Teaching Faculty Wannabe

FYI, your GRE combined score is way higher than me. Also, you should be proud of those pubs, 1st author or not. Good luck and I hope this year goes well for you!

@Moods This is true thank you for the positive notes!!!!

I understand your nerves. Yeah, I think schools accept students without interviews. Some schools don’t even conduct interviews and even those that do, I feel like they don’t always do interviews with students they accept. I am sorry all of this waiting has been making you super nervous. It all really sucks, and I hope you hear some good news soon. The fact that you have an employee sponsor should be reassuring and I am sure you are have a great application as well! Also, I hate to say this but I think we still have about a month or even more to hear back from schools. I wish the process would go quicker, but we are literally at the mercy of how long they take to make decisions. Good luck, my friend! 

Skype interview request from UVA this morning. Crossing my fingers as hard as possible for a Penn interview invite this week ?

A quck look through your schools and your program show that there are quite a lot of people who have been accepted as late as March.  Ghosting by universities is very real.  In many ways, I wish they'd just straight out reject those who stand no chance so that you know right away not to waste the anxiety on them. 
There could be a chance you could be passed over this year. I'm all too familiar with that feeling.  That said, it really isn't the end of the world.  Remember: Strength is not determined by the number of times you get knocked down, but by the number of times you get back up.  Quite a few people get passed over.  You just have to keep your head up and work on making a better application for next year.  Admittedly, though, it looks like you've gotten some interviews, which is a lot further than most people have gotten--myself included.  Just bite your lip and wait until March.  Not much you can do by worrying about it. 

That's amazing! With mine, they are just dreams and hopefully one day will happen! But you are actually going out and doing THE THING! I hope you have a wonderful time exploring Asia!

Hi all!
I was just looking around for scholarships to apply to and I came across this website that could be useful for most people: https://www.gograd.org/financial-aid/paying-for-your-phd/
I hope this is helpful!
 

Despite flight mishaps both ways, first interview weekend went well. I missed my flight there and thought I blew the interview already, but everyone was so kind to me. I was taken aback! Interviews with faculty made me nervous, but they felt like casual conversations. The director said that even though they have another interview weekend in a month, they will send decisions to our group next week or the week after. Hoping for my first acceptance.

I got my first in-person interview! I am sooooo excited! YAY! I was definitely losing hope there.

I got my first in-person interview! I am sooooo excited! YAY! I was definitely losing hope there.

I did NOT send the email through GEM (I don't recommend sending through GEM). I used my personal email. In the past I've gotten their emails by just doing a google search of their names plus university name. But luckily for these schools, I had received solicitation emails last year encouraging me to apply to their programs because I had applied to GEM. I had responded to those emails last year and established some rapport with the GEM Reps who sent those emails. So for this situation, I just used the same email chain so that they had context of who I was and I just changed the subject. 
 

On a side note NHL All Star game is this weekend!

@sirTintin @Moods  I also sent them a similar email where I updated them on having been selected by (employer), and I got similar results. I would recommend to try to find who you have had correspondence with as most of you probably got fee waivers to apply to those schools. Some of them weren’t the designated GEM rep for that school, and here’s the email I sent them:
 
Dear (person),

I wanted to update my (department) application, as I have been recently selected as a GEM fellow in collaboration with (employer). If you require additional information about this fellowship, I can gladly provide you that.
Thank you,
I’m so happy to see everyone succeed, Lets all get this bread!

Oh my goodness! I relate to this so much! I applied to nine, nada from any of them so far. I have looked at the results and people are already getting interviews, acceptances, and rejections from some of the schools I applied to. I just want to hear something. ANYTHING! I wasn’t eating all that well either nor sleeping well. I have to force myself to relearn self-care, like yoga and meditating and drinking tea and getting enough sleep, but it’s still hard.?
Good luck to everyone, though! ??

