By Nicole Foti, for the Spring 2023 SKAT Newsletter

In this article, SKAT members Dr. Santiago Molina and Dr. Aaron Panofsky are interviewed about their experiences with the SKAT job market. Dr. Molina recently navigated the hiring process as an applicant. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Science in Human Culture Program, and he will be starting this Fall as Assistant Professor in Sociology at Northwestern. Congratulations, Santiago! Dr. Panofsky is an Associate Professor at University of California Los Angeles and Director of the Institute for Society and Genetics. He has helped design and been a part of several search committees in recent years. Interviewing Santiago and Aaron is SKAT Student Council Member Nicole Foti, who also recently navigated the job market. Nicole is finishing her PhD in Sociology at University of California San Francisco and will be starting in the Fall as a Hecht-Levi postdoc at Johns Hopkins University.

Interview with Santiago Molina:

Nicole: Thank you for offering to chat about your experiences on the SKAT job market! Let’s start with the basics. When did you graduate and begin navigating the job market?

Santiago: I graduated in 2021 from UC Berkeley Sociology Department, with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. I guess the filing, or the graduation date, is linked with the job market, because when you decide to file, is a function of whether or not you are getting a job. So that was something that was new to me. I went on the soft job market the year before, but that doesn’t mean I was like ready to file. A lot of my colleagues like will stay in the program until they’re successful in the job market, and then they’ll make like a big push to get their dissertation done before they have to start their new position. I know for some people, like if you’re hitting year 6 or 7, some places will just say, “we’re not giving you any more positions, or we’re not gonna give you any more funding.” So you have to get external grants, and some places won’t even let you accept external grants, because they still have to be managed through the university, which is bogus.

Nicole: Right, it definitely varies between different PhD programs. Can you tell me about your job market experience? How many positions did you apply to, and what types of positions, that sort of thing?

Santiago: I was mostly looking at postdocs. I applied to the UC President’s postdoc. And I applied to an NIH postdoc. That was 2020 actually. I applied to I think three postdocs and wasn’t successful. I got an interview for one but wasn’t successful. Then I ended up getting like a research assistant position that was potentially going to turn into a postdoc the year after. That at least gave me some confidence that if I filed, I would still have a job in 2021. So I got that, and I kept applying in the following cycle, because those first few applications were in, I wanna say March, and the UC President’s was due earlier, but you don’t find out about it until way later, around April. So I took this position with Harvard as a research assistant, with the idea that it would turn into a postdoc. I told them that I would still be applying to other things, and they were cool with that, thankfully. I applied to the Northwestern Science in Human Culture postdoc, and I applied to the UC President’s again that same year. I got the Northwestern postdoc to start in late 2021. I was also applying to positions as they came out.

The Northwestern and UC President’s ones have protected time. The others I applied to did not. The NIH postdoc and this Harvard postdoc was like that. It wasn’t like a postdoc where I could work on my own stuff. It was like very much in my wheelhouse of my research, so that was good but it wouldn’t be working on my main project. And I was able to work part time. But then I got the Northwestern postdoc, which was for two years, and I told them that it was more beneficial to my career, and that I’d rather take that because of the teaching opportunities that it presented. And it paid a little bit better. I also wanted to be in Chicago more than I wanted to be in Cambridge. So that was my experience with the postdoc job market.

Also, I knew I wanted to do a postdoc, because I wanted some time to incubate my research. I didn’t have any solo author publications from my thesis. I wanted to keep working on that and to think about like I would need to do to turn my dissertation into a book. I wanted a postdoc that would give me that kind of support and flexibility. I felt like it would’ve been like too much of a push to go straight into a tenure track position. My first year in the postdoc, I was very measured about like applying to tenure track positions. I really only applied to positions that were very niche like in my area. I applied to one R1 university, and I got an interview but didn’t get the position. But it was really good experience. I know some people are big advocates for an “apply to everything” strategy so you get used to giving your job talk and things like that. And I think that’s great. I ended up interviewing for a job that I really, really wanted, which meant that I tried really hard. And so I got that practice. I had applied to like a few other postdocs that I just never heard back from, and that is always annoying. I was thinking maybe I can get a second postdoc, or something like that.

