The end of an era

So I did it. I finally made a decision and accepted a job offer! In less than six months I will be an Assistant Professor. Mostly I'm excited at the prospect of having my own lab, but every so often my brain goes, "Holy s--t! I have a real job!"

I've been training for this job for... 12 years now? Not content with my string of unsatisfying jobs in retail and strangely excited by my cousin's college course catalog, I started taking courses at the college down the street in 2000. After moving to one of the local universities and experimenting with a wide variety of courses, I finally settled on a major. Somehow this snowballed into volunteering in a lab, writing an honours thesis, and applying to grad school. Then came five years of masochism grad school, where I spent countless hours training to be a professor one day. The training continued with a postdoctoral position, the idea being that you are more independent but still being pounded into shape for that fateful day when you become a professor.

It feels really weird to know that the training era is over. Not that I won't still be continually learning new things, but now I will be responsible for training other people instead of being trained myself. Freaky.

Also, I today I got to delete all my RSS feeds for job ads! My google reader is a little less full, but I'm sure I can find something entertaining on the internet to take up that space.

Decisions, Decisions

I am about to complain about something that will probably not garner me a lot of sympathy: I have multiple job offers and making a decision is really hard!

Yes, I know. I do realize that this is the academic equivalent of First World Problems. There are starving children in Africa postdocs with no job offers. Of all the problems one could have, this really isn't such a bad one. No matter which decision I make, I will end up with a tenure-track faculty position at an R1 institution (RU/VH in the new Carnegie classification system, which no one on the job search wiki seems to use, but I digress). So really, I'm in a pretty awesome position and I know it.

But despite knowing how lucky I am, making such a huge life decision still makes me feel like my head is going to explode. What if I make the wrong decision? What if I end up hating everyone I work with? What if they all end up hating me? What if I work my ass off and still don't get tenure? Where am I going to have the best luck attracting good grad students? What about all the fringe benefits: which place has the best health insurance, retirement plans, etc. Which climate do I prefer, too hot or too cold? Will the start-up package be enough to cover what I need? The list of questions running through my mind is pretty endless at this point.

To combat my current mental disorganization, I am creating an overly-complicated pro/con spreadsheet, complete with ridiculous colour-coding and a bizarre scheme for awarding points for different factors. I will probably revise the points scheme at least 3 more times before the end of the day tomorrow. I suspect that after spending days rating and calculating, one school will emerge the winner - at which point I will either feel happy or disappointed and will know which place I prefer. I suppose I could just draw a name out of a hat and see how I feel about it to save myself the time and stress, but there's just something about colour-coded spreadsheets I really enjoy.

The Hidden Dangers of Job Interviews

When you are invited for a campus interview it is completely normal to be excited. Other people will congratulate you and be excited for you. Of course, it is a fantastic thing. What no one ever talks about are the downsides to interviewing. Namely, that it kills your productivity.

With my first job interview the problem was that I had to spend an enormous amount of time preparing my talk and google-stalking all the faculty to find out about their research and the school and whatnot. A solid two weeks before the interview was devoted to interview prep at the expense of all my other work.

This latest interview took up much less of my time on prep, as I only needed to tweak an existing job talk. However, interviewing means plane travel in the middle of winter with inconsiderate sick people coughing all over the place. This time I came home post-interview to discover I had inherited the germs expelled by the woman sitting next to me, thus dramatically reducing my ability to write manuscripts.

Productivity aside, the other hidden danger is caused by the fancy interview clothes one is forced to wear. 1) you look like an ass at the airport, travelling in a suit while everyone else is in jeans and sweatshirts. 2) Winter + dress shoes = increased likelihood of falling down and making a fool of yourself (yes, I did this). 3) Pencil skirt + getting in/out of a pick-up truck = looking like an idiot and possibly flashing people. Invest in a pant suit or nice trousers for your job talk, totally worth it.

Rejection Letters

'Tis now the time of year when the bevy of rejection letters arrives in ones mailbox. If you're a normal person anyway. I'm sure there is some superstar out there who is getting tons of job offers and has yet to feel the sting of rejection. I, however, am not that superstar and my inbox is amassing a collection of "I regret to inform you" emails.

