I just wanted to make sure that those of you who are on the non-academic and academic job markets know about  Interfolio. Its main strengths seem to play best to those doing a high-level or academic job search, since one of its key functions is managing and shepherding along your letters of reference. If your campus career center doesn’t already do this, the service is a great way to get your letter to the correct destination.

Since 1999, Interfolio has been the best way to collect, manage, and showcase academic and professional credentials for applications to positions in higher education, post-graduate study, and other opportunities.  Interfolio offers individuals one central place to store their most important documents, while also providing the means to distribute these materials to any institution.  Interfolio’s services offer a revolutionary way for people to present and market themselves professionally.

The idea for Interfolio was the result of an award-winning business plan developed by Steve Goldenberg when he was a student at Georgetown University. As a worker in Georgetown’s career center, he saw an opportunity to offer students a better way to promote academic and professional achievements. His business plan for a powerful and easy-to-use online credentials service won the Philip’s Publishing Award for Excellence in Entrepreneurship. Steve used feedback from the 1999 Eastern Association of Colleges and Employers (EACE) annual conference to launch the first version of Interfolio later that year.

Now, over 100,000 worldwide access the Interfolio system, including individuals who use it to manage their documents, as well as letter writers who upload letters of recommendation for their students and colleagues. Interfolio continues to use the feedback of advisors, students, letter writers and receiving institutions to develop and evolve the service.

I was tumbling down the rabbit hole of a Google search the other day, going from one link to the next, when I landed at Tara Hunt’s HorsePigCowblog. You might be familiar with Tara if you’re at all interested in social media, social marketing, social networks and other related social hoo-ha. Basically, Tara’s great. And she wrote, “If nobody shares they are struggling, nobody will know anybody else is struggling. That results in a bunch of people feeling isolated and scared and like big fat losers.”

So many of us keep our fears and struggles to ourselves believing that revealing them could somehow brand us with loser status and eventually imperil our careers or reputations. Are we being savvy or just creating unnecessary isolation? Are there issues you wish you could share with others?

It is both liberating and energizing to have professional confidants in whom we can share our worries, concerns, and aspirations, but it can be hard to establish these kinds of relationships. One must reveal a fair degree of vulnerability in order to engender trust in another, and that can feel risky. The consequences of failing to open up can be quite high, however.

A few interesting articles I’ve found floating around on the interwebs this morning:

• There’s this piece at Slate about Matthew Crawford, the Ph.D. who became a motorcycle mechanic and wrote a book about it (Shop Class as Soul Craft).
• In the U.S., the Council of Graduate Schools is initiating a new study of

It’s Canada Day here north of the 49th parallel. I know that when I was a grad student, every day was a work day, including civic holidays. Now that I’m out of academia, plus self-employed, plus a mom, I carve out very deliberate boundaries with my time (this has sometimes been difficult for people who would rather I conducted business outside of my M-F, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 pm work schedule!).

Because today is a holiday,

Last Wednesday, there was a piece in the Chronicle with some pretty shocking (and yet not surprising) numbers about how much contingent labour is used in the American university system. Now, I am too cheap to buy a web subscription to the Chronicle, so I chose not to pay to read the full article.