RBOCreativity

OK, so this is weird.  This post has gotten bumped a few times for more time pressing/less depressing/etc. posts… and now I’m in a situation at work where I have a lengthy R&R, a couple new projects, and prior to that I had picked up two of the unfinished work projects and have meetings with people about them and I’m back to having too much to think about to worry about creativity!  On the plus side, I did finish my major committee responsibility for the year last week, so hopefully I haven’t actually overcommitted at this point.  But I still want your thoughts on creativity!  And the blog is now down to 54(!) unfinished drafts.

• We are down to 68 drafts in the blog folder.  It will be less once we package up abandoned posts from 2014– we still need to decide which we’re going to completely abandon and which we are going to finish.  I’m not sure what we’ll do when we’re completely out.
• I am down to four unfinished work projects for which the data are complete but they need to be written up or rewritten or re-figured out.  One has been rejected like 7 times so now I’m trying to figure out what to do with that.  One is a bit underpowered so maybe I should abandon it, I dunno.  One the results didn’t turn out like our pre-registration plan had assumed so I’ve got to figure out how to deal with that and where to send it (my two co-PI are both deans now so… it’s just me).  One is almost done– we’re still rewriting, so that’s what I’ve been focusing on but I can’t touch the restricted data.  After that’s done… I need to actually get to work on the pre-registered one because in a couple years that will no longer be interesting.
• I have a grant proposal under review.  I don’t have high hopes for it, but you never know.
• I don’t have any new big ideas that I’m working on.  For years I’ve had more than I had time for.  But once the big project in bullet 2 is done, I won’t really have anything to present places.  It is unsettling.
• Many of the ideas I’d had but didn’t have time to work on have since been done by other people.  They were good ideas, but I was busy doing other stuff.
• A couple years ago I was giving grad students advice on where to get ideas and now…
• I do have a couple projects where I’m like 4th author out of 7, but I’m not in charge of those.  I do stuff when asked.
• I think what I need to do is just spend some time reading.  I have 463 emails of abstracts of lists of working papers and published journals in a “to-read” folder.  I used to read them weekly and keep up with what was going on, but I got really really busy.  And then it just got easy to move stuff into that folder and forget about it.  But I also think that had a detriment to being up on what the profession is finding interesting.  I still go to conferences and seminars, but…
• And I’m back to doing a ton of service.  My department head is overwhelmed with some changes that have been being made and has asked one of the committees I’m on to help out.  But just kind of vague disorganized help I don’t know where to start.  So my other track head counterpart and I got together and we’re like, how do we frame this problem, what information do we need to know… and it’s just a big mess that includes a ton of moving parts.  So that may be where a lot of my organizing etc. mental power is going.  This is another one of those cases where we don’t HAVE to be putting in the work we’re putting in, but if we don’t then the whole thing is going to be a disaster because we’ve tried not putting in the work and things exploded (or just didn’t happen).
• (Aside:  we actually have 3 track heads, but the other one is overwhelmed with other service.)
• I’m thinking of applying for a mini-dean position (like dean of X, not dean of a college).  Don’t want to be department chair, but could possibly be a mini-dean.  I dunno.  People drain me but if I’m not getting a raise and I can’t leave the state…  It’s the unnecessary meetings that kill me.
• Am I becoming less creative?
• Am I just jettisoning bad ideas before putting time in them so I’m more selective?  Am I too scared to work on the good ideas that I have because they might not be efficient?
• I feel like it’s easier to work on out-there stuff if you also have like a simple and clean RD project (or DD, though that’s a bit less fashionable) going on at the same time.
• Am I too busy with other stuff?  I feel like I was busier when I had small children, so maybe it seemed like I was getting more done in the time I had available?

How do you stay creative?  

