 We are pleased to introduce today's program, navigating the faculty job search. Not only are we excited to offer this program, but we are excited and grateful to our Boucher colleagues from Cornell University for collaborating with us and making this possible. A special thank you to Associate Dean for Inclusion and Student Engagement for the Graduate School at Cornell University, Sarah Hernandez for being such a fantastic partner. And a special note, as this is a joint event between our chapter, Cornell and the Boucher community as well, looking at the attendee list today, we have attendees from several institutions, including Syracuse University, Cornell, American University, Emory University, Howard University, George Washington University, St. Cloud State University and the University of Toronto. So just excited that we have such a diverse and representation from all across this continent. Now, before we begin, a quick note on the history of the Boucher Graduate Honor Society, named for the first African American doctoral recipient in the United States, earning his doctorate in physics from Yale University in 1876, the Alexander Edward Boucher Graduate Honor Society recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement and promotes diversity and excellence in doctoral education and the professoriate. The Boucher Society is a network of preeminent scholars who exemplify academic and personal excellence, foster environments of support and serve as examples of scholarship, leadership, character, service and advocacy for students who have been traditionally underrepresented in the academy. In the spirit of Boucher's commitment to these ideals, inductees into the Honor Society must demonstrate significant achievement in these five areas. This morning's jointly sponsored event is one way that the Rackham and Cornell chapters of the Boucher Honor Society aspire to live out these core Boucher values as well. At this time, I would like to introduce Dr. Ephraim Brammer, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the Rackham Graduate School. Thank you so much, Dr. Artale. And I'd also like to thank and recognize the work of our colleague, Latasha Mitchell. Thank you both for all that you've done to make this event possible today. In interest of accessibility, I'd also like to describe myself. So I'm wearing glasses. I have black hair that's long and currently braided. And I'm wearing a brown sport coat and red college shirt. And I also use he and him pronouns. And I'd like to wish everyone a very good morning and welcome you virtually to the University of Michigan and the Rackham Graduate School. It truly is a pleasure to be with you all for today's panel discussion. Our sincerest thanks to all of you who've joined the call and especially to our colleagues from Cornell University who are co-sponsoring this morning's panel discussion, as well as the many Boucher members from across the nation who are joining us for today's event. Also a special word of congratulations to any of our 2021 Boucher Honor Society members who were inducted at Yale virtually last week. If you'd be so kind, please join me in a round of virtual applause for our newest Boucher class of inductees. Thank you very much and congratulations Boucher class of 2021. As we honor the historic and barrier-shattering legacy of Edward Alexander Boucher, I'd like to acknowledge that the University of Michigan Ann Arbor campus resides on the territory, at traditional territory of the Anishinaabe people seated through the Treaty of Detroit in 1807. Of course, no matter where you may be joining us from around Turtle Island, now known as North America, in this virtual space, you're also on native land. It is important to honor that fact. However, the University of Michigan in particular has a special relationship with its local native communities because in 1807, the Ojibwa, Adawa, and Barawatomi nations seated land through the Treaty of Fort Megs. During those historical treaty negotiations, tribal leadership advocated for the inclusion of Article 16, which made clear that a specific portion of the land being seated would be set aside so that their children could be educated. This advocacy on part of the ancestors of our local indigenous communities is an essential chapter of the origin story of the University of Michigan. Edward Boucher, of course, is an important ancestor in this very same struggle for racial and social justice through access and opportunity in education, especially graduate education. And is with this intention in mind that we engage in this morning's discussion, navigating the job search as we attempt to make explicit the hidden curriculum of the faculty hiring process in order to promote increased diversity, equity, inclusion among university faculty. To help us advance this discussion, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our Dean, Dean Michael Solomon, the Dean of Rackham Graduate School and Vice Provost for Academic Affairs. Dean Solomon? Thanks very much, Ethan. And good morning to all. I'm also thrilled to welcome you here today and to be part of this collaboration between the Rackham Graduate School and Cornell University's Graduate School. Special welcome as well to our colleagues at other institutions logging in from wherever you are. As we wrap up this hard academic year, we should acknowledge silver linings wherever we can and that this virtual event can include you so easily is one for which I'm grateful. As we begin today's program, I'd like to specifically acknowledge the just the extraordinarily difficult circumstances and collective pain we've all experienced over the course of the last 12 months. We're grieving the devastating impacts of the virus on our families, friends and the places we call home, including the tremendous loss of life and the disproportionate impact on communities of color. We continue to navigate this challenge of the pandemic while at the same time holding hope that vaccination and other measures will progressively bring it under control. Similarly, we are experiencing pain and anger about killings at the hands of police and other armed individuals, including those in Boulder and in Atlanta, the latter driven by xenophobia and misogyny. The killing of Dante Wright by a police officer during a traffic stop just outside of Minneapolis last Sunday has also re-emphasized the prevalence of violence against black people and all people of color, even as Derek Chauvin has tried only miles away for the murder of George Floyd. Speaking to Rackham students briefly for a moment, I admired the way you have responded to the challenges of this past year, as well as your commitment to directly address issues of systemic inequality in as many forms. I have seen this advocacy take many directions this year. I would especially like to log the anti-racism work that departmental graduate student organizations have taken up within their own programs. For those of you from other institutions, I'm sure that you too have stories of resilience and advocacy to find strength in. You know, at the beginning of this academic year, during my state of the graduate school address, I outlined five areas of focus for our graduate school this year. These included our acceptance work towards recommendations from the year one report of the graduate student mental health and wellness task force. And action on our anti-racism goals and initiatives. Next steps to address the graduate student experiences with disability accommodations research study. Mitigation of the cruel effects of federal policies and planning for extended time to degree for our doctoral students. We've made significant progress addressing all these goals I think this year. And I'm especially proud to be able to announce that as one of our anti-racism goals and initiatives, Rackham has recently entered into a four year agreement with the National Center for Institutional Diversity or NCID to provide anti-racism research grants and fellowships for graduate students. A call for proposals was released last week and the deadline for applications is May 3rd. And you can read more about these at the NCID website. I highlight this grant program specifically today because this new project is so well aligned with the goals and core values of the Boucher Graduate Honor Society. Society has the twin activities of scholarship and advocacy at its core. You through your connection to the society are undoubtedly well familiar with the positive feedback loop of scholarship and advocacy with one in turn acting to motivate the other and then again at being the beneficiary. We are proud to support our graduate students as they pursue their personal goals of scholarship and advocacy, which for many include work to generate racial justice and social equity. With that said, it gives me great pleasure to again welcome you to all to this panel discussion sponsored by Rackham and Cornell chapters of the Edward A. Boucher Graduate Honor Society. We hope you find this an engaging and an informative