 So, I think we left the most important part to the last day of our workshop. We talked about publishing, we talked about writing proposals and becoming a leader and becoming a good teacher. And now that we've covered all these topics, we want to talk about how do I actually get a job doing all of this. And in the surveys that you filled out and in the conversations we had over the last two days, it became very clear how much anxiety there is about this topic and how much you're all struggling with making decisions and going through interviews and then picking the right job for you. So we are very lucky that Val organized a great panel for us that will be followed by breakout sessions to help you more individually on your application material and in the interviewing process. What I will do quickly is introduce the panelists and I will not go into their bios in depth because what Val asked the panelists to do first is to speak actually a little bit about their own career and how they got there. And then we will dive into tips on interviewing and picking the right job. So from right to left, so you're right to left. We have Katie Schnell, she is now an assistant professor in geological sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. And yesterday or two days ago I kept saying they just moved there and it wasn't actually correct this time it is, it just became a professor. And so she will bring you that perspective of how it actually happened and how she went through the interviewing process. Next to her we have Korra Randall, she is the chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder and will share her perspective of a how she got herself to where she is today but also overseeing a lot of hiring processes nowadays. Then next we have Kristin Larson, she is the director of the Renewable Energy Services at Global Weather Corporation. And many of you were interested in careers outside of academia still doing research but what else is out there? And Kristin is a wonderful resource for that and agreed to speak to you today. And last we have here with us Scott McCarrow who is currently serves as a product manager and applied research scientist also at a private company called Weisler. Some of you know their products and he will share with you how he went from being a post doc at NOAA to end up at a private company and how he made those decisions. So I will join the panelist and then think already about all of the questions you want to ask in a couple of minutes. So what I would like the panelist to start us off with is just introduce yourself a little bit more where you are, where exactly you work, how that looks like and how you got there and I don't know who would like to start. I'm Katie Snell and a little bit about my background. I did my undergrad out here at Colorado College and then I took a couple of years off in between college and grad school, just worked. I was ready to go back to grad school in about six months after I had gotten out of undergrad and then I did my Ph.D. at UC Santa Cruz and I was a post doc for about four years at Caltech before coming here and I've been here now for about a year. And I guess in thinking about how I got to where I am, I went through many different majors in undergrad before becoming a geology major and that was the one that kind of integrated all the different things that I liked once I took the class. I was done, I was pretty sold. I don't know that I can remember a time actively thinking I want to be a professor, I want to go to grad school. I just, as happens at small liberal arts colleges, they get you involved in research pretty early on and I thought it was great. You spend time outside, you get to see everything outside with a new lens and there were a lot of cool tools at the time available for doing it. So I just kind of started heading down that road and kept going on that road. And I would say things that sort of helped me along the way, which you'll probably get to with other questions is just, you remember the ring that there were always options outside of that. So I think there were always low points in grad school where I thought, I don't know if this is really what I want to be doing. I don't really see necessarily a path forward or points in my post doc where it wasn't clear to me that I was going to get a job and it was really helpful for me to have perspective that you always have options. There's a whole bunch of training that comes along with grad school and post doc that we just think about the skill set we get teaching or research, but all of those come along with another sort of bonus skill sets that are really applicable to a wide range of other jobs, creative jobs, jobs that don't necessarily require you to have a boss, which I think is also appealing in academics. And that helped me a lot through not worrying overly about whether I was going to become a professor or not. Okay, so I'm Cora Randall and I guess I would have to describe my career as being kind of opportunistic or serendipitous. So I went to undergraduate school at the State University of New York, a very small college at Purchase just north of the city. And I went there because I was very interested in both music and science. I didn't know what I wanted to do and I was told that you could combine both of them. And as it turns out, my first day there, I met with an advisor who happened to be a chemistry professor and he said, oh no, you can't really do both. You have to choose one or the other because our fine arts programs are so good. You know, they had faculty from Juilliard coming up that you really have to just do that if you want to do it. And I said, okay, well, I'll do chemistry since you're the chemistry professor. And he laid out my schedule for the next three years and said, yeah, you can go get your degree. So I was a chemistry major. And then right before my last year, my senior year, this professor who I was supposed to do a senior project with went on sabbatical at UC Santa Cruz. And he said, well, do you want to come out to Santa Cruz to do your senior project? And I said, okay. So my senior year, I spent at Santa Cruz. And at the end of my senior year, the professor whose research group we were visiting just came up to me and said, if you want to come to graduate school here, we'll give you an extra fellowship and you don't have to take the GREs. So I said, okay, I'll come to graduate school. So I got a PhD in chemistry. Somebody, a colleague that my advisor knew was working at Carnegie Mellon in semi empirical molecular orbital theory. And I got a postdoc with him just because he knew my advisor. So I did a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon doing that. I had never done anything with the atmosphere in graduate school. I came back to Santa Cruz and was doing some research, mainly following a boyfriend, met a different boyfriend who I eventually married, who lived in Colorado. And I said, okay, well, it'd be nice to have a job in Colorado. So I actually looked in Science Magazine for jobs and I actually found one advertisement for a position at CU, it was a research position to work on the Hubble Space Telescope. I had never done anything in astronomy but I knew something about spectroscopy from my chemistry. So I applied. I actually applied to another position too. It was actually an industry. I got offers at both positions, one here, one in Longmont. And I decided I wanted the one in Boulder to work on the telescope because this was right before it had been launched. And so it was really, really cool. So I took that job. I had to basically switch fields, right? Cause I had to learn astronomy when I hadn't done any astronomy before. So I was a research associate at CU at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. I was there for five years working on the Hubble Space Telescope and then the instrument that I was working on was taken out of the telescope. And it just happened to be that an Earth Orbiting Satellite Instrument, maybe some of