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noogakl81

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Everything posted by noogakl81

  1. Eigen, thank you for your feedback. That's good to know about pedigree, teaching colleges, and about doing a postdoc in your field. Is your PhD in Biology? How do they decide who gets interviews for academic positions when they have hundreds of applications? Regarding teaching in Qatar, in that post I stated that if you did leave the US for a faculty position in the Middle East, it would be difficult to come back to the US and get a good position. It was really targeted for people who didn't have the pedigree to get a faculty interview in the US but really want to be a professor, and are willing to make that sacrifice to pursue their dreams. Maybe I will change the focus of the blog to engineering, since that is what I know the most about and have the most experience in. I do have a friend who is a math professor and has confirmed that much of what I write about on my blog is applicable to mathematics faculty positions as well. But I am really interested to know more about how things work in your field.
  2. Eigen, I am sure there are things that are field-specific on the blog, even though my intent is to provide advice that is generally applicable. I also realize that my advice on the blog is probably going to be geared more towards people who will not go into academia, since I have never been a professor. Were there specific things you saw that you felt were field-specific? I'd like to know what these were.
  3. It's been a while since I was a postdoc, but it has always stuck with me how much of the advice I heard from advisors and supervisors about looking for job was true 10-20 years ago, but certainly isn't true now. I started my own blog, specifically focused on advice for STEM PhDs at postdocpurgatory.com
  4. samman1994 and ANerdHasNoName, why are your personal deadlines for graduate school so firm? Is this some sort of immigration thing, where if you wait too long, you will no longer be eligible to apply for grad schools in the United States? From a career perspective, it would make more sense to spend more than a year at a position, so that when you leave for grad school, you will have more accomplishments on your CV, good references from the company, a larger professional network, and hopefully more money in your bank account to pay for your schooling if your schooling is not paid for. Both of you make it sound as though you have no other choice but to lie in your job applications because you must start graduate school the following year. Unless there is something I'm missing, and please inform me if this is the case, that doesn't seem to be true in either of your situations.
  5. I would absolutely recommend deferring for a year. If you choose to leave your position after only a year and go to graduate school when you told them in the interview that you were not going to do this, this will negatively impact your career prospects in the future in the following ways: 1. Full-time career positions that only last one year or less do not look good on a resume. In the future, potential employers might wonder if you are only applying for their position because you couldn't get the position you want and will dump them as soon as the position you want with another company becomes available. 2. You will have a terrible reference from your first job. They can tell any potential employers in the future that first, you lied about your career plans in the interview and second, you bailed on the team when they really needed you to stick around. All of this after it had been communicated to you that you were in line for a promotion after one year! Any potential employer that finds these things out is not going to hire you. In future interviews, I would recommend not talking about specific details of your future career plans if you think this will adversely affect your chances of getting the job. You can still talk about the type of work you want to be doing in a particular field, without mentioning that you want to go and get a PhD or take a mother position. If they communicate things to you something to the effect of that they only want to hire people who want to stick around for a long time, ask them to sign you to a five year contract with no probationary period and guaranteed 10 percent raises each year. They will scoff at this, but you can discuss the reality is that in many states, they can fire you whenever they want to and you can leave whenever you want to. You know too little about what it will be like to work at the particular company, and they don't know what it will be like for you to work with them to make long terms plans.
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