Nicole: It sounds like you applied to postdocs that had protected time, and also ones where you worked on other folks’ projects, as well as tenure track positions. Did you apply to any non-academic positions?

Santiago: No, I didn’t. I looked into like positions at 23&Me and some other genetics companies, but I didn’t end up doing it. I figured it would be something that I explored if I wasn’t successful on the academic job market. But I definitely kept that in mind.

Nicole: And how did you find positions? How did you search for them?

Santiago: Mostly through the ASA job website. I’m also on Twitter a lot, so I was checking there; I follow the people who are at institutions where I’d want to work. So I saw some job postings that way. The Harvard RA position, somebody forwarded to me who thought I’d be a good fit.

Nicole: Great, and then you applied to more positions, is that right? Tell me how you went about getting your current position as Assistant Professor at Northwestern.

Santiago: Yes. So in 2022, I taught and had a really good first year in the postdoc and then started prepping for the job market in summer of 2022. I started to see positions, and I told myself I would apply to anything general sociology, not just STS positions. I was really nervous doing that, because my area of of focus is sociology of science, and I know it’s like not always top of everybody’s mind when they’re hiring. I was still open to STS positions, too. I applied to 18 jobs. I was actually really considering international jobs too. Universities in Hong Kong and Singapore had open searches. I applied to a lot of stuff. Managing the letters was a lot more work than I anticipated, too. I wasn’t teaching that quarter, which I knew I needed, and I just put all my energy into the job market.

I went to ASA that year and it was my first time going thinking “I’m on the job market.” So I definitely tried to meet with a lot of people, and I wanted to find the people who were actively doing searches who were in SKAT, who either I knew or I wanted to meet. So I went to a bunch of the social events, and I talked to a few folks who were doing a search and who I was interested in learning more about their search. That was a good move because I was encouraged to apply for positions I wouldn’t have considered because of the posted areas of interest in the job postings. Somebody reached out to me from another university that was doing an open search. I think my advisor had suggested I meet with them. That was helpful because it really got me in the mindset of like, “okay, maybe if a general search is open, I shouldn’t think they’re gonna want somebody that’s not STS or biomedicine or CRISPR.” Like I felt my work was so niche. But it helped me think about my work as having a broader appeal, and helped me think about how to translate what I do in terms of broader sociological interests. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that for my statements.

I tried to touch base with both graduate students and faculty at other R1s doing an open searches. That helped me understand what their priorities were in their search. I’ve learned that when there’s a search, there’s all this like backstory or like backstage decision-making that’s going on about what the priorities are for the department. And unless you have friends, other graduate students in those programs, it’s kind of hard to get a sense of what they’re looking for from a generic job ad. Because ads don’t look the same from one institution to another. You have to get good at like reading between the lines. Like asking your own advisors if they know who’s on the search committee and things like that can really help because then you get a better sense of who you can direct your questions to. Also, it helped me feel more confident when writing my cover lette, to feel like you’re addressing it to the right person. Doing research on each of the positions really thoroughly, that’s really key. It also helps you understand that there’s also stuff that’s completely out of your control when you’re applying that has literally nothing to do with the quality of your work. It’s really demoralizing to apply to a lot of jobs and then either get ghosted entirely, or you don’t hear for months. And there’s no feedback. You don’t know what it was, and I feel like that’s just hard.

Nicole: I totally agree with that. And so what advice did you receive while you were navigating the job market? And what kinds of lessons did you learn yourself?

Santiago: I definitely learned to do hella research on the department and on their search, if possible. Because organizationally, on the one hand there’s like hard and fast routines and bureaucratic structures that determine what the job search is gonna be. And then there’s like a completely separate set of like priorities and debates and discussions that are happening at the department level with faculty or with students in terms of what they’re looking for. I also learned that it was super, super key to have basically a group of people who are also on the job market, who I was meeting regularly, just like to vent. That was so important. And we would learn from each other’s experiences, like if someone got an interview, learning what the first phone call would be like.

