Life update

[liv]

I had a very long and tiring week last week, but at the end of it my experiment didn't yield any useful data, bah. The weekend was fairly quiet; I spent Friday sending out job applications and not doing as much tidying as I'd intended, and the guests I'd invited for Friday night couldn't make it. Saturday I gave the sermon and led the Torah discussion as planned; they both went very well, the sermon especially. I spoke about the ways that the section about constructing the Tabernacle exemplifies building a community and valuing everyone's contribution, which I didn't think was incredibly original, but people went mad for it.

SA was there, and invited me to join her for lunch afterwards. 1:30 on a Saturday is not the best time to be looking for lunch here, because Swedish people generally eat rather earlier than that, and most of the restaurants are only open in the evening on Saturday, whereas most of the cafés are running out of food by that time. Still, we ended up at Nero (not the coffee chain!), which is sort of pretending to be a trendy bar from 80s New York, a bit pricey, but the food is really very good. SA described the place as "yang" in the way that it is all black and white and hard lines and full of motion and very crowded. Weekends they do a sort of set menu where you take a basket containing a salad, a glass of fresh orange juice, a slightly symbolic bloody mary, and two small desserts, and then a choice of American-Italian main course. It's always lovely to spend time with SA, and we talked nineteen to the dozen.

Although the weather yesterday seemed to have the promise of spring, just warm enough for wandering around the city to be pleasant, and the first snowdrops just coming out, it was all a lie, because today it's snowing again. I have to admit I'm less childishly excited about this than the last eight snowfalls this year. But still, pretty.

What else? I have a lot to do with Jewish community stuff, sorting out the services I'll be leading next weekend in Oslo, and then Pesach in Copenhagen and Stockholm, and then in April I'm planning a teaching service and a youth service. And I'm starting teaching at college next week; I can't quite believe all these commitments are looming, I thought Pesach was still far in the future.

Teaching jobs
Applied 6; Success: one interview resulting in an offer which I turned down (Teeside); Rejections: two (Birmingham, London Met), plus one probable no as it's been months without a word (UEL); still pending: two (UCLan, Cardiff).

Advertised research jobs
Applied 5; Results: one interview which didn't quite lead to a job offer (Glasgow); Rejections: one (Oxford) plus two more probable as the positions have been readvertised (Oxford again, Dundee); still pending: one (Karolinska)

Cold calling
Applied: 2; Results: one really positive interview but the guy has no money (Cambridge); one come back later in the year (Liverpool).

Also, friend_of_tofu poses a really interesting question: Who do you turn to first or most often for support?, and discusses relying on your friends, partner(s) or family and how those balance. Recommended.

Comments

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

sorry for focussing on one thing - but prod the jobs you haven't heard back from to get definite no or still pending. they should at least be able to tell you if they've made a shortlist/interview list yet or not

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

IAWTC - I spent too much time of my early postdoc days waiting for answers that never came before prodding.

And there's no harm in applying a second time to the ones that were re-advertised, especially if you can spruce up your application.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm touched by your recommendation and sorry I was away for a bit and so less able to respond to useful comments, such as yours

[pointilliste.livejournal.com]

Hi. I've been out of LJ reading habits due to being incredibly busy, but just stopped in and read of your job hunting. I wanted to offer my sympathies with the whole wrangle, it's pretty arduous sometimes isn't it? And isn't that the way - an offer comes for something that isn't your first choice (as the Teeside one sounds, from my reading of your journal) while you're being strung along waiting for the Dream Job!

Good luck with whatever you decide.

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

In your experience, how often do biology junior lecturer type jobs come up in south of the UK, and are they all on jobs.ac.uk? I am wondering about heading in a similar direction, perhaps.

[liv]

Ooh, interesting, it'd be fun if we ended up moving in the same direction; we've had a lot of the same problems with post-docs. Most lecturer type jobs don't make it to jobs.ac.uk; one did, and that's how I knew that this kind of job exists, but generally it's not considered an "academic" job in quite the same way as your standard post-doc, and a lot of the ex-polys that take teaching seriously are a bit out of the mainstream academic loop. What I've been doing is going through this list on Wiki (as an aside, it's fascinating which completely obscure universities you've never heard of are twice the size of Cambridge!) and looking at the job vacancies page for each one. In most cases it's a single click from the homepage.

[liv]

Sorry, I forgot to answer your actual question! By means of going directly to the university job vacancy pages, I'm finding about two or three posts a month that I'm at least vaguely qualified for. Because they're new universities there's a lot of nutrition studies and food science, physiology and sports science, and not so much molecular. But if you're trying to teach biology at all you need someone who knows the molecular side.

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

Thank you, thats useful.