Job market summaries

I wanted to give a more formal summary of my experience on the job market because I always find these helpful when I read other people's.

Here's my career trajectory and each job market summary.  Briefly:  1 year half-time while publishing PhD; 2 years postdoc; 2 years research-track; now tenure-track. 

Last year of grad school:  I was finished with my dissertation but due to scheduling and the job market, I couldn't defend until November.  I had applied to maybe 60 jobs.  I got the following offers:

1. Visiting Assistant Professor at elite small college, teaching 3 courses per year.  After I negotiated a salary increase (just slightly more than an NRSA postdoc salary, but coming out of grad school, it was exciting), the Dean told me that I shouldn't take the job because I should focus on research before getting a tenure-track job.  It was useful, frank advice.
2. Postdoc at Ivy with a very short response deadline and 1 course per year.  Basically I had just a few days to respond.  I thought that I had better offers for the future, so I turned it down.
3. NIH training grant postdoc at decent state school, in a very supportive program, working with any faculty members on any of their projects.  Fantastic situation, but it didn't come with regular health insurance.  Postdocs had to get their own health insurance, and they would reimburse, which raised all kinds of privacy and convenience issues.  I probably should have taken this position anyway.
4. Non-NIH postdoc at the same decent state school with famous professor on important project, and possible involvement on 2 other exciting projects, which I accepted.  Most of the actual work was literature reviews and organizing international conferences, which clashed poorly with my self-image as No-Longer-A-Graduate-Student and thus should be doing real research.  If I had been more patient about the administrative tasks, the other research projects probably would have followed.  Instead, I complained to the famous professor, and he agreed to hire an administrator to organize the conferences . . . by giving half of my salary to someone else (!).  The extra projects that he had promised me somehow never materialized.  Needless to say, I went right on the job market that year.   
5. Postdoc in a foreign country with two advisors, one of whom yelled at me on my visit there.   

Round 2:  I applied to around 65 jobs.  I got a 2 year postdoc at one of the top universities in my field.  I would be my advisor's last postdoc.  The research projects that I got involved in were dysfunctional in one way or another:  one took 4-6 months to meet with me about what I could do for them, and even then didn't give me all the materials that I needed; another collaboration also wouldn't give me all the materials that I needed until I contacted them a few times over a few months.
Round 3:  During my first year in that postdoc, I applied selectively:  24 jobs, 13 interviews, and 2.5 offers.  I stayed where I was.

Round 4:  During my second (final) year in that postdoc, I applied more widely, and that's told in this entry:  69 applications:  3 conference interviews (1 tenure-track, 1 government, 1 temporary faculty), 2 phone interviews (1 postdoc, 1 tenure-track), and 9 in-person interviews (3 tenure-track, 4 postdocs, 1 research institute, 1 non-tenure-track). 

I got a non-tenure-track offer with a short deadline, so I turned down 2 tenure-track interviews.  In retrospect, that was the wrong thing to do.  Career-wise I should have still gone on the tenure-track job interviews despite having accepted the non-tenure-track job because I would have obviously accepted the TT jobs if I had gotten offers.  Personal-wise, it was fine because the city with the research-track faculty job had the most educated and interesting dating pool of any city that I'd lived in, and I met my husband there. The research-track job was a 3-year contract with diminishing coverage:  first year 75%, second year 55%, and third year 30%. 

Round 5:  I had the required amount of grant coverage ready for my second year, so I applied selectively:  43 jobs, got 4 interviews (1 research institute, 3 tenure-track) and 1 tenure-track offer which disappeared.  One of the tenure-track jobs was a soft-money position at a top school where the university would cover approximately 10-15% of my salary, so I would need grants for the remaining 85-90%.  At this interview, several faculty members told me that everyone is nice to each other because you never know when you'll need to use each other for funding. 

The tenure-track job disappeared less than a month before its start date, and my research-track job wouldn't let me continue to work there, so I moved to a different research-track job at the same university.  That's the other reason that I know that it would have been fine to accept interviews for the tenure-track jobs back in Round 4:  this research-track job showed me no loyalty.

Round 6 (!):  I applied to over 100 jobs in several disciplines related to my research.  Thankfully, I got a good rate of return:   

