earned while living in two hells — 616 and Mount Vernon High School — wasn’t a joke. Not for either of us.

My Mother's Associate's Degree Photo, Westchester Business Institute, May 12, 1997.

My Mother’s Associate’s Degree Photo, Westchester Business Institute, May 12, 1997.

My Mom disappointed me a day later, as she said, “I don’t have to tell you that I’m proud of you. I tell other folks, just not you.” It was in response to me saying that I thought her joke wasn’t one at all. But she hadn’t sealed our fates as a mother and son in a long-term strained relationship, at least not yet. That would occur a few days later.

Even under the strictest of measures, comparing a PhD to a high school diploma is ridiculous. It’s like comparing the buying power of Oprah to an ant colony. But I figured out a long time ago, long before starting my master’s program in history at Pitt, that a degree is only worth anything if you use it to enhance your life, advance your career, or pursue your calling. Even with all my qualms. About academia, about the publish-or-perish model, about the not-for-profit profit world, even about myself as a writer. It was all worth it.

One thing I did learn, though, about my Mom, maybe for the first time. I’d always wondered about the saying, “I love you, but I don’t like you.” I hadn’t really understood what that meant until the week of my doctoral graduation.

A “Keepin’ It Real” Cover Letter

06 Monday Dec 2010

Posted by in 1, Eclectic, race, Work

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When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong - Vernon Franklin, Screen Shot from Chappelle's Show, December 6, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Though this image is subject to copyright, its use is covered by the U.S. fair use laws, because this image is used as the primary means of visual identification of the article topic and is of sufficiently low resolution to not be counterfeited.

Dear Human Resources:

I am applying for the Program Officer, Postsecondary Reform position with the XYZ Foundation, as advertised by the Chronicle of Higher Education UselessJobSite.org webpages the week of 25 October 2010, enabling you to fulfill your EEO requirement by giving you the rare opportunity to interview a Black guy with a Ph.D. who’s not yet middle-aged and your curiosity regarding my career background. My work in the nonprofit sector and in higher education has provided me with significant skills in program development and management, strategic planning, technical assistance, collaboration, and grantwriting/grantmaking, making me a viable candidate for this position, except with The Urban Institute, Social Science Research Council and the American Educational Research Association (AERA), who prefer Yes People to critical thinkers, who want people who look like them or only people they’ve drank a Bud Light with in an important job.

My overall work history includes ten years of project management in various capacities with projects funded by the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Lumina Foundation. For more than four years I served as Deputy Director for the Partnerships for College Access and Success Program (PCAS) at the Academy for Educational Development (AED). I know that you don’t know what AED is, but please keeping reading, dummies. PCAS was an initiative that assisted community partnerships in addressing college access and success issues among low-income youth and youth of color nationally. This work put me in contact with school administrators, college presidents and deans, high school and college students, and executive directors of nonprofits. Yeah, I know I haven’t done much work with boards, CEOs and admissions officers, but don’t you think it’s idiotic to suggest that I’d need to work with all of these people in order to manage a project?

Over the past thirteen years, I have also honed my curriculum development skills as either a project manager or adjunct professor. This includes my work as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University, George Washington University, and the University of Maryland University College. But I know that none of this matters, since I haven’t taught at nor attended an Ivy League school (at least as a full-time faculty member – I did teach at Princeton for two summers). I have taught undergraduate and graduate courses and worked with talented high school youth, first-generation college students, adult learners and graduate students. What? Never been chair of a department or have managed a student’s dissertation process? I guess having taught 2,000 students since 1991 has made me as inadequate as you.

My work history also includes five years of technical assistance — I know, I know, what’s that? It’s acting like a strategic planning consultant, except I actually know what I’m doing work through AED New Voices and AED PCAS.

I also possess seven years of experience conducting research-based interviews, developing interview and survey instruments and protocols, developing profiles and case studies, and coding qualitative research. But you dumb asses only want to hear about quantitative research, crunching numbers, multivariate regression analysis, as if this is the end-all and be-all of doing work on education reform and social change. God, being able to tell people what these numbers mean is so much more important than the numbers themselves, but you Vulcans won’t listen.

