making lemonade out of lemons

I am not a spoiled baby. Now that I’ve had a decent night’s sleep, I am better able reframe this as an opportunity for growth versus a glaring sign that I suck.

Instead of thinking about how underimpressed I was by the grad students, I’m trying to think about how I’ve never taught a graduate level course. “Weaker” grad students might be a better introduction to graduate-level teaching & mentoring than “strong” graduate students, who are likely to be more demanding and have higher expectations.

If nothing else, I’m done with this whole process for at least 2 more years, and I’ll be free from my lab. Hubby and I can move on with our lives, even if it’s not in the location we really wanted.

I’ll have a good excuse to check out the publishers’ booths when I’m at my national conference next week (i.e., saving time in the long run, while productively using unscheduled free moments during the day).

I’m still going to buy champagne for my grad department’s annual conference party, and attempt to celebrate the positive outcome of my search.

clearly I just suck

I just received a rejection letter from the small liberal arts college I’d visited last week.

• 35 applications
• 12? phone/initial interviews
• 8 campus visit invitations (6 completed visits)
• just 1 offer

Clearly I just suck, given the measly rate of return on all my effort.

whirlwind week

A lot has happened this week, both good and bad.

I went for my last interview a few days ago. This was at a small, liberal arts college in the northern midwest. It was a great interview, and I was very pleased by what I saw during my campus visit. The students were great, and the faculty were friendly. Start-up resources would be abundant. The department will get a new home in a new building within the next few years, so nice facilities are also on the horizon. The only drawback is that it’s at a liberal arts college, so I’d have relatively substantial teaching responsibilities and reduced research responsibilities. This also means that I’d have “less status” in the field as a researcher. I’m still conflicted about how I feel about this.

I heard from my top choice school the day I returned home, and they’ve offered the position to somebody else. This first-choice candidate accepted their offer, so I’m out of luck with my first choice department. They expressed a reason why their first-choice candidate was their first choice, and from my perspective, it’s a total cop-out. But, it really doesn’t matter since there’s nothing I can do anyway.

I received an offer I don’t really want the day I returned to work following the liberal arts interview trip. I interviewed for this position a couple of weeks ago, and observed some major red flags during my campus visit. I have very mixed feelings about the offer. Some points of it were better than I’d expected (i.e., salary), but it’s not enough to eliminate those red flags. The biggie is the quality of the grad students. I’m concerned about how productive I could be in this position with what would likely be grossly inadequate student support. The teaching responsibilities would be less, but the research expectations would be higher. This is worrisome, because from my perspective, weak graduate students are dead weight, and are not “better than nothing.” It doesn’t help that this university is situated in a town that’s not particularly nice. An offer is better than nothing, but I’m not sure how much better than nothing this offer truly is.

If nothing else, taking this offer would get Hubby and I out of our current house, which seems more and more vulnerable every day we live there. I had the mail held while I was at the small liberal arts college, and the bundle of accumulated mail was stolen from our mailbox on Friday afternoon. On Sunday morning, somebody checked out all the windows at the basement level of our house and left footprints in the snow as proof. Just this morning, we found proof that somebody had been messing with our front door while we slept. Needless to say, we’re deeply unhappy about this situation, and want to move as soon as possible.

I’m also spurred to move on by the situation in my lab, which has never been great but has recently become a bit worse. Recently a grad student has asked me to join hu on a paper as 3rd author. Grad student had added a model to the paper without a priori hypotheses for certain effects. Hu wanted to include the model, but also wanted its addition to make sense with the rest of the paper. My reading of the manuscript revealed that it wasn’t foreshadowed adequately, and I spent quite a bit of time adding statements, etc., in support of the model and to make the hypotheses stand out more clearly. I also made major revisions to the methods & results section of this scientific paper. A week later hu poked his head in my colleague’s office while I was meeting with colleague, and told me that the lab’s big boss instructed hu to ignore my comments on the introduction. Grad student was quite embarassed when hu told me this, and tried to downplay it as big boss’s desire to submit the paper with minimal revisions at this point.

I can appreciate wanting to take the path of least resistance in terms of submitting papers for review, but the way this was done was pretty disrespectful. Clearly I’m not good for much around here other than doing other people’s analyses and checking papers’ formatting.

I am so out of here ASAP.

still nothing

I wish I could give a more exciting update, but I still don’t have any job offers. I did, however, receive a rejection letter on Friday morning (the “cooking” job). Not a big shocker, nor a huge disappointment. I’m starting to freak out because my options are becoming more and more limited. I leave for a final interview tomorrow at a small, midwestern liberal arts college similiar to my alma mater (Keep your fingers crossed for me, please!. I also just submitted an application for a position overseas, in Hubby’s dad’s current country of residence.

At this point, I’m just feeling resigned and flat. It doesn’t help that I’m in the thick of the PMDD blues (started taking medication again on Thursday, but it’s not working very well yet), and just feel like a distracted piece of crap while trying to prepare for this interview and cope with my phone’s silence.  It also doesn’t help that Hubby’s going through a crisis at work (i.e., is so frustrated that he’s getting closer and closer to walking away and finding something else), and would love for me to get the job in his dad’s current home country. The fact that neither of us really speak the language spoken in this area is not even on his radar, while I start to panic at the thought of having to lecture in a language I haven’t studied in years.