RBOMoney/career/etc

• Being on a trimester system means that the third college tuition bill comes pretty fast in the Spring.
• DH bought 2 of these luxurious towels for himself (I am happy with our regular JC Penny’s towels that MIL got us) and, like the fancy bamboo towels that preceded them, they take a really long time to dry.
• DH lost a lot of weight, slowly and deliberately via calorie counting and a lot of weighing out of foods.  Right now he is smack dab in the middle of the recommended weight distribution for his height and delightfully muscular.  He’s at the point now where he wants to replace most of his clothing because even his undershirts that he sleeps in and uses for workouts are too loose.  (Personally I prefer loose t-shirts for sleeping and exercising, but each to their own.)  He’s shopping slowly and deliberately with a lot of internet research.  He went to a tailor in town and got measured and then ordered a custom made shirt from Proper Cloth (not sponsored).  After he decides if he likes it he’s going to get a few more business casual things and then he’s going to start looking at his t-shirts.  (Also next time he’s at Target he plans to pick up a pack of smaller undershirts.)
• I’m applying for a deanlet position.  It’s one that is mostly paperwork, though apparently there are about 6 hours of meetings per week.  But it comes with a 0/0 teaching load and no departmental service.  I talked to the person who currently has it, and even though it sounds like a lot of work… it actually sounds like *less* people-facing than I currently have.  And there’s some putting out fires, but those fires are at predictable times of the year (hiring, P&T etc.), unlike now where I am constantly preventing them by going hey, don’t we need information X before this meeting… do the people know that we need X from them?  surely we should let them know so we don’t have to reschedule the impossible to schedule meeting and then miss all the deadlines.  And apparently the dean comes by just to chat like 4x/day, but in my current situation, the pro-gun anti-vaxxer whose office is next door to mine does the same thing, so…
• 6 hours of meetings is less than 6 hours of teaching + 2 hours of office hours.  (Plus all the other meetings I do.)
• The person currently in this position published two books in the last four years, so it sounds like it’s possible to keep up a research agenda.
• And there’s a guaranteed full pay, full year sabbatical after stepping down from the position.
• Many people would really like me to have this position, but my department head really would not.
• Having struck out on the market 3 years in a row, this seems to be the easiest way to get out from under the crushing service load in my department caused by me being the only person who notices things before they become problems.  (Things apparently went to heck while I was on faculty development leave in ways that have already caused more service for me this semester.)  On the one hand I feel a little guilty but on the other hand, I was gone for a year and nobody stepped in — no one person should *ever* be instrumental to the running of a department.  People need to step up.
• (To be fair, there are two other people like me who are also heads of their sub-fields, but they’re both associate professors and they’re much more last minute than I am.  They are also out there fighting last minute fires, but only really think about fire prevention when I bring it up.  They do 100% back me up on the fire prevention and go with me to meet with the department head about preventing upcoming fires.)
• (One of the things we have repeatedly told the department head is that they either need to get an associate head or a director of graduate studies because WE ARE BURNING OUT and the head cannot handle everything.  So far, nothing.  Though I did get a course release.)
• Also I would have my own secretary and not only is she really good, she already organizes things in the way I have been slowly organizing things in my department as I move through different leadership positions.  I think we will work well together if I get the position.
• Of course, I’m not the only person applying for this position, though I am the only person from my department, and my department is also the only one that does not currently have any deanling representation.  (Technically the current dean is from our department, but he was an outside hire and is not planning on ever actually being in my department as a faculty member and he’s stepping down next year.)
• I do not EVER want to be department head.  That is way too much people.  I am really good at paperwork but very bad at people.  Since I got back from leave a lot of people have been coming to me instead of the department head for things that are not my purview.  And the department secretary asks me for stuff because the head isn’t available and I have a long institutional memory.
• I am a people pleaser and very very bad at protecting myself, particularly in the moment.  I *want* to be helpful.  I’ve tried not mentioning looming disasters and I just cannot.  And I’m not compensated for this (other than the brand new teaching release)– my department head continues to nominate a specific other person for ALL the money-attached awards that we are both eligible for, plus she’s allowed to teach statistics online (which is the easiest class to teach online because all of the lectures are canned and all the grading is automatic) and live in another state and do zero service except inviting one high profile speaker in her field in each year.  Our research output continues to diverge as I’m put into the mommy track and she’s put into a highly compensated research-only track.
• In theory, as a deanlet, I’d be compensated for service.
• DC1 wants to stay at Carleton for the summer if zie can get a job.  We may spend some extended time in Minnesota if that happens.  We’ll see.  It does look like they have a summer meal plan, so I’m not as worried about DC1 getting malnourished.

