How to accidentally be successful at faculty recruitment:
8 steps to landing a career in Academia
“Then the carousel started, and I watched her go round and round… All the kids tried to grab for the gold ring... The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it is bad to say anything to them.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher In The Rye
Sometimes, it’s a scary ride.
Perhaps this is true for everyone, but I have found that I am terrible at planning my future steps. In high school, I wanted to be a “music journalist” (is that even a thing?). In college, I wanted to be a literature scholar, before I switched my plans to a STEM career and become a cardiologist. After ho-hum grades precluded serious medical school candidacy, I continued into graduate school to avoid corporate life. I then started my postdoctoral training with even less of an idea as to what I would do afterward. It certainly was not to become a professor—that was for other people who were way more intelligent and successful than me, who had made the ‘right’ choices in their scientific training to prepare for a faculty career- but here I was, preparing application packages for faculty jobs, wondering if I even stood a chance. During this time, I scoured the internet, hungry to read information from “people that had made it” and grasped the ‘gold ring’ of an academic job. One of my favorites is the Seven Year Postdoc. So, even though I feel like my path to a faculty position was completely haphazard and pure luck (and I am certainly guilty of survivor bias), I think that it is actually the case for the majority of academics, so I will outline my path here and try to emphasize the things that I thought were important.
Get an objective assessment of your C.V. and recruitment potential.
I was pretty shocked when my mentor suggested that I apply for faculty jobs. I did not train at an Ivy League institution for a big prestigious lab, I did not have a Nature/Cell/Science publication, nor did I have a postdoctoral transition award or any sort of external funding. Surely, to be competitive, I would need one or all of those things, because we all hear about how there are hundreds of applications for every faculty spot. But my mentor suggested I ask her own mentor and colleague, a member of faculty leadership at another institution. During our phone call, she commented on my C.V., deciding that I had been reasonably productive and that it was certainly worth a shot. Of course, this was not that light of a decision for me: I passed on a biotech job that I had lined up, committed another year to my postdoc while I did the faculty job search, and had to have hard conversations with my partner regarding the possibility of a job somewhere else in the country. However, at the very least there was a plain-speaking, academic leadership person who was certainly a no-BS type telling me that I had a chance, and I thought if I did not try, I would never know if it were possible.
2. Create a unique and powerful vision of your research program.
Perhaps I am being a little modest regarding my hire-ability, but I did have one great advantage—during my postdoc I generated a tremendous amount of experience with a novel technology: 2-photon microscopy. Departments hire new faculty for many reasons, which include adding fresh ideas and techniques to their ensemble. I instantly had a schtick, as I could be the “2-photon guy”, which could excite any institution that does not have one. I thought about what novel topic I would contribute to the field using 2-photon: the answer came from previous experience, as I had been working on a collaborative project on the aging thymus in my postdoc. I had found out firsthand that working with aged tissues was hard and expensive, so would likely deter a lot of others from working on it. But, everyone gets old, so likely someone will find aging research interesting and worth investing in an expert. During my job search, I spent a lot of time reading about immune aging, looking for the unanswered questions that imaging could help address. From there, I came up with my power statement, which I employ to this day: “I use live-cell imaging to study how immune cells interact within aged tissues.” It is important to be all-in on what you are going to bring to the table. Many institutions have a gap they want to fill, and so if they see that you would fit that gap and you are a semi-decent person, they will make you their pick. Period. Of course, if no one is looking for the thing you are offering, then no one will pick you. So it is your job to have an honest assessment of how the field values your topic of interest and whether it is worth >$1mil to bring you on to make it happen.
3. Craft a clear and interesting application package.
Once you have your vision of what you will study as an independent scientist, you need to demonstrate on paper that your field of proposed study is important and that you are qualified to do this. Your case is made in the application package, which usually comprises 3 parts: cover letter, C.V., and Research Interests. Some institutions also require other items, like a Teaching Philosophy or Diversity Statement, which I would write when I first encountered the need. But for a biomedical faculty position with a research focus, the basic package of 3 is the most important. Unless you are fortunate enough to have some networking contact with the institution, it could be the only way that the search committee would know you exist. All the parts of the application should be very clear and to the point; the search committees are usually faculty, and they are busy. They will decide very quickly whether you are worth a closer look. In some places, there may even be an administrator that is instructed to screen the submissions first, usually looking for keywords and removing people who are obviously not qualified.
