Dr. Shellie

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!"