Trying to get an academic job can be really horrible. I just want to offer sympathy.

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Beth Malmskog

I got an email a few days ago telling me that my MathJobs account will be deleted in a month, after nearly two years of inactivity. The 4 years I spent on the job market have given me a Pavlovian response to MathJobs emails. Not that I start drooling–I just get anxious. Did I mess up an application? Was I turned down for something? Are all my recommendations in? That tiny drip of anxiety reminded me of the enormous iceberg of stress that is trying to get a job. Let me just offer my sincerest best wishes and sympathy to everyone who is on the job market right now. It can be incredibly stressful and demoralizing.

Don’t get me wrong–it also has exciting and wonderful aspects.  But Sara’s post last week about taking time off also started me thinking about the process of trying to find a tenure track job. Why do young professors feel guilty for taking weekends and holidays off? Nobody would ever actually say that professors or anyone else should work all the time and never take breaks. So why the guilt and anxiety? I think that (for me) a portion of that “should always be working” feeling has to do with being on the job market.

Let’s look at it for a second: you apply for jobs, probably many, many jobs, perhaps putting enormous amounts of time into the applications, developing enthusiastic cover letters and in the process totally falling in love with the idea of job after job. You are constantly looking at yourself on paper, comparing or unsuccessfully trying not to compare yourself to everyone else, wondering how to be a better candidate. Which is a bummer mindset in itself, I must say. But then how to accomplish anything and become a better candidate when the whole job application process itself takes up a whole lot of time? How to put aside worries about your worthiness as a candidate and just get to churning out math and being an amazing teacher?

On lucky years you get interviews, which is exhilarating but you feel like you are wrecking your classes by taking so many days off. You find decent clothes, write job talks, study each college’s curriculum so you can talk intelligently about teaching there. You meet a lot of people on their turf, without getting much feedback. You get your heart actually broken by some rejections.

And then you get an offer! Hooray!  This is awesome.  So you move, and start a new job, which is really cool but for about a semester or year is actually like doing two jobs because you not only have to learn the new job but you have to do it at the same time. You try to make new friends.  If your new position is short-term, rinse and repeat.

If you are a Jedi knight you can do this without feeling really weird. I am not a Jedi. I was a huge stressed-out mess for big pieces of the years I was on the market. I couldn’t stop checking my email, ever. I felt like I needed to work all the time because I really did need to work a whole bunch of time to do it all, plus I was always trying to be in a better position for the job market the next year. Instead of just trying to do my job well, I was trying to compete with every other amazing candidate in the world. After a few years of this I thought, “I cannot keep doing this. This is not a sustainable way to live.”

This all sounds very grim, and so let me mention that my job search had a few real positives.  I had a lot of fun in some interviews (even the short joint meetings interviews!), and met great people across the interview table. People asked me questions that gave me ideas or made me put together my old ideas in new ways.  The applications and interviews got progressively easier, and I definitely got better at applying for things and presenting myself.

My current job is wonderful for a host of reasons. It’s an amazing job! I love my colleagues and students. Also, I can now fully appreciate what a great benefit it is just to break that cycle and let go of the whole extra job of applying for jobs. For the first time in years, I feel that I can usually take weekends off when I want to. Of course there are many, many other things to apply for now, but I feel that it’s possible to live a good life while doing this job, which I can now love more.

For those of you who are on the job market and stressed, I totally get it. You are going through something that can be objectively awful. It’s super competitive, you get rejected a lot, you have very little control over it, and the nature of the process constantly encourages you to think that you are not good enough. That is just not true. Everybody feels like that. I just wanted to say “way to go” and remind you that you are actually doing a pretty hard job—really two stressful, difficult jobs at once. Hang in there.

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On Taking Time Off

Posted on November 23, 2015 by smalec

As we all approach Thanksgiving, I’m wondering what your plans are. Specifically: how much of a “break” is a faculty member supposed to take?

MATLAB cornucopia filled with papers

Horn of Plenty of Work

I used to fill carry-on bags with grading, notebooks, and papers to bring home with me for the holidays, certain that this is my chance to finally get caught up. Which, obviously, I wouldn’t need to do if I’d just worked hard enough all semester like I should have.

Most of the time, the bags were never even opened, just dragged through airports as a physical manifestation of guilt; an academic’s hairshirt.

This year, I’ve got exams and projects to grade, the last weeks of classes to plan, a couple of papers that have been “almost done” for a while now, some grant and travel applications coming due, and an impending talk that could really use one more new result.

But I need to try something different. So after 5pm on Tuesday, I won’t think about any of this until Sunday.

Some family is coming to town that I don’t see that often. I’m hosting a bunch of my awesome new faculty cohort at my house for a potluck dinner. I have a few days to spend with my overworked first-year-teacher spouse while he gets a little break from his grading and planning. I’ll be running a Turkey Trot, finishing an afghan, building a PC, playing a couple instruments, and doing some non-academic reading. By Sunday, if all goes according to plan, I’ll be excited to get back to work.

I could maybe devote more time to working over the long weekend. But I wouldn’t get as much done as I’d hoped for, and I’d come back to work exhausted on Monday and drag myself through the week in a fog. I know, because I’ve done it a hundred times before. Since I started giving myself regularly scheduled breaks this year, my productivity has actually gone up.

