Eigen

It also hugely depends on how big of a gap there is in diversity at your school. We've had issues, for instance, with transexual and intersex students. There's only one faculty/staff member on campus that's openly out, and a lot of students for a single person to mentor.

This is great to hear, but it echoes back to some of the worries I've heard relating to issues with Tenure in minority faculty (from our Diversity program). The gist is that the University usually heaps a ton of extra work on minority faculty to mentor extra students, but they get no consistent "credit" for that extra work when the come up for Tenure. Accordingly, there's a nationwide issue with disparate tenure rates. I hope your school (and others) can do something to support those mentors, especially if there are many more mentees than mentors in some of those groups.

I was mostly pulling that from a CHE discussion from female faculty/grad students on not wanting to even apply to schools that don't have any female faculty. Like I said, our last time it wasn't just no women on the short-list.... It was no women applying, at all, and I've heard similar issues from other schools in my discipline as well.

You're worrying more than you need to, and over-generalizing. You're also trying to generalize a field that's very non-homogeneous. Generally, schools want you to be able to hit the ground running in some way or another, and they want people with experience in research. That's not to say you need to know every (or even many) of the techniques you will need, but you need the background to pick them up quickly and/or teach yourself. MATLAB is a perfect example- it's something you can easily teach yourself on the side. Electrophys, not so much. We expect first year students in our lab to spend most of the first year learning techniques- shadowing other students, trying out projects, and building the experience they will need. As for who decides, it's very school dependent. If a PI has money and really wants you, that can frequently sway the admissions committee- but you might be stuck working with that person. Admissions committees usually forward applications to someone with interests aligned with yours if none of them are sitting that semester. The idea is to ensure that every incoming student has a lab that will want to take them in and be able to fund them for 5-9 years. FWIW, almost none of my undergrad research experience was directly applicable. I worked doing biofuel synthesis on a huge scale, and developing large-scale syntheses for metal catalyst work. In grad school, I'm about as perfectly straddling the biological chemistry line as I can be. I taught myself cell culture, got money, set up a cell culture lab, and have many years of experience. Coming into grad school, I had almost no biological background other than intro biology and biochemistry. Now I'm a fairly capable molecular biologist, and have great collaborations at our medical school and with our Neuroscience and CMB programs. Each new grad student is ideally looked at as an individual researcher. You bring your background and experiences into the lab, and you learn new things while you're there. I'm now "that guy that understands biology but can also re-build instruments and synthesize things", and it's a unique role I'm pretty happy in. I'm sure you'll find that role for yourself as well!

I also just wanted to say that this, particularly, is an amazing idea and I hope more Universities implement something similar. The other solution I've seen that works well is to have some relatively consistently open positions at the associate/full level, with tenure. Then the department can focus on bringing in an established female faculty member who will not have to worry about, say, not being evaluated fairly on the tenure committee by an all male department. Then with an established senior woman, it becomes much easier to bring in and hire subsequent female junior faculty members. The other solution that I've seen work is for a department to hire multiple female faculty at the same time, but unless there's a large applicant pool with excellent candidates, that can be hard too. It does take pressure off of a woman being the only female in the department, however, as you mention.

There are some interesting threads on the CHE forums about how hard it can be to HIRE female faculty in some areas- especially if there are no female faculty currently. Many applicants won't apply or won't take an offer if they will be both the only female and the only junior faculty member, which can result in in a lot of difficult situations. My department tried really hard the last several openings to get a female faculty member (currently without one), and the only person that even met qualifications wasn't even in the right field, but we still strongly considered them. It's a very non-gender biased department, too- close to 1/3rd of the faculty members have spouses that are faculty at the same University in different fields, or same field at an adjacent university. Accordingly, we have a lot of female graduate students, and they seem to do quite well and enjoy our program. That said, almost none of them, from the start, have any interest in going into academia- only our male grad students really want to teach, most of the female grad students exclusively want industry jobs .

It's going to depend on the program. If the program has a strong basis in biophysics, for example, physical chemistry would be extremely helpful. Similarly, if there's any interest in modeling biological systems. Stats can be useful or not, depending on your interests. If you have a strong math background, you can just teach yourself what you need pretty easily. Also, not to be picky, but physical chemistry isn't chemistry through the lens of a physicist. That would be chemical physics. Physical chemistry is more of a look at physics through chemist's lens. Kinda like biological chemistry vs chemical biology. Similar areas of study, vastly different viewpoints.

I use double dagger or asterisk, followed by an indented line with the "these authors contributed equally" footnote. Or whatever the exact attribution is from the paper, some journals phrase it a bit differently. I also always bold my own name so it's easy to see as people read through it. So, for example: Eigen, G. *; Mop *; Takeru, K. How to Cite Papers, 2015. *These authors contributed equally to this work.

