The Waiting Game

You probably submitted your materials in the fall semester. However, for research-focused roles, you won’t really hear anything from anyone until at least the middle of January when the faculty can get together and review the applications. Be sure to check your email during this time, including your spam folder! At the end of December 2004, Michigan sent Wes an email saying that there was a mix up with his application and asking him to resend his letters of recommendation. Unfortunately, it was sorted to his spam folder and he didn’t find it until March, at which point it was too late. Try to avoid losing potential interviews for reasons not related to your merits.

While you’re waiting you may receive a bunch of emails that say “we received your application, we’re starting a folder for it” or “we have received all of your letters of recommendation”.

Example Timelines

Here are several application timelines (including information about acceptances and rejections):

There are a few things to notice about these otherwise-boring timelines:

• The spread of dates on the interview invitations is wide. Between Wes’s first (Jan 11) and last (Apr 4) there were almost three entire months.
• Even the spread between an interview invitation and an offer from one department can be long (see: Claire and Georgia Tech). Sometimes you are the first of many candidates to interview. Other times, you are choice #3 for a department with two slots, and they need to make offers to options #1 and #2 first. It is legitimate to email your host or the chair to let them know about your other deadlines.
• Many official offers will require answers before you have heard all of your offers, conducted all of your interviews (such as Purdue for Wes or NC State or UNM for Claire), or even received all of your interview invitations. CMU called to invite Claire to interview after she had concluded what she thought was her last interview (WUSTL). You may be forced into the uncomfortable position of rejecting a “known good” offer in favor of only the potential of a better offer later. This can be scary, and if you get the one job you really want you should take it, but Claire notes the opportunities she would have missed if she’d signed an offer too early. See below on hard-sell tactics.
• Sadly, explicit rejection notices are rare (especially without an interview) and are rarely early. Many places just never get back to you. Claire didn’t even track which schools that did not interview her officially rejected her and when.

Deadlines and Hard-Sell Tactics

Official offers will often come with deadlines, especially if you are the institution’s current first choice but they have others “in line” in case you reject the offer. This can lead to uncomfortable situations where you have to decide on one offer without knowing about your other potential offers.

It is basically impossible to avoid this by scheduling all of your interviews in one massive clump. Your interview offers will trickle in at a varying rate, and even if all of the dates are available for you, not all of the dates will be available at every university. Moreover, the practical limit is about 2.5 interviews per week – and 2 is much more reasonable. The travel time and the effort of being “on” for the entire interview are hard to appreciate until you’ve actually done it. Claire only had one 2-interview week, and she strongly encourages you to avoid it.

Another way to cope is to ask for more time. If you explain the situation honestly, many places will push back their deadlines. For example, Purdue was willing to push their deadline for Wes back to effectively May 2. Unfortunately, that can often still not be long enough (it wasn’t for Wes, as his timeline indicates). Waterloo extended Claire’s decision deadline to give her the chance to do a second visit at UIUC.

Finally, certain classes of offers rarely come with deadlines. Industrial research labs (e.g., IBM and Microsoft) can typically afford to sit on an offer for as long as you would reasonably like once it has been extended to you. Claire’s Lincoln Labs offer had a basically infinitely-extensible deadline. Similarly, some academic offers effectively say “you are our first choice and there is no one we will extend an offer to this year if you turn us down, so take as long as you like to think about it.”

That said, it is reasonable to turn down a position as soon as you know you are not going to accept it. You don’t have to/shouldn’t wait until right up against their deadline “just to be polite.” The sooner they know, the easier it is for them to make an offer to their next-favorite candidate.

Salary and Startup Negotiations

At some point, someone will make you an offer. This will include your nine-month salary and a startup package. Your initial contract will probably be for three years, at which point they will evaluate things and then re-hire you, and then a few years later (usually) you go up for tenure. The year in which one goes up for tenure can vary (e.g., at 5 years in Canada, 9 at CMU, 10 at Yale/Hopkins, etc.). Be sure to check.

Everyone knows everyone else and what the going rate is, so if you don’t do anything about it all of your offers within a job category will be pretty similar. Thus, negotiation.

