What determines faculty hirings in physics departments?

[DukeofDuke]

For example, does the place of PhD granted matter very much, or is more stress placed on PhD advisors and postdoc advisors, or is more emphasis given to actual papers produced by the physicists?
What would a committee hiring a new professor really care about?

The reason I am asking is because I am starting to think about grad school, and trying to weight factors like money/location against the prestige of the school or the prestige of the advisor.

Thanks to all,
DukeofDuke

 

[fasterthanjoao]

The prestige of the school doesn't matter as much as you might think it does. There's quite a few threads on this already with lots of useful info. Basically, work hard to have a high quality thesis and amalgamate yourself into the field as much as possible during your time in grad school and you'll increase your chances. Beware, however, that it can be very difficult to work your way into a position in academica.

(and the supervisor you get is very important: mostly for you. Meet with potential supervisors if possible, ask questions. You want to make sure as much as possible you'll get a supervisor that will be conducive to the way you work.)

 

[f95toli]

When the times come to apply for a faculty position I don't think it really matters that much where you did your PhD; most of the focus will be on how well you have done and what you have published as a post-doc.

 

[Choppy]

A lot will actually depend on the particular school and what they are looking for. My experience is that the faculty will favour candidates with strong potential to bring in external funding and that in turn will have a lot to do with your research experience, what you've produced as a post-doc, and your particular interests and ideas.

A lot will also depend on the focus of the department and the direction the faculty see the department moving in. So it helps to be experienced in a field that is getting "hotter" at that point in time, rather than an area that is stagnating. I'm not really sure to what degree an individual might control this - but it likely isn't that much. This will also vary considerably from school to school.

Also, candidates with strong teaching skills are favoured these days. There is a lot of interest in faculty searches in what courses a candidate might be able to teach at the graduate level. So something else that can really boost your chances are teaching awards and/or the completion of some formalized teaching programs that some schools are beginning to offer.

 

[Norman]

A lot will actually depend on the particular school and what they are looking for. My experience is that the faculty will favour candidates with strong potential to bring in external funding and that in turn will have a lot to do with your research experience, what you've produced as a post-doc, and your particular interests and ideas.

A lot will also depend on the focus of the department and the direction the faculty see the department moving in. So it helps to be experienced in a field that is getting "hotter" at that point in time, rather than an area that is stagnating. I'm not really sure to what degree an individual might control this - but it likely isn't that much. This will also vary considerably from school to school.

Also, candidates with strong teaching skills are favoured these days. There is a lot of interest in faculty searches in what courses a candidate might be able to teach at the graduate level. So something else that can really boost your chances are teaching awards and/or the completion of some formalized teaching programs that some schools are beginning to offer.

I think a distinction needs to be made here. I agree that there is a lot of variability in faculty searches. For a research institution what you stated above may be the case, but for smaller teaching universities this is not typical. Let me give an example of a faculty search that is going on right now: A small, mainly liberal arts school that I have some ties to has a current opening for a tenure track, assistant professor of physics. They do not have a PhD program. While they did not put it in their announcement, I know they are looking for a very specific person. Namely, a minority women from a top 10 grad school. They are looking to diversify their faculty. Now, assuming that a minority women from a top 10 school applies, she will get the job as long as she has good oral communication skills. So, there are definitely cases where your PhD granting institution matters.

I agree with Choppy that what he says is what happens in most faculty searches, but it is not always the case. And I would echo his statement that getting some sort of "teaching certificate" or other formal teaching program experience will give you a definite boost in your job search.

 

[twofish-quant]

For example, does the place of PhD granted matter very much, or is more stress placed on PhD advisors and postdoc advisors, or is more emphasis given to actual papers produced by the physicists? What would a committee hiring a new professor really care about?

