A lot has happened this week, both good and bad.
I went for my last interview a few days ago. This was at a small, liberal arts college in the northern midwest. It was a great interview, and I was very pleased by what I saw during my campus visit. The students were great, and the faculty were friendly. Start-up resources would be abundant. The department will get a new home in a new building within the next few years, so nice facilities are also on the horizon. The only drawback is that it’s at a liberal arts college, so I’d have relatively substantial teaching responsibilities and reduced research responsibilities. This also means that I’d have “less status” in the field as a researcher. I’m still conflicted about how I feel about this.
I heard from my top choice school the day I returned home, and they’ve offered the position to somebody else. This first-choice candidate accepted their offer, so I’m out of luck with my first choice department. They expressed a reason why their first-choice candidate was their first choice, and from my perspective, it’s a total cop-out. But, it really doesn’t matter since there’s nothing I can do anyway.
I received an offer I don’t really want the day I returned to work following the liberal arts interview trip. I interviewed for this position a couple of weeks ago, and observed some major red flags during my campus visit. I have very mixed feelings about the offer. Some points of it were better than I’d expected (i.e., salary), but it’s not enough to eliminate those red flags. The biggie is the quality of the grad students. I’m concerned about how productive I could be in this position with what would likely be grossly inadequate student support. The teaching responsibilities would be less, but the research expectations would be higher. This is worrisome, because from my perspective, weak graduate students are dead weight, and are not “better than nothing.” It doesn’t help that this university is situated in a town that’s not particularly nice. An offer is better than nothing, but I’m not sure how much better than nothing this offer truly is.
If nothing else, taking this offer would get Hubby and I out of our current house, which seems more and more vulnerable every day we live there. I had the mail held while I was at the small liberal arts college, and the bundle of accumulated mail was stolen from our mailbox on Friday afternoon. On Sunday morning, somebody checked out all the windows at the basement level of our house and left footprints in the snow as proof. Just this morning, we found proof that somebody had been messing with our front door while we slept. Needless to say, we’re deeply unhappy about this situation, and want to move as soon as possible.
I’m also spurred to move on by the situation in my lab, which has never been great but has recently become a bit worse. Recently a grad student has asked me to join hu on a paper as 3rd author. Grad student had added a model to the paper without a priori hypotheses for certain effects. Hu wanted to include the model, but also wanted its addition to make sense with the rest of the paper. My reading of the manuscript revealed that it wasn’t foreshadowed adequately, and I spent quite a bit of time adding statements, etc., in support of the model and to make the hypotheses stand out more clearly. I also made major revisions to the methods & results section of this scientific paper. A week later hu poked his head in my colleague’s office while I was meeting with colleague, and told me that the lab’s big boss instructed hu to ignore my comments on the introduction. Grad student was quite embarassed when hu told me this, and tried to downplay it as big boss’s desire to submit the paper with minimal revisions at this point.
I can appreciate wanting to take the path of least resistance in terms of submitting papers for review, but the way this was done was pretty disrespectful. Clearly I’m not good for much around here other than doing other people’s analyses and checking papers’ formatting.
I am so out of here ASAP.
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