This is a sequel to my blog post about applying for faculty positions my first time, which you can find here.
Let’s talk about the differences between applying and getting for faculty positions for the first time and then for that next time. The first time: I was desperate; I did not know what I was doing; I was naïve to what mattered. The second time: I did not need another job; I had been on numerous search committees (understanding the employer’s perspective); I knew better who I was; I knew more succinctly what I would need to improve in my situation to encourage movement. I was fortunately successful this second time around and now, I’m on the other side figuring out the logistics of transitioning to another institution gracefully, which will be covered in the last part of this blog.
A candid photo around the time I was deciding to apply to other institutions. Who wouldn’t love that view?
Why Even Apply Elsewhere?
I was not net unhappy at University of Hawaii: I love being a professor (the freedom to create your own responsibilities, the fulfillment to see your idea come to life, the travel); I love my students (students from Hawaii are very resourceful, appreciative of opportunities, and some are as capable as the students at the most prestigious institutions); I love my colleagues (I made a lot of connections across campus and collaborated with several scientists through co-advising students). I love my boss (he is super supportive and advocates for who I am as a faculty member in his institute). In my opinion, I was thriving in securing grants, teaching, graduating students into awesome jobs, picking up the pace on publishing, and contributing to service work I cared about (multiple executive conference committees and institutional equity research).
But. I was a bit professionally lonely; my home was in a planetary science institute and I didn’t find too many meaningful engineering collaborators in my 4 years here that inspired me to stay for an entire career. I may have felt a bit misunderstood by my colleagues in their evaluation of my tenure application; they gave me constructive criticism to be the first author on my papers, which may be the culture in planetary science, but is not how engineering fields impart authorship order. I hit a roadblock with a tenured faculty member, who had power over me, that prevented promotion in a position I cared about. I had a hard time recruiting new graduate students. My partner and I want to have kids soon; we were adding up the costs associated with supporting kids ($1.4M for a 3BR 2BA house, potentially $30K/year of tuition for children) and we would not be able to have the quality of life we desired on our combined salaries. The distance from our family and friends on the mainland was sorely felt. I missed the high alpine mountains that called to me from afar, not the ocean and jungle that waited on my doorstep. I felt a little unwanted in Hawaii with the level of congestion and the general sentiment that transplants make life in Hawaii harder for everyone. I know the laundry list of negative aspects seems large, but no job is perfect and to reiterate, I was overall happy.
Those areas of improvement informed my wishlist: a wider and deeper network of collaborators closer to my research interests, higher yield recruitment for graduate students, lower cost of living, closer to family and friends, and alpine mountains.
A dinner with friends at the AIAA ASCEND conference, where my buddy Ian (middle) made me aware of the space robotics position at Mines.
Applying for the Second Time
I applied to only 3 places on paper this time as opposed to 16 places last time.
I only applied to institutions that improved on my current situation in Hawaii in location, (spatial, financial, intellectual) resources, and culture. There were only a small number of places that I felt would improve my situation with openings this year and that’s ultimately where I applied: University of California San Diego, University of Washington, and Colorado School of Mines. These schools are in beautiful places, are all state schools that inherently have a component of service to the state’s population, and ranked in the top 100 universities in the nation.