RBOCareer?

• UPDATE:  All the previous bullets were written before I was told “no”.  This is the second time I’ve been flown out for something that could have been a dream job and then been told “no” and given a reason, that, if true, would have meant they shouldn’t have flown me out in the first place.  I screwed up, and I don’t now how.  So far I have only ever been offered a job one place, and that place I was too sick from food poisoning to have one-on-one interviews.  I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.  How do I look good on paper and then just screw up so entirely when I get to in-person?  I don’t lick my fingers anymore (that was something I did on my first job market flyouts)!  This one hurts especially because at breakfast, the search head told me that they would be requesting me to upper admin no matter how well I performed during the day, but a few days later they told me they weren’t going to request me to upper admin because they were concerned it would hamper their ability to hire a macroeconomist in the future, which is something they didn’t need to fly me out to know.  (I am not a macroeconomist, everyone is hiring macroeconomists this year except this school plans to hire one in the future, not this year.)  I am feeling really really down on myself.  And worried about DC2.
• I’m currently at an R1 in the South and somewhat miserable.  There’s a lot of benefits to being in an R1– amazing libraries, mostly decent students, administrative staff, etc.  I’m highly valued by my colleagues, though not compensated for that value.
• Being in the South is killing me.
• It didn’t used to be this bad, but it has gotten rapidly worse.
• Also having a department head who is pushing me further and further into a “mommy” teaching and service role while she devotes resources to another (also female– it’s not sexist) colleague so her only responsibilities are research is a constant thought.  The most recent thing (the first thing was awarding her two chairs and putting her forward for another internal grant) is that this woman is being allowed to substitute online courses for in-person courses of the core classes that we teach.  But the online courses are canned– there’s no lecturing.  It’s just responding to comments on the website and holding office hours, which I do for the in-person classes as well.  The department head’s reasoning?  I’m a better teacher.  She’s been getting complaints from in-person students about this other prof who cancels class regularly and doesn’t get through the required material, so she needs to be rewarded for it with less onerous teaching.  In the past 3 years her research has taken off and mine has stagnated (not died, just not taken off).  Resentment about this makes me someone I don’t like anymore.  But not thinking about it is like not thinking about a purple elephant.
• I cannot handle being the only source of support for so many marginalized people.  I know I have a larger impact on folks here than I would in a normal place and they deserve so much more… but I just do not have the emotional bandwidth.  Seeing people as people should be the bare minimum and my doing that should not have an effect because that should be their day to day.  But also hearing people’s stories and knowing that one of my colleagues is an active TERF and many others are upset that we ever had DEI efforts to begin with…  and having to constantly shut down racist and sexist comments in class.  It’s really really tiring.  I wouldn’t mind over-correction in the other direction.
• And I’m worried about DC2’s high school experience.  They’re great at STEM but actively terrible at humanities.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be someplace where they’re allowed to read books together as a class, and those books have female and minority protagonists?
• But I am worried about leaving the marginalized students.
• I’m worried about leaving my 6 PhD students [update: possibly soon to be 7 since another one of the above bullet woman’s students wants to switch to me], many of whom have already lost their main advisor during their time as grad students.
• Oddly, I’m not worried about leaving the department in the lurch.  If they really valued my service, I would have been compensated for it.  My predecessors were compensated for their service and still have those chairs and permanent lower teaching loads despite not being very research active and cutting back on service.  The people after me are only compensated for research.
• If we move, it will be harder for DC2 to become national merit.  It will have impacts on which and whether or not DC2 can get into the school of her choice, particularly state schools.  Right now zie wants to be an economist but is also obsessed with all things science.  Zie wants to go to MIT for undergrad.
• All of this is to say.  I don’t know what is going to happen, but a well-endowed SLAC in a blue state (but isn’t Williams or Wellesley which are econ powerhouses) has requested permission from upper administration to hire me to run and build a program [Update: this turns out not to have been true, despite what I was told would happen].  I don’t know if they will get that permission, but if they do, I told them I would take it.
• My teaching load will be a little higher but only because I currently (as of this year) have a one-course reduction after I complained about being the head of so many important committees.  (The older full professors all came in with a lower teaching load standard.)  There are no course reductions for service, even being department head, at this SLAC.  My salary, thanks to me still not getting the equity bump that I was promised 3 years ago, would not drop– it would be the same or even increase a little.  (Though cost of living is higher.)  After a year, I would qualify for something like 30K/year in direct tuition payments for DC1’s last two years and DC2’s entire college (currently I would get 1K/year if DC2 attended my R1).  I would teach more preps (currently I usually have 2 preps because nobody wants to teach my required core courses– the new place already has people teaching them).  The students would be different– no business school means more “econ-bros.”
• When I visited, they complained about their administration becoming corporate.  I complained about my administration willfully fighting DEI and how the regents want to destroy liberal influences.
• When I write everything out, it seems like if I get a choice, the choice is obvious.
• But I worry that I am losing prestige.  That I won’t be able to write big papers anymore. But I’m already not doing that.  So why not be shunted into the “mommy” track somewhere I’m happier about it.
• I do have some (standard and) non-standard things I will want to negotiate at least for my first year or two as I’m getting my bearings.  I will have to think about them harder. [Update:  I guess not].
• I have applied to bunch of other places, but I’m not holding my breath given my not-so-stellar track record the past few years I’ve been applying. [Update:  Applying to more…]

