by Varnica Arora

By October 2024, I had submitted my 30th job application. Since July, my mornings began not with tea or meditation but with a compulsive scan of job listservs. Who am I kidding—it wasn’t just a morning ritual. The tab was always open, refreshed at least three times a day, like a digital prayer to the gods of academic employment. But the gods were silent. July turned to August, August to September, and not a single call, inquiry, or phone interview came through.

Despite the bleak odds, I had held on to the hope—no, the belief—that I would be the exception. I knew what I was walking into. Friends had warned me: apply to at least 40 positions, and be prepared to go through two job cycles. Still, most of us who enter PhD programs arrive with a past full of small victories—top grades, teacher’s pet status, a coveted admission into a PhD program, some recognition that we were good at this. The belief that you might beat the odds isn’t just hope—it’s a psychological distortion baked into academic culture. We’ve all heard of that one golden child who applied for one job and landed it. Their headshot rotates proudly on The Graduate Center walls on the first floor, feeding the illusion that merit and hard work might yield results for you too. It’s a cognitive fallacy, not unlike the ones that power conspiracy theories. And it’s hard to shake, even when the evidence is to the contrary.

The reality, however, is grim. Higher education in the United States is on life support. Permanent academic positions are disappearing, replaced by a patchwork of adjunct and temporary contracts. Budget cuts, bloated class sizes, and hiring freezes aren’t outliers—they’re the new normal. And yet, departments continue to demand more. The lines between liberal arts colleges and research-intensive universities are increasingly blurred. Institutions want faculty who can do it all: teach large introductory courses, offer personalized mentorship to undergraduates, publish cutting-edge research, secure grants, and enhance the university’s prestige. In this contradictory landscape, faculty are expected to be simultaneously exceptional and replaceable—original thinkers who can also be slotted into any curriculum with minimal disruption.

After months of silence, I began second-guessing everything. Maybe I should’ve chosen a more conventional topic. Maybe I should’ve pursued counseling psychology—there were 45 job postings in that area alone. Slowly, my self-doubt metastasized into anger. Why hadn’t my advisor warned me more explicitly? Why did my program encourage passion projects with little regard for “marketability”? I felt betrayed—by my institution, my mentors, and even the language of academia itself, which extols rigor and originality but rewards conformity and pedigree. I was angry at a system that told me to follow my intellectual curiosity but offered few resources to help me compete. How was I expected to play this game when I couldn’t afford the right conferences? A $300 “lottery” just for the chance to present a paper at a conference I paid $1,200 to attend—out of pocket? The language of meritocracy begins to ring hollow when access is paywalled. I still feel that anger.

But anger doesn’t burn forever. It settles, congeals, and gives way to something heavier: exhaustion. Not the kind that sleep can fix, but a deeper kind—a back pain that won’t go away, a fatigue that sinks into the bones. A slow-moving fog that makes each day feel like a repetition of the last. The body continues—mechanically refreshing the listservs, rewriting the cover letters, updating the spreadsheets—but inside, there is a sinking. I felt like I had fallen into a deep underground cave. I didn’t know who—or what—could help me find my way out. I was reminded of Chandu, a young man I interviewed during fieldwork on youth suicidal distress in central India. Chandu said he felt bekar (worthless) after repeatedly failing to secure a job. He told me, “Thoughts of failure keep circling in my mind… they keep repeating in a loop. I fell short by just a few points on the entrance exam. Another job vacancy will be posted, and again the same things will repeat. My mind is unable to get fresh.” Back then, I understood his words intellectually. Now, I felt them in my bones. I finally understood what he meant when he said he never felt fresh.

This disorientation is not just personal. It is social, structural, and collective. In the 1930s, social psychologist Marie Jahoda conducted a now-classic study in the Austrian town of Marienthal, where mass unemployment followed the closure of a textile factory. Jahoda and her collaborators found that unemployment didn’t just strip people of income—it warped their experience of time, eroded community ties, and hollowed out their sense of purpose. One of the more haunting observations: people began taking longer to cross the street. Even with more “free” time, men borrowed fewer books from the library, and community participation dropped. What the researchers documented was a form of social paralysis—a retreat inward, even as daily life stretched on.

Reading The Unemployed of Marienthal now, I can’t help but think of the Graduate Center community and how the precarity of higher education impacts our collective being. We don’t always have the language for what’s happening, but we feel it. The hustle of multiple jobs, low participation in community events, lack of interest in student organizing, conversations that end with “hang in there.” The affective burden isn’t just mine—it’s ours.

And through it all, we are told: keep going. With every application, your materials get stronger. Ask for feedback. Workshop your documents. Tailor your letters. And yes, it’s true—your materials do improve. You become more concise, more strategic, more attuned to what committees want. But with each polished sentence, the stakes rise. Rejection doesn’t just sting—it cuts deeper, because now it’s not just your first draft being passed over. It’s your best self. And still, the response is: “It wasn’t the right fit.”

“Fit”—that elusive, unmeasurable criterion—becomes both the scapegoat and the judge. It provides no pathway for improvement, no grounds for appeal. It masks all the other forces at play: institutional bias, resource disparities, geography, pedigree, race, gender, visa status, and more. “Fit” is where critique goes to die.

This cycle of hope and letdown has a cumulative toll. After months of endlessly revising and resubmitting, I finally secured an academic job. I am grateful—truly—but I cannot shake these residues of stress. The back pain lingers…

And I can’t help but wonder: was it luck that landed me this position? Perseverance? Skill? What set me apart from colleagues who are just as smart and talented? The honest answer: I don’t know.

The current environment of chronic precarity requires a reckoning—a recognition that this process is anything but neutral, and that its emotional costs fall heaviest on those already marginalized. Until then, we keep refreshing browser tabs, supporting one another, and whispering in corridors: hang in there.

Varnica Arora is a PhD candidate in Psychology and a Fellow at the Teaching and Learning Center.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.