Julia Yearian and Connie Lilly will be the Coordinators for the APA Placement Service at the 2001 Eastern Division Meeting. Questions concerning the Service should be directed to Connie at The American Philosophical Association, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19716. She can also be reached by telephone at (302) 831-3291, fax: (302) 831-8690 or Email: clilly@udel.edu.

Thursday, December 27th  3:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.

Friday, December 28th      9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Saturday, December 29th  9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.

Sunday, December 30th    9:00 a.m. – noon

The Placement Service will be located in the Atlanta Hilton as outlined below. For your convenience a diagram of the Placement Service areas appears at the back of this issue.

After you have picked up your registration materials at the APA Registration Desk, you are ready to use the Service. If you do not yet have a Placement (mailbox) # on the back of your badge, first check at the Placement Desk, located in the Carter Room, to receive one.

The Job Candidate’s Area will be located in the Carter Room where you will find a file folder (mailbox) with your Placement Number on it. All communications addressed to you during the meeting will be placed there. Your folder contains:

New jobs (not having appeared in the Jobs for Philosophers) will be posted on a bulletin board in the Candidate’s Area. You should check this board regularly for new postings. Each ad should contain instructions on how to apply.

The names of institutions that have checked in with the Service will also be posted on a sequence of bulletin boards (one for each day) in alphabetical order. Each institution’s posting will indicate the following:

Complete the top portion of the "Request for Interview" form and attach a copy of your c.v. After you have completed the necessary information, place your request form and c.v. in one of the boxes marked Requests for Interviews which will be prominently displayed on the Placement Desk in the Candidate’s room. Your "Request" will then be forwarded to the institution by a staff member.

After your "Request" has been reviewed by a representative from the institution, the form will be returned to your file folder with the institution’s response appearing on the bottom of the form. Check your file folder often so that you can be certain to receive your messages promptly.

By noon on December 30th, all "Requests" submitted by you should have been returned to your file folder, and you should remove them at that time. Occasionally an institution may retain applications to review at a later date. If you applied for a job that had been posted and the institution did not check in with the Service during the meeting, it is suggested that you contact the institution by mail.

Some departments will be conducting interviews at tables located in the Grand Ballroom on the 2nd floor. Other interviewing table locations will be posted if additional space is required. Each institution using a table for interviewing will be assigned a table number. The table #s assigned to institutions will be posted on a bulletin board in the Candidate’s Area and near the Interviewing Area.

Some Departments will be conducting interviews in their hotel rooms or suites. If you have a prearranged interview, you may know the interview location; however, if that is not the case, please check with a staff member at the Placement Desk for assistance.

The APA Subcommittee on Academic Careers offers the following advice for job applicants: The schedule for those seeking jobs and those Departments offering positions is difficult for all concerned. From the point of view of Departments, any publication date for Jobs for Philosophers is a compromise between the competing demands imposed by the need to get funding for positions, so the later the better, and by the need to have time to process applications, so the sooner the better. From the point of view of job applicants, there are also competing demands: the sooner it is published, the more time to apply, but the later it is published, the more opportunities will be available. There is no easy solution to this problem, but you can ease your difficulties somewhat by being prepared when JFP is published. Since there is so little time between even the earliest publication of JFP in the fall and the Eastern Division Meeting, you should already be prepared with a clear application for easy review when JFP is published. You should have your vitae ready to put in an envelope, a generic draft of a letter of application ready to be fine-tuned for particular job opportunities, and the rest of your file ready for mailing. This means talking to those who are to write letters of recommendation long before JFP is due to arrive, preparing material about your teaching capacities, and selecting a writing sample for those Departments that request it. Applications should be complete, as well as clearly organized. It is to your advantage to send in your application as soon as possible after an ad appears.

Upon receipt of an advance registration, additional information pertaining to the Placement Service will be sent to the attention of the Contact Person at the interviewing institution listed on the form. In the event that we send Placement forms either via email or mail, please be sure to complete these and return them to our office at your earliest opportunity. Not doing so may cause your materials not to be received prior to the Staff leaving the office to travel to the meeting. In this case, we must have you fill out the forms again on site. If time does not allow sending them to us, please bring them with you and turn them in at the Placement Desk in the Interviewer’s Room.