Ask the grumpies: What would your alternate career be?

Lisa asks:

What would your first choice of alternative career be?

If I had a great answer, I’d probably bail and do it instead. But if I had tons of money and was looking for an alternative career, I’d want to do something philanthropic like run a leper hospital in India (did anyone else read that article in the NYTimes?) or work to reform long term elder care or something.

#1:  Realistically, probably a high school math teacher someplace unionized that pays a lot.  If I had tons of money I would have to do philanthropy or politics but I wouldn’t enjoy it.  I might actually enjoy being like a Headstart teacher or something (I am very good at teaching small kids and the more you do when they’re smaller, the bigger the benefit), but there’s no money in that, and I certainly don’t want to be a daycare teacher for no money.  It is not a dream or vocation, but if it paid as well as my current job I might consider it.

#2:  Got me.  We’ve joked about me being a night nanny because I love babies and staying up late, but that’s something I could do but haven’t.

Natka Says:

Unrealistic: I would be a full-time writer of science fiction :) Slightly more realistic: speech therapist. But I like my job and I like the money I am making, so no plans for career change here!

On salaries in economics

I recently went to a talk by a woman from the census who connected the survey of earned doctorates to tax records.  She has the entire universe of econ phds for the past 20 years (I’m in there!).  Econ PhDs in industry make more than those in academia make more than those in government.

I have more money than I ever dreamed of (though my dreams were small) and more than we actually need.  When DH is also working we are not even upper middle class anymore (though there are still multiple marginal tax brackets above us).

And yet…

Adjusted by quality/prestige of my PhD, my salary is below the median for academics.

In fact, my salary is below the median for academics in the PhD quality/prestige of the bracket below mine.

Should this matter?  I don’t know.  My friend at a SLAC likes to point out that her salary is way below mine and she’s from the same grad school.  And I think if I were to move to a SLAC I’d be ok with a salary cut (and I’d be happy to move to a SLAC so long as it didn’t come with an increase in my teaching load, which is already high for econ).

DH pointed out that part of the problem is that salary is considered an indicator of quality.  If you have a “low” salary, how good of an economist can you be?  After all, wage equals marginal productivity, doesn’t it?  Especially after the labor market has a chance to sort itself out?  (Answer:  no!  That’s completely ignoring search frictions and compensating differentials).

Should I care about prestige?  Should I equate salary with being valued?  Does it matter when I’m getting paid a ridiculous amount already that others are getting paid even more ridiculous amounts?  Would I be more productive if we had more money?  Should the fact that DH is also making a lot even enter into my equation?

