Dr. Shellie

I’m giving a talk next week to the women grad students in my old department about life after grad school.

What do you wish you knew when you were a grad student?

Any interesting comments will go into my talk– speak up!

This week, two students wrote me to ask about possible PhD positions. They are both from University X in Far-Away-Country Y. I wanted to get an idea of what good GPA and test scores would be for Country Y, and so I went to talk to two co-workers from there. While we were talking, another student came in who happened to be an alum of University X. I showed him the students’ CV’s. "Look," I said– "they both say they are ranked 2nd in the class. What does that mean?"

Within 5 hours, I got an email from one of the prospective students. He had heard on his alumni bulletin board that I had been confused about how two students in the same university could have the same class rank, and wanted to explain how it worked. I am impressed! News travels fast in the small world of academia.

Clearly, I have to be careful about what I say in the lab from now on!

I was helping a friend to sort out a job offer today. Crazy– after going through the whole job search process last year, I have started to love negotiation. It’s a new kind of puzzle that’s fun to solve. When you hit on the right formulation of your strategy– and the right words to express your position– you find you are saying something that is honest but also powerful. The negotiation moves you forward.

If this sounds crazy, check out "Pitch Like a Girl". It’s a helfpul book about how to see negotiation as a process that builds value for both parties, rather than a process that pits two sides against each other to create a winner and a loser. Straightforward word substitution ("faculty offer" for "deal", "university" for "company", etc.) yields useful advice for the academic!

Some people think that it is much easier for women to get faculty jobs in science and engineering than for men. After all, universities are "under pressure" to hire women, for reasons of political correctness– aren’t they?

A senior faculty told me, a few years back, "Yes, there are incentives for hiring women. But don’t worry– we would never hire anyone we weren’t going to hire anyway." Initially I was mystified by this statement. Now I think I understand what he meant. Here’s my impression.

Basically, getting a faculty job is very competitive. First of all, you need a PhD, possibly postdoc experience (depending on the field), a good research record, strong letters of recommendation, etc. There are many applicants for each position. A number of applicants generally have PhD’s from excellent universities, worked in well-known research groups, and have extensive publication lists.

In any given year, a department may or may not have openings for one or more new faculty members. If there is an opening, the department will advertise the position and solicit applications. They then narrow down the list to about 5 or 6 candidates and invite them to campus to interview. Of these, there will be some number that the department would really like to hire. It could be one, or two, but is probably not all 6. The people in the "want to hire" category all seem intelligent, hard-working, and dynamic, and would all be excellent additions to the research and teaching programs of the department. But the department can’t make offers to everyone, so they will try to rank people. This can be very subjective. Maybe people think that hiring in Candidate A’s subfield is of higher priority this year, or that it is most important that Candidate B could take advantage of a new research facility which is currently underutilized, or that Candidate C’s subfield is the "hottest", and so on. If they really can’t agree, they may not hire anyone.

If the department has more people that it wants to hire than there are openings, it is sometimes possible to "create" another position. This comes down to money. When a new faculty member is hired, the university has to allocate resources for her/his salary and initial startup costs for research equipment. As a result, a department can’t just add new people arbitrarily– the number of openings is determined by a negotiation process with the Dean and/or higher levels of the administration about where the money is coming from. In some (but not all) universities, there may be a little extra money set aside somewhere, maybe at the Dean’s level, to make hiring more flexible. For example, there may be money for strategically hiring star researchers away from competing institutions, or for starting new programs, making spousal hires, or any number of other "special cases", depending on the policies of the university and its governing structure. In some cases, it may be possible for the department to get money (or part of the money) for an extra position from the Dean if one of the people they want to hire is female or a minority. Or not.

So yes, being female can help. But a department will not hire you if they didn’t "want to hire you anyway." When a department hires a new faculty member, that person could potentially be working there for the next 30 years. The consensus among people I have talked to is that no one is going to make an offer to someone they don’t really want– it just isn’t worth it. But if someone is female or a minority, and the department wants them, the department might have an extra mechanism available to hire them.

