"Making it": reflections on (accidentally) landing a tenure-track job

A pile of papers, artfully stacked in a way that my desk used to look before I just started reading everything digitally (via Unsplash)

If you’ve been a long-time reader/follower/parasocial acquaintance, you’ve probably already noticed the rebrand of my site, or heard the news via social media: somehow, I have won the academic lottery, and I’ll be starting as an assistant professor this fall at University of Alaska Anchorage.

Having literally just moved across the country from California to Massachusetts for my second postdoc (actually, I submitted the application before I even had moved!), I can assure you that no one was as surprised by this development as me. This was only the second year I’d applied for full-time faculty positions, and the first I’d seriously put together a traditional job packet for a traditional TT position in my field. In the 2022-2023 cycle, I threw my hat in for two full-time teaching positions at local colleges (one a community college and the other a private university), but didn’t get anywhere. The following year, I applied for three– a teaching-focused position at an MSI/PUI, a standard TT position at an R2 state university, and the UAA job. Given my rocky grad school experience, I figured I’d have a particularly tough time on the job market. After all, my labmates and other peers I regard as more successful than me in many areas of academia and research struggle to even land interviews, and with my own position firmly on the outlier end of things, I figured it’d be the same.

So…how did I end up landing basically my dream job?

Obviously, I don’t really know– that answer lies with the hiring committee. But there’s some parts they and other department members have mentioned since I accepted, and other pieces I’ve put together from talking with my mentors and peers. With a sample size of one, obviously this should all be taken with a massive grain of salt, but my experience definitely seems to have come down to some specific factors that I don’t see mentioned or emphasized as much in conventional job hunting advice, and so I present my observations for your consideration.

First: specificity. There’s a school of thought that you should apply for every single posting even tangentially related to your field, since you never know for certain what a committee may be looking for. I think this works for some– and it was certainly my plan to widen my search after the first year of seriously applying– but the numbers game doesn’t work out for everyone. For me, there were two massive considerations limiting my choices: location and teaching load.

As I’ve talked about on this blog before, as a queer, nonbinary person in reluctant possession of a uterus, there’s a lot of places I simply do not feel safe living. As a grad student in Oklahoma, I was subject to harassment and, in a particularly terrifying instance, attempted assault, and I simply refuse to repeat that experience. How can I do good work as a scientist if I’m worrying about my own safety? How can I in good conscience recruit students to a legal jurisdiction that limits their bodily autonomy and puts their health at risk? For additional family reasons, I also preferred to stay in the US or maybe Canada. This immediately eliminates huge swathes of locations from consideration– Louisiana (home to one of the best ornithology programs in the country), Texas with its massive state university system, my home state of Ohio. Alaska was actually an outlier on this– while not explicitly hostile to LGBTQ+ folks, it’s decidedly middling on their commitment to legal protections. (I’ll get to why I considered it anyways below).

The other main factor was more related to institution type. I love doing research, but I also love teaching and mentoring. While I’ve had great mentors at R1 institutions, I’ve also seen how these institutions disincentivize good pedagogy and mentoring, and how they focus on “recruiting the best and brightest” over “serving and educating the community we are based in”. This isn’t a knock against such universities or the people at them– we need all types of higher ed to meet the varied needs of students and researchers– but this very much tilted me towards a specific subset of places. Additionally, while I wasn’t opposed to working at a private institution, my preference was to be at a public university. As a result, I was mainly interested in regional public universities (RPUs).

Reading all of that, you’re probably thinking “wait, you’re eliminating most your options right out of the gate!”. And that’s true. But there’s another way to look at it: by limiting my focus to a specific type of institution, I could focus on really crafting an application packet that would work for those institutions. There’s only finite time to spend on applications, after all, and it seemed to me that with my location needs cutting down my pool so much, making sure I had a killer application for a specific type of school in the places I did want to go was a more efficient use of my time. Is this the only way to do it? Nope! Is it what worked for me? Yep. YMMV.

Second, I played to my strengths. My CV is riddled with the evidence of a messy academic path, but I also have areas where I have really unique strengths. I’ve worked in many study systems and with many types of molecular data, meaning I can play the role of “person who facilitates cool genomics work” in a small department, collaborating with many people instead of being so tightly focused on one thing. In a larger department, this wouldn’t be an advantage– in a group of ten, twenty genomics faculty, you’re going to want to focus on your specific area much more– but in a smaller department, being the eager collaborator who likes working on all sorts of stuff is an edge. To be clear, this isn’t me putting on a front or anything, but just embracing how I roll so I could really clearly answer what I saw my role in the department as being.

There’s also prior experience, and in my case, I think one particular bit of my CV really was the dealbreaker: I had already lived in Alaska. Alaska is one of those places that has some serious challenges for recruitment. It’s far away from everything. Even the “big city” of Anchorage is a quaint small-town by the standards of most of the country. The winters are long, dark, and cold. There’s lots of people who move up there and realize after a year or two that it’s just not for them. That’s totally fine– as someone with specific location requirements, I can hardly judge– but it does mean departments will be really looking carefully to try and determine if they’re about to invest a fuckton of money is someone who will split before tenure. In this situation, having lived there before (in the more challenging location of Fairbanks, even!) and desperately wanting to go back…well, it definitely seemed to be a major point in my favor.

Not every example is as extreme, obviously, but recognizing this and leaning in to these factors that could set my application apart from others really appears to have swung the pendulum.

Finally: get feedback. My application packet was workshopped from here to kingdom come and back again by labmates, colleagues, and mentors. An application packet is a vulnerable thing– you end up writing down what your dream for your career is, and in doing so, it suddenly feels like such a fragile thing. You also have to sell yourself, which is particularly hard for those of us who are part of one or more groups historically excluded from STEM. Showing that to people you work with and value relationships with is, in its own way, scarier than sending it to an anonymous committee who you may never hear from again. But it’s vital. Most of my materials were originally written for the other jobs I applied for during this cycle, and during that meeting, they tore them apart and helped me piece them back together. Thus, when I saw the posting for the UAA job, I had my materials edited and fine-tuned within a week.

The Big Dipper and aurora over a snow-covered forest. Juho Luomala via Unsplash.

Let me be honest: there was a lot of luck involved with me landing this job. If it had been posted a year earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to apply. If I hadn’t checked the job posting site for University of Alaska, I wouldn’t have seen it, since it wasn’t on the usual job board I frequented. I got extraordinarily lucky in many regards. But there were also factors in how I conducted my search, how I tailored my application, and how I approached the process that meant that once that luck hit, I could effectively focus my effort in a way that maximized my chance of success.

Will what I did work for most people? Probably not. Can we draw comprehensive conclusions about the academic job market from this? No, of course not, and you shouldn’t with just one data point! I feel immensely unqualified to give advice in this area, honestly, because the stars really aligned for me in a way they don’t for so many. Still, I think it’s useful to share. When I started my job search, I felt intimidated by all of the general wisdom that made it sound like a multi-year odyssey where I’d be applying for dozens of positions a year. I really considered just…not going through that. I really thought I’d never land an academic job, let alone one back in a place I deeply love and miss, given my PhD journey. So I think there’s something to sharing my experience, because some of it really runs counter to that narrative, and some are pieces of advice that seem generally helpful. I don’t know the answers…but no one really does, so it’s worth a shot.