Here we go again?
Feb. 7th, 2026 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
procyonraccoonOne of the unfortunate undercurrents of the news I posted about last time is that the rationale for remaining in the UK - at least from a career perspective - is eroding quickly. This is regrettable because on a personal level I've been finding myself mostly (if not entirely) content with my social life here these days... and in many ways the broader environment has felt stable in a way that the US in particular certainly does not. But I never did apply for the job at UNM, which in retrospect is feeling like a tactical error, and if I could go back to November I almost certainly would be telling myself to have at least put something minimal in to see what might happen.
In the meantime, though, something else came up which has, at least on paper, thrown me back into the job market game after all. On Thursday morning of last week I got an extremely short e-mail from a senior professor stating that my name had "come up" in the context of the job search he was leading to find a new Director for a medium-sized observatory network - and I might be considered "interesting" as a candidate for that context. The job in question would involve leading the "scientific, operational, engineering, and financial" aspects of the observatory network, a large organization with dozens of employees around the world. The job is based in southern California and would pay almost 4x my current salary.
I was slightly dumbfounded to receive such an e-mail and almost figured it was some kind of mistake: while I have had vague aspirations of taking on that kind of role eventually it seemed like something that was a decade plus away, given that I have never led anything other than a small group of PhD students and not received any funding beyond the individual research fellowships of my postdoc days. I wrote back saying as much and asked whether he really thought I would actually be qualified for the role, to which he replied that these considerations were important but my background was not a showstopper.
I then called up Prof. K, who in the past unexpectedly seemed to have become my biggest career advocate (although I haven't had much communication with him in a while). He told me immediately that he had been the one to recommend me to the search chair for the role in the first place and said on no uncertain terms that I should apply, and when I expressed doubt about my qualifications to satisfy even the minimum criteria on the job posting he needled me and said I needed to be more assertive and not doubt myself.
So I "assertively" went along with what he said I should do and spent the weekend writing an application after all. Admittedly I expect it to go nowhere, and maybe that's for the best - in the extraordinarily unlikely event that I somehow got this job my life would change radically, taking me away from teaching and research permanently and putting me in a high-stress position of overseeing a huge scientific operation while schmoozing multimillionaires to keep it afloat (the observatory in question is a private one).
And almost certainly it won't happen anyway. But the chance isn't zero, and in any case I felt I had to anyway to keep my famous "advocate" from thinking I'd lost my ambition entirely, particularly as the environment shifts and the future becomes hazy. So the application is sent, and we'll see what happens.
In the meantime, the drama at work continues, taking somewhat of a turn towards the absurd (such that it's hard to actually take seriously). On Wednesday I woke up to find an e-mail in my inbox that one of our junior faculty members had sent to the head of the department with me cc'd on account of being his "line manager". It was extremely long and filled with accusations againt the senior management over being singled out, in his mind, as being disallowed to take on a new PhD student this year. Said faculty member is currently out of the country, so I did my best to set up my own meeting with the department chair to defuse the situation as much as possible - explaining what limited parts of the grievance has some merit while also making clear that the overall accusation and the e-mail overall was incredibly out of line. And just yesterday I found out about some even more aburd drama that is apparently playing out among the first-year students: one PhD student apparently put a union jack on his desk, other students complained about it for some reason, the original student dug in, and while trying to justify it made some potentially(?) immigrant-hostile comments amongst a student cohort that is partly immigrants. (And then for some reason of of my colleagues, rather than just telling the respective parties to stop acting like children and figure it out themselves, decided to make it her mission to pull in the respective students' research supervisors for a big serious disciplinary meeting and look up the provisions of the Equality Act on harassment on whether to support a harrassment case against the student who put a flag on his desk... *facepaw*) Oh well, at least for that one I am in no way involved.
In the meantime, though, something else came up which has, at least on paper, thrown me back into the job market game after all. On Thursday morning of last week I got an extremely short e-mail from a senior professor stating that my name had "come up" in the context of the job search he was leading to find a new Director for a medium-sized observatory network - and I might be considered "interesting" as a candidate for that context. The job in question would involve leading the "scientific, operational, engineering, and financial" aspects of the observatory network, a large organization with dozens of employees around the world. The job is based in southern California and would pay almost 4x my current salary.
I was slightly dumbfounded to receive such an e-mail and almost figured it was some kind of mistake: while I have had vague aspirations of taking on that kind of role eventually it seemed like something that was a decade plus away, given that I have never led anything other than a small group of PhD students and not received any funding beyond the individual research fellowships of my postdoc days. I wrote back saying as much and asked whether he really thought I would actually be qualified for the role, to which he replied that these considerations were important but my background was not a showstopper.
I then called up Prof. K, who in the past unexpectedly seemed to have become my biggest career advocate (although I haven't had much communication with him in a while). He told me immediately that he had been the one to recommend me to the search chair for the role in the first place and said on no uncertain terms that I should apply, and when I expressed doubt about my qualifications to satisfy even the minimum criteria on the job posting he needled me and said I needed to be more assertive and not doubt myself.
So I "assertively" went along with what he said I should do and spent the weekend writing an application after all. Admittedly I expect it to go nowhere, and maybe that's for the best - in the extraordinarily unlikely event that I somehow got this job my life would change radically, taking me away from teaching and research permanently and putting me in a high-stress position of overseeing a huge scientific operation while schmoozing multimillionaires to keep it afloat (the observatory in question is a private one).
And almost certainly it won't happen anyway. But the chance isn't zero, and in any case I felt I had to anyway to keep my famous "advocate" from thinking I'd lost my ambition entirely, particularly as the environment shifts and the future becomes hazy. So the application is sent, and we'll see what happens.
In the meantime, the drama at work continues, taking somewhat of a turn towards the absurd (such that it's hard to actually take seriously). On Wednesday I woke up to find an e-mail in my inbox that one of our junior faculty members had sent to the head of the department with me cc'd on account of being his "line manager". It was extremely long and filled with accusations againt the senior management over being singled out, in his mind, as being disallowed to take on a new PhD student this year. Said faculty member is currently out of the country, so I did my best to set up my own meeting with the department chair to defuse the situation as much as possible - explaining what limited parts of the grievance has some merit while also making clear that the overall accusation and the e-mail overall was incredibly out of line. And just yesterday I found out about some even more aburd drama that is apparently playing out among the first-year students: one PhD student apparently put a union jack on his desk, other students complained about it for some reason, the original student dug in, and while trying to justify it made some potentially(?) immigrant-hostile comments amongst a student cohort that is partly immigrants. (And then for some reason of of my colleagues, rather than just telling the respective parties to stop acting like children and figure it out themselves, decided to make it her mission to pull in the respective students' research supervisors for a big serious disciplinary meeting and look up the provisions of the Equality Act on harassment on whether to support a harrassment case against the student who put a flag on his desk... *facepaw*) Oh well, at least for that one I am in no way involved.
