Karsten Heeger: job searches and rumor mills

Few things in professional life are as stressful and unpredictable as searching for a job.

Landing an academic position is difficult, and quite often positions are open for a variety of subfields. Once you have made it through the first cut of perhaps 200 applicants you get to go through a campus visit where you meet members of the faculty and present a colloquium and/or seminar. Visiting a department and meeting the faculty can be fun and exciting but it can also be tiring to talk about your academic background and ambitions a dozen times a day. At the end of your campus visit you go home and hope for the best. I have done this a few times this Spring.

The whole process can be exciting, tiring, exhilerating, nerve racking, or all of the above. Would you want to enhance and stimulate this experience through web rumors? You can do it...... in physics.

A few years ago when I came to the University of Washington in Seattle as a graduate student I heard about the Particle Physics Jobs Rumors Mill web site. At the time it was hosted at UW but the site has moved since then.

The Rumor Mill allows you to send in comments and rumors about job searches and selections in particle physics. Short lists of faculty candidates are published on the site, along with the offers made by various departments. You can follow how colleagues switch institutions and how physicist couples move to finally land this all-so-precious dual-career position in one place. Candiates declining offers always give rise to good speculation which of the other positions they have been offered they will accept. Great fun and entertainment. And I'm sure that senior and junior people alike follow the physicists' soap on the web.

Interestingly enough, such a site does not exist for experimentalists. Phew! And searching on Google I was unable to find similar sites for other disciplines than physics. Why is it that physicists want such a rumor mill? Does it help, or is it interesting?
I find it strange and surprising but it is certainly not the first cultural or scientific strangeness I have experienced in physics.

The web has clearly changed the dynamics of the academic job search, what we know about it, and perhaps even the selection process. Consciously or unconsciously. The other day I was browsing the Quantum Diaries when I came across an entry by Gordon Watts: First Reading - his account of the selection process from the point of view of a faculty member. Just a few weeks ago I had interviewed at the University of Washington. As a former graduate student from Seattle I could imagine the discussions he described in the faculty meetings and the controversies about candidates. Even before I had heard officially from the department I could gather the status of my application. In the end, a candidate from a different field of research was chosen.

Learning on the blog the news about the outcome of my application struck me as odd. Perhaps less so than seeing my name listed in a rumor mill.

Comments

Fascinating! Thanks Karsten
N

Posted by: neil | February 25, 2005 at 03:35 PM

Hi Karsten -
there is a new link to CM/AMO experimental rumor page on the Theoretical Particle Physics Rumor Mill site, it only appeared few days ago. My husband has interviewed at University if Washington (and several other places) too. Can't agree more on how nerve racking it is, especially waiting and not knowing the situation...

Good luck with job search

Svetlana

Posted by: Svetlana | March 15, 2005 at 01:19 PM

Hi Karsten,
I'm really sorry you learned about the status of your application at UW from my blog. That is clearly wrong. I obviously can't take it back, but please accept my apologies and please know that was certainly not my intention.

- Gordon.

Posted by: Gordon Watts | April 02, 2005 at 12:51 PM

What is clearly wrong is that most search committees never bother to tell anything to the candidates who didn't make it into the first choice after those first choices are made. So, on our side of faculty search, we are happy to have information from any source - blog included - whatever that information might be. I'm sure Karsten will agree.

Posted by: Sarah | April 03, 2005 at 08:42 AM