Who are the superstars this year?

[lemming]

Weatherson has an interesting blog post here:
tar.weatherson.org/2008/12/19/a-hiring-game/

I'm wondering who the superstars will be this year. Does anyone know someone with an insane number of interviews?

I've heard MIT has a very high number of M&E students on the market this year. And NYU always has its usual number of all stars. But who are the standouts?

[humeismyhomeboy]

Me.

Just kidding. I wish I was and don't quite understand why I'm not more of a superstar. (It wouldn't be hard, it's hard to find someone who isn't more of a superstar than me). At this point, ratio of publications this year to interviews this year is 3:1. Fun fact. A dear friend of mine from grad school has roughly the same ratio. My advice, kids, go to a good grad program. Get someone who edits things to supervise your dissertation. You'll be set for life.

[superawesome]

I've heard good things about Shaw (language, logic) from Harvard and Jackson (mind) from Rutgers.

[humeismyhomeboy]

Jackson looks like a pretty smart kid. Don't know much about Shaw. I don't mean to insult either of them but neither has an APA presentation and there's one publication between the pair. Jackson's pub is in his dissertation supervisor's journal. It is good, but hardly groundbreaking. The kid should get interviews, but superstar status? Why should people from top programs have such an easy route to superstar status? If they aren't getting multiple pubs and aren't presenting work at the best conferences, isn't that just evidence that they really aren't any more special than the rest of us?

[actualname]

I think it's fair to say that this discussion is very premature. As Weatherson notes in the link above, there's not much correlation between # of interviews and # of offers, and presumably it's only the latter that really matters at the end of this process.

Not only that, I think the direction that this discussion is taking is a bit unseemly. Care to let the rest of us anonymously pick apart and judge your CV (in a rather unfair way, I'd say)?

No, I didn't think so. I'd be embarrassed to reveal my identity, too, if I were you.

[PEABODY]

I agree. Picking out individual candidates and publicly discussing their merits is classless at best, malicious at worst. Yes, their CVs are available on-line, but come on - let's not pretend that this kind of discussion is geared toward anything other than tearing these people apart.

[humeismyhomeboy]

Peabody,
I don't think it's malicious to say that someone doesn't merit superstar status. In my book saying someone doesn't deserve superstar-status is not an insult. I don't see how anything I've said could plausibly be regarded as "tearing these people apart". Someone else anonymously suggested that these two guys are superstars when interviews are about a week away. I think that if someone else is going to suggest that these two guys are this year's superstars it isn't fair to point out that there is little on their CV that would merit this status.

Actualname,
I stand by everything I've said. It would be imprudent for me to say it without anonymity since it's apparently quite an insult to say that someone doesn't deserve _superstar_ status. I don't see how it is "unfair" to use publicly available information to assess superawesome's suggestion that the guys he named are superstars. As for my CV, it didn't land me too many interviews. It's good. I'm pretty confident that if people had a look at it and didn't know who's CV it was and where I did my graduate work, they wouldn't have much bad to say about it. If people looked at it and said 'Meh, there's not much on it that would merit saying this guy is a superstar' I wouldn't consider myself offended or slighted in the least.

[superawesome]

I apologise for mentioning names, but I truly thought the thread was just about predictions rather than setting folks up to tear them down.

I think many of us, myself included, tend to have pretty sh*tty and petty gut-responses to the success of our peers. This is unfortunate for a variety of reasons. Adding insult to injury, I suppose, is the fact that most of us have are just plain wrong when it comes to self and peer evaluation. We can piss and moan about pedigree all day long, but that doesn't make it any less true that being from top 5 program reliably tracks philosophical talent. Of course, superstardom may be too difficult to predict, but we needn't invoke some juvenile and whiny conspiracy theory to explain why most of the top jobs go to people from Princeton, Rutgers, NYU, and MIT.

Am I a better philosopher than you according to the standard hard-and-fast metric? Probably, I am, after all, Super Awesome. Are there lots of people better than me? God, I hope so, otherwise philosophy is in pretty bad shape. Can we control our baser impulses and not act like jealous toddlers? I don't know, but I'll at least try.

[humeismyhomeboy]

Would any of you really think that you were being "torn down" if someone said you didn't deserve superstar status? I'm sorry, it was not my intention to tear any of these people down. Saying someone doesn't deserve that status is perfectly consistent with saying all sorts of other wonderful things about them. I thought that people who deserved superstar status earned that while in graduate school by landing publications in places like Mind, JPhil, or Phil Review and had loads of conferences under their belts.

As for the pedigree issue, while I think pedigree is a decent tracker of philosophical talent, I'd think it would pale in comparison to information about publications and conference presentations. That's just me. If I had to pick between two candidates and neither had many pubs or conference presentations I'd go with the better pedigree. If one had more pubs and more presentations, I'd take that as something that weighs more than pedigree. I would have thought that this was the sensible policy, but maybe there's some dissent.