1.  6 phone interviews and 1 conference interview that didn't go farther.  Some lessons from these.
1. The conference interview and one of the phone interviews were in the same general area, so I could have taken the jobs without moving, and my husband could have kept his same job.  One was an up-and-coming state university branch, where I genuinely liked the faculty and was enthusiastic about the teaching.  I always wonder when ulterior motives (geography) undermine applications and when they help.  
2. One phone interview was for a land grant university in a college town 30-60 minutes from the state's capital city, which looked like a lovely place to live, despite being smaller than anywhere I'd ever lived.  At the very end of this phone interview, I said that the state capital looked like a terrific city, and my interviewer countered that the college town was good, too, and that most faculty lived there.  Oops, I didn't mean to seem down on the town.  
2. Three tenure-track on-campus interview offers that I turned down.  
1. One was funded for just 2 years.  It took a lot of questioning to figure that out because they emphasized the hard money component so much that I had the impression that it was 100% hard money with no time limit.
2. One was in a prestigious academic medical center with favorable terms.  If you bring in your own grants, you need to cover 30% of salary.  If you get on others' grants, you need to cover 70% of salary.  It wasn't far away (maybe a 6 hour drive and flights were inexpensive), but they couldn't pay my flight to come visit, and they didn't want me to pay for the flight either. 
3. One was at a non-prestigious public university in the same city as the academic medical center.  Aha!  I accepted the interview at first, and I bought the plane tickets, to be reimbursed later.  But then the search committee chair got all picky about random details, and then I got a job offer, and I suddenly got so tired when I realized that I didn't have to deal with this.  I was trying to figure out a way to go to the prestigious academic medical center while canceling this interview, and I even arranged to stay with friends during the day that I was supposed to be at this job interview, but for some reason it didn't work out.  Or maybe I was just exhausted from all the traveling.
3. 6 on-campus interviews, which turned into 2 offers.  
1. Offer 1:  100% coverage (12 month) with 3 classes per year at public school. My now-husband got a job offer in that city, which happens to be where he grew up and his parents live.
2. Offer 2:  75% coverage (9 month) with 4 classes per year at a private religious university.  It was the same effective rate of pay: that is, the 9-month job paid 75% of the salary of the 12-month.  I was reluctant to turn down this job for a few reasons.
1. Job security:  Somehow I had the sense that I would for sure get tenure, although I wasn't sure that I would want to stay there my whole career.  
2. They were extremely enthusiastic towards me, so enthusiastic that they told me that they didn't interview any other candidates that year.
3.  The location seemed more liveable.
4.  Unfortunately, my husband didn't have a job offer in that city.  Given #2, I felt slightly guilty turning them down, especially because after I turned them down, the chair of the department asked why I didn't ask them for help finding my husband a job. I hadn't even realized that was a possibility. My husband isn't an academic, but he has a professional specialty and a network, and I figured that his network would be able to get him any job leads that he needed, whereas the university would be able to generate generic job leads at best, but who knows. Anyhow, it makes it easier that the road not taken had a higher teaching load. 
3. Flagship public university in a college town about an hour from the nearest city.  All the faculty there were from large cities, and were very enthusiastic about their new college town location, and it really did seem like a great town where I would have otherwise wanted to live.  It did seem like a problem to find jobs for partners/spouses:  one partner was going to graduate school in a new field because he couldn't get a job there, and two other partners/spouses were living in other cities, one in a city 1000 miles away.
4. Elite private university with a new program in my area:  It was an interesting contrast to speak with the faculty versus the students at this school.  From the faculty's perspective, they were growing and figuring out how to make this new program work.  Students expected everything to work perfectly because they were paying such high tuition, and the university has an excellent reputation.  I contacted them as soon as I got the interview offer for job #1, and they set up my on-campus interview quickly.  The dean seemed to like me and personally acted as the point-of-contact after my visit.  Once I got an offer from the first school, the dean promised to get back to me quickly.  Within a few days, I got a phone call saying that there wasn't a faculty consensus on my application.  Reading between the lines, some wanted me, but they were waiting for a candidate that everyone wanted, which made sense.  They encouraged me to apply again for another opening because the school was growing.
5. Urban state university:  4 courses per year, 75% coverage.  Great city, very friendly, updated facilities, and of all randomness, I made a connection for an under-employed friend with a masters degree who is looking for a research job to supplement her 23% coverage (yikes!) at her current job.  It was exciting to get a job interview for a friend on the other side of the US from this interview.
6. Elite public university:  Really lovely place, practically paradise on earth at least by appearances, but the position had a twist.  The department --- related to my research interest, but not "my field" --- had recently recruited a big name in the field to join the faculty.  The big name gave as a condition of his joining the university the ability to recruit at least one new junior tenure-track faculty member.  Despite being tenure-track, the new faculty would be required to work closely with this big name faculty member.  Who, by the way, is 60, male, distinguished-looking, and trying to live the swinging single life in the nearest suitable big swinging city, and had his arm around the chair of a married female junior faculty member at dinner.  Yuck.  Really not comfortable.  I was relieved not to get an offer.  I don't know whether this type of situation was normal for the discipline. 

Summary lessons of all my experiences:

1.  Women's issues still matter.  In my research-track job and some of my job interviews, there were senior men who felt entitled to touch junior faculty women, or order them around.  Really not comfortable, and simply not acceptable.  And yet because these men are important, people around them put up with it because it's easier than resisting.   
2. Health insurance matters, even for young single people.  I turned down a good postdoc because they couldn't give regular employer-based insurance policies to their postdocs.  Again, this was an unadvertised issue.
3. Never turn down a tenure-track interview, even if you have already accepted a non-tenure-track job.  Even a good non-tenure-track job. 
4. There are some wonderful working environments even/especially at non-prestigious schools.  When I was first leaving my PhD program, I didn't really know what to look for.  In retrospect, it's clearer.  
5. Jobs vary enormously in their terms.  In these times of fiscal austerity, hard money positions are extremely important, and yet few jobs mention hard versus soft money status in the position. 
6. Tenure-track jobs aren't necessarily permanent.  At my current school, all tenure-track faculty are classified as "temporary" and on one-year contracts. I started my job in the summer, and 7 months after I started I got my formal offer letter.  The letter said that they were happy to offer me a job starting on my start date, and that although the job could end at any point, "we anticipate that it will last at least until" a date 5 months in the future. I've been reassured that all contracts get renewed, and everyone is under the same terms, but it's naturally unnerving.  I'm glad that I negotiated for a pay increase before I accepted the job because our pay is frozen for the next few years, and there will be some furlough days.