you have heard of it, the Polym instrument, they needed somebody who had some of my expertise and they asked me to join their team. So I said, fine. So I switched to Earth Atmosphere Science then that was 1994. And I've been doing that ever since. So it really was very serendipitous. It was actually 2006 when a position opened up, well, it was 2005, a faculty position opened up in ATOC. And I applied for that. Since I had been doing research all along just as a research associate, soft money. I decided I wanted to have a tenure track position. So I applied for that and got it. And have been in ATOC since 2006. I'm actually both in ATOC and in LASP. So anyway, that's kind of where I got to here. My name's Kristen Larson and I got my PhD in Atmospheric Science. And then I was looking for jobs and I knew I wanted to stay in the same city and I wanted to work on a team with people I could laugh with towards goals that I was in favor of. And I talked to a lot of people who'd graduated from my department and were working in my city since they lived in my city. So I wasn't very attached to staying in academia though that would have been fine too. And one of them hired me. They had a new company and it was called Three Tier and there was two of them that started the company and so then I joined and so I called myself the third tier of Three Tier. And I stayed there nine years and the company grew from like a three person company up to an 80 person company. And then they had layoffs in 2009 when a lot of people were having layoffs. And then I started thinking, you know, maybe I should look around a little bit. And so I looked around and it wasn't until 2012 that I got another job at Seattle City Light as the long range load forecaster. And I was there and I really liked it there and they have pensions at Seattle City Light. And so I just had to stay there 20 years and I could retire. And I really liked my boss and my job. And for personal reasons I thought I would like to move back to Colorado. So I took a vacation in Colorado and I said, okay, now's the time. This vacation, the six days, I'm gonna call up everyone I know in Colorado and try my hardest to get a job in Colorado. And I did. So now I have a job. It wasn't really a vacation. So now I work for the Global Weather Corporation and we do weather forecasting and we're pretty closely connected with NCAR and UCAR and we sell that technology to the energy sector, the media sector and the transportation sector. So we do road weather and forecasting. And I work mostly on the wind energy and solar energy forecasting. So I don't think I have anything to add at this time. Good morning. Sorry. Yeah, my name's Scott McCarrow. Yeah, so I work for Weisler right now. My path, I have to go back here a little bit. So I went, I'm from Baltimore originally, East Coast, that's the jacket, but I've been here for about seven years, that's the jeans. So I went to Millersville University for meteorologies and undergrad. I was just liked to weather like most of us did. What met a professor named Dr. Clark is just one of those amazing mentor type people. And very early on said, I wanna do that. So I thought that meant being a professor. So I graduated from Millersville, didn't wanna get a job and applied to a lot of graduate schools. I went to the one that NASA sent the letterhead, which was Alabama Huntsville, because it matched the sticker on my lunch box, if you will. So I went down to Huntsville, Alabama, which is actually a really great place. I know it's Alabama, but that was pretty great. So I did my master's degree there, under guy named Bill LaPenta. He introduced me to this code that eventually became the wharf. So I was a numerical modeler there. I didn't wanna get a job again. They offered me to do my PhD. So I was one of those people who never really planned on getting a PhD, but I figured, yeah, it's only gonna be about three more years. So about five and a half years later, I finished my PhD. And my dream of being a professor was realized pretty quickly. I took one of these visiting assistant professor gigs, which brought me here to Colorado. And I loved it. I absolutely loved teaching and mentoring. First wake up call in my life was when I realized that when I wanted to be like Dr. Clark, it actually wasn't the professor thing, it was the mentoring thing. And that got me a little worried, because I said, oh, but wait, there's all this research and all this proposal writing and all these kind of things. And I forgot about that, or maybe I didn't realize that that was a reality. So to get better at that, I thought, okay, I have to go do a postdoc. So I started applying for postdocs and there was one locally here at NOAA. I'd like to say that I was the most qualified, but they literally asked me how soon can you start. And I said, I could probably be there by noon. They didn't ask me to be there by noon, but I was actually there on Monday and this was a Friday. So it was really just, they wanted somebody quickly, happened to be qualified. Maybe I'm underselling myself a little bit here, but so I ended up here at NOAA. It was one of these postdocs that could have lasted forever. I know some postdocs that have been there for about five years, but whether or not they should be is a different question. So there at NOAA I started to learn about the government and I thought, wow, maybe I want to do this. Then I started learning the realities of the lack of federal employment. So I started looking out elsewhere also. I ended up taking a job at a startup in wind energy. So I was also in the wind energy field. It was locally here in Boulder. And the reason behind the startup is because I realized that I liked working with people and I was interested in a lot of things that the people I worked with weren't. And nobody had any advice for me. So I sort of jumped off the, somebody called it earlier, the treadmill. Sort of kicking and screaming and went into the startup world where I started running wharf models, took on product management roles. I was the guy who went to Staples. So I got to do the whole like 80 hour week gig for a while. That was super fun. I also learned the dark side of crooked businessmen and long sleepless nights. But it was a lot of fun. Then I ended up taking an opportunity where I am now at Weisler. That had a lot to do with family reasons and children coming along and not driving very well with 80 hours a week. So I've been at Weisler now for almost five years where I've been an applied research scientist. I've gone to policy colloquiums and taken on some of the policy roles of the company. I've been part of an acquisition team that actually acquired, Christian used to work, which is three tier. I am chairing the 2018 AMS conference. I'm on a PhD board at CU. So I'm doing sort of the full gamut now in a private company. So hopefully I'll be able to provide some of that perspective along the way. Thank you very much. That was great. And I, before we start taking questions from the audience, we had one question that we wanted to discuss a little bit. You alluded to it and you might have undersolded a little bit how you actually found out about jobs and we want to dig a little bit deeper. What kind of advice would you give this group today about how do I actually find out about all these different things out there? We see job ads come out but probably everyone else is seeing the same ads as well. How would you say nowadays to go about finding out where these interesting jobs are? I guess I'll start because I've got it. Early on I used just sort of the AMS job boards that I stole from the Penn State job board. I started finding out where all the job boards were. More recently, you know, you start getting into these indeed websites. I mean, there's jobs everywhere, but it is a lot. I know there's some statistics coming. I'll share some. I've heard you have like a 3% chance for getting a job when you apply for it online blindly. We've all heard the importance of networks. So I'm going to