[Candace Cunard]

This is a story about how I landed a (part-time) high school teaching job at an awesome private school in Manhattan. I’m happy to talk more about the job itself (benefits and drawbacks) but in the spirit of what helped me actually FIND the job, here are the major strategies I found helpful in the process:

I’d always known I cared more about teaching than about most other things I did as a grad student in English, but my Connected Academics experience forced me to finally do the legwork of figuring out what other careers would actually serve me better than most tenure-track academic positions. I connected with a number of people working in independent (private) high schools; by far the most useful were those with with PhDs in English who had transitioned to teaching high school, though I also talked with folks who taught in these schools and/or worked in academic dean roles, but didn’t have PhDs.

A couple of them were contacts I made through my grad program, but I also cold-emailed a woman who I had googled after reading an amazing scholarly article she wrote — I had been searching for more of her research and assuming she would be in a TT position, so imagine my surprise to see that she worked at a private high school 20 blocks from where I lived!

Another way I met contacts was by going to the pedagogy panels and roundtables at the major conferences in my field (American / Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which always reserve some panels for teaching!) and identifying other presenters or folks in the audience who had some experience teaching high school…then striking up conversations and following up on them! This was especially helpful because I knew I wanted to be the kind of teacher who still had some link to scholarship/research, and anyone who was at this conference had clearly managed to navigate that path for themselves.

It was also valuable to have a couple friends in the same boat as me, so that we could swap advice and strategies. I learned about a small NYC-specific placement firm, Independent School Placement, from one friend; this firm eventually placed me in my current job. Another friend got far more interview requests than I did because he was searching in a different state, and passed along his experience with the most common interview questions — all of which came up in the one interview that I had!

Hope this helps some folks, and very happy to talk more about my experience with anyone (friends of friends included!).

[Candace Cunard]

Hi everyone! I’m Candace Cunard and I was in the latest Proseminar class (2017-18). I finished and defended my dissertation (on eighteenth-century British novels) at Columbia in May 2018, and have just survived my first month in a job as a part-time high school English teacher at a progressive private school in New York City (where I teach 2 sections of 10th grade American literature). In addition to this job, I’ll be adjuncting an upper-division seminar in my field back at Columbia this spring. I’m excited to connect with other Prosem alums about their career journeys and to continue to keep an open mind about my own; I’m pretty sure that I do see high school teaching as a long-term stable career option for myself, but I’m also not ready to “give up” entirely on the parts of academic life that aren’t part of my current job description. (e.g. I might want to publish a monograph someday! I really love going to academic conferences! I want to keep teaching in my field, which isn’t an option at my current high school!) I’m looking for ways to continue navigating my relationship to academia as someone who feels both inside and outside of it (I have been calling myself an “amphibious academic” in some places) and to hear from others who might be trying to build a similar sense of fluidity in their jobs/lives.

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