I just said yes the one place that offer me a tenure-track position in a Computer Science department. I think I need to write down my story of landing of this position. It is not particularly a very exciting one, though; it is just my story.

Like what I put on my bio (for CS departments hosting my campus-visit to introduce me), I am a visiting assistant professor in a small liberal art college and at the same time, a final-year graduate student. This combination, to many people, looks a bit strange. Some people asked, “Why people hired you before you get your PhD?”, or “What is your visa status?” Yes, especially for those who had been through all the immigrant status changing, they knew that handling F1 CPT/OPT brings extra challenges. We will talk about that later.

The target for my job hunting this time is to find a position at

• good liberal arts colleges or something similar. The teaching load is usually 2+2+labs(0.5+0.5)=5, and they get good undergrads, so I can do some research with undergrads.
• or research schools (ideally, with a PhD program). R1 is hard to get in immediately after graduation, so maybe some R2 place for this time.

Actually, I also considered a few postdoc positions, like Marie Curie Fellowship, for which I had contacted a French researcher and wrote a proposal on something I wanted to work on for the next few years. The evaluation is based on the proposal itself, without the need of even a letter from my advisor. The result came back in early February and I was rejected, but the result was not unexpected. The way my advisor put it

I’m sorry that didn’t work, but that’s a good showing in a stiff competition.

Yeah, it was a very good practice of writing a real proposal and try to get some real money. Later in the job interviews, when I talked with a research school, I would tell them this experience. I am not sure whether this helps. The thinking is, people want to see you can get funded. This is my only funding-related experience as a graduate student.

Over all application portfolio:

By Jan 13, I applied 39 undergraduate colleges, 20 Master’s universities, 19 R2 universities, 29 R1 universities, 5 postdoc positions, 3 Chinese Universities.

By March 10, I applied 13 additional places. In total, I sent out 128 applications, almost all of which are for tenure-track positions.. Adding the 80+ places I applied last season, I applied altogether about 210 places.

In the first year’s search I did not take it very serious though: I started late, did not apply a lot, and only applied postdocs and visiting position. At that time, I somehow viewed tenure-track positions as some thing not reachable. Well, I had less (real) teaching experiences at that time (no, they don’t count TA experiences very seriously), and had less publications and no fancy awards.

The result: Last year:

First round (online interview):8 Second round (on-campus visit):3 Offer: 1 Oddly, one of the places asked me visit their campus after 7–8 months of our online interview. Their email starts like “it looks like a million years ago :-)…”

This year:

First round (online interview): 13 Second round (on-campus visit): 5 Offer: 1

Oddly again, the place offer me the job skipped the first round, because they wanted to move fast. As to the online interview, they were like “we will invite you to campus anyway, why bother?” and “the conversation with the HR department will only slows down the process.” Luckily they like my research and I like them.

When I first went on the market, it was a little scary. I was not sure anyone would hire me. There were so many places hiring, I didn’t seem to fit any of them particularly well. To that, my advisor was like,

“You don’t need to get offers from all of them, you just need an offer from one of them.”

Teaching v.s. Research

The job offer I accepted at the end is from a place that has Master’s program, the typical teaching load is 3+3. Their class is small though. In the last day before I accepted this job, I was still waiting for news from a R2 School. In an email I sent to my advisor, I said “I think the case may be that they are my first choice, but I am not their #1 pick. I will just move on and say goodbye to my last chance to get into a research school for this search then.” (Edit: They ended up come back to me and offer me the job. But I already moved on.)

He replied and said

If you do research there, it’s a research school!

I hope I will be happy and productive there.

COVID-19 and interviews

Starting from Mid-March, universities began to cancel on-campus interviews and switched to remote interview instead. I got two of these kind of interviews. Some universities froze their search. I’d say I was lucky to get an offer in early March, before everything went crazy.

To those what are still on the market, I wish you best of luck!