Delivered by Dr. Andrew Green, the workshop offered a perspective from the demand side, the search committee. The goal is to help attendees be more informed when designing the job applications and formulating strategies.
The workshop started with a poll among the audience using "menti.com". We submitted our answers through tablets to the question "What kind of universities are you interested in applying to?", the multiple choices include i) research-intensive universities, ii) balanced research and teaching universities, iii) teaching-intensive universities, and iv) community colleges. It turned out that 61% of the crowd in the room was interested in R1 universities, 30% for balanced, 7% for teaching intensive, and 2% for community colleges.
Dr. Green then lined out that academic landscape in the US. There are about 2,500 colleges and universities in the US with 100 of them being major research universities. The tenure track positions are offered in different research universities, master-degree universities, and baccalaureate universities. He talked about "what does it mean to be a good colleague in that institute?" using two case studies. One is a job ad of a research university, going through from the top to bottom, he stressed that the ad was emphasizing the importance of research and an outstanding record of getting funding, while mentioned a bit teaching at the end. The other is a job ad of a smaller college, which emphasized leading a program, designing and teaching courses, while research was mentioned at the end "to get students involved in research". These two different scenarios definitely require different arrangements of the research experiences on resume.
With the landscape in mind, Dr. Green moved on to introduce the hiring process, which is usually a two-year process before a candidate is finally showing on the campus to start teaching. This includes asking for permission from the school for hiring, deciding the desired properties and draft ad, assembling the search committee, running ad, reviewing materials, initial phone/zoom screen, on-site interview, hiring decision, asking the school for approval.
Various websites provide job ad resources. And Dr. Green encouraged everyone to apply more, "the marginal cost for applying for 50 institutes rather than 5 institutes is not that much". Through the workshop, I got to know more about the big landscape as well as the mindset of search committees. The workshop is interactive, determined to know more about the audience, allowing questions in the middle of the presentation, and very informative about the job search process. This was my first time attending a career workshop at a BPS meeting because it usually overlaps with other seminar talks, but really worth it!