Of course, you will probably not know which departments this is true of ahead of time. But the bottom line is that if there are particular places you are strongly interested in working, you should see if there might be opportunities there, even if there is no job advertised in your particular field right now. If you have a colleague there, sending them an email with your CV and saying you’d appreciate hearing of any opportunities isn’t a bad idea. If you have your application packet assembled already, you can always try sending it to departments without advertised positions, modifying your cover letter to explain that you have a strong interest in their particular university and would be like to be considered if a position were to open up. You don’t want to waste time (yours and theirs) spamming hundreds of schools, and its best to focus most of your time on places that definitely have jobs. But its also worth putting in a little time to look beyond the advertisements and go after the "dream jobs" that you are really interested in.

By the way, this advice is not just for women and minorities. I know a man who was doing extremely well in his job search and racking up lots of interviews. Several universities offered to "try and open up positions" for him when they realized he was a "hot" candidate. That option is open for anyone lucky enough to be in his situation!

* For the purposes of this discussion, I’m talking about tenure-track assistant professorships in major research universities in the US in science and engineering fields that have significantly less that 50% participation by women. Remove any of those qualifying adjectives and all bets are off– you tell me. 

Our wider circle of friends includes a lot of people who are not academics. They are surprised that we are moving out of the area for my job. Why aren’t we just staying here? I’m surprised to find that many people (including highly-educated professionals and masters-level engineers) don’t know much about how the academic job market works.

They may know that some universities are more prestigious than others (e.g. "Harvard is famous"), but they don’t really understand the difference between research universities, small colleges, and non-research-intensive state schools. They don’t realize that the type of work you do can be very different at each. If I tell them that Postdoc U. wasn’t hiring in my field, they sometimes ask, "Well, did you apply to Masters-Level-State-School-Without-a-PhD-Program-Nearby?" No, I didn’t. I wanted to be at a major research university with the resources I need to do the science I want to do, including research facilities, smart PhD students, and faculty with active research programs.

They don’t know that it is extremely competitive to get a faculty position at a major research university. They don’t know that there are a few hundred applicants for each spot. They don’t fully realize that it takes 5-10 years of specialized training post college before you can apply for such a position. They don’t necessarily think that being a professor is prestigious or a major achievement.

Sometimes though, it turns out that their parents are academics, or they started a PhD program before leaving for industry, or their sister married a guy who is an English professor. Then they get it.

Meanwhile, there are the academics. Some of them are equally clueless. They don’t seem to get why you wouldn’t just move anywhere for the sake of the best (="most prestigious") job.

Fortunately, attitudes in academia are changing. More and more senior professors do understand that location matters. They know this from running searches to recruit new faculty– the major barrier to hiring talented people is location. For some people, "location" means finding a city with a low cost of living to support kids and family. For others, location means finding a job in the same place as a spouse or partner (the "two-body problem"), whether that means two academic jobs or one academic job and one professional job. For others, location means living near parents or extended family, or in the same region they grew up. For now, all these things still tend to be regarded as problematic– if you express a preference in location, people might say that you have "location issues" or "constraints" or a two-body "problem"*. I’d prefer if we could get beyond this idea that having a partner or kids with preferences of their own, or wanting to be near family, or preferring one area of the country over the other, or not wanting to feel too poor to own a house, or any number of other desires and wishes are necessarily "problems," rather than a real part of life as a human and not a robot, and that having no opinion is the norm. But as long as it is so incredibly competitive to get an academic job, and the number of possible jobs fulfilling any one person’s preferences is so low, and the number of other applicants competing for them is so high, and the chance of using your background and training and specialized knowledge outside of academic requires such a major adjustment in what you thought you were going to do for the rest of your life, these things certainly can feel like problems, to the person looking for a job. At least more and more academics are realizing that such "problems" are normal and have to be creatively addressed in order to recruit and retain talented faculty.

Meanwhile, I’m doing a little self-promotion among the non-academics. "I’m really happy to be going to AU," I say. "Getting the job was really competitive. There are over a hundred people applying for each one of these slots. And it’s a location we really like…" I feel a wee bit obnoxious, but it’s worth a try.

* To which I always think, "I’d rather have a two-body problem than not have my husband!"