When we decided to start this column, School/Work, one of the key motivating factors was the belief that we need more spaces to give and share advice. Personally, I’d like to see conferences create more room for meta discussions about the profession and our place(s) in it, but currently many don’t, or don’t enough, and not everyone can attend every conference. Which seemingly leaves the Web as a wonderful place.

Yet how do we trust the advice? Last year, I decided to run a series on my blog about the media studies academic job market, followed up this year by a briefer series on applying for PhDs in media studies. I did so partly as a reaction to the academic job wiki, which, while sometimes very helpful for telling you what layer of Limbo, Hell, or Nirvana your job application is likely in, is also full of horrible advice from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Lots of ABDs guessing about how search committees work + skyrocketing levels of angst and disappointment + anonymity = a nightmare. And it’s turned feral several times. But where does one go if not to the wiki?

At one level, the wiki serves as a damning judgment on how poor many graduate programs, advisors, and/or mentors are at giving proper advice and feedback (and at how pathetically slow and non-communicative our hiring practices are, of course!). A lot of the pontification I read on the wiki and in other places is plain wrong, but it’s there because the writers haven’t been told any better and are left guessing. My department has a weekly colloquium, and we can easily use that time to give small tips, dedicate more time to larger issues, or simply bring things up in the happy hour that follows. But that’s a rare structure, and so a lot of folk are getting very little advice, if any. Similarly, junior faculty are often left at the mercy of slapdash mentoring, and in my experience, the most mentoring often comes from other junior faculty, who are themselves simply guessing. And advice is often restricted to moving a person on to the next level within the given system (so, mentors will tell you how to get tenure at Uni X, but not how to get out of Uni X; and advisors will tell you how to graduate but not always what to do next).

So what are we to do about this (beyond letting the wonderful Jonathan Sterne do it all for us)? Clearly, I feel that using blogs as a way to offer some advice is helpful. But it seems that we’re only scratching the surface, and that so much more could be done. How to do it? We have a good readership here at Antenna, so I’m hoping to draw out some ideas.