@sirTintin Congrats on those amazing replies!
I actually did a combination of the two last night. Most of them I emailed directly since I already had their emails already after asking for the fee waivers. However, there were three that I used to contact through the GEM website. One of those people have already contacted me and three other people that I contacted directly have replied back as well. So, I think both ways is fine, but I think if you already have their email, you might as well email them directly. 
Also, as mentioned above by these two wonderfully helpful people, I highly suggest contacting the GEM Reps about getting an internship. Two of them are telling the departments for me and the other two are telling me to update the department about the internship. They all seem very excited for me, which not only makes me feel good but also gives me some hope that I might still have a chance of getting in!
I am really thankful for all the people who have helped me during this entire process, especially you all on this specific forum! Thank you! Good luck everyone, and to those waiting to hear back from employers, I hope you hear something soon!

I applied to ten and I have only gotten radio silence! From what I've seen on the results page, the results from my schools will probably start coming in the first full week of February, but I've been PETRIFIED and barely able to eat. ? 

I also want to go to all the parks! Such a big landscape to explore, but pretty expensive to leave the country. I really want to go to India, too. 

@sirTintin Congrats on those amazing replies!
I actually did a combination of the two last night. Most of them I emailed directly since I already had their emails already after asking for the fee waivers. However, there were three that I used to contact through the GEM website. One of those people have already contacted me and three other people that I contacted directly have replied back as well. So, I think both ways is fine, but I think if you already have their email, you might as well email them directly. 
Also, as mentioned above by these two wonderfully helpful people, I highly suggest contacting the GEM Reps about getting an internship. Two of them are telling the departments for me and the other two are telling me to update the department about the internship. They all seem very excited for me, which not only makes me feel good but also gives me some hope that I might still have a chance of getting in!
I am really thankful for all the people who have helped me during this entire process, especially you all on this specific forum! Thank you! Good luck everyone, and to those waiting to hear back from employers, I hope you hear something soon!

@sirTintin Congrats on those amazing replies!
I actually did a combination of the two last night. Most of them I emailed directly since I already had their emails already after asking for the fee waivers. However, there were three that I used to contact through the GEM website. One of those people have already contacted me and three other people that I contacted directly have replied back as well. So, I think both ways is fine, but I think if you already have their email, you might as well email them directly. 
Also, as mentioned above by these two wonderfully helpful people, I highly suggest contacting the GEM Reps about getting an internship. Two of them are telling the departments for me and the other two are telling me to update the department about the internship. They all seem very excited for me, which not only makes me feel good but also gives me some hope that I might still have a chance of getting in!
I am really thankful for all the people who have helped me during this entire process, especially you all on this specific forum! Thank you! Good luck everyone, and to those waiting to hear back from employers, I hope you hear something soon!

Oh, I have soooooo many places I want to visit, I could on forever. But I would love to travel around the US more. Visit some national parks (Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite) and big cities (Boston, Seattle, Portland, San Fran, Philly, Chicago), eat delicious food at mom-and-pop places, and make memories with the people I am with. My dream trip, though, is either exploring Europe by train or go to Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and Korea all in one big trip.

I feel like I have been lucky to have a mother is and grandparents that were university professors. I’ve seen all they had to deal with as not only the cultures of their departments, but also the struggle of being minorities in such work environments. If I wanted to get a PhD to become a professor, I honestly would not have applied because not only is it difficult to get a professorship, it’s hard to get tenured, hard to juggle everything that comes with being a professor (advising, teaching, research, etc), and dealing with the toxicity of some departments. It’s not always bad, but it’s definitely not the greatest, especially the tenured process. However, I agree if you are so passionate about a field that the poor prospects you may face after getting a PhD are not deterring you, then it is what you were meant to do. Getting a PhD is pretty much a leap of faith, in my opinion. But hopefully worth it! 

