{"id":56,"date":"2012-09-14T13:53:52","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T13:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/?p=56"},"modified":"2014-01-06T01:48:17","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T01:48:17","slug":"the-job-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/?p=56","title":{"rendered":"The Job Market"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>TL;DR: <em>The academic job market is looking bleaker than ever, and name brand\u00a0recognition\u00a0counts for a lot.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Step 1: College Student, study hard.<\/li>\n<li>Step 2: Graduate Student, study hard, do research.<\/li>\n<li>Step 3: Postdoc, work hard, more reasearch, prove your chops.<\/li>\n<li>Step 4: Proffesor, kick back and relax, you&#8217;re set for life.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ah, if only.<\/p>\n<p>The postings have begun for this year&#8217;s set of junior and tenure track faculty positions. This affects me directly, since I&#8217;m somewhere around step 3.5. The truth of the matter, is that the job market for faculty positions is amazingly competitive, with few offerings and a sea of prospective applicants. A while ago, stuck at home while both Laureline and Jenn were sick as dogs, I had a little fun with the information up on the <a title=\"HEP Rumor Mill\" href=\"http:\/\/www.freewebs.com\/heprumor\/\" target=\"_blank\">HEP Rumor Mill<\/a>. The HEP Rumor Mill is exactly what it sounds like, completely unverified rumors about who has been short listed or made an offer high energy particle physics faculty jobs. They&#8217;ve got one page per year, going back to the 2004-2005 job cycle. All it requires to get the data is writing quick and dirty unstructured data parser. Ithought I&#8217;d share some of what I found. Note that all of what comes out of this is highly suspect. The short-lists and offers are un-verified, the names of candidates are sometimes misspelled, and I even caught one of two instances of someone&#8217;s affiliation being improperly reported.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/jobs_per_year.png\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-0\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-57\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/jobs_per_year-300x226.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"226\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Here you see the number of ads posted per year in blue, and the number of jobs for which an offer was made in green. You hear a lot of moaning about how bad the faculty job market has gotten recently. The numbers bear out this feeling, with about half as many jobs offered between 2008-2011 as had been offered between 2004-2007. Other sources indicate there were even more jobs available pre-2007. The lack of jobs is no surprise, really. The DOE budget for particle physics, adjusted for inflation, has stayed pegged between <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aaas.org\/spp\/rd\/guihist.shtml\" target=\"_blank\">9.6M and 11.1M dollars<\/a> for the last decade.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/experiment_success1.png\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-1\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-60\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/experiment_success1-1024x261.png\" width=\"526\" height=\"133\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/experiment_success1-1024x261.png 1024w, http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/experiment_success1-400x102.png 400w, http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/experiment_success1-500x127.png 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 526px) 100vw, 526px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There was a persistent myth at D\u00d8 that CDF was somehow doing a better job of getting their postdocs tenure-track positions. If I recall correctly, a D\u00d8\u00a0panel tasked with investigating this claim reported no clear sign of such an asymmetry. Yet, here it appears clear as day. The above plot was made by counting the number of times a candidate from an experiment made it onto a short-list (one count per year, so a candidate making it into multiple short-lists in one year shows up once, a candidate making it into a short-list two years in a row shows up twice). Those who were eventually made an offer show up in dark yellow, those who were made no offers show up in red. You&#8217;ll also note quite a bit of diversity in the field. The four major collider experiment detectors (CDF, D\u00d8, ATLAS, and CMS) clearly dominate the field, but there&#8217;s a bunch of entries here from neutrino experiments, dark matter searches, some trailing candidates from LEP experiments (impressive since it shut down in 2000 and this data begins in 2007), etc&#8230; The strong showing of CDF and D\u00d8 with respect to ATLAS and CMS is somewhat unfair, since the LHC has only been in operation for three years. Looking only at the data from 2009 and on, the story is quite different.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/experiment_success_2009-present.png\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-2\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-63\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/experiment_success_2009-present-1024x261.png\" width=\"526\" height=\"133\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/experiment_success_2009-present-1024x261.png 1024w, http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/experiment_success_2009-present-400x102.png 400w, http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/experiment_success_2009-present-500x127.png 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 526px) 100vw, 526px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>What was that I mentioned about diversity?\u00a0The news isn&#8217;t all bad&#8230; Well, for me at least.\u00a0It&#8217;s pretty easy to make this kind of a graph using the home institution of the candidates.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/institution_success.png\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-3\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-75\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/institution_success-1024x346.png\" width=\"526\" height=\"177\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/institution_success-1024x346.png 1024w, http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/institution_success-400x135.png 400w, http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/institution_success-500x169.png 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 526px) 100vw, 526px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Here I make the claim that your home institution can help you get your foot in the door (i.e. get you short-listed) but after that, getting hired is entirely up to you.\u00a0Fermilab seems to do amazingly well, but these numbers are not normalized in any way, and they have a lot of postdocs. Combined, LBNL and Berkely do a very good job of promoting their postdocs as well,\u00a0solidly\u00a0dominating second place. I&#8217;m particularly impressed that Columbia does as well as SLAC and Stanford, combined, despite being a much smaller group. Still, as a postdoc at SLAC, seeing us tied for fourth place is fairly encouraging.<\/p>\n<p>Looking at the rest of the names at the top of the list, the message is clear. Name brand recognition matters! There&#8217;s likely a lot going on behind this. The competition to nab one of those postdocs is also quite high, meaning there is some pre-vetting going on. But let&#8217;snot kid ourselves. Institutions like U. Chicago, Harvard, and Yale have been at this game for a long time, and the personal connections made by their scientists over the years can provide a crucial edge when reviewers go through a stack of applications.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll end with one last figure. Below you can see the wall time of candidates, the number of years their name appears on the site. In yellow, the candidates who were eventually made an offer, in red those who never made it past the short-list.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/walltime.png\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-4\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-64\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/walltime-300x226.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"226\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>So, lose not hope, you who have been denied in the past (unless you&#8217;ve been denied 5 times). \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TL;DR: The academic job market is looking bleaker than ever, and name brand\u00a0recognition\u00a0counts for a lot. &nbsp; Step 1: College Student, study hard. Step 2: Graduate Student, study hard, do research. Step 3: Postdoc, work hard, more reasearch, prove your &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/?p=56\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data-analysis","category-high-energy-physics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":315,"href":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions\/315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.moderncentral.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}