Update

Wow, I just ran across this old blog. I wanted to give a small update.

I took the research-track faculty job that I mentioned in my last blog post. I found out about the job when I approached someone randomly at a job fair, who turned out to be the chair of a department with the power to create a non-tenure-track position. It was a great position while it lasted. My salary doubled, and I had a year without teaching to do research, so I didn't mind the occasional furlough days. It was weird, though. I noticed on my interview that all of the other recently-hired faculty were young, attractive non-overweight women with my complexion. And at faculty meetings, he was constantly touching this unmarried woman's knee. Oh, and he was married to his former undergraduate, and had that creepy older man combination of having grandchildren and children of about the same age.

In the spring of that first year, I got a tenure-track offer, and I got ready to move for the tenure-track job. Less than a month before the start date, the job was cut due to state budget cuts. The state picked an arbitrary date, and if the job was vacant on that date, it was cut. My job was on an existing tenure-line, but because the previous occupant had already left the job, the job went away.

Needless to say, my research-track position no longer existed for me by that point. I looked into filing for unemployment, but fortunately I some grant money, so I put together a 50% time position at my same salary and title through a research center that I was affiliated with. Very lucky. And it was generous of the research center because the grant money didn't come with much overhead.

Only there was a slight bureaucratic mishap. If I had left the university and been unemployed, even for a week, my old department would have paid my accumulated vacation days to me as a lump sum, approximately a month's pay. Because I didn't leave the university --- just moved within the university --- this research institute that had been so generous in putting a position together for me in return for almost no overhead now owed me a month's salary. By the time we found out about this problem, it was too late to fix. Otherwise, it was fine. And it was a reasonably productive year of underemployment: I was back on a postdoc-like salary, I got some papers out, and I applied to an embarrassingly large number of jobs.

Job market statistics

Here are my final job market statistics:

• 6 dozen applications
  
  
  
  • 44 faculty: mostly tenure-track, some research-track, a couple temporary teaching fellowships
    
  • 7 real jobs: 3 government, 4 research institutes
    
  • 18 postdocs: 5 prestigious and competitive, 13 regular.
    
  
  
• 13 short interview offers.
  
  
  
  • 4 conference (2 different conferences)
    
  • 7 phone: 3 formal (with committee scheduled way in advance), 3 informal (impromptu with 1-2 people), 1 formal declined.
    
  • 1 informal visit.
    
  • 1 email interview (seriously!) (declined)
    
  
  
• 8 visit offers
  
  
  
  • 5 paid visit offers: 4 completed, 1 cancelled.
    
  • 2 unpaid visits costing >$150
    
  • 1 unpaid visit costing <$10.
    
  
  
• 2 offers: 1 postdoc, 1 research-track faculty. Waiting to hear from tenure-track job.
  

Sources of jobs by outcome:

• Offers: both were from informal chance meetings, but neither through connections.
  
  
  
  • Postdoc offer: saw faculty posting outside my field, emailed to ask if should apply, guy said I should apply and mentioned an unadvertised 1 year postdoc, declined me for faculty and brought me for postdoc interview.
    
  • Research-track: walked up to all desirable schools at field's annual conference asking if they were hiring. The guy at this school's booth who I happened to approach turned out to be the chair, and he said to send my CV. I drove there for two short, informal visits. They gave me an offer after the postdoc's offer.
    
  
  
• Paid interviews (where employer paid travel costs): 1 asked to apply, 1 at conference, 2 online.
  
  
  
  • 3 year postdoc: asked to apply for, also saw postings in 2 places. (When considering the VAP, called 5 people in the area. One of them kept in touch, invited me to visit his campus, and mentioned that the following year I should apply for the postdoc, and then mentioned again that I should apply for the postdoc.)
    
  • tenure-track faculty: saw posting at above conference. Search chair contacted me right after he got my application to say that he knew my advisor and that they were inviting me. 4 months passed before I actually got the invitation to visit.
    
  • 2 tenure-track faculty: saw postings online.
    
  
  
• Unpaid interviews costing >$150: both postdocs, both online. One guy was friends with my advisor, and assured me that I would likely get an offer, but I didn't because the other postdocs didn't think I was interested in the area.
  
• 13 short interviews
  
  
  
  • 4 conference interviews from registering for conferences' job services.
    
  • 4 formal interviews from internet postings
    
  • email interview from internet posting
    
  • 4 informal interviews all due to personal contacts: 2 from connections and 2 just because I reached out to them randomly.
    
  
  

Conclusion: networking works, even if it's just randomly walking up to someone and asking if they are hiring. Having a good pedigree and good publications certainly helps with the random approaches, I'm sure.

Finally comfortable here. Time to leave.

Ironic that as soon as I make friends and start a relationship and become productive in my postdoc (finished 2 paper drafts in the past month!), I'm going on job interviews, none of which are in my current city. Which is a terrible city, but it's become awfully comfortable. The closest job is about an hour's drive away, which is pretty far. And I'm trying to think of ways that I could stay here, perhaps just another year. This relationship is going so well that I don't want to put the stress of either geographical separation or a difficult decision on this relationship.