Theoretically the place of the Ph.D. doesn't matter but in practice it matters a great deal. Committees mainly care about whether or not you fit into their research/teaching program, but having a well networked advisor/school helps a lot in finding openings and marketing yourself to fit them. It's important to realize that whether you get hired or not is mostly a function of luck (i.e. factors that you cannot either forsee or control) and secondarily a matter of politics. Skill is not an important factor simply because there are so many good Ph.D.'s graduating that it's difficult to distinguish people on the basis of competence.

The reason I am asking is because I am starting to think about grad school, and trying to weight factors like money/location against the prestige of the school or the prestige of the advisor.

It is extremely important that you will go into graduate school with the assumption that you will *NOT* be a tenured professor. In astrophysics, the percentage of people that end up with a tenure-track position in 1 in 5, and that's after two post-docs. The other thing is that 1 in 5 is the result of mostly luck rather than skill, so don't kid yourself into thinking that you'll somehow beat the odds, so it's really important to think about what you will do if you are unlucky.

 

[twofish-quant]

They do not have a PhD program. While they did not put it in their announcement, I know they are looking for a very specific person. (...) So, there are definitely cases where your PhD granting institution matters.

One reason that it does matter is that some institutions/advisors are just better at "working the system." Most of the time you aren't going to be able to figure out what the institution really is looking for, and a lot of the time, it's hard to figure out if a faculty search is a "real search" or if they are posting a job requirement to fill a bureaucratic requirement. The big factor in whether you get hired or not is determined before the job req is posted when the department tries to figure out what they are looking for. Once that's done (at least in astrophysics), the rest is pretty much a formality, because the community is small enough so that once you mention what field of research you are looking at. I can probably without too much difficulty tell you who the top five candidates are.

The big decisions happens when people decide research priorities both at a national and at a institutional level. Having an advisor or a department that can go to Washington and convince people that there should be more funding on the topic which you are doing your Ph.D. dissertation on is quite useful. Having an advisor and a department that has put students in a twenty departments that are interested in doing a particularly type of research is also useful (Hi Harvard).

The thing that you have to realize is that the supply/demand imbalance is so large, that everything has to go right for you to get a faculty position. If you are "imperfect" in some way, you just aren't going to get the position, even if that imperfection is the fact that you are just unlucky.

 

[twofish-quant]

The prestige of the school doesn't matter as much as you might think it does.

It's important to understand *why* and *how* certain factors matter. It is usually not the case that someone will see that you went to Harvard or MIT, and just say "we must hire this person." In astrophysics, the reputation of the advisor matters a lot more than school, and an big name advisor in a no-name school is going to help you a lot, lot more than a no-name advisor in a big-name school. On consequence of this is that it's possible for a school to buy some big names if it has money (and my alma mater UT Austin did just that, and NYU has done this recently).

 

[DukeofDuke]

Thanks, twofish. Your replies were pretty helpful.

It is extremely important that you will go into graduate school with the assumption that you will *NOT* be a tenured professor. In astrophysics, the percentage of people that end up with a tenure-track position in 1 in 5, and that's after two post-docs. The other thing is that 1 in 5 is the result of mostly luck rather than skill, so don't kid yourself into thinking that you'll somehow beat the odds, so it's really important to think about what you will do if you are unlucky.

I agree, though personally I believe I can beat the 1 in 5 at least for some poor quality institution or abroad in an impoverished country...my standard modus operandi is to act in such a way as to maximize future potential action. So, if my choice of grad school made a big difference on professorship, I would consider it more closely even if I don't really want to become a professor (and I'm not sure I do) solely to keep the window open, so to speak.

 

[twofish-quant]

I agree, though personally I believe I can beat the 1 in 5 at least for some poor quality institution or abroad in an impoverished country...

As a matter of fact, it's easy for a Ph.D. to teach astronomy. There is a huge demand for adjunct instructors in community colleges and online universities like University of Phoenix. If you have a masters degree and want to teach, all you have to do is to show up an ask. The one big catch is that it doesn't pay a living wage ($1200/month), and a lot of places will instead that you have primary employment. University of Phoenix, for example, will not hire you as an adjunct unless you are employed doing something else.