I feel like this thread has a lot of generalizations that are really more suited to field specific responses. For instance, the advice that "it's your paper" only flies so far in experimental fields that necessitate co-authorship with an advisor, or many other people. It's not your paper, it's a group effort, and you all keep hammering away until all (most) of you are happy with the result. I'm gathering this is a humanities field, but since there's no field specified, how can we tell you if you picked the right one? As for the situation, if I read a paper from someone and feel the introduction is so rough that the grade for the entire paper is going to be drug down below an acceptable level, I'd stop reading and send it back to them. Then my reading of the rest of the paper the next time isn't tainted by a rough first brush. So don't ask her to "read more and re-evaluate". You might not like the results. Re-write the paper and polish it.

I've never seen, and would probably expect some skepticism with 4 co-first authors, but I have several that I've got with one other person and our litany of undergrads/advisor that I think are pretty solid. The importance, since there is some skepticism around co-authored papers, is in my mind being able to have really defined roles. Most of mine have come out of collaborations- someone else makes something, I test it's efficacy in cells. I do modeling, someone else does an experimental component. It makes it a very straightforward split of "who did what" that can make it a lot easier to explain on interviews/your CV if you have to.

Generally, you should avoid non TT faculty for letters. That said, there are situations where a post-doc or RAP can be a better choice than a TT faculty member, if they know you really well and the faculty member does not. If you have time, you'd be better off cultivating a relationship with another faculty member you've taken classes with.

Ugh, teaching for all or teaching for none sounds horrible. In my department, TA vs RA is the carrot/stick. If you're productive, you stay on RA. If not, you go on TA for a semester/year. Then you get another semester on RA to see if you can be more productive. My PI uses the metric of "you should have material ready to put into a paper after a year on RA", else people go back on TA. It's not always the case, but it gives people a goal to work to. He also explains it in terms of getting new grants- if people aren't productive enough to progress the aims of the grant, he doesn't feel right funding them off of that grant.

Again, not in an MLA field, but I'm applying for similar jobs this cycle. Or have already applied for some, since we're mostly done with the season. What I did, after compiling advice, was to start and end my cover letter with teaching. My intro paragraph has the position I want to apply for, where I am now, and what I want to teach. Then I have a paragraph on my teaching background and interests. This leads into my paragraph on research interests, which leads into a paragraph on success with grants and publications that ends with a discussion on mentoring undergrads. This leads into a paragraph on involvement with students (advising clubs) and teaching "outside of class", which leads to my summary paragraph. It just barely fits in two pages. I also have a 2 page teaching philosophy that takes a more unique format, and a ~ 15 page statement of research (basically, 3 research proposals with a preceding executive summary and an attached budget/startup costs for those schools that want it). Some schools also requested a statement of teaching interests, that I wrote as a half-page appended to my teaching philosophy with more discussion of exactly what I'd want to teach and how. Things changed a lot from school to school- SelectiveLACs that wanted more student involvement and research but lower teaching (2/2, 3/3 loads) to a program with small MS (a section on mentoring graduate students) to state comprehensives with 4/4 or 5/5 loads. I always put teaching first in my CV, because I figure everyone will flip to my publications either way, and if my teaching is after that it might get lost. I use clearly delineated sections so it's easy to flip from Teaching to Research to Service. I've only heard from one school (that went to an inside hire), and the Jobs Wiki this year is dead in my area, so I'm getting very little scuttlebutt at the moment. We'll see soon how successful my approach was this year, but I went into the market being exceptionally selective. I'm ABD at the moment, and have plans to do a post-doc or teaching fellowship next, but figured trying out the market was a good thing.

That's exactly it. Most IL schools in Chemistry/Biology have around 200 graduate students. Some of the lower ranked schools are 50 or less. I can get a half hour to an hour private meeting with almost any big name I am interested in meeting- and that's huge. It's not just a group dinner or group lunch, it's a large section of private face time. And that's definitely played a role in those people remembering me down the road in a much more personal manner than if it had been a group event. I'm sure some of it depends on the school and how it's arranged, but it's one of the complaints I here from my friends at IL schools, as well as students of mine now at IL schools. You are right that a lot of it depends on the "non top 10 school". My department brings in ~ 30 speakers a year, most of them from good programs/well known in their field, and at least a handful a year that are in the top 1-2 names in the world in a given area. They're all in for at least a day, most over a weekend, and so there's lots of time for interaction.

Just to respond to your point 1: I'm not even at a top 50 school.... But I've met a number of nobel laureates as speakers in the time I've been here, as well as had lunch with heads of groups in some really nice national and international labs. One difference at a lower school is that I get to meet with (have a significant solo meeting) with every speaker I'm interested in meeting. Show them my work and network with them. I'm guessing the same chance doesn't exist at the IL schools to the same extent. Speakers depend a lot more on the connections of the faculty than the prestige of the school- well respected scholars and well connected scholars bring in good speakers.

