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[larryc]

The mock interviews at my PhD place were great.  The grad students put together all their application materials and submitted them to the "search committee" of their professors.  The profs would just pick them apart in a fake interview.  "LarryC, you seem to know a great deal about very little.  Do you have the breadth to teach beyond your own research?" "John, what is the last book you read for pleasure?" "Susan, you mispelled two words in your cover letter.  Why are you wasting this committee's time for a position we are obviously not going to give you?" It was a real eye-opener!

[twofish]

I think I should clarify what I mean by "bogus" and "secret handshakes."

Oh, good grief!  The selection process is certainly NOT bogus in any place that I have interviewed or been an interviewer. 

In any interview there are "right answers" and there are "wrong answers."  If you know what the right and wrong answers are, you are in a much better position to pass an interview.  If you have an institution that gets you do mock search committees, you are in better shape than one that doesn't.  If you are reading this thread, your chances of passing the interview are much better than if you didn't realize that this forum existed.  If you have a friend that has gone through an academic search process, you are in a better position than if you don't.

But this access to information greatly advantages people that are connected into the system over people who aren't.  If your parents are Ph.D.'s, you are in a much better position than if your parents are truck drivers, because you know little things like what APA citation looks like.  These are "secret handshakes."  If you are born in the highlands of Burma, you are much less likely to master APA citation format or how to format an academic paper than someone born in New York City to university professors.

As far as bogosity.....

The problem is this.  Suppose you have five candidates on a short list for a job.  What is the number of those candidates that are so bad that you'd rather withdraw the position than make an offer to any of them?  In any academic search its unlikely that more than one of them would be so unqualified that you'd rather not hire anyone.  At that point, I'd consider the remaining selection criteria to be "bogus."  A lot of them are just rules of ettiqutte (wear a suit, make sure your resume doesn't have misspellings).  That's fine if you know what those rules are, but a lot of people just don't.

Also "fit" and "skill sets".  Who determines what the job criteria are?  Also "negative whiner."  Yes that's a turnoff at interviews, and I've learned to create a "mask" which parrots the right answers at interviews.  I'll take off the mask if I feel that the people at the other end of the table can handle it, but they generally can't.  I scare people because there is a limit to which I'll conform.

The point is that a lot of what looks objective and rational isn't.  There are a lot of rules of ettiquette and secret handshakes that you have to go through.  Mastering the academic paper format, that is a "secret handshake."  Speaking English fluently, that is a "secret handshake."  Knowing how to handle infinite series, that's a secret handshake.  There are dozens of things that you don't realize, until you go off into industry where there the secret handshakes are different.

This is important because if you consider the process objective and rational, then you feel truly lousy about yourself if you don't make it.  Objectively and rationally, if I accept the criteria, I am an idiot because I can't get a R1 tenure track position, and I'm "less qualified" for the position than someone who can.

But if you see the amount of arbtrariness, conformity, brutality, and irrationality in the process, then things are different.

The most important thing to remember is that the system can make you grovel and beg.  They can make you say whatever it is that you have to say in order for you to get the job.  They can't make you feel bad about yourself without your permission.  That's the one ultimate bit of control you have.

Now I happen to believe that I'd make a damn fine astrophysics professor.  Give me time and funding, and I'll crank out some really nice papers.  The problem is that there are also a whole bunch of other people out there would also make good astrophysics professors, and ultimately, I'm less committed to learning and executing the rules of ettiquette than most people.  (And honest, I think that some of the personality traits, such as non-conformity and bluntness, that would make me a great professor are precisely those traits that make it difficult for me to function well with search committees.)

I will put on the mask if I need to, but past a certain level, I just won't put up with it.  That means staring the committee into the eye and saying politely, I'm sorry, I just can't put up with these games, and you need to find someone else.  The cost of this job is just too much, and I'll find another way to do what it is that I want to do.

The reason I care about this is that at Wikimania I got trapped.  Someone from the MacArthur Foundation wanted to me to talk about science for a video to middle school students, which I did.  When I talk about astrophysics, I get bubbly.  Enthusiasm for science and math is a contagious virus that I tend to spread, and for better or for worse, it's infected my kids.  They love physics despite my best efforts at hiding my enthusiasm.

Now I've opened my mouth about the wonders of science.  I will feel really rotten, if I get a middle school student interested in astrophysics, I don't do everything in my power to makes sure that in 15 years that he doesn't end up going through the crap that I and most of the people on this board have had to go through.

[larryc]

Mastering the academic paper format, that is a "secret handshake."  Speaking English fluently, that is a "secret handshake."  Knowing how to handle infinite series, that's a secret handshake.

No, those are qualifications.  There is nothing "secret" about them, nor anything arbitrary. They are not games, but rules for clear communication of ideas.

