thinkfetti

The quote, “insanity : doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” has been attributed to Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin, among others, but it was probably written by Rita Mae Brown (Sudden Death, Bantam Books, New York, 1983, p. 68). [1, 2]

But let’s say you’re sending out resumes, hoping to get a job. If each resume had a 1% chance of succeeding (a 1-in-100 chance), and if you managed to send out 100 resumes, you’d have about a 63% chance of landing a job. (The percentage chance of success in this idealized case is (1 - (0.99^100))*100 for reasons I won’t go into here…)

That’s a better than even chance, after doing the same, crummy thing over and over.

Or…

You decide you want to learn to draw. You sit down for an hour, try to draw a realistic picture of something on the desk in front of you, and it doesn’t come out.

(more…)

A problem that fascinates me (and occasionally infuriates me) is the one of matchmaking: party A needs something that party B can provide, party B wants to provide a service that party A happens to have need of… yet the two cannot find a way to collaborate.

It happens with people looking for personal relationships, and it happens for employers and job seekers. Somehow, a barrier of anxiety (”well, if someone wants to volunteer to help us, they must have something wrong with them, no?”) stands in the way of these otherwise promising matches.

Country A has too much corn, and country B needs corn. Still impossible to work things out.

When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, we had a saying: “if you can’t increase your cross section, increase your flux.” Translated, that means if you are having a low success rate, do something more frequently.

Eventually, theoretically, maybe, it will pay off with the sensible match being made. Even if the hiring/meeting systems are mostly, almost entirely broken, things sometimes work.

For anyone working in academia, there is little to compare with summer break. Especially given the progressive insanity that manifests during the spring semester, the accumulation of fatigue, frustrations, and stupidities that are never quite resolved during the all-to-brief winter holiday, the ending of all the noise at the end of term is welcomed with silent fanfare.

The break is never really to be identified with “summer vacation,” which is what we enjoyed as students, particularly before we had to have our own incomes. The professional academic is generally active year-round, but the end of the spring term is when the university exhales - the students leave, and the faculty leave or at least aren’t always present. There is work to be done, yes: papers we meant to write, programs or concerts to organize, courses for the fall to plan…but there is a phase change in the daily schedule, a melting of regular deadlines into freeform.

On the downside, now we must come to terms with all of our scripted procrastination (”when the summer comes, then I’ll have time to work on that paper/presentation/course”). But if that’s a downside, I’ll happily accept downsides more frequently. Almost all of us work too hard all the time (I can think of exceptions easily, but even thinking of these people is not something I want to do during my summer), but I am happy to practice not working as hard, and this is the time of year I have given myself permission to practice.

I’m an “outside member” on a search committee. “Outside” means I’m in a different department from the one looking to hire a new professor. “Member” means I was invited to participate in the selection process, and my opinions make some difference.

The search is for a Chemical Engineering position, and although I know the chemical engineering job panorama isn’t as grim as mine (music/conducting/humanities), I hold to the somewhat old-fashioned idea that applicants should take the time to make sure the materials they submit for consideration are professional-looking and as error-free as possible. (I’m sure that part of the reason I hold to this idea is that I spend hours upon hours paying attention to these details whenever I apply for anything, and that I feel slighted whenever I receive a poorly-worded rejection form letter in reply. But enough about me.)

The applications I read today were, on the whole, indicative of souls who loved research, were tolerant of the expectation to teach while at a university, and were absolutely impatient with the expectation that they were expected to communicate effectively and thoughtfully in their job applications.

I am far from the final say when it comes to the selection process. I will express my discontent (and even exasperation) to the other members of the committee, but the final selection will possibly have little to do with my commitment to thoughtful, careful writing in the job application venue. But I will offer this plea to future job applicants:

Please pay attention to what you write - even if you’re applying on a statistical basis (oh, let’s see. I have a 0.5% chance of getting this job, if the recipient is chosen at random. I’ll just throw something together, and if it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t), please show — in a convincing way — that you care. Merely saying that you care isn’t enough, for me, at least. Be professional. Be detail-oriented. Don’t let the first page of your resume end with a heading….with the content only continuing on page two. In your statement of teaching philosophy, don’t say how you “would” without saying how you “do,” except if you haven’t yet had a chance to teach. In that case, why haven’t you? Just tell me - don’t hypothesize without context.

I want to read your application - I do, and we all do. But please, take my time as seriously as you take your own time…for both our sakes.