I got a tenure-track job!

Yes, let’s get the big news out of the way, first. I got a job, I’m going to become a professor, and I’m leaving Canada this summer. Read on for more details!

What is a tenure-track job? Right now, I am a postdoctoral researcher at a university in Canada, and the “level up” is to become a tenure-track professor. Tenure-track means that you (usually) start at the junior level, called “Assistant Professor” (which does not mean assistant to a professor; I will be an independent professor; yes it’s a somewhat misleading title; etc.). Then, after five to seven years, provided I have a good-quality record of teaching and research, I will be promoted to “Associate Professor”, with tenure. And tenure means that I have academic job security and can stay at my institution for the rest of my career, should I so choose. My current job is not tenure-track and is term-limited; generally, people who want a career in academia aim for tenure, and now I’m on track to get it.

Where are you going? I’ve accepted a position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. I’ll be teaching phonetics to their graduate students and running a new lab that does research in phonetics, sociolinguistics, and child language development.

Wow, so are you moving to Honolulu? Yes, my partner and I will be moving there together in August!

Hold on, partner??? Yes, and that is news for another post at another time. 🙂

How long will you be there? As I mentioned, this is a tenure-track position, which means that if all goes well, I could actually be there for the rest of my career. But I can’t even begin to wrap my mind around the implications of that, so for now, I’ll just say: a long time.

Well, living in paradise for the rest of your life sounds like a good plan. I have a lot to say about this, starting with the truth that I chose this job (over another one) not because of the “paradise” aspect of Hawai`i, but because of the caliber of UHM’s Linguistics Department and the potential for a career of successful research with amazing colleagues and students. In fact, I have a lot to wrestle with regarding the ethics of moving to Hawai`i, a sovereign kingdom that was forcibly colonized and militarized by the United States, and putting down roots on native land. (And I’ve thought about this before.) But that’s also for another post at another time.

Where can I read about the research you’re doing now? On my personal website (though I will probably build a new one with a new domain name once I begin my new job).

What are you most excited about? Getting back into the classroom! I haven’t been doing any teaching in my current job, and I miss giving lectures and chatting with students. I’ve actually already gotten an email from a prospective student about my courses for this coming fall, and that made me practically giddy with excitement.

What are you worried or nervous about? Lots of things, and I won’t go into too much detail here, but I hope that this huge life transition will go as smoothly as possible and that I really feel like I can do well by everyone who expects so much of me.

It feels like you’ve been looking for a job for a long time… Yes, I’ve been working on applications since last August. The academic job market is notoriously slow, but also, this isn’t the first time I’ve been on the market.

An image of Eastern Oahu and Kailua Bay that I snapped from my Air Canada flight when I visited for an interview back in February.

I’ve chronicled my employment journey quite a bit on this blog, starting from before I got my degree, and before the pandemic! How naive I sounded back in November 2019… Then the world went sideways, and I crashed and burned in the academic job market, again and again. One post that I’ll always come back to was this one in February 2020, after a few months of getting nothing but rejections. It wasn’t until a few months later that I got my first post-PhD job, as a lecturer at UC Irvine; here’s what I shared in November 2020 (and buried the lede). One academic year after that, I got the job that brought me here to Canada, and wrote a lengthy reflection about that. I’ve been more sporadic about writing here over the past few years, but before I went back on the job market last fall, I posted one more time about luck, grace, and my grandmother.

This won’t be the last time I write about the academic job market, though! I have many more ideas of things to write about, including a little bit of data analytics on the thirty jobs I applied to, the ups and downs of navigating application websites, and, of course, a deeper reflection on what’s ahead in this next chapter of my life.

The last thing I’ll add, just as I did when I posted about the life transition that brought me to where I am now, is a note of gratitude to the people who helped me with the job stuff this past year. First and foremost, to my current boss/PI, who gave me not only my current job, but also a great idea to frame my research to make it maximally appealing to a wide range of academic disciplines. Second, to my past advisers who wrote all those recommendation letters for years and years and encouraged me to trust the process… and third, to all my friends and mentors in academia whom I reached out to for advice while I was doing interviews the past few months, or people who just let me vent about how agonizing all of this is. Thanks for giving me space. And you were all right: the hard work paid off. I’m relieved. Onward.

ω

Word of the Day: ʻOkina (Hawaiian for “separator, cutting”), is the name for a typographical character used in the writing system for ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, or the Hawaiian language. It’s the character that looks like an apostrophe, and which I’ve been writing with a single quotation mark (`) in this post. Technically, it’s not an apostrophe or a single quotation mark, and it does not denote the same thing that those characters denote in English. In Hawaiian, it represents the glottal stop sound that can be found in the word Hawai`i or in English words like “uh-oh” or “P.E.” (it’s the “stop” in between the vowels).