Peer-review. Hair Raiser. Apophenia: why I am not going on the academic job market. I have decided not to go on the academic job market this year. I’ve wanted to be a professor for a long time. I still want to be a professor. Just not now. Making that decision was quite hard for me. If all goes well, I will have my PhD next summer. Before he passed away, my advisor and I had many long conversations about whether or not I belonged in academia. I feel the need to explain why I’m not going on the job market in a public way, mainly because everyone keeps asking and I expect that it’ll be ten times worse at 4S, AOIR, ASIS&T, and the smaller academic things I’m doing this fall. There are multiple reasons for which I think that going on the academic job market doesn’t make sense for me right now. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. These are the major issues. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that it’s academia OR industry. Blog. Trial and Error. Review of The Access Principle. I have an ingenious idea for a company.
My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I'll simply find people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous enough to donate a game will immediately relinquish all further rights to it. But why would developers donate their games to me? Admittedly, for the scheme to work, my seal of approval will have to mean something.
On reflection, perhaps no game developer would be gullible enough to fall for my scheme. I've got it: academics! Everything I described with computer games would work even better with academic papers. Alas, my idea has already been taken, by Elsevier and the other publishing conglomerates. This article is supposed to be a review of a book called The Access Principle by John Willinsky (MIT Press, 2006). 1. Books | Slaves to science. Sally bounds up the stairs two at a time. She fumbles with the key, then bursts into the lab. With fingers still frozen from the morning air, she takes a tray of hockey-puck-size clear plastic cups out of an incubator. The cups contain fish embryos and water. She drops some of the fluid onto a slide and looks through the microscope. These particular fish are growing without hearts because Sally knocked out a gene fish need to grow hearts.
Poor Sally. Sally likes her advisor. According to Eleanor Babco of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, no one tallies how many science faculty positions are vacated every year, but it is clearly not enough to hire each year’s group of science Ph.D.’s, because the pool of in-limbo post-docs keeps growing. Science Ph.D.’s are not allowed to leave if they ever want a professorship. Sally is single, lover-less and 32 years old. Academic science, especially in the biological fields, has grown healthily in the past decade. Indeed. The New Yorker : critics : atlarge.