Your cover letter is a brief narrative to introduce yourself and clearly explain what you would bring to the program. Your C.V. will list your accomplishments. Your Research Interests will expand on both these documents by summarizing why the body of your previous work is important, and then giving a general description of your proposed research plan. The plan must give just enough detail to demonstrate you know what you are talking about without being too technical. It must be exciting and address a clear gap in the current field. It must convey that you have enough of a plan to hit the ground running when you start but also be expansive enough to power your first five years as a lab. I followed the basic outline (emulating an inspiring colleague of mine in a different scientific discipline) by having 2 very developed plans within an overall research theme, and one less-developed but still exciting plan that suggested areas of potential collaboration within a current hot topic in the field.
4. Hunt for job postings.
There are a few general ways to find biomedical faculty job postings: websites associated with publishing entities like Nature and Science; those associated with professional societies (like the American Association of Immunologists); fliers posted as a hard copy at institutional job boards, or, increasingly, virtually either through department email lists or on Twitter; a few can be found on commercial job hunting sites like Indeed, LinkedIn, or Glassdoor; or by word-of-mouth, either by a mentor or colleague or some other networking connection. Within academic job postings, there are 2 major flavors of jobs that you will likely apply to one in which the department appears to be looking very generally with regards to the subject matter (molecular biology, immunology, genetics) or one in which they are looking for specific expertise (usually a current hot topic, like immunotherapy, computational biology, or metabolism). It is considered a good strategy to apply to anything that you could remotely justify being a fit for, and also to not geographically exclude yourself unless the institution is absolutely not for you. Even if you could not see yourself working and living at a specific location, it may turn out to surprise you, and also it can be good practice and leverage if you can have more eyes on you.
5. Apply for the jobs.
I do not get the sense of there being a ‘recruiting season’, so it is best to just start looking when you are ready to start applying. Unlike jobs in the commercial sector, it is not the expectation that you will be ready to start working within the next month, so it is better to start your search even a year out from your anticipated start date. Once I started to find job postings that I was interested in, I created a spreadsheet so that I could bookmark the job posting weblinks, and I also created a folder named after the institution and saved a digital copy of the job posting in case the webpage is removed. Reading the posting very carefully, I would make sure that I have all the materials they request in the application. I would also tweak my cover letter to the institution, and save the tailored documents into the folders I had made. I would also tailor the introduction and conclusion sections of my Research Interests to emphasize what the job posting is looking for. Finally, I would send the contact information and the job posting to my recommenders so they could send their letters. I ended up submitting 25 applications over ten months.
6. Getting Invites.
Most of my applications must have ended up in the black hole somewhere because I clicked submit and never heard anything. For some jobs, I eventually got an official letter of rejection, which I would dutifully document in my spreadsheet. For a couple of jobs, I got an email from someone, usually the search chair, asking if I had secured external funding already, and when I said no I did not hear back. Now that I have had the chance to be on a search committee, I am a little shocked to see how subjective it can be, but this is a very human endeavor, like dating. For 2 of the positions that contacted me to set up an interview, the request came very soon after I sent in my application. For the third, I got contacted soon after resubmitting my application (The first time, my first-author paper was not accepted yet, which was critical to demonstrate my productivity, so I was rejected. But the job description seemed so perfect for me, that when the manuscript was accepted a few months later, I contacted the recruiter for the position to let her know and almost immediately got an invite.). Based on my experience, I think that many biomedical positions are looking for a good fit right off the bat—if a decent application comes in that fits their desired niche, they will jump on it quickly. Granted, some searches are more general and may be run in such a regimented way that they want to receive a certain number of applicants by a prescribed deadline before going through them. But my view is that committees don’t care for protracted searches, so they will quickly pounce on a good candidate. My advice is if you have submitted a good 10 or so applications to jobs that you seem to be a good fit for with regards to your research specialization, but don’t hear anything at all, you will need to be a little more proactive in your job searching. This means talking to mentors and senior colleagues about institutions they know are hiring, contacting chairs of departments you are interested in to see if they will give you another look, or attending conferences with the intent of ‘running into’ faculty that are at places you want to work. I had tried the last approach, and while it didn’t gain me an invited interview (turns out, my specialty didn’t appeal to the department in general) I still tried and had decent conversations with hiring faculty, which was good interviewing practice.
