Keep Persisting With Those Job Applications

[RonPrice]

Applying for jobs as extensively as I did in the days before the email and the internet came on board in the early 1990s, became an activity, for me, that sometimes resembled a dry-wretch. Four to five thousand job applications from 1957 to 2007 has been a lot of applications! At least since the mid-1990s, a few clicks of one’s personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of life’s game could go on or could come to a quick end over a set of wires under the ground, the electronic world of cyberspace. During that half-century of job-hunting years I applied, as I say, for some four to five thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of all those years! This is a guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this fifty year period. The great bulk, 99.9% of those thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of them, perhaps half a dozen of all those letters, in a file in my Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X, a part of my autobiographical work which is now entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs. So...keep at it folks---it can be a long story....Ron

[ajb]

Things are genuinely hard these days. Cuts and fear of cuts in science funding all add to an abysmal situation. The public sector here in the UK also faces a tough time.

 

Not the best of times to be looking for position. But I will indeed take your advice and keep on trying.

[Severian]

I got the first faculty position I applied for.

[ajb]

I got the first faculty position I applied for.

 

What was it like finding your first postdoc? I am really struggling.

 

This is despite being the soul author of two papers and the internal examiner saying that my PhD thesis was "very impressive".

[Severian]

What was it like finding your first postdoc? I am really struggling.

 

This is despite being the soul author of two papers and the internal examiner saying that my PhD thesis was "very impressive".

 

To start with I didn't get offered any postdocs at all. Then, during the summer, someone pulled out of a (rather good) postdoc job, and they needed a replacement quickly. I was just at the right place at the right time.

 

In other words, just like in every other walk of life, whether you are successful or not is largely random.

[CharonY]

Academic merit alone won't get you very far, as the market is just too crowded to shine with that alone. However, having a strong network will increase your chances being at the right place at the right time.

Edited December 9, 2010 by CharonY

[lemur]

Sometimes I think the reason it doesn't work to get a job for a while is that you're applying to the best you can find out of pragmatism but somewhere you know there's a more perfect job for you possible and this comes through in your application. At some point a job that's perfect for you will seem to just find you more than you found it. You may have sent an email half-heartedly as yet another fleeting attempt and you even thought that job was long gone to another applicant and yet, voila', you get an email or a call. In the meantime, you have the opportunity to reflect on your field and labor economics generally. You can reflect on the ultimate social-economic philosophical question: i.e. "what is the point of human labor-capacity?"