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Planning for Your Next Job

By John Meluso, PhD

Figuring Out What’s Next

Academic Paths

You’ll never know what you want to do for the rest of your life. All you can do is plan for what you want to do next.

– Jason Cons, Once worked at an LL Bean factory, Now Associate Professor of Anthropology at UT Austin

What do you want to do (next)?

What do you value?​

  • Learning
  • Family
  • Helping people
  • Connection
  • Wealth
  • Lifestyle
  • Surroundings (colleagues, population density, climate, access to nature, etc.)

What do you like doing?​

  • Interacting with people
  • Working with your hands
  • Solving puzzles
  • Teaching
  • Writing
  • Programming
  • Storytelling
  • Being creative

The Steps​

  1. Identify the kinds of activities you want to do next (and what you value)
  2. Identify the jobs that overlap with those activities
  3. Identify the skills and achievements necessary to get each job
  4. Plan out what you need to do to attain those skills and achievements
  5. Assess which paths you’re willing to follow

Your Tools​

  • Introspect: Draw on your experiences. What have you done? What did you dis/like about it?
  • Listen: Learn from others. What did they do? What did they dis/like about it?
  • Explore: Read job descriptions. What do they describe? What do you dis/like about them?
  • Imagine: Be in the role. What’s a day in the life like? How do you think you’ll feel?
  • Experiment: Try it out! What was it like? How did you feel about it?\

Paths for A Graduate Student

⅓ to ½ of STEM PhD grads go into postdoc positions

Committee to Review the State of Postdoctoral Experience in Scientists and Engineers; Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy; Policy and Global Affairs; National Academy of Sciences; National Academy of Engineering; Institute of Medicine. The Postdoctoral Experience Revisited. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2014 Dec 8. PMID: 25590106. https://doi.org/10.17226/18982

What is a Postdoc(toral Associate/Fellow)?​

  • Legally: temporary workers, training positions
  • Usually 1, 2, or 3 year positions (per institution), usually capped at 6 years total

Often (but not always)

  • Almost full-time research
  • Supplemented with teaching/service/grants
  • Better positions give time to pursue your own endeavors (33-50% of your time)
  • Always transitionary roles

From the faculty perspective:​

  • Experienced researcher
  • becoming more autonomous…
  • …and really still trainees!

Opportunities to:

  • explore new topics
  • advance challenging projects
  • complete grant-funded research

Note:

  • Some faculty take advantage of postdocs
  • Workplace abuse is common

From the trainee’s perspective:​

  • Time to prepare
  • identify what you want to do next
  • plan for what you want to do next
  • start doing what you want to do next

Opportunities to:

  • explore new topics
  • advance challenging projects
  • receive new mentorship perspectives

Note:

  • Quality mentorship is rare, but makes a huge difference in candidate success
  • Often difficult, sometimes rewarding

About ⅓ of STEM Postdocs go on to TT Positions* On Average 10-15% of STEM PhDs receive even one tenure track job offer

How Do You Get a Postdoc?​

  1. Work with your mentors! (yes, multiple)
  2. Make yourself known
    • Present your work at conferences, introduce yourself to people, ask good questions
    • Publish your work, advertise it…but most important is having the pubs to share
  3. Identify where jobs appear, what jobs appear, and when jobs appear
    • Where
      • Job sites like HigherEdJobs, AcademicJobsOnline
      • Community and conference job boards (e.g. INFORMS, NetSci, each have one)
      • Pretentious places: only on their own websites, never announced, check back regularly
    • What
      • Monitor new posts (set up notifications) and explore past posts for trends
      • Common themes, skills, needs, locations, qualities, etc.
    • When
      • Earliest are due in August or September for the following year (especially prestigious ones)
      • Many appear from Dec.-Mar.
      • There is no latest, more jobs always appear, if sporadically
  4. Develop base job market package
    • Postdocs: a cover letter & a research statement (work closely with advisor)
    • Cover letter: has a strict, field-specific, normative format to follow
    • Research statement: slightly more flexible, but still has norms to follow
    • These documents tell what you’ve done, what you can do, and where you’re going (with them)
    • Intellectually-compelling, practically-achievable, and connects to the particular position
    • Design each document as a base version that you can tailor to different positions
  5. Find 3 recommenders (vs 3-5 for faculty positions)
    • Ask others who know your work the best
    • Ask: “Would you be able to write a positive letter of recommendation?”
    • Ask in August/September so they have time. There’s no shame in asking, it’s part of their job!
    • Provide recommenders with a list of jobs you plan to apply for once you have them and what they should speak about in their letter to show you in the best light
    • Some recommenders will ask you to draft the letter for them. Templates galore online!
  6. Plan out your logistics
    • Build a spreadsheet of jobs to consider applying to with relevant info for each
    • Schedule out when you need to submit by (dates are confusing, always err on cautious side)
    • Schedule out when you want to work on each application
    • Remember, postdoc and faculty applications take a lot of work, so give yourself a lot of time, especially when preparing your documents for the first time!
    • Target having job market documents drafted by August 1 (after is okay, but some apps due early)
    • Get and integrate feedback from multiple mentors by September 1!
  7. Decide what jobs to apply to
    • How well does each job achieve:
    • What you value?
    • What you want to do?
    • Carefully choose what to spend your time on, you only have so much!
    • Don’t apply to everything. Apply strategically; the market is saturated.
  8. Prepare a job talk
    • 20-45 min long, tailor to the hiring committee’s requests/interests
    • Mostly research-focused
    • Again show what you’ve done, what you can do, and where you’re going (with them)
    • Faculty job talks are longer (45 minutes) and much more complex (for another time)
  9. Interviews
    • Typically consist of 1 or 2 rounds
    • If 1 round: ask you to present your work, then they will ask you questions
    • If 2 rounds: (1) summarize your work, fit for job, answer questions; (2) presentation, questions
  10. Getting an offer
    • They will call or email you with the details and likely ask you “how does that sound?”
    • Do not say “that sounds great!” Instead, answer “let me make sure I understand what you’re offering” and go through their list. Ask when they need you to respond by.
    • Then, go back and talk to your team (family, advisors). Respond formally with your counter-offer.
    • Negotiation is rare as a postdoc, but can be done. Especially emphasize mentorship!

How Do You Get a Tenure-Track Faculty Position?

  • Longer cover letter (almost always 2-page)
  • Teaching Statement (learn how you want to teach before doing this!)
  • Diversity Statement (learn how you do and can contribute to DEI first!)
  • Grant writing experience (often want you to have received 1 competitive grant)
  • Teaching experience (teacher of record if possible, guest lectures/mentorship ok)
  • 2-3 rounds of interviews (remote, on-site)
  • Often requires multiple years, careful strategic alignment with trends, and luck

Other tidbits I wish I’d known…

  • You don’t have to be an academic to do research…but it is easier
  • Being “interdisciplinary” makes postdocs a little easier to get, but faculty jobs a lot harder to get. Find a disciplinary home, then be interdisciplinary from within it.
  • Go into jobmarketing with back-up plans that you’d also be comfortable with.
  • Don’t get too attached to any one position before you get an offer. There are lots of moving parts behind the scenes that make things impossible to predict, and they have to choose you before you can choose them.
  • Many departments/schools are still toxic, including in complex systems. While a job is a job, choose carefully, especially if you are a member of a historically underrepresented group.