What follows is a presentation I gave at the 2013 convention of the Modern Language Association (known fondly by many of us as #mla13) in the session “How Did I Get Here? Our ‘Altac’ Jobs.” The session was a roundtable discussion, with pecha kucha presentations, about “alternative academic” careers. You can watch the slides with my audio, or read the presentation and look at the slides on your own. My thanks to Brenda Bethman and Shaun Longstreet for organizing the panel and to my fellow panelists and to the audience for a great conversation. (Update: Slideshare no longer supports slides with audio, or at least, no longer supports what I had done, so if you want to hear me, you’ll have to listen to this audio and click through the slides yourself; it’s around 20 seconds a slide if you want to keep pace.) [slideshare id=15891152&doc=mla13altacslides-130107121927-phpapp02] “Make your own luck”…