discussion. Thank you all and back to you, Ethan. Thank you, Dean Solomon. At this time, I'd like to introduce our panelists. First, Dr. Mark E. Lewis. Professor Lewis joined Cornell School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, as an associate professor after spending six years on the faculty at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on dynamic decision making most often modeled as a Markov decision process. Dynamic control of Q's is his most prominent area of focus, but he has also considered transportation, wireless communications and inventory control in his research. In 2011, Professor Lewis was promoted to full professor and in 2015 he was appointed Associate Dean for Diversity and Faculty Development in the College of Engineering at Cornell. He was promoted to Senior Associate Dean in 2017. These roles saw him oversee the diversity efforts in hiring college-wide and the promotion and tenure process. In 2019, Mark began his current role as the Director of the School of ORI and ended his term as an Associate Dean in January of 2020. He is the recipient of several awards, including an honorable mention for the Danzig Dissertation Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation Mentor of the Year and the Zelman Warhaft Commitment to Diversity Faculty Award. In 2019, he was the Black History Month Honorary of Mathematically Gifted in Black. In 2018, at the request of the Provost at Cornell, Professor Lewis chaired a university-wide committee on faculty diversity. The recommendations provided in the report serve as the model for some of the offerings of the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity at Cornell. Dr. Alexandra Stern. Alexandra Mina Stern, PhD, is the Carol Smith Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of American Culture, History and Women's Study and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan. Most of her research has focused on the uses and misuses of genetics in the United States and Latin America. She is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation, Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, which was published in second edition by the University of California Press in 2015. She also is author of Telling Jeans, the Story of Genetic Counseling in America, Johns Hopkins University Press 2012, a choice 2013 outstanding academic title in Health Sciences. For most recent book, Proud Boys and the White Ethno State, How the Alt Right is Warping the American Imagination, be compressed 2019, applies the lenses of historical analysis, feminist studies and critical race studies to deconstruct the core ideas of the far right and white nationalism in the United States. Stern is the PI of the Stereolization Social Justice Lab which uses mixed methods to study patterns and experiences of eugenic sterilization in the 20th century United States. This research has informed policy efforts to address the survivors of compulsory sterilization. Stern has held numerous grants including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. At this time, I would like to turn it over to Dr. Brammer who will lead, who will be leading the panel in discussion. You wanna thank you all for submitting questions in advance. Also, if you have any questions during this program, please use the message box and we will do our best to incorporate them into the program. Dr. Brammer, I welcome you to the virtual stage. Thank you, Paul. I really appreciate it. And again, I really appreciate all of you joining us this morning, especially our distinguished panelists, Dr. Alex Stern and Dr. Mark Lewis. We just learned a little bit about both of you through your bios. However, as maybe a more intimate form of personal introduction, would you mind sharing with us a little bit about your own personal journey into the professoriate? How did you know that academia was the right career path for you? Dr. Stern, maybe we'll start with you. Well, good morning everyone. Thank you so much for the invitation. It's an honor to be here. I just like to start off by describing myself in thinking about diversity and access. I am a white woman with large black rimmed glasses and hair that I dyed a magenta color using a Clare-All box from CVS, which may or may not have worked. I'm wearing a gray and black scarf and I have a blurred background on my Zoom because I'm really sick of looking at my own bookshelves in the background when I'm on so many Zoom meetings. I use she, her pronouns, and I identify as a member of the LGBT community and as an ally of my faculty of color colleagues and my colleagues and all peoples with disabilities. So that's a general overview of me. I also am serving now, I don't know if it was in the intro as the associate dean for the humanities in the College of LSA, which I mentioned because I think that has given me more insight into the hiring process because I've seen it now from many different angles as a chair and as an associate dean. So I think it's a really interesting question. I mean, I would say that my journey into academia was framed by a mixture of having some privilege in so far as my father was working at UC Berkeley more in a professional school. My mother never went to college and I'm an only child by the way. And, you know, so I'm by like half first gym but I don't think that really counts. And then also just I always have been someone who has been very curious and worked really hard. I've always held down multiple jobs and things to make my way through my life, whether it was through, you know, kind of work experiences in academia. I would say that, you know, I never really, this moment of great kind of crystallization of knowing never really happened for me. And I don't think it has to happen for everyone. I think that our journeys can take a variety of different pathways and that one of the most important things is to follow your passions, to be willing to take risks and to find community. It's really important to find and have community along the way. In terms of, I guess the intellectual, like the intellectual side of things of, I mean, I was fortunate enough to get into a good PhD program at the University of Chicago, which was pretty much of a cutthroat place. And I feel fortunate that I survived through that to get my PhD in history. And also, you know, then, you know, this was in 2000 when I was offered an assistant professorship job at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Then I moved to the University of Michigan. Why? I'm not completely sure. I still miss looking out at the, you know, you can see the dolphins in the bay there. It's very nice, but I've had a great run at Michigan very much. I'm happy to be here. Nevertheless, I would say that, you know, one of the, now that I reflect on it, one of the moments where I felt like I really wanted to do this was when I was teaching. I was fortunate to work as a, what was called a TA in several courses at the University of Chicago. And then also to design my own course, which I taught on Empire in the US West. And that was a great experience. And I really enjoyed being the primary instructor, you know, the instructor of record in the classroom and working with all of the students on their projects. And that's a, you know, often a very important part of our jobs, our roles as academics or, you know, on the professorial track is teaching and being in the classroom and creating an inclusive engaging space for students. So I would say more than that was what solidified that piece of the puzzle for me and made me really excited about the possibility of pursuing a career in academia along the kind of ideally tenure professor track or the instructor track. So I hope that I've covered enough for your, the first question, Ethan, it's nice to see you virtually this morning. It's lovely to see you as always as well, Alex. And thank you so much for joining us this morning. Dr. Lewis, how did you know academia was right for you? I wish I could tell you, I knew from the beginning but that would be disingenuous. So I'm gonna tell you a funny story. I think maybe there's more than 20 years ago now. So hopefully things that doors have been opened and eyes have been opened. So it's a little easier than my path. But the story is that I was an intern. I was at a little private school in Florida for the Eckhart College. I was a student there and in the summertime I had an internship at a company. I was working for a woman and she at the time was pregnant. So she goes to have her baby, leaves, you know, she's off for some time and we were working on a project. And I may exaggerate this but I think there was only a few days before she was back to work. In that few days, a person who worked with the company took our work, quickly finished it up and presented it at a company event as his own. And so I was really angry about this. And I remember the woman I talked to, my boss, I was like, what can we do about this? And she said, his mentor is the president of the company. And so I don't think I'm going