If I had to go back in time and give myself advice as a grad student and early postdoc, I would tell me to ask some faculty to tell me what faculty hiring committees are looking for in an applicant and why. I would also ask how an applicant successfully fulfills those asks.

I strongly encourage anyone thinking about a career in academia to ask these questions of faculty they get a chance to talk to because grad school actually doesn’t prepare you to understand what it means to be a professor and I definitely didn’t fully grasp the how and why

I knew I wanted to do original research and I would enjoy teaching but that didn’t help me understand what faculty are looking for when they are hiring or how I could successfully present myself as a faculty candidate. Learning helped me understand what the job really is.

The job really is the below, with an emphasis on: original research ideas that ensure you can run a group and win grants, high tolerance for lots of administrative work, spending more time overseeing other people’s research than doing your own, and lots of teaching! https://twitter.com/andreagokus/status/1311924866275307521