[twofish]

Mastering the academic paper format, that is a "secret handshake."  Speaking English fluently, that is a "secret handshake."  Knowing how to handle infinite series, that's a secret handshake.

No, those are qualifications.  There is nothing "secret" about them, nor anything arbitrary. They are not games, but rules for clear communication of ideas.

It's not secret once you know the people that can explain to you the rules, but getting connected to someone who has the time and energy to explain the rules to you is non-trivial, as is training yourself to follow those rules.  You can communicate ideas just as clearly in Mandarin as in English, it's just that interview boards in the United States expect you to communicate in English.  What's a bit harder are all of the different social conventions for what constitutes a "right answer" in an interview (which are not only language, but also different from profession to profession and from department to department).

And it still doesn't help if the fundamental problem is lack of positions.  If there are five applicants for one position, you can give everyone training as to the right answer, and you are back to where you started.  The only way that this sort of training will help is if you get it, and someone else doesn't, and that gets back to social connections.  Then you have to ask the question, if everyone got job interview training is the world better off or worse off.

And who gets to determine the qualifications?  People talk about the job descriptions as if they are sent from heaven, but there is a huge amount of power politics involved in setting up the job description.

I'm not arguing that the people in the system are bad people, or even that the system isn't the best one we can come up with given current practical realities.  What I am arguing is that the system is deeply flawed and that the arbitrariness in it means that the people who it does pass shouldn't treat it like a perfect system, and the people who the system rejects (like me) shouldn't take it all that personally.

The big problem for stablity is that there are starting to be far more people outside the system than inside it, and that's usually a precondition for revolution.  If I were inside the system, I'd be defending it, but I happen to find myself on the outside, and it is in my interest to overturn the system rather than to defend it.

[twofish]

Let me give you an example of "secret handshakes."  I got my Ph.D. in astrophysics.  I know how to phrase things in papers, do citations with Ap.J. style.  I know what the characteristics of each journal are, and where to send papers, what the research problems are, who to co-author with, etc. etc.  I've figured out similar things about petroleum geology.  Right now, I'm trying to do something useful in quantitative finance, and I'm having to learn a whole new set of "secret handshakes."  The style of the papers is different,  I don't know what each of the journals do, etc. etc. 

Give me two or three years, and I'll figure it out.  Give me another five years, and I'll be able to start writing finance papers in Chinese (and I'm trying to get to the point that I learn all of the weird conventions with that).  But all of that is implicit knowledge that takes time to learn, and I'm constantly reminded that I don't know it now.  And I lot of this knowledge, I don't consider to be "real knowledge."  Understanding stochastic differential equations, that's "real knowledge."  Knowing what each journal specializes in and what conferences to do to, that's just "arbitrary social convention."  I'd rather spend most of my time learning "real knowledge," and the arbitrary social convention, I'll just learn enough to do what I need to get done.

The trouble with academia is that the hiring system is so closed that even after I learn all of this stuff, I'll still be at a fatal disadvantage with someone that started out doing quantitative finance immediately after college when it comes to hiring for a tenure track position.  Someone who started doing this fresh out of college is going to have more publications, they will be younger, they might be able to speak quantitative finance without an astrophysics-accent.  So I'm not holding out any hope for a TT faculty position. 

OK, so I'm totally unqualified for a TT faculty position.  What am I doing wrong?  And I look at what I'm doing, and I don't think I'm doing anything obviously wrong.

[thisisanewname]

  And I lot of this knowledge, I don't consider to be "real knowledge."  Understanding stochastic differential equations, that's "real knowledge."  Knowing what each journal specializes in and what conferences to do to, that's just "arbitrary social convention."  I'd rather spend most of my time learning "real knowledge," and the arbitrary social convention, I'll just learn enough to do what I need to get done.

No, that's not "arbitrary social convention" at all. That's cultural capital, the cultural rules that you "own" that you can trade for cash, power, resources, or in this case, academic degrees and tt jobs. Everyone has some form of cultural capital, but not all of it can be converted into academic degrees and tt jobs. A gang member might not be able to cite properly, but he could probably walk through a tough neighborhood without getting hassled. I lack the cultural capital to do so, so I shop my capital around in the academy, not on the mean streets.
I agree with the thrust of your argument here, but want you to be careful with the word arbitrary. If you mean the placing of colons and capitals in each citation format, yeah, in a historical sense, that's arbitrary. But the fact that cultural capital is used as a gate-keeping device in any desirable subculture--not arbitrary at all. Much closer to universal.

[larryc]

I know how to phrase things in papers, do citations with Ap.J. style.

Just to pick out this one example, these things are neither secret nor arbitrary.  Sure, the development of a given citation style style may be arbitrary, but the requirement that everyone in the same discipline use the same system is not.  It makes it easier for us to communicate with one another. It isn't some insular game, but a useful convention.