A slight tangent on university prestige and rankings: I feel conflicted about considering university prestige and rankings in my decision about where to be employed. Let’s talk about both ends of the prestige spectrum and why evaluating prestige can matter. Within University of Hawaii, I witnessed the faculty experience in internationally-ranked top 50 departments (Earth Science and Oceanography) and departments that didn’t even make the rankings (like Mechanical Engineering). The allocation of space, startup funds, salaries, and administrative support between these different ends of the spectrum was jarring. While prestige is a social perception, prestige is grounded in some very real resource support and prestige has a very real consequence in the quality of students that apply to the program. The first time I applied to faculty jobs, I thought prestige was a stupid, untethered concept and I could do my research anywhere with whatever students; I was wrong. There exists a threshold level of resources to have your research take off, call it an “escape velocity” (thanks Helen); turns out, I’m more ambitious than the resources I currently have access to. On the other side of the prestige spectrum, I didn’t want to be in the top 10 engineering programs to have unreal professional expectations thrust on me, only to have me disappoint my peers and not be able to stick around because I didn’t meet tenure expectations. I’m trying to have a personal life outside of my job; a pressure-cooker environment is not conducive to my personal goals. A great rule of thumb when assessing your thirst for prestige and correlated resources: only apply to places you’d be happy to have done grad school at (thanks Bing). /end tangent/
My application package materials were much more substantial this second time around. The first application I sent out in November was just after I had heard negative feedback from the tenure review process and so I remember feeling sad but also energized by a healthy dose of spite. I only needed a little bit of extra energy to turn my tenure application “Statement of Purpose” into a faculty application; all the beans were counted and already nicely packaged so there is no easier time to apply for other faculty positions, as many faculty do when they go up for tenure.
I felt much more confident in my identity as a Principal Investigator and in my statements because I not only had a track record, but my experience also generated better-informed perspectives. I felt I could actually back up what I was positing on paper with tested methods. I had successful and unsuccessful grants, which act as feedback from national funding agencies to place my research capabilities within the national research landscape. I had introduced myself and my research interest to hundreds of people by this point and through iteration, I found a way of describing myself that felt authentic to myself and exciting to others. I had published numerous papers consistent with my research identity, which cultivated publicity for my lab. I had course ratings and qualitative feedback that refined my teaching perspective in a range of undergraduate and graduate courses. I had the privilege of securing a diversity, equity, and inclusion grant that tested my ideologies from my first DEI statement; enter a healthy dose of humility. When I compare my two application packages, they are like night and day, which makes me softly cringe at the naïve, overly ideological, immature, not fully secure version of myself four years ago; XOXO, she did her best with what she knew at the time.
Here are my application package materials:
Immediately after my interview with University of Washington, I went back to hanging out with my partner’s family since it was winter break.
Zoom Interviews for the Second Time
I received 2 Zoom interviews (66% yield from applications) this time as opposed to 8 phone interviews (50%) last time.
I still got nervous when I interviewed over Zoom this time around but at least, I had the security of knowing I still had a job to fall back on if I totally bombed. Plus, I had interviewed many faculty candidates before; I knew the questions they would ask me and how I wish candidates I interviewed would answer. Plus plus, I felt more like I was interviewing the institution to evaluate if they met the criteria that I outlined in my wishlist.
Basic questions you can always expect search committees to ask:
Please give us some background on your education, research, and teaching accomplishments. (Easy to answer with some directly transferable experience under your belt)
How are you different than your faculty advisor? (Easy to answer as someone who had been independent for 4 years)
Do you have any experience securing grants? (Most green faculty candidates don’t or only have fellowship applications so if you have any externally funded grants at all, you’re killing it)
What courses do you want to teach? (Easy to answer with your previous courses)
Tell us about a difficulty you encountered in the workplace. (I actually got a little emotional during my own interview answering this question because I allowed myself to be a bit too vulnerable. I didn’t have as much practice interviewing as I did the first round)
Do you have any space or equipment needs for your research? (Should be easy to know if you have a lab)
To prepare for the interview, I put together slides around my research, teaching, and DEI accomplishments, and then plans specific to the institution I was interviewing at. I spent a lot of time researching the institution, digging into the faculty search committee member research areas, the department faculty research clusters, research centers, facilities, proximal industry partners, entrepreneur opportunities, student clubs and organizations, current course offerings, and compared state demographics to the university demographics. I did way more prep for this round of interviews because I had fewer interviews that I could focus on and I knew which university factors would influence my hiring or career if I get the job.