There is really a huge demand for teachers of lower division courses. The trouble is that this isn't considered a glamour job, and it's quite challenging.

 

[DukeofDuke]

As a matter of fact, it's easy for a Ph.D. to teach astronomy. There is a huge demand for adjunct instructors in community colleges and online universities like University of Phoenix. If you have a masters degree and want to teach, all you have to do is to show up an ask. The one big catch is that it doesn't pay a living wage ($1200/month), and a lot of places will instead that you have primary employment. University of Phoenix, for example, will not hire you as an adjunct unless you are employed doing something else.

There is really a huge demand for teachers of lower division courses. The trouble is that this isn't considered a glamour job, and it's quite challenging.

Do you know what weight foreign universities give to American degrees? For example, if I showed up in Egypt or Brazil with a top 50 school granted Physics PhD, how difficult would it be to secure an academic position?

I wouldn't mind moving to another country, so long as I have an opportunity to secure money for research (which I'm assuming adjuncts would have a hard time doing).

btw, the glamor factor as far as teaching does not matter to me. My best professor by far was my first year Mechanics and E&M teacher, and considering lower division teaching to be "unworthy" of me would be a slight to my old teacher. I'm not willing to do that.

 

[f95toli]

Do you know what weight foreign universities give to American degrees? For example, if I showed up in Egypt or Brazil with a top 50 school granted Physics PhD, how difficult would it be to secure an academic position?

It depends. If it is a permanent position chances are that you would be competing with quite a few people from the top 20 schools...
Note that most positions in most countries at "teaching universities" (meaning universities that are mainly focused on teaching, and not research) would require you to be able to speak the local language (well). Hence, it might be difficult to compete with e.g. someone from Egypt who has done a PhD/postdoc in the US and has then decided to go back home.
I know a few people from the US who are now working around the world and not all of them speak the local language, but as far as I know none of them actually teach (meaning they are good enough to get grants that are so big that they don't have to teach at all), maybe with the exception of some occasional graduate course (which would be taught in English anyway).

Also, Brazil was a very bad example. There are some really good research institutes and universities in Brazil, it is definately not a "third world" country in terms of research in physics.

 

[DukeofDuke]

It depends. If it is a permanent position chances are that you would be competing with quite a few people from the top 20 schools...
Note that most positions in most countries at "teaching universities" (meaning universities that are mainly focused on teaching, and not research) would require you to be able to speak the local language (well). Hence, it might be difficult to compete with e.g. someone from Egypt who has done a PhD/postdoc in the US and has then decided to go back home.
I know a few people from the US who are now working around the world and not all of them speak the local language, but as far as I know none of them actually teach (meaning they are good enough to get grants that are so big that they don't have to teach at all), maybe with the exception of some occasional graduate course (which would be taught in English anyway).

Also, Brazil was a very bad example. There are some really good research institutes and universities in Brazil, it is definately not a "third world" country in terms of research in physics.

Actually I just dropped Brazil in there because Feynman went there :tongue:

Replace it with Chile then haha.
Hmmm, I've thought about taking a PhD on the road before, and what sorts of job opportunities would be available (especially if I wasn't looking for a permanent position). But I'm assuming that kind of wandering would be judged negatively come time to actually "settle"?

 

[Anti-Meson]

Hiring a professor or offering a professorship to a member of the faculty as oppose to a hiring a lecturer is a serious consideration. Professors must be experts in their field and to qualify as said expert the candidate needs to demonstrate such knowledge by submitting a portfolio of published papers authored by the candidate. That is the process of becoming a professor.

But say a professor wishes to move to a new institution. He has already held a professorship so clearly demonstrates expert knowledge. Though how often his papers are referenced in other papers around the world can show how experted the professor really is. That is where the prestige is, how many other physicists have referenced his work.

 

[twofish-quant]

Do you know what weight foreign universities give to American degrees? For example, if I showed up in Egypt or Brazil with a top 50 school granted Physics PhD, how difficult would it be to secure an academic position?

