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I found the work fascinating and fulfilling, and still do. Perhaps equally important, the three-year contract offered me and my wife - and our 1-year old baby - something we desperately wanted: the chance for some stability, for two steady incomes, for a house, and for the continued pleasures of life in Chicago. In addition to the work I would be doing with teaching assistants, the position offered me the opportunity to teach one course a year for the English department, and the chance to pursue research and publish on teaching and learning. In the late spring, I became aware that my name had been entered into the list of candidates for that position in the early summer, the director of the center offered me the job. My role was to work with the director in maintaining and developing programs for teaching assistants while the center conducted a search for an assistant director who would assume those responsibilities full-time. I had spent some time that academic year helping out at my university’s Center for Teaching Excellence, which sponsored lectures, conducted workshops, and pursued research on teaching and learning in higher education. The offer for that one-year position never came, but later that year another opportunity arose almost completely out of the blue. Most of them were further along in their dissertations than I was, and others had more marketable dissertation topics and vastly more teaching experience than I did. The awful part was that in some ways I had reason to be proud, at least in relation to my immediate barroom colleagues. For a non-tenure-track one-year position.
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That was the source of my pride and self-satisfaction: at the major conference for my discipline, I had managed to secure one interview. Unlike several of my colleagues, who had come up empty-handed, I had managed to land the prize we had all traveled to our nation’s capital in search of: I had a job interview. I remember sipping slowly at a beer, gazing absent-mindedly at the high ceilings and graffiti-splashed walls of the bar, and feeling like I was one of the lucky ones. We were all sharing jokes and horror stories about the four-day convention we were momentarily escaping from, the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting. In late December of 1996, I was sitting in a bar in Washington, D.C., with five or six other graduate students from the English department at Northwestern University.