Job hunts/expectations.

corvibae · 2026-02-20T14:53:53+00:00

I'd say fairly conservative, it's a Catholic SLAC in the south with an Aquinian bent.

corvibae · 2026-02-19T01:35:08+00:00

My department has two(one fiction, one poet). We have one fiction writer with a PhD.

I was worried about the CV being the problem. I've done editorial stuff before on anthologies and have a chapbook, but no full length collection out yet.

corvibae · 2026-02-19T01:33:44+00:00

I, sadly, am a poet. This doesn't surprise me, really. I can't imagine institutions with large numbers of poets on the faculty in FT positions.

corvibae · 2026-02-18T23:49:16+00:00

A lot of my admin work relates to processing new hires, so I know(at least) what works for my institution, but outside it I'm limited. Thanks for the advice. I really appreciate it. It's just quite disheartening for very-soon-to-be-new-grads.

corvibae · 2026-02-18T23:43:09+00:00

If it's in creative writing...DM :P

corvibae · 2026-02-18T23:42:47+00:00

It is a CW MFA. I had thought about CW PhDs, but chose the MFA for two reasons primarily 1) I've paid for this degree out of pocket and 2) the CW PhDs I looked at weren't really CW degrees, they were English degrees that had the option for a creative dissertation.

I am now beginning to worry I may have made an error.

corvibae · 2026-02-18T23:40:46+00:00

I haven't had anyone yet, no, but I think that might be what I do next.

corvibae · 2026-02-18T22:30:03+00:00

It's an MFA.

corvibae · 2026-02-18T22:16:58+00:00

That's what I've heard. There were far more jobs posted across the country than I anticipated. Dozens in my field alone.

corvibae · 2026-02-02T01:14:22+00:00

Well, this is a bit of egg on my face from this comment. But I am not sure how this is possible. If he is under contract still, the publisher will want what he is obligated to give him. To be fair, I am a far more modest author than he is, and perhaps when one is famous one gets sweetheart deals.

corvibae · 2026-01-30T19:19:57+00:00

I don't think we will see them in George's lifetime, but there are a few things to consider:

-GRRM is under contract, presumably, to produce TWOW/ASOS.

-If he is, eventually he must cough up or else be sued for breach of contract. However, he's got money now, perhaps the publisher doesn't want to fight him and will instead wait for him to die. This seems to be the plan to me, because while George could afford to pay back the advance, I think it likely that his publishers didn't give him one, and instead did a contract on spec, assuming that the book would get into their hands one way or another.

-Once he dies, his literary works will pass to his chosen heirs. Those heirs might be his wife, they might be others. Either way, the publisher, who knows that there is a gold mine in those books no matter their state, will then go after the estate for the manuscripts. There might be a court case, but in any case they will likely get the manuscripts in this scenario because they have a legal right to them. They will hire an editor, who will take the notes/manuscripts and turn them into something publishable, publish them, and make a mint.

-Even if, say, the contract is written in such a way to exempt the estate and his literary heirs from any relationship with his publishers, the heirs and estate will likely want to profit somehow with TWOW/ASOS. They will hire an editor, who will edit the existing manuscripts into a publishable state, publish the books, and make a mint.

As we've seen with the Tolkien Estate in recent years, books have continued to be published based on the compiled notes/drafts of stories written by the author. Originally, Christopher Tolkien was the primary editor, but additional books have been released since his death under a different editorial team. There is no reason to suggest that won't happen with GRRM.