to be able to do anything about it. I was really angry. So the next fall, when I went back to school, talked to my math professors at the time. I said, I gave them the same story I just provided to you. And they said to me, I said, I can't deal with being in corporate America. I can't imagine myself being in an environment that you have to somebody. And my mentors at the time said to me, well, Mark, you could be a professor. There's no politics in that. And that's not true, of course. We know that. But at the time, I think they were just trying to encourage me to consider this. So I said, okay, great. I'll get a PhD. That's the beginnings of my thoughts of a PhD. And I will say that I'm not sure I would have gotten through it. So I started out, I went to the University of Virginia. I didn't like that so much. And so I moved down to Florida State. And I ended up getting an email from an old friend of mine. And now it happens to be on the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts. And he said, there's a program in Bell Labs called the Cooperative Research Fellowship Program. And you come here to Bell Labs and they'll give you, you'll work with some of the best people in the world in whatever area you find exciting. And so I went to Bell Labs. And at that point I had not seen, I had almost always been the only African-American in every one of my higher level classes. So I had not seen that many black people doing so many, so many amazing things. And, you know, Bell Labs is not all black. It was a primarily white organization but they were students from all over the country, all over the world really with working with the top researchers in every area, as you can imagine. I just found it to be amazing. So I ended up having to leave Florida State because I wanted to do something they didn't have a African-American that worked in that area. And then I went to Georgia Tech. And I found that also to be a very welcoming environment with a large black grad student association. And so I went to all the black grad student association events. But at the same time, I really felt comfortable in my environment at Georgia Tech because I knew I had people at Bell Labs that were looking out for me. And so the last thing I'll mention, and I'll tell you the jobs because we're gonna talk about the job search in a minute and my job search was not a normal job search. I met a person at Bell when I was at Georgia Tech who came down to give a talk. He was the chair of the department of IOE that there at Michigan at the time. And so I went to our national societies, upper social society meeting and I happened to see this person at the, getting on the elevator. He said, hey, Mark, how you been? I said, oh, John, it's good to see you. How have you been? So what's going on? I said, I'm looking for a job. So literally on an elevator, I gave John my elevator pitch. And the next thing I knew, I was getting an interview at Michigan. That was my first academic job. So hopefully things are a little bit easier because you don't wanna hang around the elevators to find a job or anything like that. And it's not the same way to do things, hook things a little bit easier for other people that are gonna be watching this webinar. But for me, it was really a lot of luck. A lot of people looking out for me and a lot of good mentorship that I received from amazing colleagues. Thank you. No, thank you so much. I love that story and thank you for sharing. I do want to remind our participants, you can add questions to the Q and A or to the chat. And I encourage you to do so as we're receiving questions from our participants. From our participants, I did want to build off of what you were talking about, Mark. The Boucher Honor Society, one of the goals is to help to diversify the faculty across the country. And we're really privileged to be part of that network with that goal in mind. And so much of faculty coming from diverse backgrounds, first generation, low income is just not knowing, not having the mentors and not knowing the hidden curriculum. And so that's one of the things that we're hoping that we could talk about today. So when you come to this epiphany or maybe you never have the epiphany, but you come to the realization that you're in a PhD program and faculty might be the end goal for you, like what are the things that you need to start doing to prepare? What are the things that you need to do early to position yourself so that you are a viable faculty candidate? Mark, maybe we'll start with you. Oh, thank you. This is a great question. So first thing I want to say is that as PhD students and I guess as faculty, we are looking ahead. So always have to be looking at it as a, in a career you're looking forward. What's the most inspiring thing for you? What's the next thing I want to consider in my research? So I would say the same thing is true when looking for an academic job. So if you're starting out early on in your PhD career, you think about what kind of job you may want four or five years down the road. Now I can't say I did this. You just heard my story. But I'm saying to you that had I, if I were you in 2021 and you had people like the people on this panel that are looking out for you, I would do it a different, I would do it a different way. And I would start thinking about what do I want to do? So do I want to, am I inspired by teaching? Am I inspired by more on the research side of things? What research projects would I do beyond my thesis? Those are the kinds of questions that you're going to get in an interview. And in my view, you might as well get started thinking about those things now. Should I follow up on that, Ethan? Yes, please. Okay, great. Thanks so much. Yeah, those are wonderful suggestions from Mark. I would add to that, that once you feel that you have research or work that is ready to be shared with your broader communities and the fields in which you're working, start doing so. So present at conferences, you can start off with a kind of lower stakes, maybe like a graduate student organized conference. You don't need to rush to the big flagship professional organization conference. So I think, for example, in one of my main fields, which is history, there are many conferences that are organized by graduate students at different institutions or they're affiliated with a range of different organizations. And those are really meant to be supportive places to learn how to present your work, whether you're doing a PowerPoint or reading from a paper and to get comments and feedback in a supportive environment. And then when you feel ready, perhaps then submit that abstract to the bigger flagship conference or a bigger event that looks interesting and compelling to you. I think it is important to get your work out there for people to learn about you and your research and to also get feedback to see maybe what's resonating, what's not resonating. And that's part of also building a network which relates to what I mentioned before, which is community. So rather than just this idea of networking, I would think of this as community building, a community of fellow travelers that many of whom you will accompany you along the way in academia, I have found that with the community that I have built going back to graduate student days. So I think, and also it can be sometimes hard to have that confidence to send out the abstract or to take the plunge and really do your first conference or symposium presentation, but I'd encourage you to do it and to also with the lab that I run, we have many of our, we have a graduate students and postdocs and undergrads too who are going to present at events and they do kind of a mock presentation with the group, a trial run. So if you can do that as well, maybe with a cohort of your graduate students or sometimes there's opportunities within your department in the context of kind of mentorship or thinking about job placement, that would be another way to do it. So I just encourage you, like I'm fairly enthusiastic, I can't see all of you, but I'm enthusiastic about you sharing your research with the various communities you're in conversation with. Thank you for that, Alex. And I would again, like to reiterate, we would love to see your questions. We really would like to make this panel discussion yours. So the participants, the more questions that we get from you, the livelier this discussion can be. Dean Solomon, as we're beginning this morning, spoke to the difficulty and the challenges, especially over the last year or so, this might be a faculty job market like no other before, completely unprecedented. So that's the nature of one of these questions that we received in the Q&A. How do you suggest balancing the time and mental energy requirements of job searches while also finishing a dissertation in a pandemic and amid ongoing racial violence? I am facing all of the uncompensated work with no promise of employment on the other end and it makes it really hard to get started. What do you all think? Wow, that is a heavy