Academia

L. was in town for a couple of days last week and over the weekend. She came for a conference, but since she didn't have funding to pay for a hotel, she stayed with us. She is finishing up her PhD dissertation and applying for professorship positions. In fact, the reason she came to this conference in the first place is to meet some people from some of the departments where she has applied. She has applied to 28 jobs so far. Naturally curious about how the academic world, and the academic job market specifically, works, I asked her how high the likelihood of not getting a single offer out of the 28 was. “Oh, very high,” she replied non-chalantly. She had given a job talk at McMaster some months ago. She didn't get the job. The guy who did get it, she later found out, has applied to something like 40 positions, and McMaster was the only school that even short-listed him. That sort of competition seems completely insane to me. It's amazing that we have any university faculty at all. Sacrifice anywhere from four to ten prime years of your life to get a PhD only to be confronted with this kind of odds of getting a job? I had contemplated entering academia some years ago and, recently, with the looming cloud of IT outsourcing and the deeply ambivalent feelings I have about my current management work never too far from my thoughts, I have been contemplating it again. But after what L. told me, I just don't think I have the determination to climb a mountain that steep. I don't feel passionately enough about anything I would be likely to study, and then research and teach, to see it through.