[twofish]

I know how to phrase things in papers, do citations with Ap.J. style.

It isn't some insular game, but a useful convention.

It can be both a insular game and a useful convention.  Just because something is useful and serves a social purpose doesn't mean that it also doesn't have the (usually unintended) effect of excluding outsiders from the club.  The problem for academia is that there is a social desire *not* to exclude people from the club for certain things.

The problem is not so much the conventions, but rather the fact that there are so few positions and that academia has a "no second chance" culture.  If you had lots of spaces open then the fact that one person misuses APA, can't spell, or just dies in an interview is merely annoying rather than fatal.  The trouble is that when that when you have too many people for too few positions, there are too many people to use "substantive" qualifications to make decisions, and  "nit picky" things start becoming fatal.  OK someone who is a non-native speaker of English can pick up the language and figure out APA, but that means that they are publish fewer papers than someone who learns it early.

In the case of physics, there is another issue.  Suppose a space alien landed from the planet Kusbane, and there is a label that says that he may be the alien equivalent of a Ph.D.  I'd like to think that the academic hiring system would give the space alien tenure since their level of physics is likely to be far beyond those of Earthlings.  But that alien has not published papers, doesn't know English, isn't even human, and would probably die in an interview not withstanding the fact that it would make a wonderful professor, if you spent some time teaching it English and
some academic conventions.

This is an extreme example, but its not that different from real world examples.  Just to take me for example, because I've spent years in the corporate world rather than academia, I'm now a space alien and totally ineligible for a tenure-track position, not withstanding that I've got some useful advanced alien technology in my head.

To give one example.  Corporations manage to give blunt interview feedback all the time without fear of legal liabililty.  They do through a third party headhunter.  The headhunter has a financial interest in seeing that a candidate interviews well (and in dumping a candidate that has no chance of getting a job), and the fact that the feedback goes through the headhunter means that there is no chance of legal liability since the HH might not have quoted the manager accurately, and what he says is inadmissible hearsay anyway.

The problem with having headhunters for entry faculty positions is that there are just too few positions.  In the corporate world, a headhunter can very quickly figure out if a candidate has any chance of getting a job, and there are enough jobs that you'll find one eventually unless you are incompetent.  This isn't true in academia.

Personally, I think that *all* rejection letters (just not job interviews, but graduate and undergraduate admissions) should have a personalized statement describing why the candidate was rejected.  Yes its time consuming, but so is grading papers and doing peer review.

[twofish]

But the fact that cultural capital is used as a gate-keeping device in any desirable subculture--not arbitrary at all. Much closer to universal.

The argument that I make that this is "arbitrary" because it contains factors that are unrelated to the stated goals of the community, which is to encourage scholarship, and that the community has the ideal that status *shouldn't* be determined by social connections.  Academia also supposedly encourages non-conformity, originality, and innovation, and the system as it is leads to a great deal of inbredness. 

I don't consider journal article peer review gatekeeping to be arbitrary because there is no limit on the number of papers that get accepted.  I do consider TT gatekeeping arbitrary because there is a limit on the number of faculty positions available, and that limit is not determined by an a priori standard of quality.  (Not to say that I have any idea what to do about it, but one thing that I've learned is the fact that you can't do something about it, shouldn't keep you from making a mental note that something is undesirable.)

Just to share my job search experience.  One thing that has been really useful is the astrophysics rumor mill which makes the job search process in astrophysics very transparent.  Looking at this: two things stood out for me.....

1) I'm doomed.  There was absolutely no way that I'd be willing to do what was necessary to have a competitive CV for a R1-TT position.  This involves at least two post-docs at lower wages that I'm willing to put up with.

2) The criteria for TT astrophysics professors is stupid.  They may be less stupid than anything anyone can come up with, but they are still stupid.  Just to give an example, I happen to believe that if I were to spend about a year reactivating my professional contacts and publishing a paper in Ap.J. just to get back into practice, that I'd end up a much more productive researcher than someone who had spent all their life in academia.  I know about things like version control, project risk management, quality assurance that would be very useful in writing numerical supernova code.  If nothing else, I've been on the outside so that I can give students much better insight than the horrendously bad advice I was given.

I believe this to be objectively true, but I'm not going to be able convince a search committee to give a chance.  There are too many people out there, and no search committee is going to give someone who has published one paper over someone with lots of papers, and they are probably going to assume (correctly) that if I'm unable/unwilling to put up post-doc non-sense that unable/unwilling to put with junior faculty non-sense.

[dept_geek]

...

1) I'm doomed. 
...

Well, twofish, from what you have said about your excitement for the field, if you didn't mind doing some research and a heck of a lot more teaching (flipping the R-1 balance on it's head), perhaps look at a CC. You won't get a research lab (or even grad students or advanced u/grads), but if you are clever and resourceful, you can do a bit of research and have some fun. We would love to have faculty who are excited, excitable, and can pass that on. Keep looking.