Before you begin to interview candidates, please check in with the Placement Staff in the Interviewer’s Check-In Area located in Roosevelt/Monroe Rooms on the 3rd Floor. We will need to know if you wish to receive and review applications at the meeting, or if you will be conducting interviews by pre-arrangement only.

Some institutions accept interview requests at the meeting; some of these job notices may have appeared in Jobs for Philosophers while others are unpublished positions. A new, unpublished position will be assigned an AD# and posted on the bulletin board in the Candidate’s Room. If you are bringing such a job notice with you to the meeting, please provide the Placement Staff with four copies of the position you are advertising. Such a position announcement should be typed on one side only in a good size and easy to read font, and be as brief as possible. Only positions that have not appeared in Jobs for Philosophers will be posted. If you would like a position that has been posted at this meeting to appear in the February 2002 issue of Jobs for Philosophers, you need to submit this ad as soon as possible, following the close of the meeting via our website, www.udel.edu/apa, to our Publication Coordinator, Dawn Hartford. She can be reached at (302) 831-2895, or by email: dawnb@udel.edu if you need assistance with this.

Some institutions interview by pre-arrangement only after placing an advertisement in Jobs for Philosophers and then contacting candidates prior to the meeting. When you arrange an interview with a candidate, please inform her/him that they must be an APA Member in order to use the Service and they must register for the meeting before they can use the Service.

Departments that have chosen to use a Suite for interviewing will receive an Interview Schedule Form to be completed and brought to the meeting for the Placement staff. Doing so enables the Service to notify the candidates you wish to interview of your interviewing location. Be assured that only those candidates listed on your interview schedule will be told the location of your hotel room. Departments interviewing at tables DO NOT need to complete this form.

Interviewing does not begin until Friday morning, December 28th at 9:00 a.m. It is important that we adhere to the Placement Schedule of operating hours posted, as the Meeting Coordinator must schedule around us when needing this room for other functions during the Meeting.

There will be a file folder bearing the name of your institution located in the Interviewer’s Check-in-Area (Roosevelt/Monroe Rooms). Requests for interviews from candidates will be placed in this file folder.

The Placement Service provides numbered tables for interviewing purposes; if you are using a table, you will receive your table number assignment when you check in. These assignments will also be posted near the entrance area to this room. Should additional space for interviewing tables be necessary, this location will be posted.

When a candidate requests an interview with your institution, you should receive her/his vita attached to a "Request for Interview" form. The bottom of this form is to be completed by you. If an interview is granted, space is provided on this form to list the time, date and location of the interview. If you are unable to interview a candidate, space for this response is also provided on the form. Any request you receive in an envelope contains confidential material and should be destroyed rather than returned to the candidate. As a matter of professional courtesy, all other requests should receive a response. When a candidate receives a "Request" form back without a response, he or she is likely to assume that the material has not been reviewed and might possibly return this to you via our service or contact your institution by mail.

Each candidate is assigned a numbered file folder to facilitate prompt communication between interviewers and candidates. Materials that you wish to transmit to a registered candidate should be handed in at the Interviewers’ Check-in-Area in the Roosevelt/Monroe Rooms, and will be delivered to the candidate by our staff.

The APA Committee on the Status and Future of the Profession reminds you of its Statement on Placement Practices: The APA discourages the nomination by graduate departments of job seekers for positions in philosophy, and the submission of their dossiers in response to announcements of positions, without their knowledge or interest. This may seriously mislead those who are conducting searches, and may have unfortunate consequences both for them and for genuinely interested applicants. Graduate departments using a nomination procedure or submitting dossiers on behalf of job seekers should either attest explicitly that the candidate wishes to be considered for the positions in question, or (preferably) ensure that the job seekers themselves submit personal letters of application for these positions. Departments conducting searches are encouraged to recommend or require explicitly (in their position announcements) that each candidate, to be assessed of full consideration, should submit a personal letter of application for and interest in the announced position. A Placement ombudsman will be available in the Placement Service area for persons encountering problems with the interviewing process.