Hopefully, you are successful, get an invite, and can start preparing for your interview. If not, there are 2 paths you can take: (1) You can keep trying. You buckle down in your research and generate more output (i.e., publications). You continue to refine your application package by getting input from others and make your candidacy even stronger. Keep applying as you find good jobs. (2) You investigate other career paths. This decision depends on the security of your current position (as in, how long you can be retained by your current employer) and your taking stock into whether this is worth it for you. This can be a time of great uncertainty, and I admit that I had a ton of existential dread during this time [Editor’s Note: at least two tons]. Was I making the right choice for me and my family? Did I really want this? Was all my years of postgraduate training worth it? Like EVERYONE kept saying to me, there is no crystal ball to tell the future, and there is no ‘right’ choice. If you find yourself agonizing about this, I suggest giving yourself a deadline (I decided on one year), after which you will entertain other prospects. This is not to say that jobs in other sectors are easier to get, but they can have much shorter hiring timeframes than what is standard in academics.
7. Have a great job interview.
Like many things, your interviewing skills get better with practice. Some of the best advice I had gotten was to put yourself in the frame of mind of being excited to go on the job interview, not to imagine yourself being put through the wringer. You are getting a really great chance to meet lots of nice people that are interested in your science, and want to share their interesting work with you too. You get to visit a new place and imagine yourself living and working there. Generally, if they are spending the time and money to bring you out, they already are very interested. There may be a lineup of candidates they are bringing out from which they need to make a final decision, but in the end, it is more likely that the need for certain scientific expertise will drive that final hiring decision. It seems that the actual job interview isn’t as important unless you exhibit serious behavioral red flags that would make it seem like you are unbearable to work with. So be prepared with your formal presentation, your chalk talk, and a working knowledge of your destination and what the faculty do, and then do your best to just enjoy the experience.
Pre-interview selfie is highly recommended.
For my first interview, I was so nervous that I felt I did very mediocre during the chalk talk- it was the first one I had ever done, and it felt really hard to have raw research ideas interrogated. For my second one, I thought I gave a beautiful talk, but I neglected to wrap up with a short intro into my planned research (I thought I would get a chalk talk to do that, but it turns out, I didn’t). In my last one, I had a better idea of what I was getting into, and wouldn’t you know it, that is where my offer was. But, I still think it was the fit that was important, and that the visit itself was just to show that I was not going to blow it.
I felt great about this presentation, but in the end I don’t think I was the fit they wanted.
What I had not anticipated was how physically grueling the interview days are. Usually, you are visiting for a day and a half, during which you are giving your group presentations, meeting professors and institutional officials one-on-one, taking meals, and even being driven around, all while being potentially evaluated as a future peer. All throughout the day, you want to be attentive, interested, and not obnoxious, which depending on your character can be very taxing. Knowing how strict the timetable was, people were generally considerate and would ask if I needed a moment to visit the restroom; I ALWAYS said yes, just so I would have a moment of peace to collect myself. However, in general, I found these recruitment trips to be very exciting, and I could already feel what it would be like to be a faculty member. I was very heartened to find out they were not the stodgy academics I imagined, but (imperfect) people like me!
My first presentation here.
8. Making the decision.
I am not the best advice on this, because I had exactly one job offer. But all you need is one, right? Thankfully, it was a great offer in a great place, and so I was happy to accept. I was walking back to my previous lab from lunch with a friend, we were airing our uncertainties for our future when I received a phone call from the search chair. What a surreal and great feeling, after several years as a postdoc, to know that somebody wanted me to be a professor for them. I still showed the offer letter to my mentor so she could weigh in, as it is important that all the money and wording are in there to indicate that the institution is going to provide well for your new lab. Bargaining can and should be done, especially if one has competing job offers, but this was not the case for me—nor was it necessary, as the offer included additional funds to build a dedicated 2-photon microscope, and my employer has very good benefits. In any case, once you are ready to make your decision and say yes to the job, a whole administrative machine will kick into gear so buckle your seatbelt.
Final Thoughts
Likely you are thinking that my title doesn’t make sense—this is a LOT of work and definitely not accidental. However, I have titled it such because from my point of view, it feels like dumb luck and not the path I thought I would have taken. But learning and growing are not pre-determined paths and discovering who you are as a scientist is a very wonderful thing. What excited me about the path of a professor was the prospect of being among the global community of scholars working on the leading edge of science. As a postdoc, I had developed the skills and knowledge needed to start running a lab (I didn’t know it at the time, but in retrospect, duh), and I was surprised to realize that yes, I am now an expert in my field. Not only that, but it was thrilling to develop a whole new research plan, and to figure out how to make it happen. The faculty transition is certainly very challenging and scary to reach for, but if you decide to reach for the gold ring: get organized, rally the people that will keep you going, and enjoy the process: wherever you end up, you have worked very hard and grown so much on the way.