Having graduated in the early months of the pandemic, Camille Méritan (PhD 2020), now Assistant Professor Tenure-Track at Bentley College (MA), believes that COVID did not necessarily have a significant impact on her job search. She was able to travel to three campus interviews and select her favorite place a few weeks prior to the March 2020 lockdown. COVID-19 did, however, have an impact on her defense that had to be done remotely.

As for her current position, Bentley college has provided her with an extra year to conduct research and write articles since the pandemic has negatively affected the field of academic publishing causing slow turnaround for reviews and, therefore, journal papers and books to appear. Although the whole process of “publish or perish” remains as stressful as ever before, Camille has already been able to put out several papers based on her doctoral dissertation entitled "The Impact of Self-Reflection and Integrated Pronunciation Instruction on the Intelligibility of Generation Z Learners of French: A Mixed Methods Study’, thanks to the thorough guidance of Assistant Professor Aurore Mroz.

Camille shares that her teaching has not been affected much by the pandemic, as Bentley functioned following a blended synchronous model (BSM) for the AY 2020-2021, which means that half of the students were remote and half of them were on campus, simultaneously. Being familiar with online teaching and having read new research about BSMs, it was not too difficult for Camille to adapt to this teaching scheme.

Camille credits the U of I with a few important assets that she could put to good use on the job market. One of them was professionalization: in addition to learning to talk about her research in both English and French, she learned to tailor her “dissertation elevator speech” and her job talks to her audience, be it a small business-oriented university, an R2 university, or Ivy league school. One aspect of graduate student training that Camille recommends emphasizing more is service and outreach. Service, she says, can put people in the Humanities on the campus map. In addition to helping to coordinate basic language courses, acquiring experience in advising/mentoring undergraduates, sitting on independent studies with Professors, for instance, service and outreach to organizations on and off campus can add valuable experience to students' portfolio and make a difference on the job market.

Thank you for sharing your advice and experience with us, Camille, and all the best with your promising career!