Job Market Series, Part 1: Intro & Context
Context
This series covers my experience in the academic job market for R1 tenure track positions. This series is both cathartic for me and intended to share my amassed resources and knowledge of the current job market with folks in grad school way before their job market season and for those about to embark on their job market season.
The tentative structure of this series looks like this:
Context (this post)
Making decisions - where will you live for the next 5-7+ years?
Professional Context
I am a developmental psychologist by training. Before earning my Ph.D. from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota, I worked in nutrition intervention research at Cornell University. I do interdisciplinary research on stress and nutrition. I have a doctoral minor in epidemiology, which I pursued with the idea I could be a psychologist in a nutrition/public health department or a nutrition person in a psychology department. I am currently a K99 Investigator and postdoctoral fellow at Brown University. I applied primarily to R1 tenure-track psychology departments, though I did apply to some medical schools and some nutrition/public health departments if the job ad seemed like a good fit. I will be core faculty in the Center for Cognitive and Brain Health at Northeastern University beginning in August 2024. Much of my experience is most applicable to psychology and adjacent fields.
The Numbers
I applied to 17 faculty positions. I was invited to move beyond the initial round at five institutions. I received four invitations for preliminary zoom interviews and three invitations for a full on-campus interview. I was offered tenure-track faculty positions from two universities and worked with my NIH PO to discuss the offer letters during negotiation. I ultimately accepted the offer as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Health Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston (I deferred for a year to complete my training goals for my K99 and to give myself and my family a longer timeline to relocate).
Personal Context:
I am a white, cis-gendered, and heterosexual woman with a young family (kids born in 2019 and 2022) and a very supportive spouse (domestic labor-wise, emotionally, and financially supportive). My family of origin is working class and does not understand academia; they all hoped I would move back home to Chicago (so easy!). I felt pressure to find a TT job so we could “put down roots," be done with moving, and start earning more money to support my family financially. So I will share my timeline and thought process, but all of this is context-dependent on my accumulated privileges and anxieties driving my decisions! Related to this, my undergraduate and MA degrees are in commercial interior design. I only entered academia intending to become an R1 professor focused on research, which is what this job market post is about. If I didn’t achieve that goal, I would have pursued some design/research-related corporate position as an alternate. I only say this to say that I knew that a teaching-focused institution was not a good fit for me, and therefore I did not apply to any non-R1 positions.
The Timeline
Summer/Fall 2019
Highly recommend romancing yourself into writing - flowers, sunlight, coffee are a good start.
ABD and pregnant with my first child, I wrote up my job market materials and decided to apply for “dream jobs only.” I think I applied to ~6 and got 0 interviews of any kind. This was fine (albeit humbling, and I did have a good cry about it) - for one, I had a good draft of materials started for the next round, and I knew it was ambitious to be on the job market with no “postdoc seasoning.” For two, it was not a great time to be on the job market personally with a newborn/newly postpartum, and I was also submitting an F32. Plenty of things going on. I do recommend getting started on materials earlier than you think - it takes time to pull these together, it gives you a more accurate idea of how long a “real” job market season will take, and it gives you time to get lots of feedback and go through multiple drafts with multiple eyes on it.
Summer/Fall 2020
Celebrating the PhD COVID-distanced
In June 2020, I graduated with my Ph.D. A reminder that this was the COVID era in a major way before the first vaccines were available, so I interviewed for postdocs and was able to stay with my PhD lab as a postdoc doing study startup on an R01 I was co-I from June 2020 to March 2021; I interviewed for other postdocs and got a delayed start on the Brown STAR T32 to have a start date in April 2021. This may also be a blog post for another time.
I was a newly minted Ph.D., and the 2020 job market was in shambles. There were… very few jobs. Hiring freezes all over the place. I did apply to a few (maybe 3? 4?), and got 0 interviews again. Again, expected based on ::waves hands:: all of what was happening. I did update my materials, so they went through another few rounds of revisions.
Summer/Fall 2021
Writing the K99
I was in my 1st six months as a new postdoc, pregnant with my second child, submitting my K99 for the October deadline, and again applying for “dream jobs only.” I still had 1.5-2.5 years on postdoc funding, really wanted to do my K99 project, and would be interviewing while either extremely pregnant or very early postpartum, so the timing would not be so ideal – but again, the market is fickle, and I decided to take some swings just in case. Materials went through another round of revisions. 0 interviews of any kind.
Summer/Fall 2022
K99 suggestion: light a candle when submitted & celebrate with cake and champagne
I was six months postpartum, my K99 funding came through on the first round, and I was gearing up for a job market swing. I received advice to go hard on the job market in the first year of the K99 if possible and then negotiate a delayed start. The K99 is only two years; depending on when you get funding, that is only two rounds of job market seasons. I wanted to give it a solid go in my first year, and then if nothing came through, I would still have the buffer of year 2. It was nice being on the job market without “needing” a job, per se. And when I say I “wanted to give it a solid go,” I mean that I was mentally and physically exhausted and didn’t want to give it a go, but decided to dig deep and roll with it. I will say that writing the K99 greatly improved my materials and the specificity of my next project, where I saw my career going, and what I planned for my next R01. This round was a huge success (see above)!