reiterate the importance of networks. The thing about networks is everybody tells you to have one. Nobody tells you how to use them. It turns out that just about everybody likes being contacted by people. I absolutely love it when people in my own network contact me for advice or for perspective. I love this term perspective because I'm not always going to have advice that's relevant, but I'm always going to have a perspective that's different. Reaching out to people is a great thing to do because if you see a job or if you see somebody who has a job that you want and you've met them, reaching out to them is always a great thing because you might find out about opportunities that you never knew existed. So while there are lots and lots of job boards, I'm going to tell you that they're relatively worthless and a lot of the times you want to kind of talk to people and find out what's going on the real way. One of my favorite things to recommend the University of Washington has a seminar called Dependable Strengths and you can also do it their career book that's online tells you how to do it. So you look at your good experiences. So you just focus on the things that you feel good about that you did well, that other people think you did well and it could be making a photograph collection or something like that. And so you take those good experiences and then you think of the general terms that go with that and it's the buzzwords you see in every job ad or are you detail oriented or goal driven or leadership. And then for the dependable strengths you go out and talk to people and you say, oh, I'm goal driven and detail oriented and I have leadership skills. What kind of jobs would be good for me? And you can do this with everyone. But if you do it with people that work in interesting fields, then they tell you like, oh, you know, with those skills, maybe you'd be good at some other job that I know about from my industry. And so I did that when I was after my PhD and I talked to a lot of people, the people that I knew were from my department that had graduated and had jobs and then I did it again when I was leaving three-tier and then I had more experience so I talked to even more people about things and I also was more discriminating so I sort of focused on the places where I wanted to go because 80% of jobs that people get are not advertised. So talking to people is the way to find out about those other 80% of jobs. And I also have the moniker too that if you don't apply, you can't get the job. And so I started actually, so when I was leaving three-tier I also lean in, had been written and so there's that idea of apply like a man and when women apply for jobs, they're often the most qualified candidates but then there's this whole rest of the pool that isn't qualified but still applied. And so my goal was to be in that pool a couple of times and so I kept applying and I also sort of dropped parallel with like online dating. So you learn to sort of take applying and getting rejected or hearing nothing about as personally as you take it with online dating that after you've been doing it for a while you sort of get used to not hearing back and not hearing back. So I think I'll stop there. I just wanted to add maybe one or two things from the perspective. This is coming more from the academic perspective but as an example, a postdoc that I hired it was several years ago but the way I hired her actually was we were at a conference and we just happened to be sitting next to each other and there was an interesting talk and she leaned over and said something and I found it to be very interesting and we ended up talking after the talk and I learned from her that she actually, she was perfectly happy where she was but she was actually open to looking in Boulder. I wasn't actually looking to hire anybody right then but we just kind of clicked and so these personal interactions, I mean you might call it networking but really I'm talking on an individual basis. You see somebody who you like, you think that they're doing interesting work, you think you might get along with them, go and meet them, talk to them, just have a very informal conversation and you might land a job just by doing that. I had a student who now is actually working in, well she can't tell me what she's doing because it's in the national security area but it's with climate change and national security and she was just very interested in policy and so she went to one of the conferences sponsored by the American Meteorological Society. This was a workshop that they sponsor every year with science policy so a lot of you probably have either heard of it or maybe gone to it but she had this interest and she went to it, learned a lot, met the people there and this was I think, this was when she was a senior graduate student but she basically went and as a postdoc did a year or two with them and after that she worked at the NSF in policy and after working at NSF she was able to get a job then at this corporation where she now works. So a different path but it started out by taking advantage of, she knew that she liked policy and so she took advantage of this workshop that was offered and that's really what propelled her into the career that she has right now. Just to echo a couple of other things, don't discount the power of your peer network so all the people you went to grad school with, all the people you're postdocs with, I would say from an academic standpoint of getting a job, all of the things Cora mentioned are true, you have no idea when you go and just give a talk to a department as part of a departmental series, most of the time don't have any idea what they are, that department's hiring plan is, I definitely got interviewed for a job two years after having gone down and given just a normal departmental seminar. I didn't know that they were planning on hiring in that area a couple years later but I was somebody that they knew about and they knew about my research because I'd given a talk and that first talk was very casual so that part of it is extremely important, I would say take any opportunities you have at this stage to visit other departments, give talks, meet lots of different people and your peer network is extremely powerful for that, I would say most of the people that I got invitations to give talks from were my other friends from grad school who ended up somewhere else as postdocs or faculty advisors and that's all it takes and return the favor too. So it's a huge avenue of support both for this stage of things and was a huge realm of support for me when I was applying to jobs, had all my friends jobs application materials, I freely give my job application materials now as well and I would say that I relied on much more than almost any other avenue of support but that's a huge networking thing not to overlook, it's just all of your peers. Yeah, I wanted to add one more thing and this is coming from a more administrative point of view but if you're affiliated with an academic department right now, it's very probable anyway that that department has some sort of an industry advisory board so if you're interested in looking at positions that are not in academia but actually out in industry or things like that, a good place to start is with the industry advisory board that your department might have and you could probably approach some of the senior members of your department to introduce you to those people and see what advice they might have. Okay, I think at this point we're ready for your questions so we have two mics there and if not, we can also bring the mic to you in case you would prefer that. Really, I can just steal it too and bring it back. Hi, I'm Michael Peterson. I have a question kind of going back on to we're talking about these people wanting to be talked to. I know in the industry sometimes you hear this piece of advice that if you're really interested in a job, haven't heard anything for a while for example after applying, it's a good idea to kind