I go back and forth on these questions.  I do like money.  And… half of the people do have to be below median.  It’s just hard when having a below median salary means people think you’re a below-average economist.  You know?  And my salary is publicly available.

Does your field equate salary with productivity?  Does it equate salary with value?  Do you?

On Art (not ART) and creativity

(Because I have plenty of experience with ART .)

There’s been some recent twitter kerfuffles about quitting one’s day job to pursue one’s CREATIVITY.  Scalzi talks about his take on the movement in this post.

… I suspect I am not “a creative”*

I would far far rather read novels than write them. Writing a novel sounds like work.  Writing any kind of *book* sounds like a lot of work.

Also: I have no artistic talent.

So… I’m pretty happy not having some kind of creative passion that I’m supposed to be fitting into my copious free time or quitting my job to do.

Yay me?

Are you a creative?  Do you find the time to create?

*no, I don’t think this blog counts as a creative passion… I’m not sure what we could call it, but… we’re not quitting our jobs to monetize it.

What happened when I complained about my low salary

And by low, I mean low compared to similar and some worse-published (men) in my department and field. (I am making more than the non-research active people in my dept).  I am still incredibly privileged and my salary still leaves me a little shocked.

Still, even if I’m making more money than I ever dreamed of as a child, I should still be paid fairly.

And I wasn’t.  So I complained up and down in my annual review.  I talked about my cv and the work I do for the dept and the fact that although I have never gone on the market, people ask me to apply to schools.  I complained about how my (male) colleague who used to have the same salary that I did whose cv is similar to mine (but not quite as good) is making quite a bit more than I am despite his never having gotten an outside offer.  I mentioned the fact that I’m making less than our new hires straight out of grad school, even though all the male associate profs are making quite a bit more.

So my chair and dean talked and they agreed.  They noted that although I didn’t have the lowest salary in the dept, I’m in the bottom 20%, and I noted that of the people making less than me, none of them are research active.

They can’t give more than 10% raises a year without something extraordinary happening.  So they said I get 10% this year and if I complain again they will do their best to give me 10% next year.  If I want more I would need to go on the market because they are allowed to match outside offers.  He also mentioned that I was one of two women in the dept with this complaint and she would also be getting the same deal (pretty sure the other one makes just a little more than I do and also has an obviously better cv than the above-mentioned guy).

So where does this put me?  After the first raise I’ll *still* be making about 7K less than the male colleague mentioned above is making this year.  Presumably he’ll get a raise this year as well.  So I’ll still be behind.  But 10% is better than 3% (is better than 2% is better than 0%).

I probably should go on the market, but I’d prefer not to.  Still, I’ll probably actually look at the listings this year even though I usually don’t.

So… is there a moral?  Well, sometimes complaining works.  If it doesn’t work, then it might not be a place worth staying.

Help us decide our future financial paths: A guest post

#2 is on a two-week honeymoon in Italy so we’ve solicited guest posts from readers and will be running them along with random kitten pictures and hopefully(!) food pics from Italy.

Anandar is kicking us off with a money Monday question about long-term financial planing.  Help her think through her options!

*****************************************************************

Anandar writes:

For the first time in a loooong time, we have what feel like real choices in our financial life, and so I took the opportunity to write up a guest post in hoping of thinking things through (and getting feedback if you feel like commenting!).  My spouse and I are both professionals around age 40.  In our 20s, we were in grad school and/or making peanuts.  In our 30s, we were still (!) in grad school, and generally felt urgent about working to pay off the school loans/get established in our careers while paying daycare bills/afford a downpayment in our crazy-high cost-of-living area.  Now, we own a house, just paid off law school loans, our youngest is starting public kindergarten, and we generally feel less strapped.

