5 ms·
"At the age of 41, after working in several postdoctoral positions over the course of 12 years, I started applying for tenure-track and other permanent position
by x43b 8y ago
"At the age of 41, after working in several postdoctoral positions over the course of 12 years, I started applying for tenure-track and other permanent positions."
Why would you wait 12 years after your terminal degree to START applying for permanent jobs?
- mmierz 8y agoAuthor appears to be a cell biologist, where this is not atypical. There are very few permanent jobs, there are hundreds of applicants for every one, and the hiring committees would generally rather not hire anyone than accept less than the very top applicants. Author would surely have been well served by leaving science sooner. As another commenter noted, his output wasn't impressive, and it should have been obvious he would never be hired as an independent researcher. But that can be psychologically difficult for a 40-year-old whose project of becoming an independent scientist started when he was literally a teenager.