I’ve talked to a lot of other young academics about this, and we confess to each other in hushed tones that we take a day off on the weekends, or refuse to grade in the evenings, or struggle to not answer emails during date night. But this still doesn’t seem like an easy thing to admit publicly, that you can’t be superprofessor all the time.

I’m fortunate that my department is very supportive about having a life outside of the office. When some people talk about work-life balance, what they seem to mean is that you should effortlessly have a perfect home life while you also effortlessly crush it professionally. But my chair apologized for sending emails late one weekend night. My colleagues tell me to go home if I stay in the office too late. They know it’s impossible to work effectively when you’re burned out. Why doesn’t everybody?Those of you with more experience navigating “breaks”: what’s your strategy for time off without guilt? How do you keep your standards high while acknowledging your physical limits? And fellow new faculty: what are your expectations for yourself? Do you feel like you can take enough time for yourself and your family without sacrificing your career?

 

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Lost in Space/Seminar

Posted on November 16, 2015 by Beth Malmskog

One of the things I love about living in Philadelphia is that there are a lot of colleges here, and that means a lot of math talks. I could easily fill at least half my time just attending (and navigating public transportation to get to) talks in the area. Going to good talks makes me feel connected to the world of mathematics in a way that nothing else quite does—seeing “live math” can be a little bit like seeing live music crossed with solving a puzzle, two of my favorite things. In the best of all math talks, I have to remind myself not to interrupt with loud cheers at the good parts. I take this as a sign that I chose my job well.

That said, it happens sometimes that I go to talks and find myself just not engaged for one reason or another. Maybe I had an intense day teaching and spaced out for a few crucial minutes at the beginning. Maybe I followed for the first 20 minutes and then the speaker stepped to a whole other level of specialization. Maybe the speaker is very quiet and I can’t hear what they are saying. I’m assuming this happens to you sometimes, too? However it happened, there are still 40 minutes left and you realize you have no idea what is going on. What do you do (besides play Seminar Bingo)? How do you make the most of those 40 minutes of your life?

Here are some of my strategies:

1) My first priority is not to fall asleep. So I will do anything at all not to fall asleep, even just draw circles on a piece of paper, get up and stand up at the back of the room, or leave if necessary.

2) Sometimes I start working on my own math on paper or on a computer. This can feel productive, but I honestly don’t enjoy this much because it makes me feel self-conscious and somewhat silly. It just feels weird to blatantly ignore someone who is speaking in front of me.  Why am I there?  If I’m really going to check out to that degree, and the room is large enough that it wouldn’t be noticed, maybe this is okay, but I might as well just slip out of the talk and work somewhere quiet. If it is a fairly small room and it is possible that the speaker can see my lack of attention, I feel like I should keep looking back up and give the appearance of following the talk, which actually feels kind of creepy and ridiculous—I feel like I’m lying if I nod and smile when I really have no clue what is going on.  So maybe it is better just to commit to checking out and be obvious (though quiet) about it.  Just to be clear, I don’t always think other people are being jerks when they are clearly working on something else during talks.  It just feels wrong for me.  However, if the room is fairly large it can still feel better than leaving the talk.

3) Sometimes I work on my own math in my head. This feels less productive than working on paper or computer, but also less silly and embarrassing. I just maintain general eye focus on the speaker while my mind wanders.

4) Sometimes I try to take lessons in style from the speaker. If they are a really good speaker, I try to figure out why I enjoy listening to them even if I don’t understand the talk. If the talk seems ineffective, I try to figure out why. Oh, maybe it’s because they never explained any of their abbreviations! Oh, wait, I think I did that in my last talk. Never again! Sometimes this study can get so interesting that I take notes, then find myself a little bit in situation 2 above, and then need to check myself and go back to 3.

5) If the talk feels like it should be accessible, because it is for a general audience or it is close to my area, I just refocus and try to filter something, anything mathematical from the talk that I am watching. I make it a sort of game: I am a detective, what can I figure out about this story given these clues? That makes confusion less frustrating, partial understanding much more rewarding. If I have a lot of energy I will take notes and organize the information as much as I can; if not I will just listen to it as a story, look for the big picture.

Number 5 is the most satisfying, and this practice has really paid off for me a few times in the last two years. One of my projects is implementing an algorithm (mostly devised by many other people) to solve a particular equation in the group of S-units. My collaborator and I had to solve this equation to do another project, and we decided to try to generalize our code. It turns out that solving the S-unit equation shows up in a lot of other people’s work as well. In the last two years, it has happened 4 or 5 times that I find myself a bit lost in a talk, trying to get some big picture idea of what is going on, when all the sudden here comes the S-unit equation. So then I suddenly have a strong connection to this part of the material and tons of questions spring to mind. In some cases I then get to talk with the speaker about our project, and through this conversation manage to fill in the blanks that left me lost in the talk, so I learn a lot of new, very relevant math. Even if I don’t manage to talk to the speaker or totally understand their talk, I can connect my work with another general area and have a new example of how our work is valuable in the larger world! Hooray!

Every time method 5 pays off, it makes reinvesting in talks easier. But I mention 1-4 because I am being realistic—I don’t always have the energy or desire to really wring all the content out of a talk when I feel confused.  So, I would really like to know—what are your seminar strategies? Thoughts on getting the most out of talks once you realize you are lost? Is it better to leave the talk or to fall asleep? What do you think about working on other stuff during a talk?  Is it worth being there even if you are not paying attention?

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