question. So the first thing I can say is that none of us have gone through this. So this is new, I mean, I can give you advice, but it's new to me just like it's new to you, this pandemic and having meetings to be in Zoom. And then even though I grew up in an era where there was racial violence, it was not so front and center. So it wasn't like certainly riding a King in 1992 was a big deal for us and I was 22 at the time, but it wasn't like it is today. So the truth of the matter is you're in unprecedented space. And so the first thing I would say to you is to make sure that you do take some time to yourself and that may mean, and as the weather gets nice, you're out and out for walks, that you're out for, I know if you're from Michigan, I know it's beautiful that this time of year and the school is about to wind down. So you just take care of yourself. And then you do have to remember, and I hate to say this, but you do have to remember that when you go for the job interviews, the expectations are still gonna be pretty high for you. So you are gonna have to spend that time working on your resume, your CV, working on your job, finishing up your dissertation. That's gonna be, you have to do that, because when you come to my department, the expectations are still high. So we're giving a little break on the tenure clock right now, a little bit longer tenure clock than we normally would see, but yeah, we're at universities that we expect a lot from our faculty. And so that's not, that's just a reality. So I'll stop here. Yeah, I really appreciate that question. And I feel the pain that's in the question and the sense of struggling. And I also feel like I'm struggling to keep up with challenges at home and with, there's also issues around elderly or sick family members. I mean, there's a lot of things that I know that I'm juggling in all different aspects of my life. I would say one thing too, as a mantra to kind of remember is that we're all experiencing this differently, but we're going through something similar in the grand scheme of things. And it is an unprecedented time and it's a really, really hard time. I mean, you come up for air and then something else, you know, kind of assault your senses in terms of, you know, just looking at Michigan, what's going on with the COVID numbers. It's really certainly very distressing to see the relentless racial violence. And, you know, as I worked in my last book on the rise of kind of white nationalism and the far right, I mean, these are serious concerns and threats to democracy and they do affect academic institutions and, you know, ideas of what is free speech or what is hate speech. And those are other topics to talk about for another day, but one of the things I would say is that I know at the University of Michigan and particularly in the College of LSA where I'm based, we are very cognizant of the impact of COVID and these were other social issues on academia. So for example, we have been working on, with departments on COVID impact statements and we are setting up some workshops with faculty members to talk about how do you incorporate the impact of COVID and its repercussions on your statements, on your annual statements. And this is something where, you know, and I don't know, I haven't talked to my friends over at Rackham about how this might be incorporated in, for example, to a cover letter in terms of slowing down of the research. I don't think pretending academia has a good way of categorizing a range of things as weaknesses that are not weaknesses, they're just the warp and weave and the challenges of life. And I feel like it is okay for them to surface, but we need to have a good language for them. So that's something we can be working on together. I would say that, you know, in terms of the bundle of concerns raised by the question, really it's important. I know for me it would be important not to like have the snowball effect of feeling like everything is just bearing down on me, but rather kind of, you know, parse things out. Okay, I'm gonna work on Friday on my letters. I'm going to give myself space on, you know, whatever. I'm just kind of on Mondays to really process things or to take care of myself. Like you need to be good at time management in general with these types of jobs. And I would say that that, you know, it's an overused term, but the self-care part of this is needs to be incorporated into that. It's not an afterthought. It's not an afterthought because it relates to our mental health and our physical health and, you know, academia and what you're doing and getting a PhD and, you know, looking at the kind of the prospects of going on the job market. It's a kind of, it's a long journey, you know, it is a, it's not kind of a quick sprint, you know, this is, and so you need to fortify yourself along the way. And what that looks like will differ from person to person, but for myself, those are also the type of mantras that I repeat to myself, particularly when I'm feeling overwhelmed or, you know, really distressed. And I think there are moments in which you can really lose hope. And that's where I would also go back to, you know, you need your friends, you need your community, you need sort of, you need wells of inspiration for you and you're holistically and more generally. Thank you for that. We have maybe a cluster of questions around the postdoc and the advantages of postdoc. And I think it connects well with Alex your comments about how in academia, we're very able to sort of categorize or cast things as weaknesses that aren't necessarily weaknesses or sometimes create systems where it's difficult to show our strengths. And so it seems like in these three different questions about postdocs, we wanna know what is the advantage, the disadvantage of doing a postdoc and if you're doing a postdoc, how do you demonstrate your teaching competency or your teaching ability, your strength as an instructor and also, you know, balancing that with your ability to publish and do your research and pursue aggressively your scholarly agenda. How do you deal with some of the frustration of having papers that are out there and they're under editorial review but they're not being accepted yet and then you're still as a postdoc, you know, trying to break into these faculty ranks. So on paper, it's hard to capture your strengths as an instructor or your strengths as a scholar when you're still kind of in this postdoc reality. What do you all think? Well, I can start and then pass it over to Mark. You know, I come, I'm based in the humanities and I would say that postdocs have become more common in the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. There are more postdoctoral opportunities out there. Some of these are kind of standalone, one to even three year postdocs. Others are postdocs that are geared towards faculty hiring and sometimes they're connected to initiatives to diversify the faculty such as we have at the University of Michigan with the LSA Collegiate Fellowship Program and I think there is some, I know of a few similar tracks at Cornell actually because one of our PhD graduates from the Department of American Culture which is my main home, spent two years at Cornell and then moved to another institution but it was an excellent experience for him in terms of actually what you just mentioned, Ethan, in terms of having that concentrated time to work on scholarship, to get papers out there to be working on in his case, a book manuscript and also an opportunity to really it can be an opportunity, it depends on the specifics of the postdoc itself to teach your own course, to develop your own course and your own, really work up your own syllabus, take advantage of whatever might be at the institution in terms of teaching. At Michigan, we have the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, which is fantastic and they offer workshops and you can consult with them about how to design a syllabus to be more inclusive or how you might incorporate technology into teaching courses of various sizes. So I would say that one of the virtues of the postdoc almost always is that you will have more time to work on your research, especially if it's like two years long. One year can be a little bit of a rush because you get there, if you're going there in person or even virtually get settled in and then you're on the job market again and that's hard. If you have two or three years, you have more time to really be and also that security of time to be working on your various cover letters to be working on things that you would use for the job market and so on. But I would say this balancing, a lot of these questions are about how do we balance all of this? And I would say that it's an ongoing struggle because the earth is still spinning while we're doing this too. And so how and the context in which we're balancing is changing. And right now it is a really, really hard context and it can be a, it's a painful time in many ways. So I think acknowledging that is also really important