And yet, I haven't been truly disappointed or upset by any of my rejections for job applications this year. Given the craptastic market and the stories I keep hearing about people not getting any interviews at all, I'm mostly happy that I got some interviews and that they are all at pretty good places. I recall finding the rejection from grad schools more hurtful, like they didn't think I was good enough to accept into their program (those bastards!). But I guess after years of rejection from funding agencies and journals (I'm looking at you Science, Nature, Nat Neurosci, PNAS, Psyc Sci, J Neurosci), I've gotten to a point where the rejection is just part of the job. I would, of course, prefer not to be rejected, but when the other 15 13 (got two more emails) rejection letters I'm expecting show up in my inbox I will just shrug and move on.

I'm actually finding the rejection letters themselves really interesting. Although they all have the same basic info ("We don't want you!") every school has their own take on the rejection form letter. Some were very formal (Dear Dr. <LastName>), some were more casual (Dear <FirstName>), while some went full-on form-letter with a "Dear Applicant" or not using a salutation at all and just getting right to the rejection part. Some have cushioned the rejection nicely, "Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your application. I regret to inform you that you have not been chosen for further consideration for this position. Please know that this should not be considered a negative reflection on your work. The pool of candidates was large and the search committee was forced to make very difficult decisions. We wish you the very best in your career and future endeavors." Others were very short and to the point, "I am writing to share officially the news that the position has been filled. We wish you the best of luck and we thank you for your interest in University X."

With each new rejection letter I take a few moments to enjoy the language and psychology of it then I file it away in a folder and go about my business. I haven't yet gotten to the point where I feel the need to attempt this tactic:

via Geeks Are Sexy

An Overabundance of PhD's

Over the weekend I was catching up on some blog reading and I was quite happy to see this post on "The Professor Is In" about supply and demand for PhD's. Here is a snippet:

Never, ever, at any time, not even once, was there a discussion of the question: do these Ph.D. students we’re admitting have a reasonable chance of using their Ph.D.s for employment after leaving our program? That question was entirely irrelevant to our deliberations. The ultimate professional fate of the graduate students had absolutely no significance in their value to us as faculty. Instead, their value to us as faculty hinged on:

• Our egos. The “best” (ie, most successful and famous) faculty members had the most students. The quantity of a faculty member’s Ph.D. students boosted the faculty member’s status vis-a-vis colleagues and conferred bragging rights.
• Our teaching needs. The department quite literally could not run without the teaching labor of the graduate students. In one of my departments the entire first, second, and third year language programs in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (some 30,000 credit hours annually) were handled entirely by graduate students.
• Our legitimacy. A department without a Ph.D. program is a second-class department nationally and on campus. A department with a smaller Ph.D. program is a “lesser” department than one with a larger Ph.D. program. No faculty member would willingly work to reduce the size of the department’s graduate program, because it would reduce the status of the program, and thus the status of the faculty members associated with it. Ultimately, it would reduce the standing of those faculty members for things like raises and research funding.

A few points to add based on my own experiences:
1) part of a department's budget comes from how many students they have. More grad students often means more money in the department coffers. I was pretty shocked when I found out that PhD students were worth twice as much money to the department as MA students... and then the 'fast-track' program to get students into the PhD without finishing their Master's made a whole lot more sense.
2) In my experience with individual faculty members it has been less about 'ego' when it comes to having many grad students and more about productivity and the ability to obtain funding. The (often misguided) idea is that having more grad students means you can get more research done and this will increase your odds of obtaining grants. It is typically the quality of the students and the quality of the student-supervisor relationship that matters much more than their sheer number. One superstar grad student paired with the right supervisor will likely accomplish much more than five good grad students paired with a sub-optimal supervisory match.

Anyone who has been on the job market in the past 5 years knows that there are far more PhD's graduating and needing jobs than there are academic jobs available. For some this is not a problem, they are excited to leave academia and move into the (typically much higher paying) world of industry. Most grad students, however, are accepted into PhD programs with the hope and promise of one day being tenured professors. Sadly, many will not get tenure-track faculty positions and will feel like they have to "settle" for a position other than the faculty position they were working towards for the better part of a decade. In my opinion, fixing this problem really requires that faculty are more thoughtful about which students they take on, everyone is realistic and honest about their job prospects, and students are taught about (and prepared for) jobs other than tenure-track faculty positions so that they know what their options are.