Additional background:  We both have the sort of jobs (teacher and legal aid lawyer) that are meaningful but also very time consuming and stressful for conscientious types.   We live in a very high cost of living area, and while our fixed expenses are lower than many people of similar age and socioeconomic status—we are debt free except for an affordable mortgage, with no expensive habits–the whole working-parent-modern-life thing leaves us susceptible to throwing money at problems and “treating” ourselves in ways that we suspect we wouldn’t if we worked less.  While I wouldn’t say we live in Paradise, it is definitely a place where spending a lot of money can be fun, interesting and/or delicious.  We’re not interested in easing our finances by moving to a cheaper area, because we don’t want to reboot our community from scratch.  Our savings are on track for retirement at a typical age (we’re steady savers when working but also spend many years in grad school, including a spare PhD, not contributing to IRAs or 401(k)s).  Our savings for kids’ college are relatively modest, but we are taking a “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” and “you can borrow for college but not retirement” approach (our privileged kids’ grandparents have also started 529 plans).

Here are our four options for the future, ranked from least to most expensive, and I’d love to hear readers’ thoughts on how you’d evaluate them:

1)      Save up for a sabbatical year of living in another country with kids (the teacher could do this easily; the lawyer would probably have to quit current job).  This is on our “bucket list” of things to do with our children before they old enough to prefer international adventures sans parents.

2)     Save up for major house renovations to make our small home more liveable long term, including separate rooms for each child; a second bathroom; a real guest bedroom for visiting grandparents (who may in the far future want to live with us, so heck, let’s call it an in-law unit); a deck for eating al fresco.

3)    Same as #2, except borrow the money in order to enjoy the benefits of renovation much sooner, while locking ourselves in to higher fixed monthly expenses due to debt.

4)    Save like crazy in order to achieve financial independence (FI) before standard retirement ages.  Neither of us has any desire to stop working entirely, but working on a very part-time or volunteer basis would allow for more flexibility and creativity in our professional and personal lives.  Once we hit FI, we could dramatically increase our charitable donations, which we would really like to do.  I am not sure exactly how long this would take, because I am not sure how frugal we can really be and still preserve our equilibrium.

I can already hear you all saying:  since all of these options cost money, and you seem not to know what you want, why not just save as much as you can and decide later!  And for goodness sakes, these options aren’t all mutually exclusive—if you were financially independent, you could drag the kids on an international sabbatical every year!

There are a several reasons why I’d prefer to have a plan.  First, we are thinker-aheaders (if one were taking a deficit approach, we’d have anxiety issues).  Second, there are practical differences in how we would be spending our scarce free time today depending on which option is our top priority for the future (language learning! home cooking all meals!).  Third, to my mind, these options involve different mentalities with respect to our jobs and our finances, as well as our underlying value sets.  Trying to achieve FI early requires a substantial commitment to frugality.  Saving or borrowing money for home renovations entails a certain amount of doubling down on our paid work, while planning for a sabbatical involves thinking about detaching from our jobs.  And so forth.

So, thoughtful readers, how would you prioritize these options in our circumstances?  What additional questions would you ask yourself? 

Finding what interests me in a new career

One of us is job-hunting after quitting academia and moving to paradise.  I have been looking for jobs I want, but I haven’t been finding that many to apply to–I still have enough resources at this point to be able to focus my search on jobs I would like rather than taking any job.  I have applied for about 20 things and gotten 1 phone interview and no in-person interviews or offers.

What do I want?  I want something sciency and researchy, in the social sciences.  I am not a clinician and not a certified CRA.  I am not a biologist or pharmacist or engineer and I do not use Hadoop (I could learn if I had to but it doesn’t seem necessary now).  I don’t program (other than several standard social science statistics softwares and some dabbling in things like .html etc., but not like C++ kind of programming) and I don’t want to.

I have [#2: excellent] skills in data analysis, writing, editing, literature review, and many things about the research process [#2:  I fully vouch for these– she reads every paper of mine before I send it out and she’s helped me a ton when stat-transfer fails me, and more than once she’s saved my rear end doing last second RA work when I was up against a deadline and I found a SNAFU.  I’ve also shamelessly stolen a lot of her teaching stuff, but that’s probably irrelevant since she doesn’t want to adjunct or lecture.]!  (See the second table below)  I can do tons of research.

