Busy

Hey folks (if anyone still reads this anymore....)!

I haven't been updating lately because I have been busy with school. I have a big deadline in a few months; I basically have to pass to candidacy by then, and they sprung the new deadline on us a couple of months ago. Yark. I think I can do it, but by no means is it a sure thing, so I have been doing a lot of work lately. I got one paper off to my committee, and I'm working on the data analysis for my second.

My husband is also on the job market, so we have been really involved with that. It is going okay- we wish it were going better, though- he has a high number of interviews, but only a couple at top-notch departments. His committee has been assuring him all along that he will do well, etc., (by well, they mean "place at a top 30 department"), but the students that his advisor had kind of dismissed are getting few interviews, but the ones they are getting are the top places. So this is sort of nerve-wracking.

We are not worried that he will not get a job; he will, but we (well, really me.) are concerned that he will be at a crappy school or in a crappy location, or worse, both. The crappy location is not so bad if he is at a good place, because he can go on the market again in a few years, but the crappy school is worse, and crappy school/crappy location is a really bad combination. If he is at a crappy school/crappy location, we will probably have to go on the market again in a few years, and then again a few years after that to try to claw up a little bit. I have had to explain to my parents that, no, you can't really move up. The exceptional people can move up a little bit (my advisor had a student who moved from a second-tier no-name research university to an excellent state school after a couple of years. He had a major publication come out after getting his first job, and I think that helped him move up. People that I know who have moved up have gone on the market again practically immediately- maybe they waited two years.

He just has to get an academic job that is better than working in industry. He is not very inclined to work in industry. He would do just fine in industry, but is more suited for academia. If he wanted to go into industry, he would have done it already and skipped the academic path totally.