and having mentors that acknowledge that along with you and can help you strategize can also be really helpful. So overall I think postdocs can be excellent opportunities and I'm personally heartened to see more of them in the humanities and social sciences. They've been very formative for many of my, the PhDs who've studied with me and gone on to have academic careers. Thank you. I'll just add a couple of things to this. So first thing I wanna mention is when I've written that I was Associate Dean I was in charge of the promotion and tenure process in the College of Engineering at Cornell. So that means I wrote a lot of P&T letters. And one of the main things that we're looking for in these led and these packages that are submitted and promotion and tenure is separating yourself from your advisor. So your advisor, you and your PhD advisor had a particular problem you were working on, you solved that problem, you worked through that problem. And then the next thing you're going to do you're trying to make sure that you are your own independent scholar. This is the value of a postdoc because you have the time to begin that separation process. Okay, so if I'm thinking about why to do a postdoc should I do a postdoc? This is what I hope to get from it. I did a postdoc was only for a year but it was a pretty well-defined postdoc at UBC in Vancouver. So that's the first thing I wanna mention. Second thing, I think there was a lot of questions about teaching and showing that you can teach. So there's a few tricks. What I did and I think this may be helpful even today is that I taught a course that had been taught several times before. So I basically had a long list of notes from other faculty that taught the course and so lower the load on my preparation time. So you can either do that or you can coach each a course with a faculty member or even maybe sometimes it's a matter of if you don't get that opportunity it's a matter of having recorded some lectures you've given. If you've given a talk somewhere you can provide a link to that topic. They can see that you would be fine in front of the classroom. This is really what you're looking for. And then there's a question I think about paper delay. I don't think there's really a fix for this but I'll just say that you can put information on your CV about where you made the paper, where in the pipeline is it? So is it second review at this particular journal, et cetera. And then you can also provide links to the papers in your CV. And so if people really want to see that you're doing good scholarship they can just look at the paper themselves as opposed to having to believe it. A reputable journal is gonna publish that paper for you. I think that's all, I'll just talk there. Thank you. That's a great recommendation Mark. I really appreciate that. And I really appreciate the very vigorous participation from our audience today. We have many, many questions and I'm just gonna ask your forgiveness if we don't get to all the questions. I'm gonna do my best to sort of cluster some questions thematically. And so just thinking about the first steps of applying for a faculty position. Can you both talk about, you've both been on the hiring side, right? And faculty hiring committees. So can you just kind of maybe expose the palimpsest of what goes on in those rooms and those conversations. What are faculty committees looking for? What are they scrutinizing in terms of the cover letters and the CVs and the teaching philosophies? Could you provide some tips that really could help our audience really prepare the right packet? And maybe I'd like to throw in there as well. Faculty diversity is so important, so important to Boucher and we're starting to see a request for faculty diversity statements, right? So how can you demonstrate also your commitment to diversity as a faculty candidate? I guess maybe it's my turn to get started. The last piece is a heavy one, so I'm gonna maybe put it aside for just one second and then maybe we'll come back to it. But because you asked the important, the other piece is equally important which is this question of what happened in these faculty hiring committees. And I think I can say that the first thing is when you're writing your CV, you should make it as easy as possible to find things. So that's a tricky thing. But for example, a number of the papers that you've written in category. So you have papers, you have confidence proceedings, you may have book chapters you've written, number of those things in your CV. Anything that you've ever said you've made toward diversity. Maybe that's an in-service component of your CV. You should highlight those things. I think that they're really important and amazing work that you've done. So you might as well put it out there, teaching that you've done, TAing that you've done. All of that stuff should go right in the CV. And the reason I say this is because any questions that might be had in these faculty hiring committees, you wanna dispel those questions as best you can. And by making your CV clean and crisp, it's really gonna help you get through that. So the other thing I'll say, and I hate to say this, but as much as we'd like to think it's completely merit-based, in these meetings, people go back to, oh, I know his or her, or their advisor, or I don't know their advisor. And so even I've heard things like, I don't know the undergraduate school they went to. So these are the kinds of things that people, so it's not as just merit-based as you might think. If you'll bring themselves into these faculty hiring discussions. And as leaders, I'd like to hope that we're trying to move away from that, but that's not the way it is so far. We're working our way toward there. So there's that. The last thing I'll mention, I think there were some questions about dual career and two-body issues and things like that. Believe it or not, that does come up sometimes in these discussions. So it's just a matter of people and using their own knowledge. I mean, maybe you're not in an interview yet. And they know that you have a dual career issue. And so I would say that I like to know the dual career issues as a person who hires, because I treat them as best I can. And I don't let them lead into what I do in terms of the hiring decision. But I can't promise you that everybody views it the way I do. And so if I were on the hiring market today, I don't know that I would leave with that. So I think it's probably best to think about what's the best time for that, the timing of making that decision to come forward with the dual career issue that you have over the year worked out. Okay, I think I'll stop there. Great, building on what Mark's points. I mean, the first thing out of the gate, I would say is that your cover letter and any statements that you include are really, from my perspective, the most important part of the packet. Because that is where we get to know you. And those are the documents that you can own, so to speak. You can craft them. You can include the points about your scholarship and your teaching that you believe are the most relevant. You know your scholarship better than anyone else. And so take the time to kind of nurture and cultivate these statements so that you're situating your work. You're explaining its relevance. You're explaining its initial and potential scholarly impact. So I would say that those, I really when I have been on committees and when I've looked at applications for positions of any kind, I really look closely at the statements. Because at the first pass, what we're doing is reading things on paper. We're not having an interview with you in Zoom or in person. So we're really relying on these written documents. And there can be creative work, maybe attached to applications as well or other elements. But what I've really, for the most part, have reviewed in the humanities has been statements. When I was chair of American culture for several years, it's a very diverse unit with the ethnic studies programs are there. Even so, I instituted diversity statements as part of the recruitment process. Because I think that it is really important to hear from the candidates, again, in their own voice and from their own experience, how they have contributed to diversity. And it's not about who people are, although that will shape how they, their background and how they approach their work and so on. It's also very much about what people do. And diversity work can come in a range of different ways. It can be in terms of the scholarship people are doing and the types of questions that they're asking. And the research that they've done, it also can come. And I've seen this very often in STEM fields in terms of teaching or pedagogical initiatives that are involving, for lack of a better term, marginalized groups or focusing on low income high schools and teaching math or STEM and those. And that can be part of a diversity commitment. And also thinking about longer term changing, the kind of the structural inequalities that we have across