[superawesome]

I think a mitigating factor about pubs is that it seems unreasonable to expect grad students to publish more than a single article (if at all), and seeing as how ref reviews may take 6-8 months, it really just is unfair to count publications as anything more than indicative of future potential. Well, pedigree, rec letters, and writing sample may be of a sort that committees think them equal to or better than publications. Throwing a Rutgers transcript in someone's face won't land you an interview, but toss in awesome rec letters from awesome folks and an awesome writing sample and committees usually don't care about a lack of publications. Then you get harpies bashing on that person because they don't have any pubs. Yet, the harpies clearly don't have access to his/her letters and writing sample, but thankfully the folks with the power to hire do.

[humeismyhomeboy]

I don't see how it could be a mitigating factor if other graduate students are publishing or people early in their careers with heavier teaching loads are publishing. (Fwiw, I have a friend on the market who somehow managed to get two very good publications this year even though he was defending his dissertation and raising a kid while teaching. He also managed to get onto the main program at the APA a few times in graduate school. He also has letters from famous people. He only has one interview. No pedigree.)

Anyway, I'll say it again, but IMO some people around here seem pretty thin skinned. There's a world of difference between saying that someone doesn't deserve superstar status and bashing on that person. Had I thought that what I said amounted to bashing, I wouldn't have said it. It wasn't intended. I apologize to Jackson and Shaw if they feel slighted.

[apdent]

I don't want to discuss any people in particular (in fact, I don't know any of the superstar candidates), but I do think that there is rampant elitism in hiring, which I've actually had a chance to observe from both sides of the fence. People from the top programs do have the inside track on "superstar" status (which is, in itself, ridiculous because the list of still-in-school superstars can only include people like Godel and Kripke); especially if they have connections through family/friends/relationships or develop them through networking while in grad. school. People who, often for socioeconomic reasons, did not go to a good college and end up in lower-ranked programs are routinely overlooked, no matter how brilliant they are. I think this is very bad for the field, as well as for all of us. By the way, this is not (just) sour grapes - I actually did go to one of the top-tier schools that have been mentioned...

Right now, with the market as bad as it is, I guess we must all watch out for our own skins. But I really hope that those of us lucky enough to latch on to a promising career this year remember this when they are in a position to help change it!

[qwert]

I agree with the general inappropriateness of naming anybody here. Although I am not from a top 10 program, there is something that annoys me in humeismyboy's attitude. It's a pretty common attitude in forums such as this, and it's about time someone said something about it.

Publishing a few papers in six, or more, years of graduate school is not very hard. I'll repeat: not. very. hard.

Now, it would be disingenous to suggest that pedigree doesn't matter. But the point is that what employers in research schools want to see is evidence that the candidate can embark on an ambitious research project--a project that could result in *influential* publications. Publishing a lot is not clearly correlated with this--especially if the papers are of the kind: "Here is a counterexample to [insert famous philosopher's] view".

In short: a few publications shouldn't give you any sense of entitlement, though they may be evidence you are a hard-working person.

[superawesome]

Look, when the word 'publish' and its cognates gets tossed around, the default assumption is that it picks out something substantive. If John says "I have six published papers" I take it that those papers are in peer-reviewed philosophy journals. I further assume that they are not discussion pieces but full-fledged papers. None of this is impressive. So if this is all you mean when you say that publishing in grad school isn't.very.hard. then yes, you are right. In the context of job hunting and ego building, journals matter. ABD and six published papers in journals like Phil Studies or better? Holy sh*t! You are Super Awesome! ABD and 12 published papers in journals I've never heard of? Ummm, great, you sure do like to mail things, don't you. Now, let's assume that for the first 1-3 years most grad students are still too green and too busy with coursework and such to really write a decent paper for publication. So grad students have roughly 2.5 years to get a pub on their CV in time for the job market in their 6th year. Let's assume the average turn around time for a journal is 6 months, and that almost all of the first submissions to journals and likely the second will be rejected. So I polish the paper and send it around for suggestions. That takes around 6 months. I send it off, it gets canned twice, then picked up. I can put it on my CV roughly 3 months before I send out my first batch of applications. That's just for one paper. That's why most grad students have not published by the time they first go on the market. What's worse, is that they feel pressure to publish, and so they flood journals with awful seminar papers that clog the system, annoy refs, and turn 3 month response times into 6-8 month response times, that combined with the time crunch means that the paper will likely go right back out unrevised to the next journal, wash rinse repeat!

So yes, Qwert, you are correct that quality of particular papers published matter, but particular papers published only get read when published in quality journals.

So, No, Qwert, publishing in the substantive sense in in fact very.hard. for grad students.

Now excuse me while I ref this awful seminar paper.

[humeismyhomeboy]

"In short: a few publications shouldn't give you any sense of entitlement, though they may be evidence you are a hard-working person."

I don't disagree. This person had two pieces in journals that were as good or better than Phil Studies as well as a handful of APA presentations. Neither piece was a discussion piece. Is he entitled to interviews at research institutions? No, I don't think so. I think people are entitled to fair consideration. The fact that he has only one interview is (to me) a sign that something is wrong with the world.