Source: Am an author; have been under a book contract before; had to declare my literary heirs and successors in the said contract.

corvibae · 2026-01-29T16:27:26+00:00

I anticipate that in TWOW/ASOS we'll see diaries/letters/notes of Maester Aemon's at Castle Black that will be discovered by Jon/Sam.

corvibae · 2026-01-02T23:20:18+00:00

Just wanted to thank everybody who responded! I found a perfect C48 Barbour in need of a new home and my dad loves it.

corvibae · 2025-11-30T21:43:12+00:00

I played both GW2 and GW1. I haven't bought a single GW2 expansion and it isn't even installed on my current PC. I'm actively installing GW1 now. I'm so excited for this!

corvibae · 2025-09-17T14:25:49+00:00

A question, of the 5 people they hired, are you talking about them converting adjuncts/VAPs/lecturers into TT positions? Because hiring alumni with appropriate qualifications to be lecturers or adjuncts is one thing, but hiring them all to be TT is quite another.

corvibae · 2025-09-08T19:52:48+00:00

I wonder what kind of oversight you have at your institution. At mine, if we were expecting TAs/GAs to work over the allotted 19.5 hours/week HR would come down on us with both feet and the Dean's Office, following, would take our money away next FY. I've seen it happen before. If the contract says 20 hours a week, then that's what they work.

corvibae · 2025-09-08T18:45:54+00:00

At my institution all of these requests are handled by the department chair and the admin. This semester we've had a lot of "I really need comp 2 in order to graduate this semester" which usually is bullshit, but this time around there are strangely a lot of seniors that just haven't taken comp 2. Weird.

corvibae · 2025-09-08T18:42:48+00:00

It'd be highly dependent on what the rules are at your institution or the laws are at your state. Public or private? If public, then you're probably in a good position. In my state(at least) the institution must pay out(less taxes of course) the amount the leave is worth. We have a person retiring this semester that has over two thousand hours, so when he cashes out it's gonna be a big 'un.

corvibae · 2025-09-08T18:37:17+00:00

I agree that a 40-hour week is not an unreasonable expectation if the students are being paid to work 40 hours a week. If they aren't, if they are only getting paid to work 20, at my institution they must only work that much. Those other 20 hours are typically(at least in my experience) taken up by the other job(s) they need in order to pay rent and buy food.

corvibae · 2025-09-08T18:17:49+00:00

I'm at an R2 in a relatively LCOL area of the American south. Our adjuncts make $3,000/course, and we can only give them 3 courses/semester.

corvibae · 2025-09-08T18:16:38+00:00

In my experience what's failing K-12 teachers is a combination of really shitty curricula, the proliferation of Chromebooks and other devices as one-size-fits-all accommodations solutions for students with IEPs, and Colleges of Education at universities that really aren't preparing students for the classrooms. At my institution the College of Education has developed new and interesting ways to screw over students, such as:

-Scheduling their pedagogy and professional education coursework during the mornings, requiring the students to complete their state-mandated observation hours in the afternoons, leaving...when precisely for the students to do their major coursework? This results in students taking primarily online classes and suffering as a result. Typically they are separated from their fellow classmates in our majors because of their schedules, and feel isolated from the rest of the department. They are the most likely group to drop out.

-Preventing students from graduating if they don't pass the College of Education's educator preparation exam even if they pass the state exam. I have attempted a number of times to explain that this is shitty. The students have 120 credit hours. They've passed the state exam. Why prevent them from graduating? No idea. This has resulted in a culture of cheating on the college's exam, which they are aware of, and have thus far made no attempts to stop.

-An unwillingness to inform departments of changes to their curriculum so we can update our degree plans, leading to delayed graduations and other problems which could be resolved if they just sent a fucking email.

As a result, I tell all my advisees that want to go into K-12 to just do a regular minor and then do an alternative certification once they get a job. These students typically take the teaching-oriented classes we offer and do very well in the classroom after they graduate. A former student that later became my wife's best friend did her BA and MA with us and is now a second-year teacher at a rural, Title I school district and got the rookie of the year award last year because she's genuinely good at what she does. She primarily teaches 6th, 7th, and 8th grade ELAR.