I think it would depend on the country. In the case of either Mainland China or Taiwan it would be hard because you would be competing against a large pool of Ph.D.'s with good credentials and also who speak the local language and have local connections (i.e. alumni connections and prestige from having a degree from National Taiwan, Peking U, or Qinghua).

I wouldn't mind moving to another country, so long as I have an opportunity to secure money for research (which I'm assuming adjuncts would have a hard time doing

Curiously it's not terribly difficult to do astrophysics research. I know of a few people that got hired by a university or a national laboratory in a non-tenured staff position, who are doing research. In some situations, the staff position is something like research scientist. In others, they end up working as lab technicians and system administrators, but also manage to collaborate in research.

One thing that I've found is that the problem is not money but time. It really doesn't take that much money to do theoretical astrophysics since all you need is enough money to eat. The big problem is time.

btw, the glamor factor as far as teaching does not matter to me.

It's hard for it not to be a factor. One thing that I noticed after talking to people in the fashion or movie industry is how similar those industries are to science research, since science works a lot with the "star" system. It's a little annoying to see an ex-classmate get a nice "glamour" photo-shoot, while you are grading algebra I papers. There is a *lot* of subtle and not so subtle brainwashing that happens in science, and there is part of me that gets affected by it.

 

[twofish-quant]

But say a professor wishes to move to a new institution. He has already held a professorship so clearly demonstrates expert knowledge. Though how often his papers are referenced in other papers around the world can show how experted the professor really is. That is where the prestige is, how many other physicists have referenced his work.

In the end, it's basically about money. In the end, universities hire professors the way that football teams hire quarterbacks, or movie studios hire movie stars. If you have a big name professor, they can pull in grant money, and increase the prestige of your university. Also, money matters when it comes to writing papers, since it's hard to write a paper on astronomy if you don't have the money to pay for telescopes and computers, and a professor with their name on lots of papers is evidence that they can pull in grant money.

Having a professor co-author a paper can say surprisingly little about the expertise of the professor, since most senior professors as a matter of course, get their names onto the papers of the people in the research group that they manage. This has led to some extremely embarrassing situations in which a senior professor ends up sign a paper with flawed data, and they end up not knowing what was in the paper.

I should point out that I don't think this is a particularly *bad* system. but you have to understand the game so that you can make it work for you. One problem with star systems is that you end up with "feast" or "famine" situations. If you are a big name professor, you can fund a research group, which gets your name on more papers, which makes your name even bigger. However, it can work the other way.

The other problem with the star system is that you get recognition for "creative" things, but you don't get recognition for things like teaching freshman calculus. This creates a big funding problem for universities, because to address senior professors, they have to promise to lower their teaching loads, which causes a lot of intra-department resentment especially since undergraduate courses are this big cash cow that universities use to pay for "stars."

Personally, I think the whole system is going to fall apart in the next few years. Universities are having to make budget cuts, and people are starting to seriously question whether "stars" are worth it, since their salaries are pretty much immune from budget cuts.

 

[Anti-Meson]

In the end, it's basically about money

Cynically, money does play a factor, but it is not the principle factor for hiring a professor. I reiterate it is the specific knowledge and research interest the professor holds at whether it is the same interests shared by the institution, which determines if the institution hire him.

This has led to some extremely embarrassing situations in which a senior professor ends up sign a paper with flawed data, and they end up not knowing what was in the paper.

This is very rare for co-authoring professors. This is more likely when young postdocs accredit senior professors which they work with on a paper that turns out to be flawed. The professor doesn't necessarily share the same views.

 

[twofish-quant]

I reiterate it is the specific knowledge and research interest the professor holds at whether it is the same interests shared by the institution, which determines if the institution hire him.