One of the pieces of feedback that I got early that I tried to keep in mind was that, when you apply to a job and you write your statements, you end up imagining your life in that place very concretely. If you have family or a partner, you have to think about that. What is the school gonna be like for my kids? What is my partner gonna do when we get there? What is the department like? Do I like the city? You might have a family or a friend that lives in the same city, and you might write to them and be like, “what do you like about living there?” And you get a sense of what that life might be like. You have to put a lot of stories together to create that image for yourself to even hit send on the materials. So when it doesn’t pan out, you’re essentially grieving that entire future. And you do that like times 15 or times 20, or however many jobs you apply to. That’s a lot of grief. The advice I got was that those feelings are unavoidable and you’re just gonna need emotional support, either from your partners or friends that are not academics.

Having friends that aren’t academics is really helpful, because they can remind you how weird and archaic the process can be. There’s not very many other professions where the job search is as strange as the academic job market. I felt just really lucky to have that community that would support me and ask me questions and that I could talk to about the hard stuff. I think that’s really key for surviving the job market. I felt lucky that I had people who were junior faculty who were reaching out to me who were like, “oh hey, like tell me more about your research. I just got this job and don’t know what I’m doing, but I want to hear about what you’re doing” and who were excited about me being on the job market.

Nicole: What was your experience like after receiving an offer?

Santiago: I think for people who are lucky enough to be successful on the job market and who get to the point where they’re negotiating or waiting for an offer, there’s a whole other set of like skills that we’re not taught around that. Especially if you don’t have experience applying for jobs outside of academia or going through that process. You really need to just think about it like it’s any other job. You don’t owe the people that you’re negotiating with anything. You should be polite, but you’re negotiating with a large corporation for the most part. Even public universities, you should be thinking about it that way. I tried to be formal. There are different camps about negotiating. Some people say the best way to do it is over the phone, like on a personal note and informally, and then send follow-up emails to confirm things that have been said. I just don’t have the demeanor for that. So I tried to keep my communications brief and always over email. I wrote a formal letter response to my offer letter, outlining the things I felt were important for me, line by line. I was lucky that the chair of the department was willing to like go up to bat for me, and that’s not always the case. Northwestern also was able to give a pretty quick turnaround with the offer letters, which I know isn’t always the case. I have friends who are applying elsewhere, and they have verbal offers, but they’ve been waiting more than three months to receive a formal offer. That uncertainty I think is really hard to manage.

Nicole: Yes, the uncertainty can be one of the hardest things. Is there anything else that you’d recommend? Any other big takeaways that people who are about to navigate the job market or who are currently on the job market might benefit from?

Santiago: Sharing your statements with like as many people as possible is key. Having different versions of them is key. And having some kind of file naming system where you can tweak a core version. The variety of lengths, and the different focuses that you get is really all over the place. So you need to have a version of your cover letter that also has information about your diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work, because that particular position doesn’t require a DEI statement, so how do you convey that? Some places have like more of a personal statement, where they ask you to both describe your personal trajectory and your DEI work. Some places want an abstract of your dissertation that’s two pages long. Some people want an abstract of your dissertation that’s only half a page long. You have to be comfortable wordsmithing, rereading, and making sure the information that you want is conveyed well in each of those statements. I asked my friends who were successful in the job market the year before if I could see their statements. That really helped me understand structurally what kinds of things could I be talking about. I think we can forget the amount of service work that we end up doing just for free as grad students, and we aren’t trained to talk about those as skills or marketable things. So learning to keep track of those things was important. It’s definitely worth having a website. Putting yourself out there can be really hard, but I think having that visibility both like in the professional networks that you’re a part of at ASA or at 4S is really helpful, especially if you’re early on in your career. Getting involved in the section is also a great way of connecting with people in the field who might be your colleagues in the future. It’s a great way of meeting other graduate students. It’s work that isn’t paid, but I think professionally it was really helpful for me in terms of seeing what the community was like and thinking about it as community building more than networking. It helped me not feel so alienated from the process, and that was really helpful. It can be lonely, but try not to put it all on yourself. Think of it like a collaborative endeavor with folks navigating it together.