of reach out and kind of just ping them and ask them what the status is, kind of the show that you're really serious about that. Is this also true in academia? Like, do the search committee expect you to be in contact with them while they're making a decision or is that more of just an industry thing? The search committee and the professors who you visit will expect you after if you are, certainly if you are interviewed, you should come back and afterwards and send them all thank you notes and say it was a great visit, all that kind of stuff. Definitely do that, that is expected. During the process, so let's say you put in your application and there always is a deadline for applying, right? Even though it usually says, but we will accept applications until the position is filled. Certainly until that deadline, there's absolutely no reason to contact anybody, nobody is expecting it. They won't even be looking at the application, well, they'll be looking at them, but certainly no kinds of decisions or anything are made until after the deadline and then they're gonna be meetings and stuff. So there's no reason to follow up. It probably does not even help to follow up at the very beginning. If you get contacted for a, like they'll say, well, we'd like to do a Skype interview or something like that, then always follow up after that kind of thing. Hi, my name is Jing Chun Li. I have a question for all of you guys. I guess after you land on a job, what is some of the challenges you faced that you got like zero training in grad school or postdoc? Right now the biggest challenge for me, well, it's on all fronts. You learned bits and pieces of things. The most immediate one that I felt like I had had the least amount of training for was developing a lab. So I'm a stable isotope geochemist. So there were a whole lot of other sides of developing a lab that I never thought about until suddenly the people you're scheming, what kind of renovations need to happen with your facility and you're thinking about what kind of building power doesn't have, what kind of outlets does it have? How many outlets do I need? Should I have things on different circuits? Should like things you never think about until sides like that. And so again, I just, I emailed as many people who'd gone through the process, advisors, I was still at, I deferred my start for about six months so I was still at Caltech in the lab and just like started running around, taking pictures of everything, finding out strange pieces, asking for advice on power outages and Boulder and whether that happens. So nobody trains you for that side of it. Definitely push your advisors to give you some advice and definitely ask them the question in hindsight after you renovated your lab, what do you wish you'd asked about or what do you wish you'd thought about in doing things like that? And I think this name is true on the teaching side of thing and the mentoring side of things. I think I definitely had plenty of opportunities for both through grad school and postdoc time. So that wasn't as new for me as some of the other things but it's still surprising to me how different it is to be the one who's, suddenly the buck stops here in that sense, which hasn't been true for other mentorship things and balancing that. So again, just asking as many people you feel comfortable with on advice and utilizing the peer network, especially the people who just went through it. I just, the only thing I could think of is my, your question made me think of my favorite thing about a new job is that when I go to a new job, there's nothing there that I know needs to be done and hasn't been done for a really, really long time and I think lots of people in academia that you don't get a degree if you're not a little bit of a perfectionist and so in all my jobs and still I'm just struggling to not be perfect and to know that there are some things that aren't getting done and might never get done and I keep wanting to do them but, so that's my favorite thing about a new job is those things from the old job that I really wanted to do but never did. I don't have to take them with me anymore to the new job. I actually have a similar comment there. Actually, when I got out in the job field, the biggest challenge was the speed. Coming from academia and NOAA, the speed at which things moved was really eye-opening. I personally really embraced it but to Kristen's point, there's this poster that I hated with all of my heart at the company and it says never let perfect be the enemy of good and I hated that thing because I thought to myself, why wouldn't you be perfect? But it has a lot to do with the speed and sort of embracing that attitude. What I learned is that a lot of the fundamentals that we all take for granted in academia became really important, like the statistics. Understanding that P-scores are not just something you throw out there. Understanding what they mean and backing things up with relevant statistics and making sure that you're doing your due diligence. All of these fundamentals that we're all just expected to have became really important when you're making business decisions because as soon as you hand this thing across the table, these guys just run with it. The experts said it, we're out the door and your name's attached to it, right? So statistics became really important. So here I am with a statistics book on my table. My old physics books are on my table because I'm just like, oh, I better get these fundamentals down. So there's a poster in my office that reminds people that without the fundamentals, the fancy stuff doesn't work, all right? So everybody's always looking for the fancy information and oh, the PhD, tell me about the modern stuff. But I really think the fundamentals became important. So don't take that stuff for granted for what that's worth. Hi, looking back on all of your respective career paths, is there anything any of you would change if you could? Yeah, I don't have a bakery right now instead. Yeah? No, I'm very happy in my life. With all the frustrations and job, I'm very lucky to be happy in my life. And that's really important to me. I've had a lot of really good mentors in my life who always, I look at these really amazingly accomplished people and they never told me how to be a good professional. They always told me to focus on being happy, building your network, just being happy with yourself and making sure that work doesn't become who you are. And because of that, I don't think I actually would have done anything different regardless of whether I would have liked to have done certain things faster. That's a different question. I think the thing I can think of right now is I think I should go play Ultimate at lunch a few more times and I wish I'd done that over the last couple of years. And then the funny side of your question is that I was at a company that was doing layoffs too and do I regret that they didn't lay me off? So I can't really answer that, but I think that story that at the end of your life you don't go back and think, oh, I wish I would have spent a few more days at the office. So I guess I wish I'd spend a few less days at the office and a few more ultimate games and things like that. So I would say, I can't think of anything that I would really change, but as I said, things just kind of happened. But one thing I actually have done though, and maybe that's led up to no, not thinking that I would have changed anything, is I am always reflecting on, am I gonna regret something? So in other words, if I say, okay, well, I need to pull an all-nighter, is that really okay? Am I gonna regret it later? Is what I'm doing in order to spend that time, is that really worth it? And I really am always trying to balance things to make sure that no, I'm not regretting things. And then there are, of course, the long-term things. I mean, certainly I have two kids and there was always the balance, right? Now they're in college, so there's not as much of a balance, but certainly