Too early to worry about that, though! This stage of the job market is for getting offers. Once I have offers, I can think about how to make reality work. The hard part about getting offers is seeming so enthusiastic about a place where you don't feel so happy about. My current job, they never asked me what I thought of this city, and it's a temporary postdoc, so they weren't so concerned about that anyhow.

But, really, after putting out all those applications, what I want most of all is just to stay here, doing exactly the same thing as I've done the past 1.5 years, only this time I'll be happy and productive. Perhaps the two grants that I applied for will come through in time to be able to continue here. Maybe I can find more grants. Maybe I will get an offer that will let me defer.

If I stay with Jon and stayed here another year, I think at that point, he could reasonably consider moving with me without feeling like he was premature in his decision, or like it would be too disruptive.

Department chairs

I used to hear faculty discussing department chairs as if they were another species, and I didn't understand how that could be: they came with the same training and did the same kind of research as normal faculty, so how could they be so different? But now that I have met so many of them, I understand.

They're academics, and yet they're politically conscious. They're cocky and excited, even if they're under-resourced and have a mediocre record. They're oh so nice, yet every discussion is a negotiation requiring some attention to strategic concerns. They promise a little as if it's a lot, and they promise something when they might not have anything.

The first times I saw these traits, I didn't realize it was part of a pattern, but now it's so clear.

The myth of the postdoc

In the midst of job season, we all have romantic ideas about what fellowships are like: you picture yourself in a different environment, doing different work, and you come home to a fulfilling social and personal life that is just like the one you have now. Obviously a complete fantasy.

Right now, I feel extremely productive. I am doing research that is interesting and relevant, and the projects are coming along at a fair clip: I have given or will give several distinct conference presentations this academic year, written a grant application and part of another, and have a few papers at a good stage of preparation, but virtually everything that I have accomplished has been this year.

In the first few months of my postdoc I felt disoriented to live in a new city and university with completely different patterns of life; distracted by moving and the endless tasks that have to be done, and the lack of money due to having moved; and overwhelmed by the need to make friends and professional contacts simultaneously in order not to be lonely. Meanwhile during all these adjustments, I felt lonely, scared, tired, and sluggish, and just plain non-resilient. Any setback was discouraging, and there were so many.

That's really not a good mood in which to take on new projects. Craving the familiar, I just finished old projects and got them published. That's precisely not what you're supposed to do, but it was hard to do otherwise. New projects have lots of unpredictable setbacks and at a time when every single part of my life was in upheaval, I didn't feel that I could handle setbacks well. The first time I went to a new project group and the first 5 minutes was two faculty members (one research-track and one tenured) dissing my advisor, and the remainder of the meeting was just boring. Between the awkwardness and lack of interest in the project, I didn't continue.

As I prepare job applications, the cost of moving and transition has been forgotten. And it really has to. New jobs require a leap into the unfamiliar and willingness to take the consequences, whatever they are. But I am pretty sure that even though right now everything feels so good and right that the loneliness and disorientation of moving seem so far away, I will have another lonely and disoriented and perhaps even depressed season as I move to my next position. I will forget all of that as I interview (thankfully I have gotten some), and will be nothing but sweet and light on the interviews.

Variations on a theme (dating)

I just reread my post from early August, and almost 4 months later, my dating life looks similar.

Jack and I stopped seeing each other even as friends. Something incredibly banal and boring happened --- fill in your favorite Brady Bunch episode subplot minor minor conflict. After nine months of impeccable communication skills learned in MBA school, he blamed and accused, sent endless emails, ending with "what else short of slapping you would show you that I was upset." The whole situation surprised me. I just didn't write back, and that was it.

New romantic interest seemed extremely promising: we connected well (most recent date 6 1/2 hours of just talking), he's smart with BA from a top-20 small liberal arts college, taught high school math at a prep school, and he is well-built and good-looking. It didn't even bother me that he was a starving artist and estranged from his surviving parent after the other parent's protracted illness. Until it turned out that in the recent past, around when I was finishing grad school, he was homeless for several months. Homeless as in all of his belongings in a bag next to a park bench that he slept on because he ran out of friends to stay with, as he lost his friendships after staying with each of his friends.

Why do I have such an affinity with the troubled?

He didn't go into more detail about his time being homeless, but yesterday I saw homeless men standing with signs by the road off the highway yesterday asking for food (I gave one the apple that was supposed to be my afternoon snack), and I started thinking about the myriad degradations of homelessness and the wall of dehumanization between the homeless and non-homeless ("everyone else"), and it breaks my heart that he had to endure all of this.

I feel of two minds about this.

On the realistic hand, obviously an enormous red flag. The specifics do not matter. He has less of a buffer to protect him than most people, having chosen to go to art school instead of continuing in his steady job, a complicated family, and a tendency towards depression, but whatever the reasons, someone who could actually fall so far once could do so again. And he still does not have a steady income: a few jobs that are a part-time job with low enough salary that he still qualifies for some types of public assistance.

On the optimistic hand, he also pulled himself up from such a hole that is so deep most of us cannot imagine it, and he is wise enough to know that he cannot get into a real relationship until he feels more steady on his feet. He is also wise enough to avoid tangling relationships with social work. And I feel like I connect better with him than 90% of the men I've met this year.

On the realistic hand, I can hear so many women saying the same thing, and just ending up burned.