One thing at a time… one thing at a time…. one thing at a time….

no offers

No news following any of my interviews yet.  I’d hoped to have heard something from either of my two top choices by now, but my phone’s been silent. It should go without saying that this is disappointing. It’s also embarrassing; the individual who had my position before me required 2-3 tries on the market before hu secured an acceptable position, and it looks like history is repeating itself. Plus, the other 2 postdocs affiliated with my lab have already accepted or will soon accept good offers.

Regardless, in the context of my everyday interactions in this lab, I can handle the embarrassment of a failed attempt on the job market. I think I may die of shame if I have to hold my head high while at my national conference in a few weeks (i.e., during interactions with my mentors and colleagues from graduate school, all of whom have secured tenure-track jobs in a timely fashion). Thinking about this is enough to bring me to tears, so I’d better stop thinking about it and just get back to work.

the interviews are finished?

I hope the interviews are now truly finished. There is still one more on my schedule for later in the month, but I hope that I won’t need to go on it. I hope I’ll have an offer by the end of the week, because if I don’t, I’ll probably start freaking out bigtime. Be forewarned. By the end of the week, I will either be on cloud 9 or calling my shrink for a quick med refill.

I had my 5th interview last week, and it was fine. I have grave concerns about the position, and suspect I will be extremely reluctant to take an offer. The fact that I’ve had a sick stomach since eating dinner with the search committee doesn’t help! The big sticking point is that this department “doesn’t do start-up packages.” This is a big problem, but one that probably doesn’t make sense unless you’re an academic.

A start-up package is sort of like a signing bonus, but it’s a bonus intended to help new faculty get their research programs going. In my field, start-up funds can be used to purchase equipment (e.g., computers, software, or any tangible items required for research), pay for expenses (e.g., travel to conferences, membership fees for professional organizations), or pay participants for being in research studies. In my field, the last item on the list is perhaps the most important, because it’s hard to get people to take part in research if they don’t get anything in return. They’ll do it, but it’s a lot easier if you can pay them even $5 for their time. Packages can be as small as $5K or as large as $80K; it depends upon the field, what’s needed to get going, and how skillfully a new faculty member can negotiate. This money sits in an account and gets used within a period of time during the first years in that position. Whatever isn’t used might or might not be lost. Faculty can’t write themselves a check from start-up, as these funds truly are for research purposes.

Not having start-up funds is a huge obstacle. This school mentioned that they will negotiate certain necessary research-related expenses, but won’t call it start-up because apparently that implies that these funds will be used to accomplish X research and if X research isn’t completed by the time the new hire goes up for tenure, then there’s no way the new hire can be tenured. This might seem reasonable, but it actually makes no sense and is very, very odd. What’s not encouraging is that faculty members repeatedly mentioned writing grants to purchase moderately priced software packages (translation: they’ve begged for a piece of software that costs about $1000). The package I work in every day costs $1800 for a single computer.

It’s also problematic that the teaching load has suddenly increased by 1 class each semester, and can’t be reduced unless an undefined “substantial” amount of research is being accomplished.

These are major red flags, and I doubt I will be able to seriously consider this position.

In the meantime, I’ve been reflecting upon my limited success on the job market thus far. I have to admit, I’m pretty disappointed about my prospects. I already know I’m off the list for one position, and only one of the remaining possibilities is truly great. A second would likely be workable, but the other two would be challenging at best.

I’m also disappointed that I’ve had so little interest from my primary discipline, and that 3 of my 5 interviews have been in programs/departments that are compatible parallels. An analogy: if I were an actor, I’d be getting lots of interest from the television industry, but less from the film industry. In the minds of many in this field, my primary discipline is superior to the parallel discipline.
On one hand, there’s a part of me that feels like I should do better, given my training and skills. This part of me says that I should spend another year in my postdoc if I don’t get an offer I *really* want this time. This would give me more time to get the articles I currently have under review into press or publication. It comes at a cost, however, since it would be yet another year of comparatively lower income, which makes a huge difference in terms of saving for retirement and meeting other life goals. I’d be embarrassed to be four years behind my peers who finished their Ph.D.s at the same time as me. I’d have to go through this exhausting process yet again, too. Most importantly, I’d have to do a lot of explaining to search committees about why I’d stayed in my postdoc for 4 years, and this alone might decrease my chances at certain institutions.

On the other hand, part of me feels like I should be grateful for whatever comes my way. The fact of the matter is that no matter how much I hide it, I *do* have a disability that’s interfered with my progress and productivity. I’ve worked hard to compensate for those pre-ritalin years of limited productivity, but it doesn’t seem to have been enough. I can’t guarantee that I can keep up my current pace indefinitely, especially once I have to take a break from ritalin to start a family. Just because others think less of “tv” jobs versus “film” positions doesn’t mean that I have to think less of it, provided I can do my work and continue to do it well. A job is a job, particularly if it’s not a postdoc!

Perhaps it’s best just to plan to swallow my pride, accept what’s offered to me, and do my best work wherever I land next.