ABSTRACT
Although your academic career will entail various transitions, the “transition from being a graduate student to being an assistant professor is the most difficult” (Goldsmith, Komlos, and Gold 135). Such a claim hardly demeans the difficulties of surviving doctoral studies, including the dreaded dissertation and its defense, nor the soul-emptying exertions of negotiating the job market, including the dreaded MLA hotel-room interviews with strangers and the anguishing on-site campus visits. However, typically these challenges are met with the accompanying support of a major professor and a group of graduateschool friends. Transitioning to an assistant professor position, on the contrary, is typically a solitary journey: not only geographically-as you move, alone, from Texas to Virginia, for example-but also mentally, as you are now wrested from an advising professor, who guided your research and mentored your scholarly work and relations, wrested from your community of fellow graduate students; wrested from end-of-semester deadlines that demanded that seminar papers be completed or exacting graduate-school deadlines that encouraged a dissertation to be defended. You will find yourself bereft, perhaps gladly, of the comfort of your Freshman Composition course, which you taught three or four times a year for three or more years. You will have transitioned to a new world, to a new geographical location with new faces-most nameless, with new demands, new power relations. You are no longer (formally) a student; you are
now a colleague. You are now an assistant professor: untenured, to be sure, but you are now a professional.