I am not an extrovert and interacting with people most of the time drains me, but I interact quite successfully in teams and research groups.  I’m not interested in being a manager of people in a pure managerial sense, though I can do some and I am experienced supervising teams of research assistants.

Ever since I was a little kid, every “career interest” test I have ever taken has always come out that I should be a professor, and it still does.  However, nope nope nope!

I played with this online thing for scientists and it was kinda enlightening.  It tells you, among other things, about what your values, skills, and interests are in a career.  Here are mine.

First, here are my values of things that are unimportant and important to me in a new career:  (for these big tables, click to embiggen).  I know this is a lot to ask for, but it represents the ideal.

Second, here are my scientific skills, what I think I am good and bad at:

Third, here are my interests:

The jobs it suggests for me include faculty at a research university (nopenopenope) and the things I am already applying for, such as research manager stuff.  I would be happy to manage someone’s lab, although I can’t put up with a job where the ONLY thing I do is make other people’s travel arrangements.  I could do quite a good job in something like research administration, if it focused on compliance and not budgets (though I can and will do budgets so long as it isn’t the *only* thing). I am good at teaching but I will never do it ever again.  I love collaborating with other scientists but am not crazy about managing people.

I would like to work for a nonprofit or the VA (which keeps failing to hire me over and over).  I’m not against working at a for-profit company though, especially if the pay is good and the work is interesting.  Program-analyst type stuff seems to be a title I come across a lot for job postings.  The site also suggests that I be an epidemiologist (interesting but I’m not trained for it), a clinical diagnostician (not trained for it and don’t want to be), and a teaching faculty (NOPE NOPE NOPE).  I would be fine as non-academic staff at a university.  I do not do drug testing, nor do I have any wet-lab skills.

You can be sure that my cover letter and resume are shiny, personalized, revised, and proofread by #2 [and, #2 notes, more importantly, the career office at her former grad school went over her resume when she did the change from cv to resume].

I’m not expecting to go in at the highest level, and I don’t really want to. I am definitely willing to work my way up to some extent, but not all the way from the proverbial mailroom. My retirement funds are anemic and if the job is really poorly paid, it might be more profitable to spend that time searching for a better job, rather than being tied to a job that’s both low-paying *and* boring.

Mostly I’ve been applying for jobs that I find on Indeed.com.  But I need to expand.  And yes, I know I should be networking more (and I swear I am networking!)– this post is part of that effort.  ;)

I promise I’m not as much of a special snowflake as I sound like here; I have skills that would really help an employer if only I could convince them of that [and, #2 notes, if she could find more job openings, preferably before they’re advertised…].  Help!

Grumpeteers, what say you?  How can I get a job that pays decently and is also suited to my skills, interests, knowledge, and background?  

How do raises work where you work?

I work at a university.  Every year, the university decides what % raises each department will be able to give on average (usually ranging from 0% to 3%).  The department decides whether or not to top up.  Sometime in the summer raises are determined (initially we all got COL raises that exactly matched inflation, then we got 0 raises because recession, now there’s a seriously awful “merit” formula that makes no sense).  In any case, raises are determined at exactly the same time each year and we know when to expect them.  We don’t have to talk to anybody to get them, they just happen.  (Though complaining about equity at step increases such as promotions might help.)

We can get out of cycle raises by getting outside job offers.

My DH is working a real job right now.  We have no idea how raises are supposed to work.  He was going to ask at his annual review, but unfortunately his annual review got cut short (to about 10 min) because there were delays and it got pushed up right to his flight time.

He doesn’t know, is he supposed to ask?  Is he supposed to make a case?  Is there an automatic COL increase?  Does he only get raises when there’s an outside offer?  We don’t know.  So he’s asking.  He doesn’t want to ask, but he will at some point because without cost-of-living increases, one’s real salary erodes.  (Plus the company is doing well, partly because of his efforts!)

In the mean time, that got me curious, how does it work most places?

How does it work for our readers?  Are raises automatic?  Are they tied to something?  Do you have to ask about them?  Do they happen annually?

How do you get your raises?