Interview with Aaron Panofsky

Nicole: Thanks for being here! Let’s kick off with you telling us about your experience on hiring committees – how many job searches have you been part of in the past? How many in the last 5 or so years? What types of positions have you hired for?

Aaron: I’ve been on hiring committees in a couple different capacities. I participated as a member of a couple of them. I have also participated in the prior, in the design of the job search in a couple of instances, and the composition of the committees. So as department chair, I have not been on some committees, but I have also composed them and then sort of taken the recommendation from the committee. But I have been on committees prior to that. And so how many committee job searches have I actually been a member of? Probably about like four or so that have actually been a member of, but then there’s probably an additional four that I have been in this sort of more impresario role. Kind of like setting the terms and then sort of participating in the search, but basically by being the chair. Do you have the frame of how that normally works?

Nicole: Do you mean how search committees are put together? Not really, actually.

Aaron: Let me go through the broad process. What will happen often is, at least here at UCLA, the department has, probably every year or so, has a kind of hiring plan. There’s two or three pathways that happen. The modal one that everyone enjoys the most is the department has a plan for what they want to do, like we need to hire in these areas. They write up a little report about that. Then they pitch that to their dean. The dean then goes back to her office, takes everyone’s plans and says, “Okay, here’s who is retiring. These are the lines we’re gonna search for this year. This is how much money we have.”

this one.” Then it’s usually the department chair’s role to- Or if places that have an academic personnel committee or a vice chair that helps with that stuff, they usually then write up the job description with a hiring plan. Then that gets posted. The hiring plan usually has the job description, but it also has the requirements of what someone’s asked to submit, and have. Like, do you have to have the PhD in hand? Do you have to have training in a particular area? Et cetera. It will have the kind of evaluative criteria.

It’s supposed to have things like “We’re looking for a scholarship or amounts of publications, public impact of publications, evidence of teaching excellence,” these kinds of things with a little bit of a qualitative description of what that means to you and then to us. And we have a plan for how the committee is going to follow that. Are we gonna produce a rubric, and everyone reads every material and then scores everyone, and then discusses? At least at UCLA, you can’t just be like, “We’re gonna search in this area.” You have to lay out a rubric, a process, a set of criteria, and a procedure that we’re gonna follow.

And then the chair also names the search committee. With our searches, we usually try to name a committee that has three or four members. They usually like to have an odd number, so in case you have ties, there can be some kind of vote. We like to have some mostly internal members and an external member. That’s helpful to have a member who’s from another department or has some external expertise who can just help kind of give a different perspective than the department itself. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and so, uh, that reminds me, just write a quick note to myself, a person I have to email. So that’s kind of the broader process.

I’ve been involved in that process three or four times already by this point, doing the designing and thinking about those things. We have hired at the Institute for Society and Genetics (ISG), but it’s a interdisciplinary space that has life science folks and also social science, humanities, STS people. So it’s sort of a combination of these two. We’ve actually hired in both areas. We run three ordinary searches. Two in the life sciences domain. So looking for an interdisciplinary life sciences scholar.

And then one that’s been looking for more of an STS scholar. The other two were actually splitting between two departments. That’s the other pathway that happens, is that they might run their search and then say, “Hey, this is a person that would be good for your department.” Then they’ll approach you and say, “Would you like to put a person on our search plan? And would you be interested in being involved in the interview process with this person for a possible split appointment?” Or something like that. That’s another way that this happens.

Then there’s also what we call an opportunity hire. That’s usually for a full professor-type person, or someone who has a very specific research program that’s extremely exciting. That’s usually not available for junior people. But that’s the kind of thing where it’s like, we know that superstar X wants to move, and they might be willing to come to LA. You go to your dean, “Hey, is this something that we could do? We think we can get them.” And that’s when you apply for a waiver of search, and then you see what you can kind of build together. Then there’s a middle one, what I was mentioning earlier, where it might be the Institute for Society in Genetics knows they want to hire a humanities person, but we don’t have a preexisting relationship with any humanities department. So we say any humanities person who does STS work or biology work can apply, we gather all the appointees and our top candidate. Say we have two top candidates, one’s a philosopher and one’s an English literature person. Then I would go to those two departments and say, “Hey, Philosophy, we have this person. Would you be willing to be a partner with us in evaluating this person?” Or, “Hey, English department, we have this person.” So that’s sort of a third way.

