The Two-body Problem - Part 4 - Meanwhile

The job we did have, the one we had turned our lives on end for, was turning out to be not all that. You'll all remember how much trouble I had getting a job in the first place. That's the TT gig, we knew it when we choose this path, but what I found here was not what I had been hoping for, a fact that contributed to a lot of self-doubt and depression, until I started tapping into my larger network of colleagues and realized that I was not crazy, but rather the situation wasn't quite right.

It turns out that I'm in a really dysfunctional department and the overall culture of the University is really behind the times. I'm not going to go into specifics, but we'll just say that I'm often put in situations a normal pre-tenure faculty shouldn't be put in. Situations that make me consult my moral compass, and make me worry that when I follow it, I may feel some negative consequences. Think everything bad that the term "old boys club" conjures up and I'm living it.

Aside from that, I'm not a good fit for the education mission of the department. Most people don't know what I do and seem to get upset when I tell them it's not what they think I do. I have yet to get a permanant course number for any class I teach, which means I'm making up a new one every semester, and getting really low enrollment in said new courses. I can't put together a full committee for my graduate students because no one in the department has appropriate skills to fill those roles. These things combine with some of the cultural issues to put up big road blocks to my research program.

Despite that, I've been successful. In just under two years, I've received ~quarter million dollars in nationally competitive grant money for myself (well over 1.5 mil if you count the grant totals for all PIs), and published 3 papers, with 2 more currently under review. My teaching ratings are above average as well. I say these things not to brag, but to make the point that in most normal situations, I'm successfully meeting the requirements for tenure. I'm not a scientific rock star, but I can hold my own. I think it's important for anyone reading this to understand that I'm not whining, I've been making the best of a bad situation.

Yet, I worry. Not the healthy kind of worry, but the kind that makes you bite your tongue in faculty meetings. The kind of worry that made me have to think hard about whether or not to turn in a student for plagiarism because it might ruin my chances at tenure.

Finally, I'm in a master's only program, when I interviewed, I was told that we had a new undergraduate degree and a PhD program that would be starting up at the same time I arrived. Neither of these has materialized. I wanted to become a faculty member because I love both teaching and research, without undergrads and without PhD students, you're limited on both ends of that spectrum. So ultimately, this was not the job that I wanted.

Couple all of this with Hub's employment situation, and I was on the job hunt again.

This was not an easy decision. The thought of it actually made me want to throw up a little. But the thought of staying in this situation forever was even worse, so there you have it.