you're always thinking, okay, well, am I working too much? Am I spending enough time with the kids? And I think that as long as you're thinking along those lines, not just cutting it out of your mind, just saying, well, I'm gonna ignore that for the week and then next week I'm gonna pay attention to the kids. That doesn't work. But I think that you can do a lot more than what you might be afraid that you're able to do. I mean, things, well, okay. Things, I think, just work out. I guess I would echo the same thing. It's odd to think about your sort of life trajectories. For me, my life would be extremely different right now if I'd gotten any of the jobs I'd applied for in sort of the first three years of my postdoc. So I started dating my now husband the day after my last job interview for the season before I applied and got the job I'm in now. And had congratulated myself on having avoided the challenge of a two-body problem up to that point, thinking the whole thing. And the irony of how these things work out is we started dating, we got engaged, we had a really hectic job season, we got offers and negotiated positions, and somebody had told me at one point in grad school, you'd be surprised at how fast things can change at different points in time and where you might go for a long time applying for things and feeling like nothing has ever changing and nothing ever happens and you still just make your life decisions and they move on and things kind of work out. They don't necessarily, that doesn't necessarily mean in things working out, you get a faculty position or you get this or that, but I wouldn't trade anything. If I'd gotten any of those jobs, I think I would have had a very different life than I have right at the moment, so. I just wanna share something real quick though. I'm gonna turn a question around on you. And I was asked this question a couple years ago. It turns out to be a really important part of my life and I was really angry when they asked me the question. They said, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And I stared at this guy and I was just like, am I supposed to know that? What do I want to be when I grow up, right? And I thought to myself, well I only have three choices, right? Academia, government, private sector, right? And I thought to myself, oh my God, I don't know what I wanna be when I grow up. And this was kind of eye-opening for me because I thought to myself, this is a problem and I need to figure this out. And I wonder how many people in this room are applying for jobs because they think that's what they should be doing as opposed to really wondering what do I really want to do because once I found out what skill sets that I had that I loved doing and what skill sets I was just good at, maybe didn't like doing, I was, my career just sort of took off. So I'm happy to talk about that more later if you're in that role. But if that question made you mad, think about that for a minute, so. Hi, my name is Kim Myers. I'm an AARPARF at Texas A&M University. So my experience with my PhD supervisor was poor and he's never once submitted a letter for anything that I've applied for. He would say something like, oh, that's really competitive, you won't get it. And then you just later, weeks later after submitting something, I'd say, hey, did you get all my application materials? I haven't heard anything and they'd say, oh, we never got your letter of support. So I applied for the AARP RF because I didn't need a letter from him specifically. So when I'm applying for jobs, does it look really bad if I don't have a letter from my supervisor and what are possible ways to spin that in a positive light when I'm in that situation? Because I'm kind of expecting that to happen. That's not my point. Yeah, no, that is a really difficult situation. So at first glance, I'll be totally honest, yes, people will say, wow, she doesn't have a letter from her advisor, there must be something wrong. But they, second glance, they'll say, but it may not be something wrong with her. And so I think that the best way to handle that frankly is to be honest and straightforward about it in your application. You do not wanna come across as making excuses. Absolutely not. Then the panel, whoever's trying to hire you will certainly see that. But they need to know that there were some issues. And so to the extent that you can explain those in an objective manner, to the extent that you have other professionals who can vouch for what you're saying, other people who can write a letter of reference that and they know the situation, that would help tremendously to do that. And again, I cannot overemphasize the value of meeting people in person. So if you can, at conferences or whatever, get to know somebody who you might wanna work with, that's really important. If it's in industry, that's a different thing, but somehow visiting the company, getting them to know you is really, really important. Yeah, I don't know if your experience is different, Christian, but I don't typically look at recommendation letters in private industry. Usually looking, you know, first of all, we're filtering through literally hundreds of applications first. And then we're gonna bring you in because at least in my organization, the team aspect, how you're gonna fit in the team is really important. And what you were in your academic or postdoctoral situation, at least for us, isn't really all that interesting, I guess. We're more worried about what you're going to bring to us as opposed to what you've done. So that's just a slightly different perspective, I don't know. I think that HR, I'm thinking about how HR is set up currently, is they only look at your references after they've offered you a job, and they just do it to make sure that you're not gonna shoot people your first day or something like that. I mean, I don't know if anyone else has this situation, but you can always write the letter yourself and say, you need to sign this. I mean, there is that. I don't know if that's relevant for anyone else here. I mean, my advisor in grad school literally says, you're gonna have to write that, I don't have time. I don't even know if he ever read the letters I wrote. Maybe it helped me get my postdoc, I don't know. But. So I feel like I need to qualify that my PhD supervisor and I actually get along fine. At least he treats me fine to my face. I just don't trust that he would actually submit the letter whether it's good or bad. Like he just wouldn't do it. He just doesn't do stuff like that. So then I think Scott's point is really good if you can go to him and either write the letter yourself or at least all the bullet points. Cause maybe that's part of it is he just doesn't want to take the time. Hang on, hang on. Thanks. Most of the time they do not ask for a letter of recommendation. They will directly call my advisor and that's what's happened with me. I got halfway through the job and two of my referees, they emailed me that we gave you the best we could. But I never heard from my advisor what he told and I didn't get the job. So my conclusion was my advisors said something which turned them off because they didn't have to call my advisor if they didn't want to give me the job after they did interview me at the site. So I don't know what to do with that kind of situation. And I did get along with my advisor really, really well. I don't know what happened the other day. So I can't respond directly but I do some career coaching on the side and I always tell people you can only pay attention to things you can control, right? You can't ever control who you're up against ever, right? You can't control what other people are gonna say about you. All you can do is control what your resume looks like or your CV, the work that you've done, the relationships you have. So unfortunately, like I said, I can't respond directly to this situation but it's a situation that's out of your control. I also believe that if I apply somewhere that doesn't like something about