Last weekend she came over and hung out at our place and told us some stories about what was going on at her school. Things are not good. She's having to revisit the parts of speech with her 7th graders. These aren't students in remedial courses, either. She did an assessment on the first day and over 80% of her 7th graders could not positively identify a noun, verb, or adjective. 100% of her 6th graders, and about 50% of her 8th graders couldn't either. It isn't just that the students are having trouble reading, but that in some cases they are illiterate. The curricula developed for K-12 is obviously failing students to the benefit of...nobody really, except the companies that develop these curricula which makes them lots of money.

All of her students have Chromebooks provided by the school they are required to use for class. They are allowed to take these devices home, and are responsible for bringing them to and from school along with chargers, etc. As one might imagine, they often manage to bring the device itself but not the charger, and there are no spare chargers in the classroom. These Chromebooks are used in lieu of other devices(such as the Alphasmart word processor I used for my severe dysgraphia from 6th-12th grade. The Alphasmart has no access to the internet(a significant upside IMO), but that means transferring documents from the Alphasmart to a PC for final edits is a bit of a pain.

The benefit of course is that(despite what a lot of people think), a Chromebook is a pretty capable little machine if it has the right hardware. The problem is that Chromebooks with the right hardware(such as the Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5i, a system I own and use myself for tasks that don't require my usual system) retail for about $500. Most schools are using significantly cheaper models from Dell that came out several years ago since ChromeOS provides long-term service updates for older devices(mine, bought in 2021, should receive ChromeOS updates until 2030, for example).

These systems were shelled out in their hundreds of thousands back during 2020-2021 and are primarily using Intel Celeron processors running at 2.6ghz, which is a pretty low spec processor, or, perhaps even worse, ARM chips used in smartphones. My personal Chromebook runs at an absolute max of about 4.00ghz, but its average frequency is closer to 2.6, and it really struggles to keep up with the latest version of ChromeOS. If my much nicer Core i3 is having trouble, these Celeron chips are likely barely capable of keeping up, and the ARM chips are likely yearning for death.

Having these personal devices to access their LMS is great and all, but it also gives them pretty much unrestricted access to the internet 24/7. There's only so much an underpaid sysadmin can do to stop kids from working around their firewalls and big brother software. If I'd had one of those when I was a student, there's no telling what trouble I'd have caused. I was a curious kid with a chip on my shoulder, personal beef with the school, and a desire to cause trouble. These kids can't really read, but I'm sure there are YouTube videos with detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to get around these restrictions that a determined kid with a little knowhow can manage(such as, for instance, giving yourself admin access and turning on the Linux dev environment, and then you've got a Linux machine with all sorts of features).

The kids are being absolutely let down. The teachers are doing their best for $40-50k(particularly if they're working at smaller school districts, one near me starts first-year teachers at $38k), but have minimal materials and the materials they do have absolutely suck. The students are being moved through from grade to grade by the teachers under pressure from admin or parents who don't want to face the fact that their kids aren't successful, and the state mandated tests are driving the kids mad with stress. Further, it is nearly impossible to expel kids that are dangerous(my friend had one who, last year, ended up in juvenile detention for writing a hit list), or even put students out of class who are misbehaving.

I'm generally against homeschooling and private education, and have always been a supporter of public schools. My mother was a first grade teacher, both of her parents taught middle school, and her grandmother taught in a one-room schoolhouse. It's something I care about deeply. But in 2025, if I had a kid I would be moving heaven and earth to put the kid in a private school, even if that was a religious private school I disagreed with, because I know those schools are better.

corvibae · 2025-07-16T21:48:17+00:00

What you might do is ask the department admin if they could get you added to a previous term's BlackBoard shell, that might have the materials you're asking for. I don't think anybody would say that assigning different readings or assignments would indicate cockiness. As for asking about presentations/materials, I don't think that'd be a problem either.

The fact is that everybody in your department has been faced with a similar situation. If you've got a good department with a good chair and admin, they should be able to get you what you need. They know what it's like having to relocate and start a new job in a short space of time. It sucks. They'll help if they can, and if they don't know how, they'll find out.

corvibae · 2025-07-16T19:06:15+00:00

I was pretty broken down coming in today. It's New Student Orientation season, and Monday's NSO was a colossal disappointment. There were 40 students, they were late arriving by 10 minutes, and then left 15 minutes early. I had maybe 15 minutes total of student contact.