Nicole: That’s so interesting. Would you say that is a common path for SKAT folks, since we’re often interdisciplinary?

Aaron: I think by far the most, like 80% of the situations are going to be the first, the more traditional departmental hires where there’s basically a departmental line. But with SKAT positions, I think these are actually quite amenable to this kind of job, for example, there might be an engineering school that it has money to do an AI ethics position, or an environmental ethics, or social dimensions of AI, social dimensions of the environmental crisis, etcetera. They’re the ones with the money and the line, but they know they can’t, as an engineering school, they can’t evaluate a social scientist properly. So then they might spawn out and partner with the sociology department or history department.

In those situations, it’s always incumbent on the candidate to be able to talk to multiple audiences and to really lean into that interactional expertise and to be able to represent themselves in a way that is legible to two audiences, usually simultaneously. Because it’s not like you give a talk in the sociology department and then give a separate talk in the engineering department. You give one talk that has to kind of weave together and convince both that you’re a bonafide scholar that, that they would be curious and interested in.

Nicole: That’s super helpful. Can you tell us some of the most important qualities that search committee tend to look for? Maybe you could touch on the more obvious ones, but also what are some of the less obvious things, the kind of hidden curriculum, as people call it?

Aaron: The stuff that I was saying earlier about how we design our searches and we have a whole explicit search plan, part of that comes out of UCLA’s, attempts to be a more equitable and inclusive institution. I think even 10 years ago, or five years ago, there’d be a lot more sociology departments doing an open hire: send us your applications, your cv, letters of recommendation and two writings. That’s it. Then whoever’s on the search committee would flip through it in their own random way, with their own sort of criteria in mind. Now we, I think the trend across the United States at least, is to be more explicit about what the criteria are and to be more equitable, so that there are these seven or eight things we’re looking for. And we’re going to do a one to five score, at least initially, to kind of get a sense of who’s performing well or not.

So I think it’s very fair to ask. If the search committees does a good job in crafting their job description, all that stuff will be in there: we’re looking for scholarly excellence, teaching excellence, commitment to xyz, special attention is given to projects that span the public sphere and academia. That means they want a community component, that sort of thing. You do have to read very carefully the search description and see what each one of these things is, the criterion that they’re looking for. And you should represent yourself so that you should try to hit every one of them. Obviously you can’t hit them all equally, but you need to touch on all of them.

I think it is very fair as an applicant to contact the search chair or the chair of the department and ask about some of those hidden items. Like, “I noticed that there’s a special attention to such and such.” Don’t be shy. Now, it may be difficult, because if you’re applying to an open position, there might be 250 applicants for it. So they may not have much time for you. But especially if you’re applying to a weirdo position, like the kind of things that we often advertise for being outside of a traditional department, I think it’s actually really important for an applicant to ask and try to have a 20 minute conversation with the search chair to see what are the criteria, “I see a line here in the job description that says this, can you really help me unpack that and tell me what you’re really looking for?” Because really search committees want people to put their best foot forward. They don’t want to be cryptic. They don’t want be like, “Oh wow, we were really looking for an international focus. And when we wrote the word global, it turned out that people just started talking about neoliberalism as a global phenomenon. But what we really wanted was international comparison. Darn, since we articulated that wrong. And since no one asked, we got the wrong thing.”

