Stories of Women in Neuroscience · Stories of WiN

Advice for faculty job applications

·39 min·5 clips

Faculty searches can feel opaque, and this special episode treats them like faculty job applications 101. The focus is biomedical and neuroscience paths, but plenty travels outside that lane. Monique compares two kinds of academic jobs from experience: her current assistant professor role in the Departments of Neurobiology and Neurosciences at UC San Diego, and an earlier role at a liberal arts R2 institution in San Diego. The advice is refreshingly blunt. A position can pay better than a postdoc and still hurt the next move if it slows publications or leaves someone without the resources to do serious work. Monique and the host keep coming back to productivity. If an interim job makes papers harder, it may look less like a bridge to an R1 role and more like lab management with a faculty-flavored title. They leave room for personal constraints, though. Monique says nothing was keeping her from moving, so those tradeoffs felt too risky for her. After that, the conversation moves into tenure-track searches, especially national searches and research-focused R1 jobs. K awards and MD-PhD cases come up as nearby but different, since clinical time can change the salary math. The closing advice is useful for anyone staring at application documents. The projects document is a place to show big ideas, not an NIH grant that pins down every experiment. Start early if you can. If this cycle is already here, get moving; if next year is the target, use the summer to build documents carefully and lean on the resources around you.

As heard by us

A grounded guide to judging faculty jobs by the conditions that let research continue.

Faculty job applications are framed as a question of fit: job type, timing, and the conditions that allow research to keep moving. Dr. Monique Smith uses her assistant professorship in Neurobiology and Neurosciences at UC San Diego, along with an earlier, higher-teaching-load…

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You want a faculty job map for R1, R2, small liberal arts roles, productivity, and the risks of staying put.

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