Other prospects are two men a long plane ride away: George (who does like me, it turns out) and the wedding guy (who now calls me a couple times a week, and is slightly disappointed when I get off after 2 hours, and he is looking for another job in closer cities).

Oh, and a just-minted-PhD from school whose personality I find really attractive and I think he's cute, but he is very fat. Now that he's defended, we have time to get to know each other. The thing that puts me off from him has nothing to do with him, just the social context. He's one of those "really nice guys" that "someone should date" but no one around him wants to. When people saw me with him once, they got all excited, and somehow it makes me uneasy to be that "someone." [Addendum 1/8/10, it turns out that the excited woman who saw us told her roommate that I was having brown bag lunch at school with this guy, who told the Starving Artist, and presumably others.] But with all considered, there's a great deal to be said for stability.

The worst kind of colleague

I'm on this project alluded to earlier that I realize is so canonical as to be a stereotype.

Senior faculty member gets a grant, gets some wheels moving, and passes it to junior faculty member. Junior faculty member works on it enough to do one of the objectives of the grant, presents them at one or two conferences, and sits on the project.

Senior faculty talks up the project to postdoc (me). Postdoc contacts the junior faculty member in September, October, November, finally gets an appointment, goes to appointment (90 minutes round trip), and finally finds out about the project sometime in the middle of the winter, but nothing is ready to be passed on at that point. Makes another appointment, remembers the appointment just in time to make the appointment if it were in the same building or even campus but it's an unpredictable as much as an hour away, so emails just before scheduled appointment time. Meeting rescheduled after 3 weeks.

Postdoc tells senior faculty member that she will be applying to present the work at a conference and senior faculty member says "Great! Let me know what I can do." Postdoc rushes to write abstract draft in record time, asks many questions including "Whose names go on this?", and gets no response. Abstract is necessarily vague because project has not yet been started. Junior faculty member gets wind of the abstract and asks to see it. Only emailed comment on abstract is about the positioning of authors' names. Names changed. Revision sent. Remember this abstract is based only on the grant application because project has not yet been started.

In the early spring, postdoc finally meets with junior faculty member (baked goods in hand as apology) to get started on the project. Junior faculty member is not in office. Postdoc waits and eventually leaves baked goods on desk with a note. Junior faculty member comes eventually, abstractly thanks postdoc for the baked goods, mentions that abstract was read and commented on, but "It must have been thrown away or lost." I'm not making this up.

Junior faculty member selectively gives some of the materials to postdoc, but not all materials. Postdoc asks for materials used to do earlier work, as well as the presentations that the work was presented in, but junior faculty member will not give them.

Postdoc finally starts project, rushes to get enough work done on project to present at a conference, gets most of the necessary work done, and presents.

After months without contact, senior faculty member emails "research group" during the conference and says they need to meet soon because an MD grad student, referred to in email as Dr. FirstName, is joining the project. Perhaps tomorrow.

Meeting is set for after the conference. Postdoc, remembering earlier missed meeting with junior faculty, dresses carefully in the morning, thinks about meeting all morning, arrives at the distant office 45 minutes early. 10 minutes after meeting start time, junior person arrives. Senior faculty member is called and is at home due to a scheduled-well-in-advance medical procedure. 30 minutes after meeting, Dr. Grad Student arrives. Postdoc reports on conference. Senior faculty asks postdoc to spent 2 days a week with Dr. Grad Student getting him up to speed. Postdoc stupidly says that she doesn't have that much time right away, rather than just agreeing.

Postdoc spends time with grad student and gives much more to grad student than junior faculty gave postdoc originally, emails project to report that. Postdoc notes that grad student will have easier time getting up to speed than postdoc originally did because he has all materials that the postdoc has, so in theory can get going right away. Passive aggressiveness is apparently contagious.

After meeting, junior faculty member emails (Cc: senior) and asks again for conference abstract, whether the abstract was sent to any other conferences. Postdoc says this was the only conference, forwards original draft to demonstrate all of this was discussed months ago. Junior faculty member rehashes argument about name order and again asks whether abstract sent anywhere else. Postdoc reminds junior faculty that name thing was already discussed, repeats that it was not sent elsewhere, and in addition forwards 2 additional emails, documenting what was sent to the conference, and last night's email that it was not sent anywhere else. And then wastes part of morning writing bitchy blog entry about this dysfunction.

Postdoc webcomic

I love it:

Conflict of interest statement

Why are suitable guys so unfriendly?

My Email #1: Emailed guy on ok cupid because he sounded smart (one of few) and he mentioned xkcd in his profile, so I mentioned a couple of my favorite strips.

His Email #1: He drops the name of a niche computer program that I use often, which is actually extremely weird. Why would he think I would know what that was? And writes 4 or 5 more paragraphs, mentioning that he is away for 6 months and including no questions. Maybe he is clueless and doesn't realize he isn't giving me a way to continue the conversation.

My Email 2: Wow, I use that program a lot and ask why he uses it because I'd thought he was a computer programmer from his profile. And ask a few questions to keep the conversation

His Email 2: No, he's in my small sub/field. And 1000's of miles away. This email is like 2 sentences long also with no questions.

My Email 3: See you at the annual conference!

--------------

Another case: Also ok cupid. I email a guy in the fall, again one of the smart ones. he turns out to have been at my graduate school when I was and I was almost certain that we knew some of the same people. He CLOSES his profile. (I know he didn't just block me because I have a second account and tried from that one as well.) Did he just enter witness protection?

