A BRIEF TIMELINE OF MY POSTGRADUATE PROFESSIONAL ADVENTURES :

At the 2003 conference, I remember a vast encampment of castaway, floor-sitting, portfolio-toting grad students shuffling slides outside the cavern of the Career Center.  Only four years ago, the art-job market was still a slides-only economy, and that was just the beginning of the financial fun.  I’d sent out about 50 applications, each one requiring 20 slides of my work and 20 of my students’ work.  So, 2000 slides, 6000 labels (name, title, medium, dimensions, date, little red dot indicating orientation).  In addition to which: plastic slide sheets, priority mail postage, return postage, transcript charges, binders, dividers, conference fees, travel expenses, and CAA membership. I spent about $2500 (about $1000 of which my parents contributed) on job applications in a year where my gross earnings were about $9000.  In May 2003, after I’d first started applying in October 2002, I was offered a one-year teaching position at Knox College in rural Illinois, with a salary of $35,000.  By that point, I’d already found a better-paying position as a high school art teacher in Atlanta, and so I turned the college job down to stay near my friends and family.

In 2004 I stayed put in my high school job.
 
In 2005, I did a less onerous search thanks to the blessed advent of the digital portfolio.  The new Atlanta branch of the Savannah College of Art and Design, which happened to be 15 minutes walking from where I lived, offered me a job teaching Foundations, and in a Faustian (or Anna Nicole Smithian?) moment I accepted.  The pleasures and terrors of for-profit education are a topic for another time, but I knew from the start this would not be a long-term solution.

In 2006 I had campus visit invitations for 4 tenure-track jobs.  I accepted my current job at Sewanee: The University of the South under time pressure- but with a relatively happy heart, despite the fact that it would mean a third straight year of living apart from my love.

And 2007? That is a mystery in the making.

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