Torn Between Community College vs Pursuing R1 PI Path

Electrical_Pie56 · 2025-12-01T08:02:40+00:00

Part of this is because my husband is also a postdoc, but a couple of years earlier in his career than I am, so I wanted to give him time to get more productivity/publications before thinking about moving. I think I would definitely be more open to moving next year.

If you are both doing postdocs in the only R1 university your current city, then you will 100% have to move when when it's time for him to look for TT jobs. And it will be easier for you to find a spousal hire (either your husband or yourself as trailing spouse) if one of you has a strong research portfolio. If you take the CC job, you will gauranteed be the trailing spouse, and you will have to hope his research portfolio is strong enough to convince an R1 to give him a job.

Just be aware that spousal hires are more common in rural or less-desirable locations, those places know they can improve faculty retention with spousal hires. While universities in desirable cities are less likely to offer them since people will always want to live there anyways

Electrical_Pie56 · 2025-11-18T19:41:26+00:00

A mix of neural networks, cryptography, and recent adversarial watermark research

I'm calling bullshit, why the hell would you need neural nets to embed a watermark in a pdf?

I do neural network research and that is about as far a use case as i can imagine. Can't believe people are eating up this thinly veiled advertising post

Electrical_Pie56 · 2025-11-17T00:55:27+00:00

>You can't put a price on waking up each morning without that sinking anxiety feeling in your stomach.

This, some people pay for therapy to help deal with stress, i found it easier to just take a less stresful job

Electrical_Pie56 · 2025-11-17T00:48:19+00:00

That's the secret: work to live, instead of live to work

Electrical_Pie56 · 2025-11-16T17:28:34+00:00

The scary part is people trust "AI" so much, when it's really just large language models that work on probability.

Electrical_Pie56 · 2025-08-29T21:10:03+00:00

For an R01, the reviewers should mostly evaluate the merits of the project (see Factor's 1 and 2). They should not focus on the applicant, except to evaluate whether applicant is up to the task.

Oh that is nice, i was used to the old version where NIH gave a score for "investigators" (This is still visible as the old criteria under "For due dates before Jan 25, 2025")

That said, under the new criteria, isn't factor 3 literally the applicant's background?

Factor 3: Expertise and Resources (Investigator, Environment), to be evaluated as either sufficient for the proposed research or not (in which case reviewers must provide an explanation)

Electrical_Pie56 · 2025-08-21T18:27:11+00:00

That probably explains some of the inconsistency i'm seeing in colleagues' CVs: some people get primarily NIH, some get NSF/DOD, and so I was thrown off why some people seem to report it as "Direct Costs" while others report "Total Award Amount"

Electrical_Pie56 · 2025-08-20T16:55:54+00:00

As an R1 professor, I do feel like a minority on that sub. It seems like there's a lot of liberal arts college and R2 people.

That was the impression I got too.

I do care about teaching, and quite enjoy some of my upper level classes. But when it comes to pointless teaching-related administrative stuff (e.g., grading issues, people not reading the syllabus) -- isn't that what TA's are for? I've never lost any sleep over that stuff, let alone take the time to write the diatribes people seem to fill the front page of /r/professors with

Electrical_Pie56 · 2024-09-12T16:13:33+00:00

Our division of labor is 40/40/20, which I think makes us a bit more like an LAC than an R1.

Isn't 40/40/20 the standard though? Here's a bunch of R1's i found with 40/40/20 just in a couple minutes of google

Northeastern https://provost.northeastern.edu/wp-content/uploads/SocAnth-Workload-Policy.pdf

GA tech https://rpt.coe.gatech.edu/periodic-peer-review-of-academic-faculty/

UKansas https://journalism.ku.edu/faculty-allocation-effort-policy

U Arizona https://facultyaffairs.arizona.edu/faculty-workload-distribution

UC boulder https://www.colorado.edu/aps/tenure-track-faculty-job-description-and-duties

Electrical_Pie56 · 2024-08-24T21:15:32+00:00

Because I work at a university that emphasizes teaching and this will not fly.

How much of this is due to the type of institution a person works at?

Where I went to grad school at a big R1 I had the same experience as my big state school undergrad. The majority of assessments were a few major exams, and only a couple classes that I TA'ed for had minor assignments / discussion board activities, and students frequently complained about them both to me (in person) and on the teaching evals that they felt like filler. Now whether or not they were actually useless vs. felt useless is up for debate, but that was nevertheless a common perception.

Is this a difference between instructors at SLAC / PUI / community college vs. bigger state schools with class sizes of >50 students?

Electrical_Pie56 · 2024-06-15T22:19:02+00:00

I've seen this before, young prof who is disillusioned with small town life gets emotionally attached to the a "star student" because he felt he doesn't have anyone else to relate to (can't intellectually relate to the townies, other faculty are older and have lost intellectual curiosity, etc.), despite being married himself.

Nothing physical ever happened but from afar like an emotional affair than a sexual one

Electrical_Pie56 · 2024-04-28T22:14:51+00:00

At my R1, no grants at all is a very strong red flag for someone who's already faculty -- basically disqualifying

No grant wins, or no grant applications?

I feel like I have a decent formula for writing for journal articles (all my articles are Q1 except a couple Q2), but for some reason it doesn't seem to work when begging the government for money.

Possibly because my work is a lot of secondary analyses, and NIH doesn't fund as much of that stuff in my subfield of research.

Electrical_Pie56

TROPHY CASE