I am less than half way through a five year postdoc/fellowship in mathematics. Some places have talked to me about possible tenure-track positions over the past year. As the years go by, I am getting conflicting opinions on whether I should stay put for the full five years and then go with momentum on the job market or put out applications selectively each year. In the latter case, I don't know how selective to be as I don't know what "level" of institution I should be focussing on. My mentors give conflicting advice on this, so I don't know where to go with this. The places that have hinted at positions are solid, but not perfect for personal reasons.
My questions are as follows with regards to going on the market early:
- How do you know when you are "ripe" for the tenure-track market?
- Will I be shooting myself in the foot applying this year for a position that may have a position in my last year of postdoc?
- If I take a permanent position early, will this make it much more difficult to obtain a better position later?
- How can you tell what level one should look to shoot for when applying early and not wanting to take too low of a position on your (personal) ranking?
Answer
Here are my thoughts on the matter. (The OP and I know each other, and I think by now he has figured out to take me seriously but not too seriously.)
The worst part of the academic job market is the randomness and uncertainty. In any given year, there will be a pool of desirable positions and a pool of candidates who desire them. The second pool is unfortunately much larger than first: more than an order of magnitude larger. But within that pool there is a much smaller subpool of candidates whom most people agree are deserving of a position of the desirable sort. More or less by definition, this subpool has approximately the same size as the pool of desirable positions: but what sucks is the "approximately." So every year on the job market there are candidates that don't get the desirable positions essentially because they lost a game of musical chairs.
Because of this phenomenon, having longer postdocs is a mighty gift. The difference between a two year postdoc and a three year postdoc is already considerable (and the difference between a one year postdoc and a two year postdoc is almost cruel). I advise all postdocs who are interested in research jobs in mathematics to do everything in their power to arrange to apply for jobs while they still have the option of one more year on their postdoc. This smooths out the randomness and uncertainty considerably, and as @Ben Webster says, it's actually better than that: when you apply for jobs in year N and don't get them, you get very useful information for year N+1. Ideally you will get specific feedback on your application itself, but even if not: if you apply for 20 jobs in year N and get 3 interviews, then you should be okay applying for not many more jobs in year N+1. If you apply for 20 jobs and get no interviews, you better apply for a lot more jobs in year N+1.
The main counterargument that I can think of against applying for jobs is that it takes a lot of time to do it in a solid way. Most people that I know do not apply for jobs in the first year of a three year postdoc, in part because they're slightly traumatized from their recent job application cycle, their research program is just starting to take off (that's when you should graduate!) and they really want to burn midnight oil on that rather than more job applications.
A five year postdoc: wow, that's nice. I would suggest not applying for anything in the first year and spending your second year expecting not to apply but keeping an eye out for perfect jobs (including jobs that people are trying to recruit you for). Whether to apply for jobs in your third year depends on how well your research has been going recently: if you just landed a big result or big publication that you don't see yourself topping for a little while, maybe do it. If you feel like you need the time to build up to where you want to be, maybe don't do it. I would strongly recommend that you apply for jobs in each of your last two years.
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