I just want to do research

I have started writing grant proposals. Everything is soft money around here, and grants are the only way to advance. Suddenly speaking this language of grants (why didn't I learn earlier?), everything makes more sense in conversations between colleagues.

At a recent conference, I spoke with a person I went to grad school with (who was a TA of mine but PhD was in a different department) who is coming up for tenure now. I asked about the requirements for grants. Some places, even hard money places, have an unofficial requirement that you need at least one major grant to get tenure. It turns out his department only wants a publication record. I never thought that I would say this, but "publish or perish" is so generous. Now that my new norm is "eat what you kill."

As a friend of mine said, "When I would hear faculty members say that they just want to do research, I always interpreted that to mean that they didn't enjoy teaching. Now that I know about grants, I understand."

I just find it unbelievable that people speak in academia as if all it takes is good ideas. Just pursue what you like. As if that were enough. If I could do it over again, I would make a list of the research areas that operate on 100% hard money and choose grad school and research topics only from those areas. Now that I'm at the job stage, I would apply only for jobs that operate on 100% hard money. But most jobs seem not to list that crucial crucial fact.

Starting collaborations

At a conference I spoke with a grad school classmate of mine who was in another PhD program but with similar interests. He is in the first year of a faculty job, and I asked him he was able to get any research done while teaching. He said that he had and even gotten some new collaborations going.

I confessed that I had some difficulty starting collaborations, so I asked him more details about them. One of the two is still in the "looking for collaborators" stage. The other collaboration is with a faculty member at the same university in another department. He's contributing expertise to the project. I asked more details how he met this person --- did this person come to him or did he come to the person.

"Well, I came to them and they came to me." He paused. "Actually, it's my sibling."

Whew. Glad to know others have just as much difficulty as I do starting collaborations. Still he has a guaranteed salary for the next few years and gets to teach and come up for tenure.

Interpersonal conflict: just like a TV show

I have a colleague who is probably about 5 years older, faculty, and had been working on a project that I'm supposed to take over. It took months to make email contact with her, she didn't really apologize for that, and then I concentrated on other projects because I found her long email response time (and associated traits) difficult to deal with. Plus she is beautiful and well-dressed with pictures of her beautiful, well-dressed kid all over her office, and assorted baby equipment.

And I find the project daunting in tedious ways (i.e., it's a time-consuming new trendy method, and it's not clear that all the time put into the method yields much better work than things I already know or other things I could learn).

But I came back to the project, though, because I like the PI and I wanted the PI to be happy with me.

This colleague is difficult in all the ways you can imagine. And yet I had an "after school special" type breakthrough with her when I noticed no pictures of a significant other in her office. Just lots of kid pictures. And no ring on her wedding ring finger, just a ring on the engagement finger that looks nothing like an engagement ring. Or wedding ring, for that matter.

So if she is difficult to deal with maybe that is part of why. And baby equipment in the office could be that she is a single mom without a backup in case the child is sick. Who knows.

Whoa, diss!

I'm applying for back-up postdoc funding in case I don't get a faculty job next year. I had 4 committee members, two of whom were helpful. One was my main advisor. The other active member was the only committee member I fully liked and respected and appreciated their feedback --- really looked up to them. Never worked with them other than on my dissertation paper revisions, but I just really liked them.

This person wrote a recommendation for me and wouldn't put it on file in a dossier service, but said I should ask whenever I needed it. Of course not planning ahead very well, I never did ask because I was always asking too late to expect them to be able to do anything. Now I am planning ahead, starting an application several months before it's due (go me!), and so when I asked if they could update the letter they said no.

The first response was: you really should ask someone at your institution. When I replied that actually they request people from grad school, the second response was that they didn't have time. I thanked them and said I thought I could find someone since the deadline was so far off.

But I feel really stung, especially since I like them so much.

I felt like everything had been going so well. And, otherwise, it is.

The woman who does everything more beautifully than you do writes a grant proposal

There's a woman at my university who is just a year older than I am, and finished her PhD a few years ahead of me. The most famous member of my committee whom I loved and I didn't get to spend much time with was her advisor and has been her co-author on at least half a dozen papers. And she's really nice, so I can't dislike her, as gratifying as that would feel. I met up with her recently, and thought immediately of this Sylvia character who does everything more beautifully. When I was reading these comics back in straight-A high school 4.8 GPA days, I thought I understood, but now I realize I couldn't. Now I do!

Beyond being recognized as a junior expert in one of the areas where I do research (and am only locally a semi-expert), due to having collaborated with her famous advisor on many papers, and doing interesting work, she is also more perfect than I could imagine being personally: she's married to a successful academic guy her age, lives in a great location, with one child so far, is effortlessly thin (looked better a few months post-partum than I look now), nice and really low-key.

The only main requirement of my postdoc is to submit a funding proposal by the end of the academic year for a career development grant. I met up with her and found out she is currently funded by the exact same grant, having gotten it on her first try, which was fantastically helpful and extremely intimidating. Her proposal is extremely well-done. I've not looked at many of these things, but I can really tell hers is exceptionally good. It has coherence and logic: it's an important and central problem, and yet extremely well-defined and manageable, it builds on her areas of expertise, and it comes with a 20 year vision attached. She had a substantial publication list going into the grant application process that shows a variety of projects she can do, and was already junior faculty for several years at the time of submission. I have just my dissertation published, one paper from undergrad, and that's it.

