10-15 interviews, 1 fly-out lol. Starting to be a shad shad boi.
The market is brutal
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Same here. LRM, Non TT AP for a few years, two pubs. My pubs are better than recent TT APs in the department. Zero interviews.
any idea why? i thought having good publications at a LRM is quite a strong signal
This is the number one mistake candidates make. Don't look at APs who may be a disappointment and denied tenure. Look at the Associate professors. That is what the department is looking for. If you're 2+ years out, they want you to be well on your way to exceeding a successful hire in terms of productivity.
This is misinformed advice, too. You would be shocked to find that even recently tenured associate professors at departments outside of T100 and LACs have embarrassing and/or impressive publications - many times worse than those of JMCs (who would not get an interview due to their LRM statuses).
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my conversion interview --> flyout, H(ish)RM
Europe: 7 --> 5 out of 70 applications
US: 5 --> 1 out of 50 applications (all but 1 interview were in December so I'm not holding my breath here)US market is indeed insane. It was mostly schools in the top 30-40 that had any positions so it should surprise no one that it was incredibly difficult to get an interview in the first place. Converting to flyout in the US was almost impossible unless super duper star.
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Hiring a fresh PhD has option value because the bad ones can be discarded at tenure time. Hiring someone two-years out with mediocre publications means giving up that option value. Much better to take some random draws from a distribution and keep the max than to take someone known to be close to the mean. So your expected value needs to be significantly higher than the average AP. For this reason, you should only take a postdoc over a reasonable shot at a TT job if you have strong private information that suggests you are going to produce a strongly positive signal in T-1 years, where T is the length of the postdoc.
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Hiring a fresh PhD has option value because the bad ones can be discarded at tenure time. Hiring someone two-years out with mediocre publications means giving up that option value. Much better to take some random draws from a distribution and keep the max than to take someone known to be close to the mean. So your expected value needs to be significantly higher than the average AP. For this reason, you should only take a postdoc over a reasonable shot at a TT job if you have strong private information that suggests you are going to produce a strongly positive signal in T-1 years, where T is the length of the postdoc.
This is simply not true. I've seen many committees prefer seasoned APs because their pipelines are much more developed, and have gotten over the rookie teaching mistakes. A post-doc or VAP are not bad options, and may soon be prerequisites for landing a TT job.
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this thread has made me feel a lot better. There are many others in my situation: MRM with decent number of interviews but no conversion to flyout. Anyway bros, don't forget that US TT jobs are down 60%!! This isn't our fault. Take another PhD year if you can, or a post-doc/VAP if you can't. Next year will be better.
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this thread has made me feel a lot better. There are many others in my situation: MRM with decent number of interviews but no conversion to flyout. Anyway bros, don't forget that US TT jobs are down 60%!! This isn't our fault. Take another PhD year if you can, or a post-doc/VAP if you can't. Next year will be better.
I agree with the sentiment and am in the same boat as you guys, but not at all sure next year will be better.
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Hiring a fresh PhD has option value because the bad ones can be discarded at tenure time. Hiring someone two-years out with mediocre publications means giving up that option value. Much better to take some random draws from a distribution and keep the max than to take someone known to be close to the mean. So your expected value needs to be significantly higher than the average AP. For this reason, you should only take a postdoc over a reasonable shot at a TT job if you have strong private information that suggests you are going to produce a strongly positive signal in T-1 years, where T is the length of the postdoc.
This is simply not true. I've seen many committees prefer seasoned APs because their pipelines are much more developed, and have gotten over the rookie teaching mistakes. A post-doc or VAP are not bad options, and may soon be prerequisites for landing a TT job.
"A post-doc or VAP are not bad options, and may soon be prerequisites for landing a TT job." --> This is converging to other PhD markets in STEM.