Status
I am doing more travelling this week, visiting several universities and hunting for faculty positions. By now, I have been to a number of different places, either as an official seminar speaker, or to "drop by" and visit someone I know on the faculty. The most confusing part of these visits is that I never know in advance how I will be treated. If the person I am visiting has decided in their mind that I am a "Postdoc/Grad Student type person," I generally get treated pretty badly. That is: they sometimes keep me waiting before talking to me, tell me they are too busy to meet with me that day and pass me off to one of their grad students, and fail to offer lunch or dinner. On the other hand, if the person I am visiting has mentally filed me under "Promising young person who is a potential Assistant Professor, possibly right here at this University," I get treated exceptionally well. They ask me about my opinion of the field, where it’s going, what I want to do next, trade gossip, and offer to reimburse my expenses.
At any given university, I generally talk to a number of people. So sometimes the way I get treated varies quite a lot from person to person. And often, someone who starts out treating me like a unimportant Postdoc/Grad Student will change their tune when I demonstrate that I know not only what I am talking about, but know all the same people they know. (And presumably review their papers!)
All this is much better on official job interviews. There the general assumption is that I should be treated as a potential professor, not a grad student. Moreover, the university knows in advance that it is paying for my time, in the form of travel expenses, hotel reimbursements, etc. People value what they pay for.