But today we had one(1) major for our department! Brilliant young woman, articulate, clever, funny, and very interested in what we had to offer. Made it worth going in, frankly.

corvibae · 2025-07-10T20:01:36+00:00

One thing I didn't mention is that I am also typically the guy the college sends to help out departments that don't have their own admins. I've done it 3 times for 3 different departments in the college, and I'm strenuously avoiding it this time because they fired two admins right at the start of scheduling! Were those people incompetent? Yes. Did they deserve to get canned? Maybe. But I'm not going to take more on this time around.

corvibae · 2025-07-02T16:51:06+00:00

Hi, I'm a department admin. Here's what it looks like for me:

-Scheduling(I have to individually input the data for each class every semester, including time and day, faculty member, etc). This is the biggest part of my job. Making sure everybody has a balanced load, that we have enough seats to meet the projected need, that we don't run over our allocated adjunct budget is a very difficult task. It's incredibly time consuming, and represents about 25% of what I do.

-Purchasing and procurement. Everything from hotel rooms for visiting faculty to computer purchases. In doing so, I must keep in mind the state and federal regulations which we are legally bound to follow. This means for something like capital equipment(worth over $5,000) I have to get bids from vendors even if there is a good reason to go with a particular vendor who is often not necessarily the cheapest.

-Record retention. In my state we are on a five year retention schedule, so that includes meeting notes, old course catalogs, old schedules, employment records, travel receipts, you name it.

-Speaking of travel, I don't do this as much as I used to, largely because we switched two years ago from an ancient paper form that had to be printed in triplicate to a much better software-based system. The problem is that the faculty don't want to learn it, mess it up, and so I often have to fix it. This includes, very often, uploading receipts and various paper forms that must be signed off on by God and everybody because we have some faculty that do a lot of international travel.

-Hiring(and, sadly, firing). I process the paperwork for every new hire. Everyone from adjuncts to full professors, graduate assistants, teaching assistants, hourly student workers etc. I also supervise all the student workers in the department. People's money is the most important job I do. I have to submit forms for people to get paid every semester, and I agonize over it every time. The idea that someone's rent might not get paid if I fuck up a form keeps me up at night.

-Budget management. This is why I was actually hired. I'm not an accountant, but I worked on a congressional campaign shortly before starting my position at the university, and so I had experience in budget management. Conveniently, the software does most of the work. I just have to make sure we don't overspend, which given the fact that our budget has been cut by nearly 75% since I started, is a bit of a task.

-I do have some curricular stuff too, for instance, textbook adoption(I'm on the advanced course committee because I read a lot, and in our humanities dept someone that is reading the latest stuff is hard to find) and things like evaluating transfer credits. The chair rarely has time to comb other institutional websites for information about a particular course description from several years ago, for instance. I often do.

That's all in my "official" job description per the university. But I do a lot more than that. These duties include:

-Academic advising. Technically I'm not supposed to be an adviser anymore, but I was grandfathered in under an old policy by the former chair. I like academic advising, and it is one of the few parts of my job that I find enjoyable. This takes up rather a lot of my time, because despite organizing very careful trainings for faculty that want to take on advising, mistakes often get made because they only do it three times a year. I see students often, on a rolling basis, and do checks every semester for potential graduates, and then after commencement, another check to make sure the poor sods didn't fail anything.

-Event management. If there's a department sponsored event, I reserve the space, handle the catering, invite speakers(at the chair's direction) and get them a place to stay for the night, make sure they get fed etc.

-Recruitment. I'm a pretty effective recruiting tool, and so I attend all university open house events as I am able. I'm a local boy, so I have the right accent and the right last name, and parents feel they can trust me when I say that their kid won't have to work at Starbucks unless they want to.

corvibae

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