By Kristin DeVleming and Rhea Palak Bakshi

Between budget crises and pandemic lockdowns, this year is one of the strangest times to be looking for a new job. Here are two perspectives from people on the COVID Job Market.

Kristin DeVleming

Kristin received her PhD from the University of Washington and is now a postdoc at the University of California, San Diego. 

In a typical year, being on the job market is difficult, and the stress is only intensified in this atypical year.  

The pandemic has certainly shifted job availability, with fewer public R1 schools hiring. Private institutions seem, as a whole, less affected, and there were more liberal arts and four-year institutions hiring than I expected. While the interview process is ongoing, more schools seem to be initially opting for multiple rounds of thirty-minute Zoom interviews. The in-person interview has been replaced by two days of meetings on Zoom, including your colloquium talk. While possibly convenient to stay in the comfort of your home, you do not have the opportunity to see the campus or participate in lunches, dinners, and other informal conversations. At home, the one-on-one meetings with department members over Zoom have an added anxiety element beyond the usual nerves (Will my internet be stable? Can they hear my dogs whining outside the door?), and the job talk comes with all of the extra worries that accompany online presentations.  Interviewing from your own home also robs you of the shift in mindset that comes from traveling to a new location; it is hard to feel mentally ready for an interview with your day-to-day home life carrying on in the next room and the knowledge that no one will know if you wear pajama pants with your nice interview shirt.  

Personally, I have found the job application process to be stressful and time consuming, as it would be in any typical year, but these feelings have been further compounded by the difficulty of working and teaching online and stay-at-home orders removing any semblance of my work-life balance. Yet, the inability to travel for interviews and to physically see a potential academic future has had a delusive effect on me: despite the hours of work that I have put into applications, I feel that none of it is real, and I wonder if the hiring committees feel the same, as the candidates blur together over Zoom. But, even in the chaos of this academic year, life goes on. Thus, here I am, experiencing one aspect of this course of action that is independent of the year: the uncertainty as I wait and work through the process that is the academic job hunt.  

While I hope that many of the difficulties of virtual hiring are only temporary, from my perspective, there are a few simple things that academic institutions could do to make the process easier on the candidates. Have a schedule with clearly defined Zoom links, and, if possible, have all meetings use the same Zoom link so the candidates do not have to jump from link to link, scrambling to find the right one over and over again. Have a clear “emergency contact” phone number or email, in case of internet outages or broken meeting links. Be cognizant of differing time zones when scheduling meetings, and be willing to work with the candidate in scheduling to accommodate different living situations. For longer interviews, provide a funding option for the candidate to interview in a quiet place with fast internet, such as allowing them to book a local hotel for two days. Lastly, have some form of social gathering, perhaps before or after a talk, so candidates can get a sense of department interaction, and remind faculty to spend a few minutes introducing themselves before the meetings begin, which is often forgotten in the virtual setting (Oh, everyone’s here? Let’s jump right into questions!). This advice may lose its relevance next year, but I hope that these ideas are useful should we continue virtual hiring.  

Rhea Palak Bakshi 

Rhea is a fifth year PhD student at the George Washington University.

This year has been a difficult one — the loss of loved ones, fear of falling sick during a pandemic, adjusting to online teaching and learning, and round-the-clock lockdowns have all taken a serious toll on us. For international students, the situation has been trickier. The uncertainty of whether we could maintain our full-time status as students at universities that went completely virtual or whether we would be forced to take a long flight back home with the high risk of catching an infection has constantly loomed over our heads. Additionally, for those of us in our final year of graduate studies applying for jobs in a shrinking economy, we find ourselves on a very sticky wicket. 

When I first logged onto MathJobs to test the waters, I was pleasantly surprised. I had been expecting a dearth of job listings and plenty of job search cancellations. However, there were many lecturer and postdoctoral listings, with a preponderance of the former. What did worry me was the shortage of tenure-track listings. 

As an international student in a country whose political future was on shaky grounds, I decided to apply for academic positions all over the world. This turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I felt more secure about my future knowing I hadn’t kept all my eggs in one basket. One must be mindful of the fact that the timelines of the job markets abroad may not align with those of the American job market. The application procedures can be quite different too. 

The interview processes have varied depending on the type of job and country I applied to. I interviewed with American universities for teaching and tenure-track positions, and those interviews consisted of several rounds of virtual meetings in which I talked with different groups of hiring faculty and gave a teaching demonstration. Foreign universities, on the other hand, interviewed me for postdoctoral positions and they opted for a single thirty-minute virtual interview which consisted of a brief presentation of my mathematical interests followed by a discussion with the interview committee. 

While I had the advantage of being in the comfort of my home, the thought of weak internet connectivity, the clanging of dishes in the kitchen, and my dog barking at the Amazon delivery person constantly plagued me during my interviews. Moreover, I felt that it was next to impossible to glean the work culture and ‘vibe’ of the universities from a virtual interview, no matter how many questions I asked my interviewers. I had never visited most of the universities or cities before, and choosing to work in a place I knew so little about was disconcerting.

All in all, the job market has not been as bad as I had thought it would be. It was stressful, and at times it felt as though I was sending out applications into the void. I did receive emails from universities to which I had applied which said that their job search had been suspended due to the financial challenges they faced. I do know of PhD students who have delayed their graduation by a year due to COVID-19. There were universities which specifically asked whether I would need sponsorship for a visa in the future, something which served as a red flag for me. Despite feeling homesick for more than a year now and having an especially bleak fall break, speaking with my family every day and knowing they loved me no matter what the outcome helped. Keeping a positive mind and knowing that there were many who were facing the same challenges I was helped. We really are all in this together.