*Concerns of Young Mathematicians* Volume 1 Issue 19 November 10, 1993 An electronically distributed digest for discussions of the issues of concern to mathematicians at the beginning of their careers. PLEASE FORWARD TO ANY POTENTIALLY INTERESTED INDIVIDUALS Please, direct submissions and questions to Steve Kennedy kennedy@math.stolaf.edu , editor for the month of November. Next issue: Wednesday, November 17 To subscribe: Send mail to Charles Yeomans at cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Back issues and other information are available via anonymous FTP to ftp.ms.uky.edu, in pub3/mailing.lists/ymn-list. Editor for August was Kalin Godev (kalin@math.psu.edu). Editor for September was Ed Aboufadel (aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu) Editor for October was Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu The opinions expressed herein are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the YMN or the editorial board. Table of Contents Item # Title ------ ----- 1 Editorial: Hiring Procedures 2 News and Notes 3 Harvey Keynes: Job Announcements 4 Charles Mannix: Hiring Procedures 5A Ed Aboufadel: Official Transcripts 5B Mickey McDonald: Official Transcripts 6 Curtis Bennett: Research Network 7 Steve Kennedy: Hiring Committee Survey 8 Curtis Bennett: Member Survey 9 Closing Credits _______________________________________________________________ Item #1 Editorial: Hiring Procedures There has been a lot of discussion in this newsletter about improving the hiring process. There are two really big problems with the way things are currently done, and they are related. Hiring committees are just buried under a sea of application materials; by way of example, my dossier is just about to be mailed and includes a cover letter, teaching and research statements, grad and undergrad transcripts, curriculum vitae, and teaching review summary--a total of 13 pieces of paper, letters of recommendation will add 5 or 6 more pages to my file. Multiply this by 6 or 8 hundred applicants and you begin to understand the reasons for the other big problem: applicants wait 6 or 8 months without hearing a word from a vast majority of the schools to which they have applied. Having been an applicant several times and never a hiring committee member, I wondered if something could be done about the second problem and, I must admit, didn't worry too much about the first. My solution is item #7 below. I suspect that a desire to alleviate some of the anxiety created by that 6 month wait was also behind Mark Winstead's suggestion that we run a rumors column. Charles Mannix has a MUCH better idea than either of us. He solves the second problem by solving the first. I won't tell you his thoughts (see item #4 below). I don't know what it would it take to change the entire academic mathematics hiring process to Dr. Mannix's procedure. I do know that in two or five or ten years I'll be on a hiring committee somewhere and I plan on remembering his idea and trying to convince my future colleagues that we should do things his way. I hope you all consider it, too. Steve Kennedy St. Olaf College kennedy@math.stolaf.edu ____________________________________________________________________ Item #2 News and Notes a) Jobs Ads Redux: I only received one response to the News & Notes item of last week asking if you thought we should run job ads or announcements. This response was from Harvey Keynes, the gentleman who submitted the announcement (see item #3). The editorial board would like to hear from you: Do you want to see job ads in Concerns? Why or why not? b) Curtis Bennett reports an 8% return on his membership survey of last week and thanks those who have responded. Please let us know who you are and what you want to see in this newsletter. The survey is reprinted below (item #8) for those of you who have yet to respond. c) More Deadlines: You must register for the Employment Register in Cincinnati by Friday, November 12 to ensure that your vita appear in the Winter List of Applicants (December issue of Employment Information in the Mathematical Sciences). ____________________________________________________________________ Item #3 Harvey Keynes: Job Announcements I submitted the posting which lead to the discussions and decision not to publish them. The reason that I submitted a job brief( NOT a full posting- I referred to the standard AMS/MAA/AWM and e-math sources for specifics) was the following: 1 The position was very unusual- math and math ed in a research institution. 2 It really is intended for young people- 5 years or less from Ph.D 3 Based on the number of people looking for positions, there may be good applicants who miss it through the standard channels 4 The networking multiplier effect of the newsletter. You may want to consider publishing bullet-type job briefs( 2-3 lines) of special opportunities and see how they are received. If problems do occur, then you could review the decision. Your current policy may not be the best helping the employment situation of your readership. Harvey Keynes University of Minnesota ____________________________________________________________________ Item #4 Charles Mannix: A Modest Proposal This note is a statement of my personal opinions only and has no other authority. I had sent a letter to the AMS that was highlighted for a time on the e-math menu and still appears in the concerns for mathematicians. That letter's topic was a questioning of the sense of sending letters of recommendation before an institution indicated that there was at least some interest based on the candidate's cum vite, cover letter, etc. If you allow for some bias