Having read her proposal I have a very clear idea what I could do process-wise to develop it, and yet I feel even more paralyzed than I did before I read it. The most intimidating part: I have 2 months left to produce the grant proposal. She produced the grant proposal 4-5 months early and circulated it widely and got lots of feedback, asked lots of questions to program officer, and that's how she got it on the first try.

Compared with her, I'm a very weak candidate. But I don't have a few years to develop prior to the grant proposal.

The hard part moving forward is swallowing my fear, moving on, and starting to work on it anyhow. I'm definitely not going to succeed if I don't start. And if I don't get this (likely!), I can reuse the material somewhere.

Staying in touch with a postdoc advisor

Dialog is so much easier when I have recently been in contact with my advisor. The longer I spend away from him, the more dread and friction I feel about doing work, and I slow down and feel overwhelmed by all the projects I'm not doing enough work on, and it's exactly like the Doldrums in the Phantom Tollbooth, which is where you end up when you don't know where you are doing.

Then once I see my advisor, I am scared and feel a little stupid for part of the time, but then feel revved up and actually like I am doing just fine and I can do good work that will uphold my part of the traineeship bargain, and actually become super responsible and responsive.

Yesterday I met with my advisor. I was totally dreading it because I spent a few weeks under the weather, partially from physical illness and partially from the accumulated mental sludge and inertia from having been away from normal life for awhile. I was convinced that there was a good shot that I wasn't going to have my position next year, and that he would tell me just how disappointed he was in me and that he's sorry it didn't work out. It's not entirely paranoia on my part. I have been told similar things before and left to flail --- being asked to leave an academic program even --- though the flailing was temporary and certainly not fatal to me or even my career. But I forgot that he really wants this to work too.

Anyhow, paranoia over because he spoke to me like I am definitely going to be here next year. So I feel relieved. And we spoke about new projects and the next steps and how I am going to apply for funding real soon now.

As a result of this meeting and the burst of energy, when I got the "training grant annual update" form in the email today I wrote up the report and sent it back within an hour. Had I gotten the email before the meeting I would have sat on it hoping that I would do enough work to make myself worthy of filling out the form. Delusionally thinking, perhaps, that I could write and submit a couple papers before the end of the month so that I would have something on there other than my dissertation papers.

But the right way to think about it is to do all the work for the annual report, work hard and if I do happen to submit a paper I will add it to the report and resend it.

Life is so much easier when I'm happy and optimistic. When I'm in the middle of a procrastinatory funk, it's so hard to regain my optimism. Though maybe it just takes a meeting. Or even just any human contact.

This is my second consecutive day of good work habits. If I keep this up, maybe I will even start to feel like I am not just pretending to be responsible.

The lack of obstacles is intimidating

I finally got the data that our "collaborators" had been withholding. I emailed the PI at the other university during the first week of the month, and twice more, asking for the data. He answered his email towards the end of the month. And I got it that day. And now there are no obstacles. I find that extremely intimidating.

The only thing standing in my way is me. (I am the change I am looking for?)

I went on a date with this engineer who told me of his first post-college job. He was hired on a 6 month contract into a group that was originally a bit over half a dozen people. He hadn't learned this area in college, and wanted the opportunity to be trained in it. When he arrived, the group was down to 3. Then the other two quit. And then the last one quit. And he was the only one in the group, and stayed up as late as he had to in order to do all of his work, and bought lots of books. And he did all the projects that the group was given. He is first generation --- he moved to US in late junior high --- so maybe has good work ethic from that. Whatever it is, I am in awe.

Were I in the situation I would take the many excuses available --- didn't know the material, group left, no mentorship, no contact with anyone --- and decide maybe I could do it, but it wasn't worth it. Worth what, I'm not sure: the time? the ego risk? And do just the minimum and hope to find something more suitable.

A friend of mine said that sometimes he thinks that in dating I am hoping to meet someone who will be a good model to improve my work habits. In fact I am.

Paranoia in"Collaboration": assertiveness lesson #598

I am joining a collaboration between my advisor and a group at another university about 1-2 hour flight from here. This is a collaboration where my advisor's lab is providing to the project something not available anywhere else. The rest of the project is not so innovative --- there are several dozen similar things.

The PI described the project and another two to me, and basically wants to meet me before we start collaborating, so they will fly down there for a few days. And soon. On phone call 2, he says that I should have as much done as possible in advance and that I should have one of those 4 am to 10 pm days, and it will be just one day.

In order to have work done in advance, I need information. He refers me to his peons (well, actually junior faculty), and they send me some information that is not adequate for planning. Two weeks of email exchange and finally they agree to send me "everything."

Some time passes in between all this --- some legitimate, some procrastination because my mind got off the project --- so my memory of the conversation is fuzzy enough that I don't catch on right away that I was only sent "everything", not actually everything: it's less than 1/3 of the project and my advisor's contribution isn't there. But I spend another week or two thinking I must have misremembered.

Finally I schedule a phone call with a junior faculty member who reveals that the PI is not actually comfortable sharing, or "collaborating", until he's published a certain amount on the project. As if he is afraid that his collaborator's postdoc is going to steal his entire project away.