So how does the institution determine their research interests? In the case of NYU, the way it worked was that they wanted some people and then changed the departmental research agenda specifically to attract those people. In other situations, it's a reaction to funding priorities. If you know that the government is about so spend massive amounts of money on energy research or if biotech is going to be a big thing, then you have a lot of incentive to orient your department research toward energy or biotech.

The big decision is when a department figures out what it's research priorities are. Once a department figures that out, I can tell you who is going to get hired. In astrophysics, if you give me a topic, then there are at most five people in the world that are eligible for the position.

Again, I don't think this is a bad thing. NYU is an amazing case study on how to create a prestige university quickly if you have $2 billion to spend, and it's interesting to see the shift at MIT from physics to biotech.

This is very rare for co-authoring professors. This is more likely when young postdocs accredit senior professors which they work with on a paper that turns out to be flawed. The professor doesn't necessarily share the same views.

I was specifically thinking about the Element 116/118 scandal and the Korean cloning scandal. One thing that I found curious and somewhat amusing was the fact that it became obvious that the senior scientists involved basically just rubber stamped the papers, and had no real idea what the junior scientist was doing, so once it became obvious that the junior scientist had faked their data, you had the senior co-authors in some seriously, seriously embarassing situations. Now it is rare for someone to totally make up data, but it is amusing what happens when someone does.

This goes to the way that research works in universities. It's an open secret that in most university research, it's the grad students, post-docs, and junior people that do most of the grunt work, and the role of the senior people is to a) get funding and b) offer some insight and review. It's not a bad system, but when you have a senior professor that manages to co-author 50 papers a year, it's much less a function of individual genius than management competence.

One other thing is that interesting is that all of this involves open secrets. There are situations in which a senior scientist does work on an original idea, and there are also situations in which they put their name on the paper in because they rubber stamped the findings. It's pretty simple to figure out which is which.

 

[twofish-quant]

Also just as a note for undergraduate and graduate students. Learning and thinking about the business and political parts of science research are going to be as important for your career as the technical parts.

One thing that is different about academia and industry is that in industry recommendations are useless, whereas they are the lifeblood in academia. The other difference is that if I go out and advertise for a computer programmer, then the odds are that I will have never met any of the people that are applying. If a search committee goes out and looks for a cosmology professor, you send them your CV, and they've never heard of you before, then it's rather unlikely that you will get the job.

One good thing about the internet is that it's made the game a lot more transparent than it was before, and "rumor mills" are part of new science landscape.

http://cdm.berkeley.edu/doku.php?id=astrophysicsjobs

One thing that should give you pause is how few jobs there are. I think they number of new astronomy Ph.D.'s produced each year is about 300.

 

[Anti-Meson]

So how does the institution determine their research interests?

The institutions don't pick the professors, the professors pick the institution that shares his/hers research interest.

 

[Andy Resnick]

I'm curious how many respondents on this thread have actually been on a faculty search committee.

 

[twofish-quant]

I'm curious how many respondents on this thread have actually been on a faculty search committee.

I haven't been on a search committee (although I have been on grant review panels). Most of my information has been from professors that have been on these sorts of committees, since professors do gossip quite a bit. I'd really be interested in hearing from someone that thinks I have gotten something seriously wrong.

Also focusing on an individual faculty search misses the general problem. You have roughly 300 astrophysics Ph.D.'s graduate each year, and at most 50 or so new tenure-track positions. Ultimately it does boil money to funding since it's the level of funding that determines the overall number of positions open.

It's also a very good idea to read the "Chronicle of Higher Education."

Part of the reason I'm interested in issues of faculty hiring, is that it makes it possible for me to encourage people to go into science without feeling guilty. One serious, serious mistake has been for the powers that be NSF, NAS, and the White House to encourage people to go into science because there will be some nice job at the end of the rainbow, and that's a lie. Personally, I think that people should go into science because science is worth doing for the sake of doing, and because I think that an educated society ends up being "better" than an uneducated one. Now how do we get tons of Ph.D.'s to improve society. I'm not sure, and I don't think anyone really knows, but part of the purpose of research training is to get you to figure out the answers to questions that no one has figured out yet.