When the search committee asks you if you have any questions, it’s always good to start with: “how did this position come about?” Having been on searches in Hawaii, I now know that faculty searches come about for specific reasons; I feel it’s important to ask about the intention behind the search to assess fit and pitch yourself in a certain light. For example, the department could have gotten a large infusion of funding to start a new initiative, or the program is incredibly successful and needs more faculty to keep up with the surge in student admissions, or a faculty member recently left and the department needs to find someone to teach the orphaned courses. Knowing what’s important to the search committee allows you to emphasize and constrain your responses (initiative = programs and facilities, program expansion = new courses and capabilities, faculty replacement = cover current courses and program maintenance). I almost always follow up with a question about identified gaps that are either met by this position being filled or must be met in a certain way by the person filling the position; good to have the search committee be explicit about expectations they have for the new hire.
Based on my research on the institution and the search committee’s response to my first question(s), I have specific targeted questions for the search committee that help assess if they can support me:
Do you have the facilities I need to do my research? Can I have access? If not, could I get the space and permissions to build my own?
What are mechanisms to get students involved in research (research credits, monetary compensation, project teams)?
How do I get involved with the centers on campus?
What kind of administrative support do you offer for grant writing and submission?
What kind of internal funding opportunities do you have for early career researchers?
Which industry partners does the department or do you collaborate with heavily?
What is the graduate student population like? What are their backgrounds upon applying and how competitive is the admissions process?
Here are my Zoom interview materials:
Interviewing On-Site for the Second Time
I visited 2 universities for onsite interviews (100% yield rate from Zoom interviews) this time as opposed to 4 interviews (50%) from last time.
Academic ecosystem with interview components highlighted in color.
The goal of the on-site interview is for as many faculty as possible to feel like they’re getting a collaborator (mix of friend and colleague), the department and college to feel like you are a good return on investment (you bring in more funding than your salary + startup), the students to want to take classes from you and work with you, and for you to see how you fit in at different levels of the institution (department, college, university, geographic location). The interview should reflect the ecosystem that you will be brought into as faculty. Here’s a diagram of the academic ecosystem and representative interview components, boxed in color.
Left: University of Washington’s interview schedule. Right: Colorado School of Mines’ interview schedule.
On-site interviews consist of some basic components to get to those assessment goals: public research seminar, teaching demonstration, food with students, dinner with the search committee, department chair meeting, many faculty meetings, lab tours, and ends with the search committee meeting. University of Washington thoughtfully inserted meetings with administrative staff and a DEI representative that I recommend more search committees craft into their on-site interviews. Mines set up a meeting for me to meet the Provost and President, which was cool! Here are some sample schedules for the two on-site interviews I did.
The interview components in order of my perceived importance emphasize research presentation, teaching presentation, faculty meetings, meeting with the chair, meeting with the search committee, meeting with the dean, and student meetings.
The research presentation is your main pitch in which folks (mostly faculty) evaluate your competence, your marketability in securing funding, and the ability of the institution to support you. This seminar is where you can have the broadest reach across the department. My public research seminar had been four years in the making. I have a 45-minute seminar that I’ve been refining since I started my professor gig that I’ve given in different evolutionary stages maybe a dozen times formally and in parts dozens of times informally. The slides didn’t change that much but I changed my transcript by making frequent mentions to *synergies* with faculty and resources at the institution. I also made explicit my vision and capabilities that met gaps at the current institution, based on what I had learned up to that point in the interview process.
View from the audience during my teaching demonstration. Photo credit: Ian Jehn
The teaching demonstration reveals your competency to do the second most important part of your job: teach! My teaching demonstration was the newest material I had to prepare specifically for the faculty interviews. I decided to teach a lecture on attitude dynamics, the fundamentals of my research. I chose something that made me fall in love with the academy. Initially, I tried to shoehorn my flipped classroom teaching style into the teaching demonstration because I thought that style was more representative of how I teach but ultimately decided to do a traditional lecture because the time allotment and lack of interaction with students prior to the teaching demonstration was not conducive to the flipped classroom style. Prior to the on-site interview, I scrubbed through my own notes from grad school from two courses, drafted my own version of how I would teach the same topic, and practiced the lecture on a group of students at Hawaii who would benefit from the subject matter. I asked for their feedback and they recommended I make props to explain different reference frames: 3 colorful pipe cleaners molded orthogonally (thanks Bailey).