The junior faculty member promises to send my advisor's contribution, but says I need to speak with the PI if I want the other 2/3 that is necessary to have "as much as possible done" in advance as he said.

I am used to standing in my own way by procrastinating --- I could have twice as many publications if I didn't check email or distract myself --- but it is weird realizing that there are actual other people that are real barriers and how important it is to be on my toes so that I can call b.s. when necessary. Because I wasn't on my toes and assertive, a month passed which was almost completely unproductive for this project.

In fact, I almost feel like I have to budget in this wasted time: how many hours and weeks to convince collaborators to actually collaborate.

Another funny/disastrous date

Last night I went out with this guy from a few blocks away whom I met on facebook.

When he picked me up I had to go back and turn off the radio and I made the mistake of mentioning it was Obama's press conference. He was ranting about socialism in the stimulus bill within 1 minute, but also about the lack of sufficient infrastructure funding (isn't that contradictory?), and continued for the next few minutes even as I tried to at least ground the subject in facts ("Which economists back that up? Did you see the Congressional Budget Office report on stimulus multipliers?", His reply: "I don't need economists. I'm a capitalist. Obama has all these socialist economists who want the government to take over the economy."), so I knew before even getting into his car that it was pretty much a write-off date.

He thought similarly because he changed our plans, and instead of going to the nice area to walk around and have coffee at a Barnes and Noble, he decided we should go to a B&N in a strip mall. He didn't order anything. I paid for my own tea.

When I mentioned that I go to a hip neighborhood sometimes, he said something about how he hopes a homophobe would have a fit there. He had been raised pretty conservative, so I was curious whether he was anti-homophobia (= possibly gay) or just neutral about it, but when I asked him to elaborate he would only say, "There are gay people there, but they don't hurt anyone. They're totally harmless. You can walk around there and it's not like they do anything to you. It's not like they attack you like in boys' dormitories at single-sex schools. You didn't know that they attack each other in boys' dormitories?"

Shortly after, I told him that the guy I dated this summer had recently come out to me. He stopped the car (we were in a parking lot) and said, "There is no way THIS (gesturing at the length of my seated body still wrapped in my coat I'd been wearing the entire time) turned someone gay. You could turn Elton John straight!" somehow managing to make me feel simultaneously objectified and flattered. And I definitely did not want to take off my coat.

On the way home, I told him the story of the religious adulterer (posted about earlier) and he got so angry ranting about pretend religious people that I thought he was going to crash us into the median. I thought about which skeletons he might have in his closet, and I did get him to reveal a past engagement he'd gotten into after a month of dating and she broke off after 2 weeks.

I have to admit it: I kind-of like disasterous dates as long as they are not the only dates in my life.

Published! Officially finished with dissertation

My final dissertation paper got accepted for publication. All the papers are well-placed, and this one is in a journal with highest impact factor of all. The average impact factor of the journals where my dissertation papers published is. . . well, extremely high. I mean, not Science/Nature high, not even close (though arguably one should be looking at the log of impact factors rather than impact factors themselves because the high ones are so high), but probably higher than many of the dissertations to come out of my program. And they are all single-authored papers, and all in journals where that's very unusual.

So I am really happy about this. Especially since this last paper actually has the chance of making a difference in the field, though also of pissing people off. And that is actually why I delayed submitting it. That and the fact that my committee never seemed to like that paper very much, and it didn't come off super well as a job talk during my first year on the job market.

But the journal took it, and that's all that matters!


Success is scary. It raises the bar of what I feel like I need to accomplish now. Rationally, that thought doesn't make any sense. An accomplishment can never be a bad thing. Not every piece of work is fantastic, and you certainly can't start any project expecting it to be fantastic.

Nonetheless, every project I'm working on so far is at the very beginning stages, and I am not yet feeling absorbed in anything which I find scary and distracting.

And it's hard to feel absorbed because as I am starting projects I wonder if the ideas I'm having are as fresh and original as my dissertation papers. But that's not productive. It's not like I set off on my dissertation looking for something creative. I was just trying stuff, almost on a whim, and things came together. Some projects will come together to be fresh and get well-published. Others are like book-keeping, and they add to what we have but in the same way as others' work does.

All the work habit books talk about turning off your inner editor in order to get started. These books are talking about writing, but the same idea applies to research. Try a little idea, and then see where it goes. As the title of one of my favorite writing books says, "No plot, no problem!" That's for writing novels, but the same idea applies. And it's fun to read about recklessly writing a high volume crap in order to be able to pull a novel out of the mess. Maybe I should get it from the library again and reread.

And the height of non-rational thoughts: I see all the bad economic news and I imagine not doing any work and not getting renewed and continuing on my lack of work streak in any job that I take and . . . well, that's already ridiculous.

If I have a solid hour of work on one project, that's a start, and a solid day, that's great, and a solid week, I will really feel absorbed. Attainable goals; one foot in front of the other until I get to other side. That's how you cross a wire across the Twin Towers (as I heard the guy talking on NPR on Friday), and it's how you do anything.

So much easier said than done. It's totally self-aggrandizing to say that my pretty high impact factors put me anywhere like crossing the Twin Towers on a wire, but even if they do: walking doesn't change, no matter where you are. Attainable goals. Attainable goals. Attainable goals.