You also have to be really careful in how you describe success. Working at a top-10 program that has money to throw at every problem really only prepares you for work at another top-10 program, and only if you will be successful enough to have money to throw at every problem. If you want to expand your faculty search to lower ranked schools, lots will appreciate you being able to be productive without piles of money to throw at problems, either through creative solutions or being able to build/repair instruments on your own. Similarly, while top institutions have a ton of funding, they also focus more on post-docs and PIs research progress then developing you as a grad student into an independent scientist. It can be really easily (relatively) to be lost in the shuffle, or be only valued for your use as a pair of extra hands in the lab with no particular interest in what the work is doing for your career.

I want to highlight this in our discussion about the importance of a highly ranked school. A lot of the people I know who've been quite successful had offers at top-5 and top-10 schools in our field, but chose to go to a lower-ranked school that they thought would be better for networking and their particular interests. Then they kept building networks and a portfolio of publications and research work to stay competitive with people who did go to a top-tier school. There's often a bias that leads people to think that because faculty at top-tier schools publish more, that it always leads to better opportunities for publications and writing and research experience for grad students there- and that can be true, but isn't a given. Sometimes top tier schools are much less focused on training graduate students, and view them as cogs in the machine rather than helping them develop as individuals. Smaller schools can be more reliant on individual students developing as independent scholars, rather than just what they can get done for the school while they're there. It's also much more likely that you'll be relatively isolated to a sub-section of faculty members, as opposed to the support of an entire (smaller) department at a lower ranked school. Coming from a small, lower-ranked program, many of our outstanding graduate students have the entire program helping them build networks, not just faculty in their area. Lots of recent offers for post-grad work have come through connections from faculty at the other end of the spectrum of interests, but a small program facilitates the development of mentors and relationships with a wider range of faculty.

This is a really tricky line to draw between correlation and causation. Many of those who will eventually land TT jobs tend to go disproportionately to high ranked programs, so there's no wonder they skew towards having more graduates on the TT. That doesn't, however, mean that the fact they went to the school made their chances very slim. It certainly doesn't hurt, nor does it hurt that those schools have a reputation for attracting good students who in turn make good faculty. But you can do quite well going to a lower ranked program and shining, and I don't think I'd attribute it to luck.

There's a difference between having broad interests and not being able to pick specific interests. When I was coming from undergrad, I applied to programs that properly spanned 3 disciplines- from chemical physics, to molecular biology with chemistry in between. But at each school, in each program, I had a particular interest and saw how I fit into several labs in that program, what I would like to do and what I could offer. Having too specific of an interest can be a bad thing- it means you're not flexible during or after grad school. You might have the only PI that you really wanted to work with die of a sudden heart attack your first semester- could you happily switch to another lab? You might be working on the TT, and find that grant funding in your niche area is drying up- are you going to be OK with and able to switch to a topic with more available funding? Even outside of that, rarely will you be able to do work for the rest of your career (in STEM) that you start in your graduate program. You start with graduate work on topic A, but the world already has someone doing that work- your advisor. But you take those skills you learn, and do a postdoc on topic B or C- which also have people doing that work. Then you take the skills you learn, and the topics you were exposed to with A, B and C an write proposals D, E and F that combine various aspects of those work with your particular skill set. And then you become the person working in that new niche you collected. I really worry a lot about some new graduate students I meet when we run them through orientation- they are so intensely focused on a project that one faculty member is working on, and that's all they can see themselves doing for the rest of their career. And that's a really bad place to be- they won't be able to differentiate themselves significantly enough from that advisor to convince hiring committees that they're an independent and individual scientist. On the initial topic of safety schools- I like to say safety schools and reach schools don't really exist in graduate applications. You apply to places you think you would fit really well. If that's a top 5 program, go for it. If that's a bottom 50 program, go for it. The importance is the fit you have with your advisor, and the potential for YOU to do excellent research during your PhD. If you break ground and publish several nature papers, no one will care where you did your PhD- they will just care that you're the person that publishes really good work. Is publishing really good work easier when you are at a top school? Sure. But it's not easier when you're at a top school, but have a crappy relationship with your advisor and no real mentoring. Publishing top research is all about you having the environment and facilities you need to publish top research.

You'd have to be at a really poorly paid HS position, or be looking at exceptionally high paying lecturer positions. There's a reason getting a TT position is akin to winning the lottery in many fields. In many fields, you're also now competing against people going on the market as tenured hired from schools floundering or closing, as well as decreasing numbers f available positions for increasing numbers of graduates. These stats shouldn't make you decide your career path in and of themselves, but it's worth going into it knowing the facts and with open eyes. That's how we, as a profession, avoid growing numbers of adjunct disaster stories.