and ego, I thought it was rather a good letter so I was surprised to see that there did not appear to be any mention of it in in your journal - either pro or con for my position. Of course, I was not surprised that the vast majority of the the current e-math job listings still require multiple letters of recommendation to be sent before an application is apparently considered. Could I request that you look up my letter and read it for the following makes more sense. [ed. note: This letter is available through the AMS gopher service. Type gopher e-math.ams.org. Select item 8 from the main menu "General Information of Interest to Mathematicians". Dr. Mannix's letter is item 8.] I find the present job hunting situation insane from the perspective of an experienced engineer. It is a textbook example of inefficiency to all involved. The fact that the job market is tight can lead to only one of two sane responses by a typical jobhunter. A) Broadcast, xerox, and wordproccess cum vite and general letters of recommendation to every college, university, and crossroads in the land and pray the shotgun approach will hit something. or B) Target a few selective places where one really does want to be and would be happy and send them a quality application custom tailored for their situation. Unfortunately for people like myself that really prefer B) there is a catch 22. Any single serious, well thought out application is often lost in a sea of paper from people who prefer A) The poor members of a hiring committee are so numb from reading that they really pass over some of their absolutely best bets for a good permanent match between the individual and the institution. (Please refer to my earlier letter.) The solution, if only the employers would agree (and I believe also in the tooth fairy and expect to win the lottery tomorrow) would be what I was alluding to in the earlier letter. PERFECT UNIVERSE OPERATING PROCEDURE. The colleges ought to weekly review incoming new applications. The standard initial contact ought to be only a one page cover letter and a two page resume. (Not more than 3 pages total.) By Friday afternoon, one of three letters should have been mailed back to the applicant. Letter A) The Deadend letter: "We are a mismatch, there is no openings this year, etc.. let neither one of us waste more time and paper. Letter B) The Hedge letter: "You are a good candidate, but not a perfect match for the position. We would like to retain your application for potential later consideration, but do not send any more materials at this time. Let us both put our time into more viable directions for awhile" Letter C) The Turn-on letter: You appear to be a very close match for the position as well as the answer to a maiden's prayer and savior of the universe. Please immediately dispatch letters of recommendation, transcripts, and other supporting materials. The guidelines ought to be that most of the letters are type A), about 20% of the letters be type B), and a small select minority be type C). Under my suggestion, people with type A) letters are immediately out of the system with a minimum of time, cost, and paper to the sender and the receiver. People with type C) letters who really want to be at that school now know that there is a very real chance of their being accepted. If that is an institution that they are really interested in, it does start to make sense to get REAL letters of recommendation, etc. and otherwise target a highly selective response. (My prefered mode of action.) People with type B) letters don't have to pester their references and/or send out a pile of pointless paper fresh off the xerox. Meanwhile, the college always has the option of returning to these initial contacts should they not have any or few type C) letters. Meanwhile, excess paper is not cluttering up the department's filecabinets and the applicant is not put to a lot of xeroxing bills, and/or loss of face with his references, and/or living on unrealistically high hopes prior to the true rejection letter when the job is filled by somebody else. Also, the poor members of the committee do not have to read ALL their cum vita, statement of interest, recommendation letters, etc. paperwork in one sitting. END OF PERFECT UNIVERSE What I am suggesting is that the colleges keep three lists. This is what happens in practice anyway except that the present system with most college employers requires everyone to have submitted ALL the paperwork -- which in most cases is pointless. The three lists are: "Deadends" "Fallback Positions" "Hot Prospects" The procedure I am suggesting had worked well in the trade I use to be in. The reason it worked, however, was because the majority of employers in that trade had an employment office who processed incoming mail against requirements in the week it arrived. Only the more promising was forwarded to the line managers. The fundamental flaw in my proposal is that most college hiring committees do not meet at frequent intervals. Alternately, there is not a talented enough staff person or the assignment of a senior faculty member to perform a prompt preliminary sort and take the responsibility for making a decision. Instead departments wait months until they accummulate boxfulls of paper by a deadline. THEN a multiperson hiring committee starts to read it. Of course, by then, there is really a point to asking for letters of recommendation from everybody because it is too late in the hiring cycle for those letters and other supporting materials to be supplied by those very few who would be on a short list. In my opinion, the entire process would be much less of an agony for all and