[ADCS lectures series, update when published!]
Faculty meetings show other faculty how you are to collaborate with and how relevant your research is to theirs; the finalist recommendation relies on the aggregate faculty vote so these meetings are where you need to win the hearts and minds of many people. Most of the interview in time will be filled with one-on-one or small group faculty meetings, where the search committee either asks specific folks to meet the candidate or opens up the schedule to any department faculty to sign up for interview timeslots. I treated these meetings way differently from the first time I interviewed ever and every interview after: I was so tired; I didn’t match the energy level of the faculty member I was meeting; I didn’t ask too many questions; I didn’t assert myself in talking about what I can do. I think this conveyed to faculty at my first interview that I was low energy, uninterested, and insecure; I was not exuding peer-like vibes. Well this time, I naturally changed and pushed myself to match who I was meeting in intensity and depth of conversation; I prepared questions ahead of time associated to each faculty member on my schedule; I made a goal to myself to solidify a research collaboration with each faculty member I was meeting. With a bit more structure coming into these meetings, I had genuinely enjoyable conversations with more faculty like “how would the temperature of the Earth change if we launched a huge sunshade that covered 2% of the Earth’s surface?” and the promise to exchange papers after the interview to start a collaboration.
The department chair meeting usually gives context as to the department vision, job expectations, and level of resources you may be able to negotiate after you’re offered the job. The department chair is usually the person who submits the request for a new faculty position so they likely wrote the exact words that justify your existence here on campus. There is context and a thought process behind that justification that you should crack into. The department chair is also responsible for setting expectations and holding faculty accountable to teaching and service requirements. They are also responsible for acting as your point of contact during negotiations so they know what the institution can provide you and what it can’t; you want the chair on your side to maximize your startup package so start that conversation going as to what resources you’ll need while you’re on campus visiting.
The search committee may kick off the interview process but if not, they will certainly treat you out to dinner and close out your interview. The search committee had the largest part in bringing you to campus (sifting through paper applications, ranking candidates to interview, selecting the finalists) and crafting your experience. They are your biggest advocates and want the interview to go well in the way of maximizing the probability of the department extending an offer and the candidate accepting the offer. Typically, the search committee chair is closely related to your field or is leading some initiative that brought you here. Your interactions with the search committee could be the beginnings of the deepest relationships you could have on campus, research-wise and collegially. They will take you to dinner (usually a nice place to show off the surrounding geography), offer you good food (and alcoholic beverages, be prepared to hold your liquor or boundaries), and talk about personal lives. This is a great time to chat about living locally, hobbies, families, but research can come up so you need to be lucid enough to speak clearly about technical concepts. The search committee will come back to you at the end of your visit to answer any remaining questions and discuss the logistics of the rest of the search process.
The dean(s) meeting depends on how involved the dean is in the department operations. If the dean is hands off, the dean meeting can mostly be a vibe check. I have had a dean who interviewed me aggressively and was the person I had to negotiate my startup with.
Students show up to the public seminar and to the teaching demonstration but they also get a dedicated timeslot, typically lunch, to talk privately to the faculty candidate. Students aren’t forced to attend these events so they’re lured with food. This student meeting may be the most revealing meeting for the faculty candidate because the students don’t hold back in telling all. If there’s dysfunction in the department, students will be the first to mention. You can also use this meeting to gauge the level of diversity in a department, ask about the climate, and assess the level of engagement. Here are questions I always ask: Are you getting paid enough to live here? What classes would you like to take that don’t exist? Is diversity, equity, and inclusion valued here? How long does it take to get a PhD here? What kind of jobs do you want after you graduate?
Lab tours are a nice break from having to interact heavily with people and to look at things. It’s a nice time to showcase students and equipment capabilities. It’s a nice time to dream about what your own lab may look like, how to leverage existing facilities, and how to augment the university’s capabilities. Try and have a conversation about where your lab space may be and any requirements you may have for the room (water, electric, load capacity, ventilation, etc.).