 

[jtbell]

I'm curious how many respondents on this thread have actually been on a faculty search committee.

I have, although I'm at a small teaching-oriented undergraduate-only college, so we look for a different sort of candidate than do the institutions that are generally being discussed in this thread.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'm curious how many respondents on this thread have actually been on a faculty search committee.

I have. It's kind of amusing watching people who don't know the system try and describe how it works. :uhh:

First, the 1 in 5 number is about correct. It's easy to see why this is a small number - each professor trains N graduates students, only one of whom will eventually replace him. The problem with thinking "I'll beat the odds" are that all 5 (or however many there are - I would have guessed ten) grad students think exactly the same thing.

Second, by the time you are looking for an assistant professorship, you've probably done two postdocs. It's far more important what you have done during those postdocs than where you went to graduate school. The strong correlation between students at top schools and permanent positions can easily be explained by the fact that top schools attract good students. If you look at the faculty of Chicago, you'll see people from Harvard. But you'll also see someone from South Carolina.

Finally, what's a good school depends on subfield. If someone wanted to do experimental nuclear physics, Harvard and Chicago are not the best choices: Michigan State is much, much stronger.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Let me first preface this by admitting I am feeling churlish due to recent events at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, my alma mater. However, I've had a wide range of experience (on both sides of the hiring process), so here's my perspective:

First, it is correct that different institutions are looking for different skill sets- just as one does not simply look for "a job", one does not simply apply for "a faculty position". Since tenure is based on two-and-a-half 'core competencies' (research, teaching, service), different institutions place different emphasis on research skill and teaching skill. If the Department is looking for a very specific research program, then they have someone else in mind.

Second- departments almost always only hire when someone retires. That is, you the candidate are being interviewed specifically as a replacement for someone. The search for a faculty member can take years- there is usually not a rush since the outgoing person can stay on indefinitely due to tenure. Chair searches and Dean searches can also take years. Chair searches also mean the Department is not hiring faculty- that must wait until the new Chair arrives.

Here's my personal experience:

Your CV and research statement crosses my desk because the search committee is impressed by your resume. They may be impressed because of substantive reasons, or may want you because your advisor is a rock star. As an aside, your CV and research statement may not cross my desk because of substantive reasons or because the search committee thinks your advisor is a clown.

Now, I read your research statement- rather, I scan it because I don't have the time or interest to understand what you do. I look at your CV and try and figure out if you can function independently or need other people to tell you what to do. Then we meet for 30 minutes or so and most of that time I spend trying to determine if I can collaborate with you. Then you go on to the next person and I go back to work until it's time for your seminar. I spend that time trying to determine if you did the work yourself, or don't really understand your own presentation. Notice, at no time have I ever read any of your papers. I rarely understand the slightest thing you are talking about, and I usually think half of your presentation is stupid.

Later, months later, after you go back home and after 10 other candidates have given seminars, we have a meeting to go over everyone's performance. I don't remember what you talked about. I probably don't remember you at all. So the only people who do talk are the ones with very strong feelings about you- that is, people who think you suck. Maybe you are immature. Maybe your advisor pissed off someone in the Department 10 years ago. Maybe you didn't demonstrate (enough) you did the work you claimed you did. Maybe your papers are in 3rd- rate journals. Maybe you are boring. People will argue that your research and results are crap- especially if they have similar research interests (i.e. are competitors). Arguments will occur about how to maintain or re-direct the identity of the Department as a whole, arguments that really have nothing to do with the candidate under discussion.

Remember, in industry hiring and interviews are conducted by people with 'people skills'. Scientists are notorious for not having that skill.

After we vote and rank (second visit, wait list, forget it), it's up to the Chair to decide to extend an offer. Maybe the Chair disagrees with the rest of the Department and does not extend an offer: this part is closed to the faculty. The process can get derailed at any time for any reason- there is *never* a rush to fill a position, because there is *never* money that will be lost by not hiring someone.

