My wife and I are country people at heart. We love hardwood forests, wild green fields, and cool lakes; we even enjoy powerful afternoon thunderstorms and the occasional blanket of snow.
So when we imagined our future, we filled in the scenery using the land we knew best. My wife envisioned a cozy house on a large plot of land where she could grow vegetables and berries and maybe even a fruit tree or two. I pictured a sprawling campus on a hill overlooking the woods, with perhaps a river or a lake in the distance. Above all, we both dreamed of a land that was lush and green and quiet.
At the moment, we live in Los Angeles.
It seemed like a reasonable idea when we moved out here: I had managed to procure what appeared to be an ideal postdoctoral fellowship in the biological sciences, and my wife (a teacher) had a solid offer from an excellent school. Besides, that's how it works in academe, isn't it? You can't exactly hang out your shingle and have a great research university spring up around you; you have to go where the jobs are, even if it's not quite where you want to be.
Now, two years later, that rationalization seems a bit thin. The postdoc was not all it was cracked up to be, for one. I came here because of an opportunity to work with specific equipment and a specific population of animals, but somehow the equipment never seems to work properly and the population is never really available.
As for my wife's job, it's often more draining than rewarding, especially given the commute. (It's a 15-mile drive to her school -- or, in Los Angeles units, 60 minutes. That is during rush hour, which, in the afternoon, lasts from about 3:30 to 7:30 p.m.)
So when I fly into LAX and descend into the smog and the sprawl, I always remember what someone once said about Los Angeles: Those who are not here are eager to get here, but those who are here are eager to leave.
I started looking for a tenure-track job last spring. I confess that I didn't really know how to go about it, so I fell back on an old strategy. When I was searching for my postdoc, I used a mass-mailing approach: I contacted 75 people or so and got responses from maybe 25 of them. Some were prominent scientists who generously took time to tell me that my plan for a postdoc was completely insane. I had serious interviews with two, one of whom offered me my current job, and, boom, that was it.
So after touching up my vita and compiling a list of potential recommenders, I decided to count up the number of available positions so I could get some idea of my chances.
What I learned from that process is that it can take a surprisingly long time to count to zero. It takes an even longer time to count to zero day after day, over and over again. It's also very frustrating for my wife, especially when she has just come in the door from that exhausting commute.
So I had found zero ads and zero jobs, and thus my chances were zero as well. (Hey, at least the math was easy.)
In some desperation, I considered looking for another postdoc somewhere else, and I even thought about extending my current appointment. But that wasn't an ideal solution. Postdoctoral fellowships are strange things: Nobody quite knows what you are or what to do with you. You're expected to be independent, more or less, but you don't really have the money or the influence that true autonomy requires. (Nobody much cares when a mere postdoc reports malfunctioning equipment, and nobody has qualms about cutting in line to test your population.)
Then there's the low salary, as well as the constant lurking knowledge that you're going to pack up and move again in the near future. Still, it's better than no position at all, so I decided to keep it as a fallback while continuing the search.
Then, in the middle of the summer, I found a job. Now, I don't mean that I was actually hired somewhere; in my current lexicon, "found a job" just means "found an ad for a job that I might actually want," which is itself an exciting event.
The ad was particularly worthy of celebration. It announced a tenure-track job at a good institution in a relatively rural part of the Northeast. It said the job would start in August 2007, exactly when my current grant would run out. It listed three courses that the new hire would teach -- I had taught them all. It listed a desired research specialty -- one that was almost exactly my own.
I went to the department's Web site and scrolled through its list of faculty members. No well-known lunatics, which is always nice (it means that you can limit yourself to worrying about the less well-known lunatics), and there were several names that I knew and respected. Better still, several of the professors had done research in areas related to mine -- close enough for collaboration, but not so close as to induce claustrophobia.
There was a space here, I thought -- one that seemed to have been designed for me and me alone.
But then I scrolled down a little more. Near the bottom of the page was a listing of an adjunct professor. His vita said that he was looking for a tenure-track position to begin in August 2007. He was currently teaching the three required courses. And his research specialty was exactly the one listed in the ad -- word for word.
Funny, that.
Funnier still when I looked back at the department's list of tenure-track faculty members and found that the most recent hires had also worked as adjuncts there before getting their current positions. Funniest of all, when I found two more openings that I'm interested in at other institutions, I found very similar situations there.
I'm sure that practice makes sense from a department's point of view. It gets to test out people before it hires them. For the rest of us, it's just another hurdle; not only do we have to find job listings, but we have to figure out if the jobs advertised really exist at all.
Nevertheless, I suppose it's progress of a sort. At first I was confronted by a series of closed doors; now a few doors have opened, even if they're apparently blocked with invisible fences. I'll continue the search for a door that's actually open. I have a solid list of publications (I think), a good teaching record (I think), and good recommendations (I think).
Something somewhere will open up at some point (I think.) If not, well, I'll hang around as a postdoc for a little longer, and try my luck again next year.
Besides, you never know. Maybe those other job openings aren't shams at all. Maybe I'll be able to steal the position away if I do well enough in the interviews. Maybe one of those adjuncts didn't work out and they want to hire someone else. And maybe -- just maybe -- one of them is a city slicker, a lover of crowds and sunny weather who spends his nights dreaming of a job in L.A.
