Dr. Shellie

I have the best two students in the world. Smart, motivated, focussed, positive, cheerful, helpful, and happy to come work with me in the fall.

Now off to finish that postdoc…!

Dear Professor Shellie,

Thank you for your time and effort during the application process. I received offers from your university and Highest-Ranked Super-Famous University. It was a very hard decision as these are both excellent universities. At Highest-Ranked Super-Famous University, I was offered a project with Extremely Famous Tenured Full Professor to study Hottest Topic Ever. After giving it careful thought, I have decided to go to Highest-Ranked Super-Famous University.

Best wishes,
Formerly-Prospective Student

Dear Formerly-Prospective Student,

I am shocked, absolutely shocked that you chose a position with Extremely Famous Tenured Full Professor at Highest-Ranked Super-Famous University over the RA position I offered you in my group! Where is your sense of vision?! Just wait until my lab takes over the world.

Best wishes,
Prof. Shellie

Regular readers will know that I enjoy talking to strangers, notably in airplanes, shoe stores, and taxis. This week I made a trip to my new university (we’ll call it AU) to take care of some business (attend a workshop, meet the university’s representatives in DC to talk about grant funding, look at lab space, see a research facility I need, etc.). On the way from the airport to the university, I discovered that my taxi driver lives in a pretty tough neighborhood not far from campus. He ended up telling me about his kids, and how he spends a lot of time driving them to after-school activities and tutoring so that they don’t end up with any time to get in trouble. His older son is a junior in high school and wants to be an astronomer.

"What I really want," said the taxi driver, "is for him to go to AU. But AU isn’t for everyone."

I asked him about his grades, which were good, and said some sort of abstract things about how it was possible to get financial aid, and that I think the university would really like to encourage more kids from his neighborhood to attend, and then I thought…. hey, wait a minute. I am the university. I mean, my name’s on the faculty page and all. I’m a professor. If this guy’s kid is a good student, I can probably help him get admitted. I gave him my email and told him to have his son contact me.

I thought this was an obvious point. But maybe it is not: A tenure rate of less than 50% is not attractive.

Suppose you are 30-something years old, and have moved all over the country and/or world for your career already, having done undergrad, masters, PhD, and postdoc in different locations. Would you rather go to a university where your colleagues expect you to get tenure and will support you in getting there, and the assumption is that unless something goes pretty wrong, you’ll be able to stick around after the first 5-6 years? Where you could maybe buy a house and expect to keep it for a while? Or would you rather go to a university where on average, only 50% of professors get tenure? That’s a one in two chance of getting kicked out.

Some people will always go for the more prestigious university, even if the tenure rate is low. Those universities can offer concrete (if potentially temporary) advantages. But I think that many (in particular, women and two-career couples) who would rather not be subjected to yet another high-stakes "testing" process at this stage of their lives, with the possible downside being  another job search, period of uncertainty, and possible cross-country move five years later.

An amazing thing happened last weekend. I was in the shoe store, hunting for work shoes. It was the type of shoe store where they pay great attention to measuring your feet and describe to you in detail the technical construction of each shoe. All the shoes are ergonomically correct. I tried on a pair of suede sneakers.

"Not right," I said. "These ones don’t make me look older."

A gray-haired woman sitting nearby laughed. "Maybe you could dye your hair gray!" she said.

Another customer asked why I was trying to look older– was it for my job? "That’s right," I said. "I’m trying to look more like a professor."

"Oh, are you a professor?" asked the gray-haired woman. "So am I."

I explained that I was almost a professor, starting in the fall. We started to chat. She told me her name. I realized that she was actually a Very Important Female Professor, someone whose name I knew, who I had read about several times in our university newspaper. She showed me the shoes she was trying on.

"I’m trying to look more authoritative," she said. I found it funny (and somehow comforting) that Very Important Female Professor had exactly the same goals for her shoes as I did. We went about buying our shoes, and chatted some more. On the way out, she paused. "Email me if you want to have lunch some time," she said.

So I did.