my background and I've done everything I control, the chances are I don't wanna work there anyway. So just sort of a broad statement. And maybe if I can chime in real quick, doing a lot of hires here at NKAR New Car. We often have say five finalists and all of them are wonderful and check out and their references are glowing. There's nothing wrong in the application or in the references that are coming in and still we somehow stare at each other and have to make a decision. And it's, so being on the other side of it, I wanna just tell you, you might be doing everything right and it comes down to very, very small differences and maybe a question about scientific fit of that particular thing that we're looking for and has nothing to do with what you or your references said about you, for example. This question is mainly for the academic side of the stage. Katie, you mentioned it a little bit but I'd like to hear more about your experience as a dual career academic couple and also from the perspective of a department chair, what tips or experiences you'd like to share on that. Sure, like I said, I did my first sort of three rounds of applying for jobs, not being in that situation and then the sort of last round of job applications suddenly found myself completely having to do a 180 in terms of thinking about how to apply for things and go through the process. I'll preface this first by saying I don't think there's a recipe for how to get through it. I think there are a lot of different approaches that work. The best thing to do is find out all the different ways in which people have gone through the process, find out all the different ways in which people have, things have kind of worked out and what kinds of compromises they have been willing to make to make something happen. I would say the plus side anecdotally seems to be that more and more often there are pathways through and opportunities from universities especially that don't require you to make some of the compromises people used to have to make in this situation. So people told me right away going into this, they're like don't split a position, don't take the split position approach. No one ever even asked us to do anything like that from the get-go. And I think there are a lot of universities that are starting to realize, that are starting to take a very positive look on that. This is a good way to get to people, faculty searches are expensive and if the department's good at negotiation, if the university has a lot of resources or knows how to get those kinds of resources and has flexibility and mentality for doing these things, they're willing to do them because it's a good way to get to people and keep them. The odds that my husband and I find positions like what we've pulled off here with the support we have to build labs and things that I think we're not going anywhere unless we get to nine tenure I think. So we're pretty locked in and I think that's a lot of schools are starting to learn that side of things that that can be a real big plus. I know from a standpoint of applying, there are a lot of different philosophies to it. I know of people who've basically put in their cover letter of their application that they're going through this part and I know other people who've offered advice don't say anything about it until you have an offer in hand. We tended towards the latter, mostly from the advice that as much as departments will say they're not gonna take that into account, it's still nice to know that you'd rather have somebody evaluating you just on you and not with any other complicating procedures but there are occasions where that's actually a benefit and this is when, if you know, I would say the other advice about going through this is if you know of anyone, you have any kind of personal connection with somebody in that department that you feel comfortable talking to off the record about the situation, it's not a bad thing to do. They can give you some insight on how those things have worked in the department in the past and again, that's all kind of case by case basis. If you know somebody, if your advisor might have a connection and tell you, you know, you can do something like this. I think when we, my husband was applied for a position here, I had an offer at Oregon State when we were doing this negotiation and we kind of talked off the record both to one of the faculty members who came through Caltech and to this day actually, I keep forgetting to ask, I don't actually know when it came down to the search committee, whether they actually knew that he and I were a couple. They had the opportunity to, we talked to one of the faculty members and then after Seb's interview, we actually talked with another faculty member in the department who wasn't on the committee but who'd gone through relatively recently a sort of dual career situation and she was really generous and gave us a lot of her off the record information and it all still worked out. So I think the bottom line is there isn't a recipe. The best thing you can do is both be applying for as many positions as you are qualified for because having negotiation powers, the other really big thing in this and I saw that happen from, I had the offer at Oregon State first and my husband was still in the process of interviewing for jobs and he wasn't yet done with his PhD so the Oregon State was really cautious about what they talked about and I kept pushing, no, we wanna talk about a tenure track position and as soon as he got an offer the conversation completely changed. So it is important that there's negotiation power and it's also important. There is a huge element of luck in this. We were both lucky that it worked out that there was a good fit for me here and so the department was interested and that worked out. So you can't deny the element of luck but you can improve your luck by applying for a lot of different positions and trying to get yourself at least negotiation power on that standpoint. So were you asking for my opinion as department chair on the dual career aspect? Yes. Right, right. So during the interview process we are not even allowed to ask if you are married, if you have a partner, if you have kids, anything like that. We're just not even allowed. So I would agree that with the, you know, while there are a number of ways you could do it I think that the probably most effective way to apply is that's not even a consideration. You're applying for your position and when, you know, once you get the offer then you're gonna be negotiating for startup packages and anything else and that's when you would say, you know, I do have this issue. Now, chances are, you know people in the department where you're applying and so they already know that there's a two body problem but I would not raise it as an issue. Yeah, so not sure that, if you have any other specific questions maybe I'm forgetting things that I should be saying. Okay, so, well, in terms of the two body problem, yeah. So they can ask for anything and they should ask for anything. You know, you should ask for, what do you really want? I mean, you're, you know, you get a position in say, ATOC and your partner wants a position, you know, in the music school. You should say, hey, you know, my partner is, you know, in this field we would like him or her to have a, you know, a position in the music school and you should just negotiate about that and they would go through a whole interview process but one thing that certainly is true at CU and I think across the nation at this point, I'm not sure about internationally, is that people are really, really, really interested in increasing diversity in the sciences and so two body problems are being treated, I think with a lot more, word I'm looking for, we're much more likely to look harder for a position for the second person in order to increase diversity at the university so this would be true both for men and for women because, you know, men, if, well, okay, if you're a heterosexual couple, even