Really, really hard
How hard is it to get a job as a professor?
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It is blasted hard. Rely on your own merit, not on connections.
I was once up for a VAP at an l a c that is a well respected college but not known as a particularly outstanding place. It happens that the chair of the search committee, who was also the department head, earned his Ph.D under Sidney Verba. To get my name onto the shortlist, I arranged for a phone call to be made to the search committee chair by none other than the great Sidney Verba.
The chair was quite happy to hear from his own advisor, and he revealed that they already had a candidate in mind for the VAP and had merely advertised it to satisfy human resources.
I am now employed elsewhere and the late great professor Verba sadly is no longer making calls on my behalf.
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Thanks for the weird story very weirdly told, Grampa.
It is blasted hard. Rely on your own merit, not on connections.
I was once up for a VAP at an l a c that is a well respected college but not known as a particularly outstanding place. It happens that the chair of the search committee, who was also the department head, earned his Ph.D under Sidney Verba. To get my name onto the shortlist, I arranged for a phone call to be made to the search committee chair by none other than the great Sidney Verba.
The chair was quite happy to hear from his own advisor, and he revealed that they already had a candidate in mind for the VAP and had merely advertised it to satisfy human resources.
I am now employed elsewhere and the late great professor Verba sadly is no longer making calls on my behalf. -
Tehere are a lot of factual, smart posts in this thread. Bravo, people.
I'm at a very low-ranked R1, and when we advertise for a standard subfield position (nothing too specific), we tend to get 200 applications. Maybe 20% of those are obviously not good, but many are from impressive people from top programs who are doing good work and publishing.
Those numbers suggest that it's a tough meritocratic system. But it's not, at least not entirely (though the legions of Ivy-league PhDs at bad schools might disagree). It's often very arbitrary. Once a search committee gets it down to a list of say two dozen, then things like synergy with existing faculty or diversity (of various sorts) become important.