Interviewing on-site benefits the most from previous experience, more than any part of this many-staged process. I think it’s because you have to be nearly 100% on for two days straight; one benefits from having as many canned, practiced responses in your back pocket so you can save energy for the diversity of unexpected questions you're undoubtedly going to get. I know many people dread on-site interviews because they’re so exhausting, yeah that’s absolutely right, but you also get to meet so many awesome, well-meaning people who are so passionate about their craft. Type 2 fun: not fun in the moment but fulfilling when you reflect on the experience.
The best nontechnical tip I ever got about surviving these interviews is to always take the chance to fill up your water bottle or go to the bathroom. You’ll look like you have the smallest bladder but you’ll also be super hydrated (makes you look good), you can get some alone time, and you can check if you look ok; maybe squeeze in a pep talk while you’re looking in the mirror.
Some last information about on-site interviews: the search committee and department chair will do their best to show you the department’s best face so take your experience with a grain of salt. You will likely be shielded from the bad faculty if there are any and if something feels off, try to pull that thread as tactfully as you can. Also, if you are interviewing elsewhere, now is the time to tell the search committee or chair.
The recruitment process does not rest, even when you’re traveling to a conference or taking a ski break. The informal offer and startup negotiations happened during the IEEE Aerospace Conference at Big Sky, Montana.
Negotiating a Startup
My new chair said it best roughly: “I will do my best to get you as much startup as possible because we both benefit but I will not be kind as you field other offers.” When an institution is getting you an offer, they will be as swift as their process will allow because they want to lock you down. I was given this template for a startup package, asked to fill it out, and asked to send it to the chair for iteration.
Typically, you should ask for the following tangible line items in your startup:
3 months of salary in year 1, 2 months of salary in year 2, 1 month of salary in year 3
2 full-time student salaries for 3 years
Maybe a postdoc salary for 2 years
Equipment to enable your research
Office space for yourself, ideally with a window
Office space for your students
Lab space with any special requirements
The intangible line items you should ask for include:
Start date
Teaching relief as you start or develop a new course
The ability to spend your startup earlier or for longer than 3 years
The ability to go up early for tenure or to have your clock extended
Admissions of your current students
Dual career support, such as a position for your partner
The chair and I had an extensive phone call reviewing the first draft of the startup package where he essentially approved of what I asked for and told me to shoot for a number between 650K and 700K. I incorporated his comments and sent him a second draft, which he approved and sent forward to the deans, who also approved!
Around the time I was negotiating with my director digitally, I was doing some field testing on the Big Island at Mauna Kea State Park
Home Institution Counter Offer
My current director told me to tell him if I had an offer so he could try to retain me. There are three things I asked for: salary, startup package, and dual career options.
I had been told previously that the going rate for salary increase to retain faculty was at 10% and there’s not much negotiating there. My salary at Mines would be $145,000 and if we were to scale Golden’s cost of living to Honolulu’s cost of living, I would have to be making $242,000. I felt embarrassed to ask my director for that much money so I asked for $200,000. That’s a no. Most deans don’t make that much.
I asked for my Hawaii startup package to be matched to Mines’ startup package, from $200,000 to $685,000. My director went directly to the Provost and found $400,000 lying somewhere so that’s a near yes.
Since my director couldn’t come up with the salary, he didn’t even start with the dual career hire, probably because that’s the hill with the steepest slope.
My director put up a good fight but unless all conditions were met, I was not going to stay.
Schedule
Upon reflection, here’s how the hiring process played out over time:
My partner and I visualizing the size of a moving pod, 6’ x 7’ x 8’, indicated by the blanket footprint and my extended height.
Transition
While thinking about the transition, there are three aspects of my lab that I want to fight to retain: students, equipment, and grants. If there’s anything I can say about transitioning, there aren’t solid and public policies about how to do it. Rules aren’t set in stone and processes aren’t standardized; the best you can do is by word of mouth. Read some blogs, ask your peers, ask your mentors, ask your chair, ask your dean. Every person’s situation is unique so solutions must be equivalently unique.
