MLA debriefing

Last week I went to the MLA convention in Seattle.  It's been called many a different name (the shark pit, the pit of desperation, and hell for language nerds are just a few of the choice nicknames) but I enjoyed it.  It's the annual national convention for all modern languages and is held in a different city each year.  This year it was in Seattle (yay west coast!) and included almost 1000 sessions over 4 days, 12 official hotels, another dozen unofficial hotels, and some of the top (and perhaps bottom?) minds in languages today.

MLA is also the place where many universities hold their first round interviews.  That in itself is a whole other dog and pony show.  Everywhere you look you see people in their best dress (and we are language nerds, so we dress a little weird) trekking all over the city from hotel to hotel hoping for the best and trying to size up the competition while nervously chatting with other interviewees in the hotel lobbies.  Interviews take place in the hotel rooms (sometimes suites, sometimes not) and there is always at least one little snafu (like the cleaning lady coming in part way through or the interviewee falling off the bed into the interviewers suitcase and simultaneously shooting aforementioned interviewer's undergarments into the air - this didn't happen to me, thank goodness).  Meanwhile, all the interviews seem to start on the hour and the elevators are like a sauna as ten desperate recently "doctored up" grad students hope for the best and sweat out the worst.

Then there's the "runway."  That is, the procession of your language colleagues to the different sessions across the city.  In a smaller language like Italian pretty much everyone attends every session.  In languages like Spanish or French, you have a better chance of missing people.  If you're trying to avoid any of your former professors or fellow students, this is where you'll see them . . . actually especially if you're trying to avoid someone.  It's one giant exercise in professionalism.  Everyone wants to know what you're doing now, are you here for interviews (and if so, then it gets really tricky because you're probably interviewing with the same schools!), when did you finish your dissertation, what publications have you done this year, what conferences have you attended, what grants have you gotten?  You are trying to measure if they're really interested or if they just want to know if they have a leg up on you for the perfect job, and try to answer diplomatically while hiding the fact that you might, perhaps, be sizing them up at the same time.  It's a workout!!!

I left feeling pretty good and happy to have caught up with my grad school buddies - which probably means I "didn't do it right."