It’s worthwhile as a candidate to definitely ask what kinds of things matter but are maybe a little bit hidden curriculum. For example, commitments at an R1-type place, the research is gonna really be the number one. Being able to represent your research program in a way that’s not too inside baseball, but in a way that people can see that “So what.” Not just the sophisticated methods you use, not just the esoteric theory you’re doing, but like why should someone who has an important problem now — that doesn’t necessarily have to be mean that you’re gonna cure cancer and, and homelessness, it doesn’t have to be like an applied answer — they have to understand what is the scholarly thing that pops here. I’m addressing an age old problem in social theory about this versus this, whatever it is, but then you have to explain why that problem is important and how you address it. I think that’s even true for like people who are studying the problems of the day. Nothing is self-justifying, even if you think there’s an urgent social problem. That I think is really important. Make it so that when people are reading that one page letter, that they can understand, “Ah, I see what Nicole is like. I see what her problem is. And I see why that’s important.” Then that’s going encourage them to look deeper and really put you in that long list where they’re gonna read the articles, read your stuff in more depth, read your letters, because actually this is an important thing I just realized. I think the first thing that people will read, that’s how they create a long list, and then they create a short list, and the shortlist is invited.

You want to get yourself on the long list. If you’re before the long list, probably your letters are not being read, and your papers and writing are not being read. If you get onto the long list, then it is being read. That’s how you get onto the shortlist. So how do you get on the long list? It’s with that first letter. Your letter of intent or your letter of purpose, you need to very quickly let them know who you are and why you’re important. It should be more than a narrative-ization of your CV. Rather, it should be your research passion, that short elevator pitch. I see why this is important. And then they go to your CV, and they flip through and see, “Okay, a couple publications, a couple things in review, etc.” And then they’re like, “Okay, Nicole’s thing is in the long list pile. I’m gonna rank her highly.” Then they’re going on to the next, the other 150 that they have to read. Once you get onto that long list, that’s when they’re going to read the papers, read your teaching plan, read your other stuff in more detail. So you want to definitely get past that first screen. I think that’s the elevator pitch.

Another thing, I do think that teaching matters, some teaching experience, some ideas about teaching excellence, inclusion, how you ensure student success, some kind of evidence of that. Quick descriptions of exercises you might use. The last thing, I think one of the hidden curriculum things that actually really matters is a commitment to diversity, inclusion, inclusive excellence, things like that really do matter. They’re both an explicit and an implicit criterion usually in our searches. You cannot launch a search at UCLA without asking for a statement of diversity and inclusion. Even for a scholar who feels like they maybe don’t come from an underrepresented background, but their commitment as scholars and as teachers can speak to those issues, and their actions as representatives of this profession can speak to those issues. And I think it’s really important to strong things to say about how you’re driving the process of diversity and inclusion, and kind of weaving that through your work. Even if it’s not, say, work on inequality or race and ethnicity. You can still talk about how your work is inclusive in other ways.

Nicole: I’m very glad to hear DEI work is taken seriously. Is there any other advice you want to add, maybe something that you’ve seen that’s really impressed you?

Aaron: I think everyone says this they’re hiring a colleague, right? They’re interested in you, but you need to prove you’re interested in them. Figure out who the people are you’re going to be meeting face-to-face if invited to visit, and do research on each of them. That doesn’t necessarily mean reading their articles, but it certainly means knowing what they study, understanding a couple key contributions that they make, and being prepared to engage them in a conversation about that. That, I think, is really crucial. I know that for people in your position, there’s always this sense that you have to have published so much before you even get a job. Everyone who’s getting the jobs has already been an assistant professor somewhere else. How am I going to even compete? This is generally true, but part of that is because those folks usually know how to play the game of representing themselves really clearly. They have a certain level of polish to their presentation, being able to relate their work to the concerns of others, and being a sort of confident ambassador for their own work. The last hire we did, the person we hired was the least experienced on paper. But she wowed everyone with her intellectual curiosity, the maturity and the complexity with which she was able to explain her project, and the way she was able to have detailed conversations with everyone that she met with. They all went away thinking , “Yeah, I can imagine collaborating with her. No problem.” It could be talking about what to put in a grant application, or co-teaching, or something else, something that shows you’re really interested in being there and can be viewed as a colleague. I know it’s a little bit abstract, but you definitely know when you see it, right? People who really know how to connect to others.

Nicole: That’s a perfect point to end on. I think you gave us a lot of really valuable information about the hiring process and some of the implicit and explicit qualities hiring committees look for. We thank you again for taking the time to share your insights!