[larryc]

The problem is not so much the conventions, but rather the fact that there are so few positions and that academia has a "no second chance" culture.

Now that is true, if not perfectly related to the first point. It would be nice if we trained people more broadly.

Also, a lot of life is arbitrary!

[twofish]

Now that is true, if not perfectly related to the first point. It would be nice if we trained people more broadly.

I don't think it is a matter of training, but instead a matter of incentives.  As long as the culture is set up so that getting a tenured faculty position is the top of the pyramid and none of the other options are talked about seriously, it's not going to make a difference.  "Training" people to be broader is going to be totally undermined if the faculty hiring/promotion processes discourage that sort of thing.   Do as I say, not as I do.

This is the paradox.  If you don't spend 100% of your time and effort getting that faculty position, you won't, but if you *do* spend 100% of your time and effort getting that faculty position, then you are totally dead meat if you don't. 

One of the worst periods in my life was when I was getting rejection letters from tier-one physics grad schools, and it was directly related to the fact that I had a lot of background in EE and liberal arts.  I made it into several tier-two physics grad schools, went to one, and because I had some EE background, the transition to industry was very smooth, and the interesting thing is that I suspect that I'm in a better position to do academic work than people that went the traditional route.  I've got some money, professional contacts, and most importantly I'm not burned out. 

What scared me a little is that when I went back to my alma mater for the 15th reunion, I was the only undergraduate from the physics department from the 1980's or 1990's there, and I haven't heard any one of my classmates showing up in professional literature.  There is the very disturbing possibility that I'm one of the very few from that generation that hasn't burned out.  Someone needs to do some statistics, but I fear that the system may have destroyed an entire generation of scientists.

It was painful to make the tradeoffs, and it would have been made *much* less painful if someone had talked about it, and declared it to be rational.  The trouble is that all of the people giving advice had gone to tier-one physics grad schools and then spent all of their lives in academia.  The culture was that getting a faculty position was success and anything else was "failure," and preparing for not getting a faculty position actually increased the chance of "failure."

One of the sad things is that all of this "doom and gloom academic" talk is actually keeping people out of Ph.D. programs.  In an astronomy department survey, the bad news was that only 15% have gone into tenure track faculty, BUT 70% are doing something astronomy-related and most of those are still doing research, and no one is flpping hamburgers.

[twofish]

Well, twofish, from what you have said about your excitement for the field, if you didn't mind doing some research and a heck of a lot more teaching (flipping the R-1 balance on it's head), perhaps look at a CC. You won't get a research lab (or even grad students or advanced u/grads), but if you are clever and resourceful, you can do a bit of research and have some fun. We would love to have faculty who are excited, excitable, and can pass that on. Keep looking.

I taught at the University of Phoenix for a while.  Learned a lot, but ultimately lost interest because I wanted to start teaching calculus there.  I've probably burned my bridges there since I've blogged on what I really think about UoP (it's not all good, it's not all bad, but the corporate world is even worse than the academy about liking people say what they really think).

CC really doesn't pay that much money, and I'm better off programming C++.  Curiously, I've found that it is somewhat dangerous to be employed at doing something that you like doing.   You can do something for love.  You can do something for money.  It can cause a big mess if you mix the two.

Right now, I put in my eight hours a day, do my job, get paid, and I'm not too emotionally involved with my work.  The trouble with being emotionally attached to your work, is that it leaves you open to a tremendous amount of exploitation.  As it is, if the employer treats me badly or if I find a better offer, I turn in my two weeks notice and leave.  It's much harder if I  were emotionally attached to the place or the cause, which is the generally the case with academia.  Why else would grad students and post-docs be willing to be treated like crap?

Right now, I have several options that I'm evaluating.  One is to go to Wall Street.  Work myself to death for two to three years, and then take the big pile of money, and teach at a community college for the rest of my life. 

[michigander]

Edwige, I was told that when I began to talk about topics that really excited me, the volume of my voice increased so much that some of the interviewers wondered what was going on.  I'm told that this was eventually correctly interpreted as nervousness, but I guess that some folks were ready to toss my resume concluding that they didn't want to have to sit through meetings with someone who was so loud.  Fortunately, I'm good at mental self-talk during interviews and other stressful situations, so I think I'll be able to avoid this problem in the future.  I'll find out soon because I have an interview at another school tomorrow afternoon!

[edwidge]

Gee, that doesn't sound so bad! Weren't they excited by your enthusiasm for your topic? Nervousness can manifest itself in all kinds of strange ways; I tend to talk really quickly, then notice that I'm talking really quickly, comment on it, then silently ruminate on the fact that I've been talking too quickly and should not have commented aloud about it...

Good luck with your interview tomorrow!