It occurs to me that there might be a common thread tying together various advice posts I’ve written about the ecology faculty job market in North America. In the past I’ve advised applicants not to worry that the job might have, or be intended for, an internal candidate. I’ve advised applicants not to worry if the ad is a redo of a failed search from last year. I’ve advised applicants not to worry if the ad seems likely to get many applications. I’ve advised applicants to apply to ads that list subfields of “particular” interest, even if they don’t work in any of the listed subfields. I’ve advised applicants to go ahead and apply even if they don’t have all that many first-authored papers in leading journals. Etc.
The common thread in all these cases is that I’m advising applicants not to guess how ‘competitive’ they’ll be for any given position, and definitely not to pass on applying for positions they want, solely because they don’t think their application would be ‘competitive.’
Worrying that a position is intended for an internal candidate, or that there’s an internal candidate who will have a big advantage solely by virtue of being internal, is just an excuse to think to yourself “I won’t bother applying, because my application wouldn’t be competitive.” Worrying that an ad is a redo of a failed search from lat year is just an excuse to think to yourself “I won’t bother applying, my application was unsuccessful last year, so it wouldn’t be competitive this year.” Worrying that the ad will get lots of applications is just an excuse to think to yourself “I won’t bother applying, there will be so many applicants that my application won’t be competitive.” Worrying that the list of subfields of ‘particular’ interest doesn’t include your own subfield is just an excuse to think to yourself “I won’t bother applying, they’re bound to get many applicants in the listed subfields, so my application wouldn’t be competitive.” Worrying that you don’t have enough high-profile first-authored publications is just an excuse to think to yourself “I won’t bother applying, I have a weak publication list, so my application wouldn’t be competitive.”
It’s starting to feel inefficient to me to keep writing these sorts of advice posts, because these posts aren’t really addressing the root problem. Ok, I’m sure that some faculty job seekers have found those past advice posts helpful. But I suspect that other job seekers haven’t found them helpful at all. Perhaps because the root problem isn’t really that ecology faculty job seekers worry about their number of first-authored papers, or about internal candidates, or whatever. The root problem is worrying that your application won’t be ‘competitive.’ Which is something that your brain can always find some excuse or other to worry about. Trying to shoot down the excuses one-by-one is like playing whack-a-mole on the symptoms, rather than addressing the root problem.
Which doesn’t make the root problem addressable, of course. There are more ecology faculty job seekers than there are tenure-track faculty jobs (though the former don’t outnumber the latter by nearly as much as some people think.) And any given tenure-track faculty job ordinarily will have more than one minimally qualified applicant. Those are the two fundamental, inescapable facts that make the ecology faculty job market competitive. And so it’s only natural for ecology faculty job seekers to wonder, and worry, if they’ll get a job offer (any job offer), or if they’ll get an offer for this or that specific job. And that’s really what worrying about the “competitiveness” of your application amounts to: worrying that you won’t get the job, or any job. Because a “competitive” application is just “an application that’s likely to get the job, or any job.”
There’s probably nothing I, or anyone, can say that would relieve faculty job seekers’ anxieties here. Sorry, but a job market in which job seekers outnumber jobs is going to be rough on the job seekers; there’s no two ways about it. So all I’ll say is: try not to let those understandable anxieties about the ‘competitiveness’ of your application lead to counterproductive, self-sabotaging behavior.
In particular, if you feel like you need to triage your faculty job search, meaning “prioritize applying for some positions while passing on applying to others,” don’t do it by applying only for positions for which you think you’ll be “competitive.” Trying to guess which positions you’ll be “competitive” for is a mug’s game. As an applicant, you don’t have nearly enough information to estimate with any useful degree of precision how “competitive” you’ll be for any given position, or on the faculty job market in general.* Nobody else (like, say, your mentors) has enough information either. So don’t try to guess your “competitiveness,” and definitely don’t pick and choose which positions you apply for based on your guesses. If you feel time-constrained, so that you can’t apply to every position for which you might possibly apply if you had unlimited time, then pass on applying for jobs that don’t fully match your own preferences. Pass on applying for jobs in places you’re sure you would hate living in, or jobs that require more teaching (or more research) than you’d ideally want to do, or jobs that don’t match your research interests all that well, or etc. Don’t pass on applying for a job that you’d seriously consider if offered, just because you think your application would be “uncompetitive.” No matter what excuse your anxious brain comes up with for thinking that your application would be uncompetitive. Passing on applying for jobs you might want, based on guesses about your competitiveness, is not savvy, or even realistic. It’s just self-sabotage.
If you’re on the ecology faculty job market, I hope you found this post useful. Good luck, you’ve got this.
*Except maybe in extreme cases like “you are still more than a year away from finishing your PhD, you have no teaching experience beyond that one semester TAing, and no peer-reviewed publications at all.”