all educational levels in the U.S. So I would say that it's a good sign from my perspective if an institution is asking for a diversity statement or for you to address diversity work in the context of your package in some way, shape or form. But in an explicit way, not just as a little side note in a kind of a foregrounded way. Related to the CV, I do think that CVs are narrative documents. They are itemized lists to some extent, but they are not like they are evolving narratives of your professional path and your professional work. And we do know that faculty of color and female faculty, faculty with disabilities and faculty who often serve as mentors for like first gen students or students of color, they are often doing a lot of invisible labor that is not gonna make it into a CV. That means that we need to change CVs so that CVs can make this visible. So I would encourage you to add a subcategory in your CV that says community based work or informal mentorship roles or whatever the category would be because I really feel like this work needs to be seen and this work needs to be valued and understood as a part of the larger portfolio. The onus is on us as kind of leaders of institutions to make that more visible and to allow for a formalization process and for that to be seen and for that to be valued. Oh, and then one last point I wanted to make, I would say that unfortunately, there still is this pedigree fetish, let's say, in academia of so-and-so went to such institution or like, oh, there are advisors, a superstar who won the Nobel Prize or whatever. And I would say that I'm part of a cohort of faculty and academic leaders who are trying hard to push back against that. Not that there can't be value in being at a certain institution or working with a certain advisor, maybe that's generated great work, but that doesn't mean that we still need to look, we need to kind of open the frame of institutions that we're looking at. We have people who come from situations where they're not gonna be able to go to these private institutions. They might have started at a community college and then transferred into a four-year state school and done amazing work. That needs to be celebrated and valued and understood as look at what this person did. Well, they were at this institution. And the same for, I would say, PhD granting institutions. The other thing is that, particularly for non-traditional PhD students or let's say someone who's gone back to school in her 30s with children, it might not be possible to move across the country to go to X or Y prestigious institution. Maybe they're getting their degree at a kind of more regional or local place. We should still definitely look at them based on, again, when I said before, the cover letters, the description of the research, the impact that they could have on the field. So I would say that the more that we can include this kind of institutional diversity in terms of thinking about where people come from when they get their PhDs, that from my perspective is an important part to diversifying the faculty and pushing back against kind of, the myths of meritocracy and so on. Thank you so much for that, Alex. Let me just jump in on this diversity statement question. And I think everything that Dr. Minister has articulated is exactly right in line with what I was gonna say anyway. There's one piece I wanna mention and that is that pretty much every university now has an opportunity for faculty to get involved in diversity efforts. So one could write who you are and your efforts in the past, but also when you're applying to a particular university, tailor your interests on diversity efforts to that university. So where you might get involved, where you might help. That's all, go ahead. Yeah, thank you both for that. And thank you for lifting up these issues of invisible tax and kind of the uncompensated work of diversity practitioners and higher ed in making visible within the evaluation side of this work, right? So even how do you make this fit in your CV? How do you show it in your personal statements or your research statements that you're doing this work so that it's evaluated and it's assigned value is a really, really important point. I did want to go to the chat and ask a kind of follow up question on this part of the process. And I think the institutional fetish or prestige fetish that Alex was talking about might interact with this question as well. Faculty letters of recommendation, right? So if you have, if you're a position that you're working with a very prominent scholar in your field, like is it better to have that good name or the name of that recognized prestigious institution and just kind of a generic vanilla letter of recommendation that just has the right name and letterhead or is it more impactful to maybe have a letter of recommendation from faculty advisors who aren't as well known in the field or are teaching at state public universities, but really express who you are and the relationship that you have and the great work that you're doing. What's the secret to a good letter of recommendation from the faculty advisor? I can start. Can I answer all of the above? Typically a packet will include three letters, sometimes asked for more, but I've seen most commonly three letters. I would say that certainly you want letters from those who know you best and who really can speak to your strengths and underscore your unique contributions who maybe you have taken a few, took a few courses with and they can talk about your performance in those courses or maybe someone with whom you have been a TA or GSI at the same time. If you have a more generic letter from a big deal person in the field won't hurt you, it probably will help you. And this relates to a question that I skimmed over in the chat which is about the fact that with these, what is it called the Interfolio System and the systems that we're all using where we're uploading letters for our graduate students who are on the job market, those of us on the kind of other side reading those realize that faculty are writing a huge number of letters. I remember one of my professors at the University of Chicago said his final publication would be an 8,000 page volume of letters of recommendation because he had written so many. And so we know that we're doing a high volume of these because we wanna support you all and I recognize that some of these are going to be more generic. Some will just say, I recommend so and so strongly for this postdoctoral opportunity at your institution or I recommend so and so for this tenure track position at your institution. I've even seen letters where the institution was, if it was sent to the University of Michigan another institution name was there at the end of the letter. I never held that against the candidate. We all know we're working really hard to produce these letters. So I wouldn't get too concerned about that. And I think that this is also something where and we haven't talked too much about this yet where the mentorship is really important. So not only mainly your main advisor but I always encourage a multiple mentorship model. Maybe there is a job placement. It's the job placement role in a department is often filled by an assistant professor or someone who was on the job market and let's say in the past five years and has had that experience and they can typically provide really good guidance on, okay I can ask for letters from these five people which three should I choose? And so I would definitely seek them out. Don't be shy. That's why they're the job placement coordinator because they want to place people in jobs and that's their role and they wanna do it well. So I would encourage you to reach out to them. So I think this is the first time Professor Minister and I were gonna disagree. And here's why and maybe I can pull her to my side. So here's why, when you have a very senior person let's say that's the star in the field a generic letter from that person in my view can hurt you because they may be writing more positive letters about other people that are also on the job market. I've seen this happen where we get two letters from the same person. The person is glowing about one person and not so glowing about the other person. And it makes it clear that they don't really know your work. And so I would say in some cases it's gotta be careful not to ask that person. And I would also mention that not all the time but there are quite a few people that are maybe not stars but pretty well known in the field that maybe still are writing very positive letters. So if they're your thesis advisor I don't think you have a choice. You're gonna have to ask that person to write a letter because people will wonder why not thesis advisor. But if they're not your thesis advisor and happen to be a big name it may be a big with a small B name out there if I write a better letter for you. And that's what I would prefer to see. So not really disagreeing but just nuance there I think. Yeah, thank you for that both