Once an offer has been extended, negotiated, and finalized, then you are expected to obtain tenure. That is, you are not hired unless the Chair thinks you will be awarded tenure. And the department does not award tenure, the Institution does- you will be evaluated by faculty members from (for example) the History department, Deans, the Provost, the Board, and the President. Most of whom you have never met.

For Chair searches, the faculty is invited to listen to the candidates and elect a (nonvoting) representative to the search committee. But the Dean is the one who makes that decision.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Andy pretty much nailed the process.

 

[twofish-quant]

First, the 1 in 5 number is about correct. It's easy to see why this is a small number - each professor trains N graduates students, only one of whom will eventually replace him. The problem with thinking "I'll beat the odds" are that all 5 (or however many there are - I would have guessed ten) grad students think exactly the same thing.

And the small number of openings is what creates the basic problem. One thing that you quickly find out when you look at hiring anywhere is that it is an extremely random process. You just say the wrong thing in the interview, one of the interviewers just had a bad day. If you had 300 people with 300 openings or better yet 300 people with 400 openings, it really doesn't matter that much because if you bomb one interview, you'll dust yourself off and move to another. You really can't do that in academia.

The other thing about physics is that everyone knows everyone else. There really aren't that many research physicists in the world, and everyone in a field knows everyone else, and this can result in a lot of petty jealousies and you can find yourself caught in all sorts of politics that you weren't responsible for.

The strong correlation between students at top schools and permanent positions can easily be explained by the fact that top schools attract good students. If you look at the faculty of Chicago, you'll see people from Harvard. But you'll also see someone from South Carolina.

There are some other factors:

1) facilities - basically it's really tough to do observational astronomy without a big telescope and it's really tough to do theory without a supercomputing center. If you end up somewhere without facilities, then your papers are going to be less interesting.

2) history - Until about 1960 pretty much all astronomy and physics took place in a very, very small number of universities. What happened was that with sputnik, Harvard and Princeton started creating large numbers of Ph.D's and postdoc's who then went to the midwest and started new astronomy departments. One consequence of this is that if you go back in time, the number of schools that people get their degrees from gets less and less diverse.

3) networks - People from the same school tend to share information and outlooks.

Finally, what's a good school depends on subfield. If someone wanted to do experimental nuclear physics, Harvard and Chicago are not the best choices: Michigan State is much, much stronger.

The same is true for subfields of astrophysics. If you want to do optical astronomy, Hawaii and Arizona are on par with Harvard-SAO and better than MIT. Radio astronomy - UVA. Supercomputing - Texas, UC San Diego, or UIUC.

Also it doesn't take that much money and effort for a university to develop a center of excellence in a particular subfield.

 

[twofish-quant]

Andy pretty much nailed the process.

What he has described is a little different from the searches I've seen. The faculty searches that I've seen were the result of "new money" coming into the department, which let it think strategically about what types of astronomy they want to branch into.

In those situations there is a rush to fill the positions, because the person that gave you money to fund a new position (whether it's the federal, state, or a private donor) will get very annoyed if after a reasonable period of time, the position isn't filled.

 

[story645]

I know of a few people that got hired by a university or a national laboratory in a non-tenured staff position, who are doing research.

At my school just about everyone (including deans and chairs) is an assistant professor. A good number of them do/are expected to do research and apply for grants. There are very few tenured positions, and there are a number of professors the students (and faculty) expect will die before they retire. The refusal to create new tenure positions/hire new people means that departments with lots of grad students have almost no faculty teaching undergrad courses, which leads to its own problems.

 

[Andy Resnick]

What he has described is a little different from the searches I've seen. The faculty searches that I've seen were the result of "new money" coming into the department, which let it think strategically about what types of astronomy they want to branch into.

In those situations there is a rush to fill the positions, because the person that gave you money to fund a new position (whether it's the federal, state, or a private donor) will get very annoyed if after a reasonable period of time, the position isn't filled.