Additional relevant experiences include:

▸        Previous experience in conducting a grantmaking process, including a request for proposals, selecting a suitable selection committee with extensive academic/professional knowledge and field experience in their respective fields, and sending members of the selection committee out in the field to interview the potential grantees. What? I’ve never worked for a foundation? My bad – I thought that skill sets were transferable! Oh, that’s right – I lack the I know lots of important people skill set!

▸        With PCAS, foundation relations/fundraising work  raised $1.2 million for PCAS. Surely I should’ve raised more, right? At least $10 million? But I know you won’t hold that against me, right? Yeah, right!

▸        Have published works on multiculturalism and diversity, race and identity, education, and social justice including my book Fear of a “Black” America: Multiculturalism and the African American Experience (2004) How scary! Another angry Black male sticking it to the Man with a book about diversity. Of course, this shows how little people who react to the title think about educated folks of color anyway, looking for any excuse to confirm their own ignorance as wisdom, as well as articles and  reviews in Black Issues in Higher Education, The Washington Post, History of Education Quarterly, Radical Society, Teachers College Record, and Academe Magazine. Dude, you’ve fallen short — where’s your New York Times op-ed or Atlantic Monthly piece?

I believe that my experiences in the nonprofit sector make me a qualified candidate because they have provided me a rich understanding of nonprofit management, social justice, policy advocacy and program development in the transition to higher education. I look forward to hearing from you soon. But in some cases, I’d die from asphyxiation trying to hold my breath.

Sincerely,
Donald Earl Collins

#####################################

I’m hardly bitter about my experiences in the job market. But working with people who are clueless, dishonest and obfuscate at every turn can make looking for another job frustrating beyond belief. Maybe this is too honest, even for me. In the past seven years of applying and interviewing for a bunch of jobs, I’ve learned so many times after the fact that I wasn’t selected because I wasn’t a friend of the director or a certain senior program officer. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, they say. Which explains why there are so many people with questionable skills in high responsibility jobs.

Lies and the Lying Liars in Job Searches

16 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by in 1, Politics, race, Work

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Al Franken's Lies Book Cover, November 16, 2010. Donald Earl Collins. Qualifies as fair use under US copyright law because the photo is being used for illustrative purposes only and is a low-quality crop of original book cover.

Below is a set of emails I received regarding a job I applied for about a month ago. I filled out a thirteen-question addendum to my original application for an initial phone interview, and authorized them to contact all six of my references (which they did) before being offered an interview:

 

11/09/10 5:24 PM
Dr. Collins – would you be available this Thursday or Friday to come to AERA in Washington for an interview? Please let me know.

Best regards,
Bob

—
Robert W. Jackson, Partner
Jackson & Associates Consulting Services, Inc.
“Excellence in Human Resources & Marketing”
Manage your most important resources – your employees
Tel.  703 450 8567
Cell  703 203 0293
rwj11601@gmail.com
jjacksonhr@aol.com

11/09/10 6:01 PM
I believe we will take about two hours of your time. Perhaps two and a half. It is possible there will be a final interview either next week or at a later date. Hope this helps.

Best,
Bob

11/10/10 8:03 AM
Dr. Collins – Due to travel schedules I need to postpone your interview so I won’t need you to come in to AERA this week. I will be back to you next week with next steps.
Thanks very much.

Best,
Bob

11/16/10 4:13 PM
Dr. Collins – I regret to inform you that AERA has selected another candidate for the Program Manager position. The position was offered to the lead the candidate yesterday and he accepted this morning. Thank you for applying for the position and for the time you spent discussing it with me. I wish you the best of luck with your career.

Sincerely,
Bob
—
Robert W. Jackson, Partner
Jackson & Associates Consulting Services, Inc.

Now, no one likes being rejected for a job, especially knowing that it was most likely an insider — someone who knew the people at the other end doing the hiring. Still, it’s acceptable that it’s who you know, and not what you know, that matters in a high-level job search. But a blatant lie, a delay tactic so that the American Educational Research Association (or AERA) could hire someone with an inside track to the position? Shame on both AERA and Robert Jackson for not having enough transparency and ethics to let me and other applicants know that we were never in line for the job!