of you. And again, thank you all that have contributed to the Q&A and the chat. And my apologies again because just looking at the time I know that we're not gonna be able to address everyone's questions unfortunately. But again, trying to maybe cluster some things thematically and even follow the progression of the job search. We've talked about getting your packet together and some of the components of the packet. Imagine if you will that one of those candidates is offered a campus visit but do you have any tips about job talks and how do you engage in that campus visit? Again, we're trying to expose the palimpsest and really share the hidden curriculum. So what makes for a good job talk? What makes for a good campus visit? I guess I'll go for a system. So first of all, I would say the campus visit almost starts when you get off the plane if they pick you up to the time and take you back to the plane. So there's no, so even though you may go through a long interview process and they say, oh, now the interview is over let's just relax and have a drink or whatever you're still on the job market. So that ends when you no longer are in their presence. So job talks I think should probably be tailored to this type of institution. It just turns out that I'm in an OR department that happens to be very much mathematical. I've had several people interview here with a generic talk they've written for some other place which is not as technical. And we feel like, well, that person doesn't really want to come to our department. They have a generic talk should be tailoring it part of it. So it's not a matter of changing the talk completely but it's a matter of way more heavily knowing what kind of department you're interviewing in. And if you really want that job as a little more work, I'm sorry about that but that's what I would say. Yeah, related to that back to our almost disagreement. I think that it is a question of nuance. I mean, the person that the letter is being written for the Recommendee won't necessarily know what the range of adjectives are from more tepid to more enthusiastic. So I would say again, this is seek advice in putting together your suite of letters that you're going to have sent on your behalf. So I think, and I also think that this can vary from field to field depending on fields where someone is supposed to like in a history department, it's often solo authored articles or monographs whereas in the sciences, when some of the social sciences it's more typically collaborative work or co-authored work where being first author, especially as a early career person is super important. So all of those things would go into the mix depending on the field. In terms of the campus visit, well, let's assume that these campus visits are going to be in person as you were suggesting. What's been interesting this past year plus is that so much of this has happened on Zoom which has created both new opportunities and new stressors in the interview process. What I would say, what I would advise you if you've been invited for a campus visit is do not be shy about asking the person who contacted you. There's typically two people that will contact you. One is the chair of the search committee. They are going to know about ask them. If you're giving a present, let's say you're giving a job talk, how long are you expected to speak for? What is the custom in the department? There are departments where everyone is super quiet until you're done with your talk and then the questions come. There are other departments where people will ask questions along the way. It's just different kind of cultures in these fields. So you should know that. You should make sure that, so find out about the kind of intellectual scope of what you're expected to present and what that is, what is that going to look like and kind of what the departmental dynamic tends to be. Who's going to be in the audience? Ask that. Mainly though certainly will be faculty members, members of the search committee, graduate students might also be in the audience. Sometimes undergraduates, if your talk is interdisciplinary, it might bring in folks from adjacent departments. And then I also, the other person is typically a staff person who will be really well-versed in the actual mechanics of the visit. So if there's something you need to know, and this is where we really need to work hard with across our institutions to make our spaces more accessible for everyone and for people with disabilities as well. If you need anything in particular, they should be asking you for that, whether it's like access copies or some kind of like subtitling or cart services. At the same time, just ask them, if when you get the itinerary, well, what should I expect? How much will I have to be moving from place to place? Like I just think it behooves you to gather all the information that you can and typically there will be questions like, sometimes people have food preferences or allergies or you'll wanna communicate that information. So if you see those types of questions being asked, that's from my perspective generally a good sign because it means the idea is to make the visit as positive as possible so that you can shine and kind of show off your research and maybe it depends on the institution, your teaching abilities, your pedagogical style. And if those aren't there, you should ask about them as well because that's also gonna give you information about the institution. Remember, they're interviewing you but you're interviewing them too. You're getting a sense of the institution and if it's a place where you would want to be because it's a big commitment to move somewhere else and to like devote a great majority of your time to being in whatever the department would be and working with the larger community at that institution. So I would say ask questions, gather the information you think will help you prepare, don't be shy about doing so, really have an understanding of what the itinerary is and let's say it's a two-day visit, what those two days will look like and carry power bars or whatever will help fortify you along the way so that you can stay hydrated and stay kind of on point. This can be really exhausting if you have seven or eight hour days of interviews and enjoy it, enjoy it, enjoy meeting these people and try to make it as positive an experience as possible for you. Thank you. We have great engagement in the chat and the Q&A and I just wanted to read a couple of things. So Jessica Montoro would like to contribute that the professor is in and the slow professor are two books that Jessica has found helpful in unpacking the faculty job market. So we just wanted to call that out especially as we're coming near the end of our time but Alex related to your point that you're also interviewing the campus and the departments, right? We have a question about exactly that, right? I think we probably feel very acutely right now during the pandemic, how difficult the faculty job market is and so you feel almost grateful just that you're being interviewed, right? And it feels awkward to be scrutinizing of the institution, right? But are there red flags? Are there things that should cause concern for you? If you're doing a faculty interview that might suggest, well, maybe this isn't the department for me or maybe the institution isn't demonstrating the kind of inclusivity or the kind of diversity or commitment or diversity that I need to be able to flourish as a faculty. Yeah, so the last piece is commitment to diversity piece is a tough one. So let me just tell you, so what I recommended and I don't know that people followed when I was a associate dean is that if you have a minority faculty candidate, you might on the first visit ask if that person would like to meet with other minority faculty candidates. And sorry, not other minority faculty, not candidates. Or if you look at the agenda for a female faculty member and just see if you make sure that you have women on the interview list. So if you're going to an institution that doesn't have that, it's a little bit trickier because then that leaves a candidate to ask the question. Can I meet with a minority faculty member? I did this when I came to Cornell. Can I meet if there was no African-Americans in the department when I arrived? I said, can I meet with a minority faculty? But I was coming in as an associate professor with tenure, so it's a little bit tricky. As a new PhD or come up with a postdoc. But in my view, I think this is crucial. So if you don't get that opportunity, you have to, I do a lot of homework to make sure and I might even reach out separately to a diversity programs office or to minority faculty at the institution as you're considering. So when you arrive, you're not surprised. I think that that's a, that's just as Professor Minister mentioned earlier, it's a commitment that you're making for a long time and you and your family are gonna live there and you wanna be able to thrive and not be held back by some of these other things. So