I want to re-emphasize this. Let's set aside for a moment family or others who don't know anything about academia for a second, and focus on advanced graduate students or people with PhDs trying to discourage people coming in or thinking about PhD programs. I feel like some people are characterizing this as malicious or clueless strangers trying to steal your dreams and framing this as some kind of rah-rah "believe in yourself!" overcoming of obstacles, but IMO, that's not what this is.
I received my PhD 4.5 years ago (hard to believe I will be 5 years post-PhD this year!). I currently work in an industry job that I would not have gotten without my PhD - not in the same way, at least. And I still spend some time actively or indirectly discouraging people from going to get a PhD. It has nothing to do with these people's work ethic or whether I think they're able to do it, or anything like that. In fact, I have gently discouraged people who I know could do a PhD no problem, who wouldn't have any issues getting through the work. (To be fair, I don't usually give advice unsolicited - but since I work in an environment in which I am one of a few who has a PhD across my company, I get asked this question a lot.)
First of all, while many students come in knowing about the job market, some don't. Some people's professors have told them the old canard about the wave of retirements coming soon (you know, the one they've been spinning since the 1990s), or whatever else. Some of the people trying to warn you may have been in this bucket, and they are only trying to be kind and pass on information they wish they had when they were new.
Second of all, many students haven't thought about a Plan B if they don't go into academia, and I want any person who's asking me to think about it before entering the program because the academic market is so terrible. I want them to realize that the chances of them becoming a professor are pretty slim and think about what they want to do after. Furthermore, I want them to realize that a lot of successful academics are also exiting the academy for Reasons. The issues of a tight job market don't end once you secure the first tenure-track job; some people are stuck teaching in small towns or other areas they don't want to be in; some people get stuck with toxic departments; some people have always planned to "write their way out" but find it increasingly difficult in this atmosphere. I know I have a perceptual bias: since I am an ex-academic with a PhD, academics who want to leave contact me all the time (sometimes, out of the blue) to ask about how they can do the same thing. So I don't know what the real percentage of academics looking to leave is, but it's definitely not zero.
Thirdly, and most importantly, what frenchphd said is true. I went into my own doctoral program not even wanting an academic career at all. Through six years of a PhD and a year of postdoctoral fellowship, I started to question what I thought I wanted because of the subtle (and not so subtle) cultural and social pressures of going through an academic PhD program. Professors tend to frame their work - overtly or more subtly - as the only work really worth doing, or the superior choice. They tend to infuse their efforts at career guidance with the same feelings. Few professors are fully informed on the options that you might have outside of academia, so they are of little help there. (I launched my non-academic career search by my lonesome, and when I did secure my job - I am a UX researcher at a large technology company - I had to explain to my postdoc supervisor AND my doctoral PIs what it was. They had never even heard of the field or knew it existed, and it's populated primarily by ex-academic psychologists.)
The other thing here is that so much time, opportunity cost, and potentially money could be saved by someone who knows they want to work outside the academy, or for whom the chances are good that they will, by not going to a PhD program. I am 3.5 years into my career, and I have done really well pretty fast for someone at my stage; I recently got promoted to management at work. That said, I often wonder where I'd be if I had invested the 7 years I spent PhD + postdoc working instead - not just financially and career-wise, but mentally. I don't regret the years I spent getting my PhD - I learned some valuable skills and tools, met some lifelong friends, got married, and produced a large project I am proud of. But when people ask me if I would do it all over again, knowing what I know now...I don't know the answer to that question. Usually, I lean towards no.
So yeah, usually the discouragement has nothing to do with how you work under pressure or what you're capable of, and it's not trying to squash your dreams. I want people who go into doctoral programs to go in with their eyes open. I always end my spiels with saying if you can go to a PhD program knowing that you likely will never be a professor; that if you are in the infinitesimally small group of people who do get a professorship, it'll likely be at a teaching college with a 3/3 load or more; that your non-academic job search, should you undertake it, will largely be powered by you with little outside support - and yet you are still so passionate about your field and research that you want to do it anyway and can be satisfied simply by the process of studying an area you deeply love for 5-7 years - then yeah, a PhD is for you!
Supervisors aren't necessarily the most reliable sources of advice, either. Yes, they know you, and they know your ability to complete the PhD. But most of them have survivor's bias, and also many of them haven't had to look for a job in years, sometimes decades. They only know how difficult the market is second-hand, and frankly they are not really evaluated by whether or not they get their students jobs - they are evaluated far more on how much research they get done, and they need graduate students to accomplish that.

They do skype interviews, then invited those accepted for a recruitment visit

It was about a month ago when I accepted, so I don't remember all that well. I think there is a link at the top of the page that takes you to where you accept/reject, like @ray92 said.