if a man is bringing, you know, has a wife that does not get the offer, the universities are still gonna be interested, wow, you know, is there a position and similarly, if there's a woman who, you know, the only way she's gonna come is if her husband gets a position, we're gonna be looking at that so these days actually is a good time, I think, to have a two body problem because I think that they're just, you have a lot more opportunities. Hi there, can you speak to, if you're hired at a certain level in an institution and then with time get promotion, can you speak to how that differs in the way that you can negotiate lab space, startup budgets and things like that versus just starting at that institution and negotiating that the first time you arrive there? I can probably speak to that really well because, you know, I was at CU, I started at CU in 1989, did not actually get my position until 2006 as a faculty member, I had no startup package and the reason I had no startup package is because I was already there and they knew I wanted to become a faculty member, they knew that I was tied to Boulder and so I really did not have any negotiating position and that was fine with me because I really just wanted a tenure track position and I don't need a lab, I do computer work so it was not a big deal, I had plenty of funding to fund everything so certainly there is a disadvantage if you are at an institution and then are trying to stay at that same institution so yeah, that's I think basically the bottom line, it doesn't mean that you can't negotiate a startup package but I think that you're starting from a lower bargaining position. Hi, my name is Karen McKinnon, I'm an NCAR ASP postdoc here and I have two relatively practical questions about the application process so hopefully they'll be fast. One is in terms of letters of reference and choosing between more senior faculty who may be on your committee or you know somewhat well but haven't worked a lot with versus younger faculty or say NCAR scientists who you've worked with more closely but are more junior in their career and how to choose kind of which of those people to write letters of reference and the other is as I was finishing grad school people loved to remind me the clock starts ticking as soon as you finish, you basically have five years at their grad school to find a job, all these things just to I think stress you out a lot and Cora obviously you did not get a year job five years at grad school but I wonder about if it's any different at CU nowadays in terms of how you view people just out of their PhD year in their first postdoc versus people who have actually been in the field for a long time as their research scientists. So at least in our department it really is not a problem to be out of the field. I mean atmospheric and oceanic sciences is different from a lot of fields in that there are so many opportunities to be stay in the field without actually being at a university or anything. Somebody we actually if somebody has been completely out of the field so you do your postdoc but then decide you're gonna stay at home not be in the field at all for like five years or something I think that would be really really hard to come back in. You would need to come back probably as some sort of soft money or something and get to know all the people in the field again and build up the reputation. But if you've been in the field just not in academia I don't think that that is an issue at all. You had asked another question about that though. Oh letters of recommendation, right. The letters from the more senior people are gonna be viewed more highly than the letters from the junior people. Now letters from senior people if you're asked to write a letter of recommendation you take the time to go through what they've done in stuff and so you don't a senior person doesn't have to know you really really well in order to write a very very good letter and sometimes those letters actually are even better. When people come up for tenure we insist on the letters coming from people who they do not know very well. You know it can't be somebody who you collaborate with certainly nobody who you've co-authored a paper with. We expect people in the community to know who you are. So if you can get letters from senior people who actually say you know I don't work with her but man her work is so good and she's really moving the field forward that would be looked on very very highly in the search process. And to the other question is I was remembering that when I was interviewing in 2009 I did get offered a postdoc position. So that was when I was way more than 10 years out of my PhD so it's still possible for that to happen and then it reminded me of someone else I know who was became a software engineer and was at a software company that eventually died and then came back and got a soft money position which he is still enjoying to this day. So the doors don't close as hard as you might they might seem to at this stage for you. Can I just add one thing to that is that I think anecdotally especially after say the 2008 period of time things definitely slowed down. So at least looking around at other postdocs that were with me at Caltech other places in Geosciences I think are sort of average time of postdoc before people tend to get. Faculty positions is shorter than a lot of other science fields. I certainly see this my husband sort of divides this time between Geosciences and microbiology and that end of the world you can spend a long time as a postdoc before you become a faculty member and that length of time I think is on average getting longer and I would say the positive side of that sitting on the other side in a search that we just went through there were somebody just raised a question about a candidate who'd been a postdoc for five years and said is this something we should worry about and collectively we said well no we don't think so because this person's been working on a really hard problem. Their recent publications have shown that they've been and that's just a problem that needs a lot of time to solve and that was the end of the discussion. So I do think it's not as hard and fast adore or they're a recipe for a certain time limit as we sometimes get told. So I think that I have a question that might resonate for people who have applied for academic positions right now. So if you're in a position where you see it as posting that looks like if you're a perfect fit you do all the research in the same area you know everybody in the department et cetera et cetera but then you find out you don't get an interview and that is because there's 146 candidates. I'm kind of curious from how the numbers look from more of a perspective of a community per se of those 146 if you think you're uniquely qualified about how many of those would actually be truly competition and how many are just applying just to apply. It's gonna vary of course depending on the search how broad the announcement is. We can easily get 150 applications or whatever where half are really really seriously competitive candidates and the other half are pretty easily you can say okay you know they're either they're not qualified or they're just they're in a different enough field that it just wouldn't work but you know probably half are you know you say wow they probably would be pretty good so the competition is stiff and you know you might go out for letters from I don't know 25, 30 folks if you have maybe you know 100 applicants and then get a shorter list down to 10 or 12 maybe 15 and then finally get another short list down to you know four or something like that but yeah I would say you know people should not be discouraged if you're if you don't get called for an interview or something like that the competition is so stiff and like we were saying before it's often times it has nothing to do with your application with your qualifications anything like that there may be just a tiny things that well you know we need to