The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology (Chicago Guides to Academic Life) PDF
Preview The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology (Chicago Guides to Academic Life)
The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology the chicago guide to landing a job in academic biology C. Ray Chandler, Lorne M. Wolfe, & Daniel E. L. Promislow The University of Chicago Press chicago and london c. ray chandler is a professor of biology at Georgia Southern University. lorne m. wolfe is a professor of biology at Georgia Southern University. daniel e. l. promislow is a professor of genetics at the University of Georgia. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2007 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 1 2 3 4 5 isbn- 13: 978-0-226-10129-3 (cloth) isbn- 13: 978-0-226-10130-9 (paper) isbn- 10: 0-226-10129-0 (cloth) isbn- 10: 0-226-10130-4 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chandler, C. Ray. The Chicago guide to landing a job in academic biology / C. Ray Chandler, Lorne M. Wolfe, and Daniel E. L. Promislow. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn-13: 978-0-226-10129-3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10 0-226-10129-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-10130-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-10130-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Biologists—Employment. I. Wolfe, Lorne M. II. Promislow, Daniel E. L. III. Title. qh314.c43 2007 570.71(cid:2)1—dc22 2006029907 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992. contents Preface vii Acknowledgments ix 1: The Academic Job Market 1 2: Choosing a Graduate Program 13 3: Prepare Early for Your Job Search 25 4: Target Your Job Search 35 5: The Application 41 6: Preparing for the Interview 71 7: The Interview 79 8: The Seminar 91 9: Social Time 109 10: The Negotiations 117 11: All in the Family 131 Afterword 147 References Cited 149 preface After years of watching otherwise excellent job candidates fail to get job offers because of avoidable errors and wanting to make sure that his own students avoided these mistakes, Ray Chandler decided to write a paper for a widely read biology journal about the dos and don’ts of the job search. He enlisted Lorne Wolfe, and together they wrote a fi rst draft. Lorne felt pretty good about the manuscript and gave it to Daniel Promislow for comments when he was visiting Lorne in Statesboro. After reading the paper, Daniel said to Lorne, “Nice idea, but it shouldn’t be a paper. It should be a book.” And so was born The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology. There are many books out there on the academic path. You may have already seen, for example, The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career (Gold- smith, Komlos, and Gold, 2001). This is a fi ne book that provides you with a reference not only for the job search, but also with much advice on how to write a thesis and what to do once you become an assistant professor. We have decided to take just one aspect of this process, the job search, viii preface and distill it down to the essentials. We have deliberately written a book that is short, easy to read, and that we hope might even bring some levity to an inherently stressful process. We have written this book for a broad audience, from undergraduate students thinking about going to graduate school, to those of you who have been offered one or more jobs and are about to start negotiating start-up packages and salary. If you are a professor who already has an academic job in biology, we hope that this book might serve as a useful resource for ways to help your own students and postdocs. For those of you just starting out, you may be feeling just a little bit ner- vous, with lots of unanswered questions. Is academia right for me? Should I teach a course during grad school just for the experience? Should I accept that job offer from a school whose start-up package consists of a manual typewriter, two pairs of scissors, and a $10 gift certifi cate for the local hard- ware store? There are so many decisions to make as you wend your way along this path. We hope that this book helps you fi gure out the answers that are right for you. The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology does not pro- vide a magic formula to guarantee that you land the job of your dreams, but it does offer a lot of common sense. In some cases, you may fi nd yourself thinking, “Oh, so that’s how it works.” In others, the book may simply con- fi rm what you already thought. And occasionally, you may disagree with our advice. That’s okay too. The most important thing is that the path you pursue feels like the right one for you. If you go forward confi dent in your knowledge of how all this works, you will be more relaxed. And once you relax, you can start to have fun with this entire process. Whether you are now at a conference and reading through this book in your hotel room, or sitting in your offi ce taking a break from writing a man- uscript, or on vacation (Hey! Don’t think about work all the time!), we hope this brief book helps you fi gure out where you would like to end up as you pursue an academic career, and how to get there. We look forward to hear- ing your own stories. acknowledgments From so simple a beginning . . . charles darwin This book would never have come to fruition if it were not for the enormous help that we received throughout the entire process. The quality of this fi nal product was improved immensely by comments from Sheri Church, Lynda Delph, Steve Hudman, Leslie Rissler, Deborah Roach, and several other anonymous individuals. We were pleased to see that our colleagues put as much rigor into reviewing a book manuscript as they do our research publications! Kris Boudreau provided invaluable ad- vice on the general outline of the book and the encouragement of a true veteran. We thank Matt Hahn for his willingness to share his research state- ment with us. Carol Froehlinger contributed comments and some of her own insightful words to the last chapter. As scientists, we are used to having to generate new data every time we carry out an experiment. When we sat down to write this book, we discov-
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