I'm slowly learning myself- it's a slow process for me, because no on in my department uses it, so I can only use it for things that I'm not co-authoring, which is a small number of items at the moment. I've had "The Not So Short Guide to LaTeX" recommended to me, and it's a very good introduction, imo. I'm also on a Mac, and using TexShop at the moment (free, small footprint), but I've looked into TeXpad on Fuzzy's recommendation as well. The biggest issue I've run into is formatting figures- I'm a field that uses quite a bit of math (which is easy in LaTex) but also a lot of graphics (images of cells, schemes, etc.), and I've found some are easier than others. I've also had some issues mass-transferring my references to BiBTex, but there are a couple of good export styles now for many of the major citation editors (I know Endnote has one) that lets you specify a citekey when you export. I've also used Scrivener on and off to write for years- it has a major benefit of being able to compile a document either to TeX or to Word, so you can use it as a drafting solution, and then export to either depending on your needs. That's especially useful to me with some journals in my field only accepting Word submissions.

I've been using TurboScan a lot, and it works reeaallly well. I can get as good or better document scans than my desktop scanner, and it automatically detects the page pretty well, adjusts for tilt, and gives you a "flat" image. You can easily stitch together multi-page documents with it, and export to dropbox/any other app/email PDFs. I especially like that you can go back at any time to replace/add another page to a multi-page project you're already working on. You can add another page, drag it to the position you want, and re-save the whole thing really fast. I use it in conjunction with GoodReader, which I use to organize PDF's & documents on my iPad. I can set folders to manually/automatically sync via dropbox, either to my iPad (for my papers on my computer) or from my iPad (for scans, etc.). I use the scanner function mostly to take snaps of my lab notebooks/random pages of notes on my desk so I have digital copies (PDFs) of them on the go, but I also recently used it for some late 1800s documents my Grandmother had, and it did an admirable job of getting really good copies of ancient newsprint. Also worth noting the TurboScan app is universal, and I use it on my iPhone as well- so that might be a good interim solution for you.

This is also definitely not normal. High attrition is an issue, but I don't know anyone who hasn't landed a decent job/post-doc coming out of our program, and we're a pretty low tier R1. Even people just straight up leaving or leaving with an MS have gotten jobs pretty fast. Faculty jobs are a longer search, but so far everyone that wanted one of those has gotten one as well- I'm currently the only person on the market with no job, but it's likely I'll move to a post-doc next year anyway and apply from there. Most of our graduates go to industry or government labs, and have pretty high placement rates. I'd say there's definitely something wrong if that many people can't find jobs. That said, high school teaching can pay pretty well- I know people that have left other positions to teach HS Chemistry. I also echo the sentiment that it's too bad you're not being honest with incoming students, I think that's pretty important. I give all relevant data to visiting and new students, including placement rates from various labs.

That actually, sadly, doesn't sound that far out of the norm for me. Attrition rate is pretty consistently 50%+ in Chemistry PhD programs, and lots of people get in thinking its going to be quite a bit different than it is. And in this state of funding, a program outside the top 25? Having no pubs for 3-4 years isn't that far out of the ordinary, sadly. Especially if grad student turnover is high, and it's a department without a lot of post-docs. One of the big drivers of attrition, too, is that with a BS, you can make about 2x a grad stipend and employment rates are pretty high. And after a year or two of a program, leaving with an MS and getting 2-3x the salary.... Starts sounding better and better.

Going off of the "pressure" line of discussion, I think it's important to remember that you will make good use of your network wherever you end up. Some of the more influential and well connected scholars in my field are not at R1 institutions! They have good collaborations, and they make good use of their skills. If you end up somewhere that is predominately undergraduate, then you focus on training and preparing those undergraduates for future careers, including funneling them to people you know looking for talented graduate students. I was pretty clear from the start that I wanted to teach, and that while I was keeping my options open, I really wanted to end up at a non-R1 type school, focused on undergraduate education. It's helped smooth things over to a large degree with my faculty and advisors, even though all of them have told me they really don't have much advice to give, as they have no real experience with non-R1 hiring or preparation. Our school dean famously told a group of graduate students once that teaching experience was rarely an important factor in any faculty hiring decision, irrespective of the level of the school- so the R1 mentality is quite pervasive. In a similar fashion to Rising_Star, I'm applying to a range of schools this season. Basically, places that have an interesting department, an opening, and look like somewhere I could see myself working. This has included mostly good SLACs, but also a couple of small regional state schools, and some larger state research schools, including those with PhD programs.