Are you a faculty candidate? Are you going to be looking for a position in academia in the coming months or years? Professor Roman Voronov has been working on a blog “A Faculty Candidate’s Guide to Getting an Academic Job” for the past couple of years and we have recently migrated all of the information over to aiche.org and created the "ChE Faculty Candidates Resource Center." We think this new website will be a great resource for faculty candidates.
We sat down with Professor Roman Voronov, community website manager and co-chair of the "Meet the Faculty Candidates Poster Session" at the AIChE Annual Meeting to discuss what this site is and how it will help faculty candidates.
The website is available at www.aiche.org/facultycandidates.
What is this new site?
As a part of my national service duties, I collaborated with the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) on developing a teaching resource meant to help prospective young candidates find a faculty job in academia. The resource titled “ChE Faculty Candidates Resource Center” debuted in January 2016, and contains various guidance materials on: a) Application Packet preparation, b) On-Site and Remote Interviewing and c) Negotiating Job Offers.
Who is the site for?
The resource is targeted at Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers nearing the completion of their appointment and looking for a faculty position in academia. Although people either in industry, or in an existing faculty appointments, who are looking to switch careers (e.g., a research professor interested in a tenure track) may also find it interesting.
How do you think it will help faculty candidates?
The “ChE Faculty Candidates Resource Center” is a place where candidates can find answers to just about any question they have about the job search process, starting with statistics about the candidates themselves and academic salaries, to information about the internal workings of the hiring process. We also have first-person accounts of interview experiences and pointers for what are the attributes of a good academic packet vs. common mistakes made by applicants. Moreover, the resource contains blog posts where the reader can communicate with me in an interactive manner via posting questions and comments.
Why are you running it, Prof. Voronov?
My interest in helping faculty candidates began when I was a Ph.D. student going through the same job-searching process. At that time, I was frustrated by the lack of a centralized help-resource, or any examples of what an academic packet should even look like. Thus, during my postdoctoral appointment, I began to get involved with chairing the “Meet the Faculty Candidate Poster Session” — an opportunity for the candidates to exhibit themselves in front of potential employers — at the AIChE Annual Meeting. Ultimately, after having gone through the job-search cycle multiple times, I became faculty and decided to share the accumulated experiences in a blog format. As I answered more and more questions from candidates, and was exposed to the “other side of the fence” point of view via serving on three search committees, the blog evolved into the “ChE Faculty Candidates Resource Center” hosted by AIChE.
For more information on the ChE Faculty Candidates Resource Center, visit: www.aiche.org/facultycandidates.