Interesting, I don't think I got any rejection letters when I was job searching after college a few years ago. If I didn't get the interview I didn't receive any response at all. Now, the search didn't go too long, so maybe it was just too small of a sample to judge anything by. I certainly didn't expect to get any letters though.
Rejection Letters for a faculty position
51–60 of 84 posts
Re: Rejection Letters for a faculty position
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the reasons I posted the letters was because I'd not seen a big set of rejection letters anywhere before. In fact, I hadn't actually looked at the mass of them together before myself. You are right. I didn't outline the reasons why I posted this very explicitly. I hoped that people would form their own opinions about these things, honestly. One reason, for myself, was that I found myself reflecting on failure,…
There are surely many reasons it was worth sharing. For me it was educational to contemplate the number of applications submitted. Also, in this case it was fun to the see the letterheads for a large number of well-respected engineering schools all addressed to the same person. Just to be in the position to be rejected by those departments is a significant accomplishment, after all.
In my experience, the number of applications submitted is actually somewhat low compared to most recently graduated PhDs these days.
Re: Rejection Letters for a faculty position
#53It would be nice if more startups did this. Just a nice letter saying "While your qualifications are outstanding, we regret to inform you that your expertise-in-X is not what we are looking for at this time." If someone takes the time to fill out a five page web-based form and goes through your online fizzbuzz tests, a customized letter is only appropriate.
Having worn a interviewing & selecting hat for , I can say my objectives for rejection communication were: (1) conveying the fact of it politely and unequivocally, (2) ensuring that the process halts immediately, and (3) leaving an impression such that the candidate's likelihood of thinking & speaking ill of us in future is minimised. The fact is, rejection usually amounts to disappointment and in some people that me…
How about (4) giving the candidate one or two things that they could improve about their performance at interview?
Re: Rejection Letters for a faculty position
#54I remember, in the early 90s, someone in our department sent out over 500 applications, and got nothing but rejections. He then started putting the rejection letters outside his office. The department chair politely asked him to take them down, so that prospective PhD wouldn't be scared off. :-D
500? If there were only that many faculty openings when I was on the job market... Ever since the dot com bust and more recent state government delevering, the academic job market for computer science has never been quite the same. I hear that enrollments are finally starting to rebound.
Re: Rejection Letters for a faculty position
#55So this guy is an employed PhD (at the job he "wanted most") and writes a blog post about how emotionally traumatic receiving rejection notices at normal (if not below normal) rates was. I don't get it.
Listen people, here's how HN works. If you disagree with somebody, you reply. You don't downvote just because you disagree, and you definitely don't downvote without a reply just because you disagree. Downvotes are for trolls/rude people. Explain to this person why you disagree, I want to know.
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Re: Rejection Letters for a faculty position
#56It would be nice if more startups did this. Just a nice letter saying "While your qualifications are outstanding, we regret to inform you that your expertise-in-X is not what we are looking for at this time." If someone takes the time to fill out a five page web-based form and goes through your online fizzbuzz tests, a customized letter is only appropriate.
Having worn a interviewing & selecting hat for , I can say my objectives for rejection communication were: (1) conveying the fact of it politely and unequivocally, (2) ensuring that the process halts immediately, and (3) leaving an impression such that the candidate's likelihood of thinking & speaking ill of us in future is minimised. The fact is, rejection usually amounts to disappointment and in some people that me…
I think the most-needed advice for people advertising positions is: (pre-1) send any kind of rejection communication at all.
Re: Rejection Letters for a faculty position
#57How does such a touching, honest article get such terrible comments? (Referring to the comments on the author's blog.)
In any case I don't see why anyone would allow such lampreys to suck the life of their own web page.
Re: Rejection Letters for a faculty position
#58A faculty position right after finishing the PhD? Isn't it a bit too early to retire so soon?
I am in germany, so my experience may not compare. But at my institute we have many international postdocs. As far as I see it, there is NO way to get a faculty position without an international research record. Some of our postdocs get a professorship though, but it may be in Korea or China, never in Europe or in the United States so far.
When I thought about my career during my PhD time, I felt like it was a one way ticket to think about science positions only. They were very rare and the competition is hard. What is to gain except a mediocre salary for a lifetime? At least in Europe it is also tough to go back from a research institute and work for a business again.
So I decided to develop software (I am a physicist). That is closer to my interests than science. I finally landed in space projects and write scientific software, have free access to great data (that no scientist in the world can see so early) and I can really focus on my work. The professors, on the other hand, spend their day giving and preparing lectures, organizing money for the research and don't have time to do some research themselves.
There are always ways to go. If one way is tough, it will most likely remain tough all the way. It opens the mind to think about alternatives and this chance should be taken, imho.
Re: Rejection Letters for a faculty position
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know that people disagree. I didn't downvote him, but I can imagine that people might have because his comment is a no more than an uninteresting summary of the blog post. It's not really adding much to the conversation.
Actually what the comment does is simultaneously satirizes the blog post author as a person of a highly privileged status feeling sorry for himself because of the "emotional trauma" of his highly successful job search AND thusly questions the relevance of the post at all. I guess I should have spelled it out more clearly.
And that is why you got downvoted. Obviously a lot of people find this post interesting (at 6th position on the front page with 87pts right now). Furthermore, a lot of people tend to find the "does this even matter" posts that show up on almost every single comment thread boring and irrelevant.
If you don't like an article or don't find it interesting just ignore it, that's the whole point of the voting system. Things that are interesting to a lot of people bubble up, things that aren't, don't. Commenting with "I don't think this is interesting" isn't helpful.
As for your actual post, the author is saying the rejection letters had a particular impact on him even though he eventually got what he wanted. Having been rejected by a few places when applying for graduate studies after having decided that I didn't want to go anyway(because I had decided against pursuing further studies and starting to work) I can definitely sympathize with the author, it still feels bad.
Furthermore, I think the collection of such letters is definitely interesting. Most people when they get rejected tend to think that their case is unique and think that this reflects badly on themselves. I think that it's interesting to see that even people who "made it"(got his dream job, didn't he?) still went through that. So it's perfectly normal.
Re: Rejection Letters for a faculty position
#60I went out on the faculty job market 1.5 years (the second year I wasn't as serious about it so I'll count it as .5). The first year was 60+ applications, the second was less than 10 if I remember correctly. All of that resulted in 7 interviews, 1 offer that I didn't end up accepting, and a whole lot of rejections.
My advice to anyone applying out for faculty jobs is just to expect a ton of rejections. I stopped reading the letters/emails after I knew they were rejections. Reading more doesn't do any good and it's not like it is a personal letter anyways. One of the things that made it easier was that I was once involved in a faculty job search. 400-500 applications were whittled down to about ~40 that looked good. The process of whittling those down to the 7-8 we interviewed seemed very arbitrary; many of those we didn't interview looked very good. After the interviews, you could have made clear arguments for a few candidates. In the end, one got an offer. So, after seeing the number of applications involved, and the randomness involved in the process, it's pretty easy to just know there will be a lot of rejections.