Job Search Phase I

Job search and dissertation, the two biggest projects in the final year of my grad school. Job application is deemed to be such a hard journey that I want to document it to inspire future me in any difficult situation.

At the beginning of my 4th year in grad school, my advisor asked me to start looking into job opportunities as if I were already on the market. I subscribed to a few mailing lists, and browsed some job postings. All those opportunities looked so far away that I felt neither excited nor prepared. Then the pressure of ABD came, and I just devoted myself to the busy pivoting among qualifying papers, the dissertation proposal, and teaching duties.

After ABD, all of a sudden, the urge to job search arrived. In the summer, my professional society launched a career boot camp to help academics transit to industry. The boot camp showed many possibilities to me and warmed me up by putting me in networking.

The actual job search started at the beginning of Sept this year. I created a Notion space for searches in academia and industry, listing cold emails recipients, fellowship opportunities, teaching positions, postdoc openings, and industry vacancies. Immediately, I was overwhelmed. Different opportunities have tremendously different eligibility criteria and various material requirements. Meanwhile, it was heartbreaking to figure out how many restrictions there are for international students. Found an exciting fellowship, but scrolling down, the post says “only citizens or applicants with permanent residency can apply”. Clicked into a link to an appealing industrial position, but details indicate that the position might not sponsor a working visa.

More importantly, there is a core question. What do I want?

What do I want?

However, at the bottom of my heart, I was not confident of having all of these, or even just one of them. I tuned myself to be flexible and exploring, but never clarify what are the things that I was eager to have.

The fuzziness resulted in great panic. When there were two dues on Oct 1st, one extremely competitive fellowship and one teaching position in an unknown school. I could not figure out what was “the best use of my time”, and became super draining about the choice. When my advisor suggested that I should drop the fellowship application, I became deeply upset.

Now, a week after the draining, I felt relaxed after dropping both opportunities from my list. Amit the upsetting moments, I identified the triggers of the panic – the eagerness of getting good opportunities, the limits of time and energy, and the fear of being unqualified.

The conversation with my advisor was helpful.

There are two types of opportunities. The positions that you are really excited about. The positions that you are very likely to get.

There may be some misalignments between the two categories, but if it is something that I really want, or fitting my skill sets/experiences, I should just go for it.

Also, fear of missing out is unnecessary. There are always more opportunities. This week, I added 4 more opportunities to my list, after dropping the 2 with a great time crunch.

For now, I also wanted to document the encouragement from my advisor and another committee member.

You are as good as, if not better than, anyone else in our field.

You are strong in research and are active in your job search.

If you feel happy, we will all feel happy for you.

I believe in you. You should believe in yourself. 你要相信你自己。

我要相信我自己。