I also, so during the interview process, this is not about diversity, but during the interview process, I would recommend if there are faculty that are not in the department that you would like to talk to, meet with, that just happen to be in your research area. Say they're in another department, so I work in OR maybe as a computer science person. I wanna, if there's time in the schedule, can I meet with this person outside of the department? For one, it's interesting to you to also show you're serious about the interview. So I recommend that if that seems a reasonable thing for you in your interview, that you should do that. Yeah, to add to those points, I would say that if you're being put in kind of, if you sense that you're being put in any type of like a solo status, like you are the female candidate, let's say a mathematics department, I'm picking on mathematics, sorry, my great mathematics department here at U of N, but we'll just say the hypothetical mathematics department where four people are being flown in for interviews and you're the one woman of the group. And that is referenced during your talk in some way, shape, or form, or you get this, you read the clues in the room that that is one of the reasons you might have been selected or that's how you're being referred to. That for me would be a red flag. It would be the same with if you were the only minority or candidate of color and that those dynamics come into the room. Now, sometimes institutions are trying very hard to diversify, but that doesn't mean that they should be let off the hook in kind of falling into those types of tokenized pattern. So that would be a red flag. Another thing to look for is when you're actually on site in the department, see how the department is representing itself. Is it kind of these walls of shame, so to speak, or the dude walls as they've been called, as Rachel Maddow called them, where what you see is like 12 portraits of the white men who were chairs of the department over from 1920 to 1970. If that is how the, and it's not that those guys weren't good chairs and it's not like we want to slam them in any way, but is that representative of the department and what the department wants to be going forward? One of the things that I did when I was chair of American culture was we had a very, I would say, I mean, it represented the diversity of the department, but it was just a pretty lame, what do you call it, like just a portrait or kind of a, I don't know the, I'm still waking up, I haven't had enough copy, but one of these kind of dioramas with the different pictures of people, but it wasn't organized well and it didn't really show off the diversity and the kind of the breadth of the department. So we switched everything up and we had new photos done and we made sure that the lectures were included with the tenure track faculty as part of the community and the staff had their own area and all the graduate students had, we had the same for them. And that really showed this is who the department is in all of its diversity and all of its beauty and this would be the community that you'd be joining. So for me, that would be an important clue. And then of course, I would say that there are social events attached to faculty searches, those typically should have more than one people. If you were a female candidate and you were only going out to dinner with a senior male, he might be a really great guy and he might be a really good guy, but to me that would still be, I would hope that there would be at least several people at like the dinner or the lunch, because you also wanna talk to more people. And anytime there's a one-on-one dynamic, things have the potential to go, in the worst case scenario, kind of off the rails and not a good way. So I would always look for, well, how many people are gonna be at this? Who's gonna be at this? If you want someone else to participate as Professor Lewis was saying in your visit that you wanna meet, ask them to come along. So those are the types of things where you would get glimpses of not so great climate or dynamics in units. Thank you both for those fabulous answers. I think we probably have time for one more question. I do wanna address, again, this kind of trajectory. So you have a great packet, CV, you get the interview, you knock it out of the park when you do your campus visit and your job talk and then you actually offer the job. Again, given the climate right now, you're just grateful that you have an offer and sometimes it's hard to think about actually negotiating contract, right? So one of our first Boucher chapter events like this was precisely about that, right? So we kind of unpacked the faculty job contract negotiation. And I think hopefully one of our future offerings will be a more thorough examination of that again. But as we close today's proceedings, there does seem to be, you know, expressed throughout the chat and the Q and A, a reasonable amount of anxiety, right? It seems to be very, very difficult faculty job market right now. And it seems like there are people who have experienced being dissuaded from a career in academia or being discouraged from pursuing this is their career they're calling or it just feels like there's so many obstacles right now in addition to the obstacles that existed before the pandemic. And so what would you say to our participants today who are feeling a little discouraged, they're feeling a little less than optimistic about a career in the professoriate? Okay, so I guess I'll start with this. So I started with my story about how I came to this job and I'll just mention quickly because I'm never going to write out of time, I mentioned that in spite of the fact that there are politics in academia, it is the best job I could hope for. And let's just put it, so I'll say this. So I read an article a while ago which talked about stress. And to be sure those six years are on a tangent they're a stressful but the least stressful jobs that were on the list in the article were a one independently wealthy. So if you're rich, you'd have less low stress. And second one was tenure faculty member. So yes, it's the tenure track getting to tenure is a long road, it's five and a half, six years. And that is the stressful time I admit that but at the same time, you are exploring things you're excited about. You're working your way toward a lifelong career in academics and freedom to be able to think of what you want to think about. And so I hear you about being discouraged but I'd say keep on trucking, keep pushing. It's a great job. I would say in response to that question I feel the anxiety too in the chat and I know about it from many of the students who have studied with me who are now on the market. And I'm writing them continually, writing these letters of recommendation and trying to help them open doors here and there, postdocs and positions and so on. I would say it is true that academic institutions have been hit hard by COVID and this is a moment of change and things are hard. So I think first of all, we shouldn't deny that. I think it's really then ever more important to, for example, in your cover letter to talk about innovative and interesting things that you would like to do at said institution related to undergraduate education, related to interdisciplinary initiatives and so on. And then I realized that this panel has focused on the academic job search but there are many other different types of careers out there in which you can leverage your PhD, do really interesting work, make pretty good money and live in a place where you want to live. And I have a good number of students who are very happy indeed with not having pursued the academic job market and taken on other types of roles that research institutes are put in the public sector. In the sciences, there are many different engineering, there's all kinds of opportunities that are not academic track. So, certainly I would encourage you to keep on going and to, again, work with your mentors, work with those in your departments, get advice from your larger community and cohort. But also, I think if you have had been, if you've been fixated on one particular thing that is the Holy Grail, I would encourage you to shake that up a bit and to think about potential other opportunities or ways to use your PhD that you might not have even realized would be very rewarding. And that's not meant to be discouraging for you working to pursuing the academic job market, go for it. But really open kind of your lenses in terms of thinking in other ways you might be able to use your PhD to have a really satisfying career. Great. And so with that, I'd like for you to join me in thanking Dr. Mark Lewis and Dr. Alex Stern for an incredible presentation and imparting their words of wisdom on us. And we wanna thank Cornell again for your fantastic partnership in this endeavor. And we hope to be able to offer these kinds of opportunities and events again in the future. So keep an eye out. And thank you all and be well. Take care.