Not Finding Work

14 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic

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Source: Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2003

This is at least the fifth time in my adult life that I’ve struggled with having enough full-time work consistently, this time in concert with the Great Recession and a drying up of consultant work. Luckily I do teach and do have some consulting work. There have been other times over the years, though, where having any work at all was beyond my grasp.

The first time I went through this as an adult was the long, hazy-hot-and-humid summer of ’88. Long because the University of Pittsburgh’s school year ended the last week of April. I was home from April 30 to August 29, 120 days in all, marking the longest time I ever had off from school. I came back to New York, Mount Vernon and 616, and spent the first two weeks on domestic work. I waited two weeks because there was too much cleaning to do, too many clothes to wash, too many old responsibilities to pick up again.

It was already too late by the time I began to look. Summer jobs were sparse and I was now in competition with college students in the area. I could’ve had a two or three-week head start on things if I’d started looking right away. My mother didn’t let me here the end of it. “I told you to look, but you didn’t listen,” she said to me over and over again. “You could’ve had a good job, but you sat on your ass and did nothing” was another thing my mother said to me, as if I didn’t need a break before looking for work.

By the beginning of June, I was also in competition with high school students for jobs. The summer of ’88 just happened to be one of the worst summers on record for finding a job, at least if you were between sixteen and twenty-four. In some areas like New York, the summer unemployment rate for young adults went over seventy percent, and it was worse for Black males. So I wasn’t alone, at least according to Tom Brokaw and NBC Nightly News.

I certainly didn’t feel any better, though. I went to the New York State Employment Office on Gramatan, and they offered me jobs mowing grass and fixing air conditioners. The first one required a car and barely paid four an hour. The other paid $4.50 an hour but I needed to have experience fixing air conditioners. Oh well! I looked through the papers, and called for a law office job doing research. The job required a history background and offered a $10 an hour salary, but it required me to have my B.A. in hand. “Just because I don’t have degree yet doesn’t mean I can’t do the work,” I practically begged. The woman on the other end of the phone responded, “Trust me, I’m doing you a favor. You’ll thank me later.”

I was desperate for work by the second half of June, so desperate that I literally walked Manhattan for a job one day. I looked at a job ad in the Daily News, one that required applicants to go to an address on Broadway in Manhattan. The job allegedly paid $400 a week. I had just enough money left from my CIS job at Pitt to catch the Subway there and back. I walked from 616 to 241st, and took the 2 like I used to. Stupid me got off the train at 42nd Street and Times Square, having forgotten that New York’s numbered addresses didn’t take jumps from block to block. If a building’s address on one block was 1000 Broadway, the building’s address on the next block would likely be 996 Broadway. My address was around the 200 mark of Broadway. I proceeded to walk in my only good suit from Times Square to Broadway and from there in Midtown all the way to Chinatown, a walk of nearly three miles. It was pouring rain on that hot and humid day, somewhere in the upper eighties.

After almost an hour of walking, I found the place. It was a sweatshop, with lots of Chinese immigrant women sewing cloth for dear life. Apparently the job involved “supervising” these poor women. I had to turn around and walk until I found the nearest Subway stop, wind my way back to 241st, and then walk home from there. Five hours, five lost pounds and two ruined shoes later, I was beyond worn and forlorn. I gave up hope that day of finding any summer work.

My last real attempt at finding work that summer was to take the U.S. Postal Service’s postal carrier exam out at their sorting facilities in North White Plains. It was an embarrassing experience, taking a civil service exam with folks who obviously weren’t in school. I didn’t even know that there were study guides for these exams, for knowing the difference between McClellan and Mclellan, zip codes 10552 and 15250, and AK and AL as states. I spent two hours sweating in a warehouse-like room, breezing through questions and hoping that I would get a call. That was the twenty-fifth of July, the last Monday of the month.

About ten days later, a letter came from the Postal Service telling me that I passed the exam with an 86. Preference would be given to veterans and other applicants with special circumstances, then the highest scores after that would get a call, depending on job vacancies. I knew that it would be a long time before I heard from them again. I did, just before Christmas ’92, when I was in my second year of grad school.

While going back to school ended my unemployment cycle that time around, I don’t have that as an option now as a partially gainfully employed professor and consultant. But, between my skills, faith, hope and the fact that I still have quite a bit of work already, I have as much to look forward to now as I did twenty-two summers ago.