In my experience, (newly created) endowed chairs are filled by senior people and tenure is part of the deal, not at the assistant professor level. When a new Department Chair comes in, there's usually a package for multiple hires, but senior people are brought in first. When NYU created the soft matter center, the first people they hired were senior-level folks. Again, "senior level" means specific people are targeted for hiring, which is very different than an open call for junior-level tenure track people.

The other thing I forgot to mention is that after we all rank the candidates (second visit, wait list, forget it), it's entirely possible that everyone gets a "forget it" rating. My previous Department has had 8 open slots for about 3 years now, and has filled maybe 2 of them.

 

[twofish-quant]

The refusal to create new tenure positions/hire new people means that departments with lots of grad students have almost no faculty teaching undergrad courses, which leads to its own problems.

Creating new tenured positions also doesn't help very much. Whenever there is new money, there are strong pressures to hire a "superstar" and the idea behind this is that in paying for a superstar, you can bring in even more money. This causes a lot of problems among which is that in order to attract a superstar you have to promise reduced teaching loads, which causes adjuncts and undergraduates to get squeezed even more.

One dirty secret in academia is why universities have undergraduate courses in the first place, which is that they are massive cash cows. Lecture style classes are extremely cheap, and this subsidizes research. The problem with this sort of cross-subsidization is that it creates really, really bad incentives for education. There is really no educational reason why someone should have to fail out of a class. You can easily give a pre-test to see if a student has the necessary background for a class, and if he doesn't, you hire tutors that fix the problems before they get sent into the meat grinder. The problem with this approach is that you they don't get $$$ from the students.

It also has extemely corrossive effects on academic values. One of the harder questions to as is "so where does my paycheck *really* come from?" and if you start getting uncomfortable answers (i.e. to support massive amounts of research, we need to squeeze freshmen and undergraduates and create a rigid class structure) you stop asking uncomfortable questions, and if people can't ask and won't ask uncomfortable questions, that undermines the whole purpose of tenure.

The other problem with this is that it really is unsustainable. The internet just destroys business models based on cross-subsidization, and also forces things to be more transparent. Also if universities have to undergo another set of budget cuts, you are going to have a campus revolt. Adjuncts and staff are simply not going to put up with another round of cuts unless some tenured faculty share the pain, and once one major university somewhere starts laying off tenured faculty, the Rubicon has been crossed.

 

[DukeofDuke]

...Where is the physics in this?
It sounds like a nightmare. I suppose its natural that not even the physicists can escape from that good ole will to power, competitiveness and the creation of hierarchies with their accompaniment of politics. I just didn't realize the scale.

I guess that naive view of "I just want to have fun and do physics" most of us undergrads have doesn't translate into some Utopian academic system...

 

[hellbike]

the more i read this forum, the less i want to pursue scientific career.

 

[twofish-quant]

the more i read this forum, the less i want to pursue scientific career.

Don't go into science for career reasons. If your main goal in life is to make money, there's no particular reason to study science. However, studying science is cool for the sake of studying science, and if your main goal in life is to make money, you are going to run into other problems.

The good news is that there are lots of good opportunities for people with science degrees outside of academia, and part of the reason I want to be honest about what academia is like is that I really think that *more* people should study science and get their Ph.D.'s. Personally, I think that the more educated people a society has, the better off it is, and part of a good education is to give you the tools that you need to figure out what to do with your education, since your teachers don't know.

 

[spartan711]

I am an undergraduate student, so I don't know too much about this subject. However, one of my potential goals was to become a professor, and I am rethinking it now. I truly love to teach people science/math, and I love to learn about anything( anything "practical" - comp sci, programming, math, science, econ, etc).

A professorship seemed perfect for that, as I would be on a college campus. Now though, it seems so bleak and unhappy... :( can anyone recommend an alternative profession? I intend to obtain at least a Masters in Engineering or Math.

(sorry if this is a little off-topic)