a good deal more efficient if math departments initiated a policy of a prompt initial screening based on a minimum of submitted paper. Then require meaningful letters of recommendation, expensive official transcripts, etc. only from those persons highly likely to find themselves on the "short list" Unfortunately, college math departments have no incentive (except sheer masses of paper) to change. The only way to force them to change would be a boycott by new PhDs of places that had unrealistic demands prior to a person getting some feedback that they were a serious job candidate. In the current desperate scramble for employment, this is not realistic. No system is perfect, but I believe that one which would incorporate a prompt early realistic screening decision would reduce the number of painful comments raised in your paper. The trick would be to get it universally adopted. (Now if I could only win the lottery and retire to the South Seas for my followup act.) C. E. Mannix Jr. mannix@amath.washington.edu _______________________________________________________________________ Item #5A Ed Aboufadel: Official Transcripts Are Not Necessary As I went through my job search two years ago, I discovered that when an employer requests "transcripts" in an advertisement, they don't necessarily mean official transcripts. I actually went so far as to send email to people to ask, "Do you want official transcripts?" The answer was always no. Official transcripts are necessary once they offer you the position. I don't believe you are taking a risk by sending unofficial transcripts, but you might want to check first. Email is still pretty inexpensive. Edward Aboufadel Southern Connecticut State University aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu ____________________________________________________________________ Item #5B Mickey McDonald: Do They Really Mean It? About OFFICIAL transcripts. Does anyone think that maybe all the schools mean by this is they want at least a copy of the schools' official transcripts -- as opposed to an official original copy? I sent no official original copies out last year and it seemed not to affect anything. -Mickey McDonald mickey@oxy.edu ___________________________________________________________________ Item #6 Curtis Bennett: Summary of Reader Response to Research Network Idea About a month ago, I asked for reader input on the idea of a research network. The number of responses was underwhelming (3). The 3 responses all supported the idea, although one response suggested that we should discuss many related questions to publishing in the YMN. In particular such questions as: 1. Should there be a code of conduct regarding this issue that all participants would be required to abide by? With "physical" presence this fear is alleviated by the direct interaction (body language etc). In general, is the fear of stolen ideas just a paranoid fantasy or is it a real issue? I will say in a first response to this question that yes, I do know of several cases where there are disputes about who did what. At least one of the cases is less consequential for the person who felt he should have been credited since he is a very famous mathematician and the piece of work was small. On the other hand there is certainly reason to be fearful. How to alleviate this on the research network I don't know except to suggest that participants may try and arrange meetings at conferences. 2. Also those of us who do not work alone (and not always on projects of our supervisor/boss) have to navigate in the sea of "who gets his/her name on the article". I am not talking about the usual question of whether the supervisor should automatically get his/her name on the paper. I must assume that there are some informal guidelines about who should be asked to cowrite the article and given a chance to get their byline published. Again, I will give my personal response. There are not any written guidelines to my knowledge. Typically, the people I know in math err on the side of asking people if they would mind being coauthor on a paper. Since this entails a certain amount of work (usually), the answer is not always yes. I have been asked recently to coauthor a paper and it is turning out to be an extremely large amount of work -- much more than I had expected. Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu ___________________________________________________________________ Item #7 Steve Kennedy: Hiring Committee Survey As mentioned in the editorial above, I wondered if there wasn't something that we could do, right now, to relieve the stress that applicants suffer after sending their applications materials out and then sitting and waiting, sometimes for many months, for a response. Anybody who has talked with young mathematicians on the job market in the past couple of years knows that such people are frantic to hear something, anything. The conversation is something like: "Did you hear that the U of X has started interviewing? My cousin's wife's uncle has an interview there next week." "No, I didn't know that-- did you know that ZZZ College made an offer to bright young Princeton grad? She's sitting on three offers now." I proposed to the administrative board that we send the following letter to every hiring committee chair in the country. We intend to send it, probably in early January, over the signatures of the board. Responses will be published weekly in Concerns. Dear Colleague: We are writing you on behalf of the Young Mathematician's Network (YMN). The YMN is a group of 600+ mathematicians (young and not-so-young) concerned about the special difficulties facing young