Is working in a traditional department preferable?

[pink_]

My best advice for grad students is to position themselves to be able to fit into a traditional department because it makes you eligible for more jobs. I'm at a very small private school, and while we have a Women's and Gender Studies minor, it's composed of courses offered by the traditional departments. We do a fair amount of interdisciplinary teaching, but we only have traditional departments, so to be competitive for a job here, you need to be competitive as a member of the English department or the History department, or Philosophy, or . . .

[Hibush]

I don't think you can just go by having a 1 billion dollar endowment. But then again, if you have as low as 200 million, and that has to "feed" 1000 students or more, then there is going to be strain, especially if there is very little "indirect" coming from grants, and some, but not enough, gift money. You can sort of go by endowment per student, but that would seemingly put Sweet Briar in great shape! So, you need to know more than just one or two data points. Also, time derivatives of the quantities are fairly important.

Spork was highballing that number to make a point that small colleges in general should be avoided because their shaky business model doesn't result in faculty job security. The only exceptions (Grinnell, Bowdoin, Smith, Swarthmore, Pomona, Amherst, Berea, Middlebury, Vassar) are not hiring enough to build a career plan on.

[dinomom]

Obviously a job is a job, but as someone who switched fields after graduation into a "studies" department I have found that there are fewer, not more people with whom I can have a compelling conversation about research and who value my subfield. This is partly due to the size of the department, which is much, much smaller than my graduate program (a typical outcome, I think). Think about how you want to position yourself and your research. I'm wishing now that I were in the more traditional field.

[Sun_Worshiper]

I'm in an interdisciplinary department (a "professional" school), and it has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, the pay is relatively high and it has been fun to engage with new people and ideas.  On the other hand, I don't have many colleagues to pursue collaborations with, or even to just talk about ideas, networking with others in my field can be trickier, and my senior colleagues often don't know what to think of my publishing record. There are also constant fights over curriculum and what our identity should be.

But look, job seekers can't be picky, especially now, so apply to every job that is a decent fit, whether in a traditional department or some kind of interdisciplinary setting.