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[topgirl]

My husband is a mathematician and he currently has a job as a visiting assistant professor. I'm a STEM post-doc. We don't live together, and our plan was to try and find a job together when one of us gets a permanent job. But, I'm getting pretty tired of being a forever post-doc which seems to be the norm in my field, and so I'm strongly considering non-academic jobs as a good alternative for me. I just have no idea how to time one academic job search and one non-academic job search, and I'm really afraid I'm messing it all up by starting too early.

I naively thought that the market was bad enough that it could take ~6 months or a year to find a job (like the amount of time an academic search takes), so I started applying a few weeks ago. Also, when I decided I wanted to leave, I wanted to act on that right away because it was a tough decision and I am worried about wavering. But, now somebody wants to seriously interview me, and I'm freaking out because it’s way too early. I know the games you can play in an academic search with trying to balance offers and get an offer for a trailing spouse etc etc, but what the heck do you do when talking with industry folks? Should I just back off and wait until my husband has a job and then start applying only to jobs in his area? Skip the non-academic part of the search and do only an academic search for now and hope for spousal hires and if that falls through then consider industry jobs? (even though my heart is less and less in academia-- like I said, there is some wavering) Or, take the job if I get a great offer and hope my husband can get an academic job in the region?

 He wants to teach at a small liberal arts school, and I'm really afraid that if I insist on just taking a job somewhere, he won't be able to find a job in that region and will have to quit teaching, or just adjunt, and will resent me (he says he'd be fine with that, but I'm not sure I believe him. God help him, he loves teaching).

I'm just freaking out because it is a big bad world out there, and I don't know how the game is played outside my little corner. Any advice? The non-academic spouses of my co-workers seem to just follow them around, but if I’m going to leave academia I want a career, not just a job.

[hegemony]

He has the job that will be harder to land.  To me it seems like ultimately, he'll need to get a job in a major metropolitan area, one that will have the kind of industry jobs you'll be qualified for, and then you'll have to do what you can to land a job there.  If you're okay living apart for longer, you can start gaining experience now with the jobs you're now applying for, if you want -- whether a post-doc or an industry job will help you more at this point will depend on all kinds of variables which you're probably best placed to evaluate.  I think the course of action with the least chances of success are for you to get a job someplace and then hope an academic job opens up for him nearby.  Tenure-track jobs just don't work that way.

Best of luck to you.

[topgirl]

Thanks, that makes sense. You are so right about a job search in mathematics being tough. At an emotional level, it is just so hard to be patient with this whole job search process because I just want it to be over so badly. I'm incredibly sick of not living with him. But, by all accounts, these things take time.