mathematicians today, especially those difficulties associated with finding employment. We are working to alleviate those difficulties, primarily by providing information, to both job seekers and hiring committees, on how to perform a successful search. To this end we publish a weekly electronic newsletter--Concerns of Young Mathematicians. One of the particular difficulties of finding mathematical employment in academia today is that the enormous number of applications for each position make it effectively impossible for hiring committees to notify unsuccessful applicants of their status in a timely manner. The sheer volume of paper involved has slowed the whole system down. Applicants are left sitting, wondering, sometimes for many months, just what is happening to their applications. This produces stress. It also produces tens of thousands of telephone calls from distressed applicants, thus even further slowing down the process. We believe that YMN, with your help, can partially eliminate this difficulty. It is likely that several hundred of the applicants for the open position in your department are members of YMN. If you would consent to notifying the administrative board of YMN at one or more stages of your search, we would publish that information in Concerns of Young Mathematicians, where hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people would see it. We believe that we, and you, would be providing a valuable public service. We also believe that this mechanism would allow you, at least partially, to discharge an obligation, which current circumstances prevent you from discharging: that of keeping your applicants informed. We realize that this can not replace a courteous rejection letter, but we believe that earlier notice to some of your applicants may lessen the chaos that now exists in the job market. We are asking this same thing of the hiring committee for every position of which we know. This includes every position advertised on e-math, Employment Information in the Mathematical Sciences, Focus, Notices of the AMS, and the AWM Newsletter. To make your cooperation particularly easy we have appended two electronic "reply cards" to tear off and send (to ymn@someplace) at the appropriate time. If you would prefer to send more (or less) information, please feel free to compose different messages. We hope that you will participate in this program. If you would like more information about the Young Mathematician's Network, please contact any of the undersigned members of the administrative board. Back issues of Concerns of Young Mathematicians are available via anonymous ftp from speedway.net, and via gopher from e-math.ams.org. To subscribe to Concerns, send e-mail to cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu. Cordially, signatures please e-mail to: ymn@someplace We have begun interviewing those candidates at the top of our short list. Your name and affiliation please e-mail to: ymn@someplace We have made an offer and it has been accepted. Your name and affiliation Steve Kennedy kennedy@stolaf.edu ___________________________________________________________________ Item #8 Curtis Bennett: Call for More Survey Response. Hi everyone. To those of you who have sent in your survey, a big thank you. One member has asked how many people have delayed graduation because they didn't receive a job the year they were ready to graduate. I meant to include this question in my original survey and did not. So, if any of you out there who have delayed graduation and turned in the survey would send me a brief note mentioning that you delayed graduation because of not getting a job, please let me know. To everyone else, there is still time. Here is the survey. Please send it in. I would appreciate it if subscribers could fill out the following survey mail it directly to me. (I hope my email system can handle it!) I am not asking for names, merely general biographical information. Survey: Please cut and fill out and return to cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu 1. Subscriber: [ ] Individual-- [ ] Female [ ] Male [ ] Group 2. Is your (expected) degree in: [ ] Mathematics, [ ] Statistics, [ ] Other:______________ 3. Date of Ph.D. (Expected or Awarded):___________ Did you (have you) delay graduation because of not having a job? [ ] yes [ ] no 4. Employment: [ ] Academic [ ] Non-academic [ ] Unemployed (Please Specify) [ ] grad student [ ] Scientific Industry [ ] Part time [ ] Government [ ] 1-year position [ ] Financial Industry [ ] 2+ year [ ] Other_____________ temporary position [ ] permanent, non-tenure track [ ] tenure track [ ] tenured 5. Reason for subscribing: 6. Is there anything in particular that you would like the YMN to address? 7. Comments: (Note, if you have a job story to tell, you may put it here, alternatively, you can post it to the CoYM. I do not guarantee I will have the time to read all job stories). Curt Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu ____________________________________________________________________ Item #9 Closing Credits The Young Mathematicians' Network is administered by: Charles Yeomans cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Mark Winstead winstead@ml.kva.se Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu Stephen Kennedy kennedy@stolaf.edu Kalin Godev kalin@math.psu.edu Neil Calkin calkin@math.gatech.edu Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu Jeff Adams adams@bright.uoregon.edu Edward Aboufadel aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu ____________________________________________________________________ End of Journal -- Next week: The Discussion Continues