I love my students, which is why I spent a lot of time optimizing for their well-being/career in the transition process. Faculty often make the mistake of leaving their students high and dry when they decide to move on and I didn’t want to do that. Here’s how I approached the most graceful transition for my students:
I chose my start date because a lot of my students would finish by December, except for 2 PhD and 2 Master’s students. I made plans for two Master’s students, who would finish a semester after I leave, to coast in their last semester or to be advised from afar.
One PhD student will stay at UH so I’m ensuring that I maintain faculty status at UH and that a grant account that I leave here has enough money to support this student for the rest of their career. This involved talking to a colleague who was also leaving and led me to some UH policy about maintaining advising status, talking to department grad chairs to have faculty vote to keep me on, and then talking to the dean of the grad school to explore all possibilities.
The other PhD student will come with me in name to Mines but will physically stay in Hawaii. This involved working with the Mines program chairs to define what courses would be able to transfer, which exams need to be retaken, and defining the rest of each student’s graduation schedule.
I don’t have much specialized equipment so I ultimately decided not to ship much of my stuff from here to Mines. The general procedure would be to have your home institution evaluate the worth of your equipment and sell it to your next institution. Here are some decisions I made to be specific:
I have some motion capture cameras that costed $76,000 new and I thought they were maybe worth $30,000. University of Hawaii thought the same evaluation. I did a survey of current motion capture systems and found that Optitrack could achieve similar resolution with $30,000. If I bought a new system, UH would be able to keep my old system and give it to a new faculty who may need it while I could have a new system that held warranty/support. Net gain so I decided to not transfer my motion capture system. Equipment evaluation attached.
3D printers improve every year in cost and capability so I’ll buy new.
The tools in my lab roughly costed $2,000 and while it would be convenient to keep a set of tools that I knew my operational lab needs to function, the quality of tools had degraded and sets were incomplete. I’ll buy a new set.
I’m still debating whether I want to transfer my rovers, which costed about $2,000 in parts, but are worth way more to me due to all the labor my lab put into developing and testing the rovers. The settings are just right and they’re custom-made so I will likely go through with the necessary paperwork with my fiscal officer to transfer them.
Universities love grants and have an unspoken agreement that if faculty want to transfer their grants away from their home institution, they are obliged to comply because if they didn’t, they would carry a bad look and their new faculty would be denied grant transfers: mutually assured civility. Also, I talked to the department chair of my new institution to onboard as a non-compensated research faculty member so I could submit to proposal opportunities that if awarded will be waiting for me at my new institution.
Of my grants, I only have one grant that is long enough and institution-agnostic enough to warrant transferring. I have already talked to the PIs of the award, who then talked to their program manager, who then agreed that as long as the PIs agree to the effort, it’s fine.
My other grants end before I’m leaving. Another reason I delayed my start date is because one of my awards (EPSCoR) is specific to the state of Hawaii so I can’t transfer it. There was over $200,000 in the account that I wanted to spend on progressing my research.
I’m going to miss these dumb little birds (zebra doves)
As I write this on August 7th, 2024, I live in a state of bittersweetness. While I was thinking about moving but didn’t yet have an offer, I could easily identify aspects of my life that weren’t going well. But now that my departure is imminent, I’m seeing all the good that I’m leaving behind. I’ve put together a bucket list of activities I want to do while I’m still in Hawaii, basking in the gentle-breeze climate held perpetually at a comfortable room temperature, and trying to spend as much time with friends as possible. After I announced my departure but my desire to still collaborate, I noticed that some people resist befriending or collaborating with me and that many acquaintances ask about my departure despite it being months away.
While some folks express a flurry of tasks they need to accomplish before they leave, I currently have tons of free time as I planned a ramp-down but have yet to ramp up at Mines. I’ve written a couple of proposals with Mines already and have mapped out the syllabus for the course I want to teach next fall but there’s only so much one can or should do from afar. I’m using this time to write more papers with my students, learn some new technical skills (computer vision), record some online educational content, and write some blogs to digest on this time of my life.