increase the expertise we have in this area a little bit more than this other area and so maybe you're chosen you're not chosen just because your area isn't quite where we wanted it when you know there was a whole range and you put out a broad ad you're gonna get lots and lots of people in and then you have the people who are hiring have the luxury of saying oh well you know which area do we think would be the best for us to go into so really do not be discouraged I think that yeah you do need to if you're interested in academic position you should be applying to a lot of different you know when they when you see the ads come out you should be applying to them because you really can't tell once all of the applications come in what the search committees will finally decide in terms of you know where you know in detail they're gonna go. Hi. Julia Gauklitz I'm at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and I have a question about the long postdocs and in a way how to well so the situation at Woods Hole is that they discourage long postdocs and the normal duration is 18 months and they don't really want you around for longer than two years so there aren't really internal methods of extending that position so it requires more moving around to different locations which is very challenging when you have a family and so I guess I had a two full question one in terms of I guess finding external funding for those longer postdoc positions that are necessary since you need to go through multiple job application rounds to get a position or if I'd really like to stay in academic research in general and how that would be looked at if I am a you know haven't had a position for a couple of months but I don't wanna just get you know work at McDonald's cause I wanna stay in research and then I'm applying for faculty positions but might not currently have a position. Okay so I would say like any position I know we've all heard with the recession that it's been much harder for the people who lost their jobs and we're out more than a year it's been much harder for them to come back and this is any career that we were talking about any job that we were talking about it's been much harder so I think it is true that if you don't work for quite a while it's gonna be harder but I think there are options in there so a lot of people have been talking about postdoc positions and a postdoc position generally would be something I think that the way that we see it you know from the hiring end of things is a postdoc position is something where you have you are working for somebody else you know you're not bringing in the money somebody else is bringing in the money it's really their grand ideas the research that they're working on but like what I was talking about for my career most of my career was not a postdoc but it was soft money so here at the University of Colorado and I know there are other places like this but maybe CU is actually one of the best places for it we have these research institutes where hundreds of faculty they're not teaching faculty they're allowed to teach classes but they are soft money scientists they go out and they get their own research grants it's kind of like the civil servants except that you don't have a hard salary I mean you get it based on the grants that you get in but basically you have a research position and those positions are flexible you know if you don't get enough money I mean what you'd like of course is to get enough funding to have a full time position but you don't lose your job if you don't get full time funding you can work on you know half time funding and you still have a job which may not be great for your finances but it's great for your reputation right you're still writing the papers you can still you know you just say yeah I'm a research associate at whatever university or whatever it happens to be and that way when you are applying for positions it's not a problem you know you haven't been out of the workforce you're going to conferences you're going to meetings you're still meeting people so I think that if you're in that realm rather than trying to just extend a postdoc try to find an institution such as CU Boulder where we have research institutes themselves research positions that they're not postdocs they're just soft money research and you have a lot of flexibility you have a lot of responsibility because you're bringing in your own money so it's like having your own business right but you basically just write the proposals and do your research and so you can stay in the field. I can add some perspective on that so that I would say the last two two and a half years of my postdoc were mostly self funded through NSF grants so these were things I couldn't submit them as a PI because I was a postdoc a lot of places won't allow you to do that so they were submitted as my postdoc advisor as a primary PI involved in these things but we made it clear there are things you can do you can write into the grant obviously this works if you have a good relationship with your postdoc advisor and a sort of honest relationship about those things but we wrote into the proposals that I was the primary person from Caltech doing that work I was in essence the Caltech PI even though my advisor was the other PI and that worked out I had a number of different proposals that ended up getting submitted one of them got funded and funded me the other one didn't and I opted not to resubmit that I told myself I wasn't gonna resubmit that until I was a faculty member there and it was a grant proposal that was more or less all ready to go like I literally submitted that five days after I started my position at CU last year and it got funded so all of those things are good down the line or work up front but I don't think you'll ever have a postdoc advisor who's not willing to let you work write a grant proposal it's worth laying out the conditions the terms of the conditions ahead of time so I'd talk to my postdoc advisor about what would happen if I left and what it meant for the project I had the benefit that I was fairly autonomous in terms of my research interests so I knew the things I was working on were not things that were gonna get done probably in the lab unless I was there so he didn't have any problem with me taking more or less the intellectual side of those projects and it left intact some analytical money in the lab so when I've gone back there while my lab is being set up I have money to work with that's sort of just left in a pool so I think the main thing is asking your advisor about it, having a plan about those kinds of things and making sure you talk about the terms of how that will happen if you go somewhere else or what that looks like but those definitely got written into the grant proposals and I know that was a substance of what was also in his recommendation letter making it clear that I was the primary author of that grant and I think that makes a huge difference in your applications as well too. Thank you very much. We're unfortunately running out of time and I know there are more questions and we might during the break if you can stay around for a couple more minutes if somebody wants to approach you. For now please thank the panel for all their insight and information Just to let you know what happens after the break we will break out in three groups but we have to do this slightly differently from the last two days. We have, it's three different rooms and what I'd love to do is whoever's sitting kind of on the, from my perspective the left side of the room will come into the south auditorium and then the right side of the room will kind of break out into two subgroups So that makes sense we need one bigger group in the south auditorium and then you will have two smaller groups going up into the breakout groups and then you switch after an hour that makes any sense. So, and then we will dig deeper into interviewing, salary negotiations and your application materials. So for now take a break.