You should negotiate

Negotiating, especially for salary, can feel unsettling. Graduate students tend to have little experience with haggling and often find doing so uncomfortable. Since your new salary will be four or five times what you are making as a grad student, it may seem like it’s not worth it just for another thousand or two. The trick here is that your raises by default will be cumulative/percentage-based. By the laws of compound interest, your starting salary is critically important over time.

Negotiation is also standard. The Dean/Department Head/whomever you’re interacting with expect it and will be neither surprised nor offended. With respect to startup packages, it may help to realize that opening offers are typically standardized in a given year for a given department. Meanwhile, startup needs vary wildly. Some faculty require specialized equipment, lab space, or travel funds to visit remote study sites. Offers aren’t typically adjusted for this a priori, instead starting at some “reasonable” baseline, with negotiation expected.

How to negotiate

Note 1: remember that although you conduct this process with the department chair (or hiring manager or whatnot) who sent you the official offer, it doesn’t hurt them and they are not really involved. If you ask for another $5k, you’re not taking $5k out of the chair’s salary or (usually) even their budget. The chair will typically convey your request to the dean, and typically argue for it. The dean will come back with something and the chair will relay that you. Do not adopt a zero-sum mentality – you’ll hamstring yourself. In industry the situation is even more clear-cut – you’re not negotiating with your manager, you’re often negotiating with someone in HR or Accounting or somesuch.

Note 2: it is incredibly helpful to get offer details in writing. Departments can be a bit reticent. Sometimes it really is a bureaucratic timesink to have to issue a revised formal offer mid-negotiation; sometimes the person on the other end would simply be happier if you didn’t have a formal offer to wave at another institution. Try to get details over email, and politely nudge your counterparts for official documentation, as much as possible.

Salary

The Taulbee Survey is a great resource for market rates over time.

They’ve given you an offer with a starting salary of X. How do you ask for more?

The competing offer: This is the easiest approach. If you have a higher offer from another comparable place, they will probably at least try to match it (this isn’t a guarantee – Wes’s UMass offer was not matched by NYU, for example). Even if the higher number cannot be fully matched, a school will often increase starting salary by some amount in response. This works less well between schools that are far apart in the rankings, or in places with very divergent costs of living. You may have to send them a copy of the other offer to show the dean.

Cost of living: Schools in big expensive cities may well have factored this into their opening offer, but you can ask anyway. Schools will sometimes make cost-of-living arguments to justify relatively lower salaries — you can counter this with your own research. You may be surprised — housing can be more expensive in smaller towns like Charlottesville than mid-sized cities like Pittsburgh.

Just ask: Mention that you think the salary is low or that (you’ll never do this, but hey) you’re a strong researcher with a promising research career coming from Berkeley with a better-than-respectable resume and that you think you’re worth a bit more.

Evaluate benefits, especially health care, along with salary offers. One of the offers Claire received included a fairly high salary compared to her other offers, but provided notably expensive health insurance that largely counteracted the salary advantage. You can mention this type of issue in negotiation conversations.

Regardless, you never want to turn things into an “or-else” or “ultimatum” situation. Phrasing is key: “your offer is not the most attractive offer available to me” rather than “give me more or I’m leaving.” The fact that they made you an offer means that they want you; they’re sort of on your side.

It’s also valid to ask to what extent the salary is negotiable. In many places (e.g., Berkeley, Microsoft) you obtain permission to hire someone at a certain “level” or “rank” or “band” and that strictly limits the starting salary range. Claire found that there was wide variability in the flexibility that schools had regarding salaries, especially between state schools. In her experience, state and public schools are free and open with the details of their offers with everyone, because their salaries are typically public knowledge. Department chairs at private schools often keep such details very close to the vest.

Startup package

The idea behind a startup package for tenure track positions is to help a new faculty member bootstrap their labs to success over the first 2–3 years, giving them time to independently raise money via grants. The startup package should therefore include money for graduate students (two students for two years each is typical), travel, equipment, and some way to cover your Summer salary for the first year or two. It should also include discretionary funds. Offers sometimes fold some-to-all of the useful startup categories (travel, equipment, summer salary) into discretionary.

You’ll probably find it easier to change your startup package than your salary. You can try to ask for more students, more discretionary funding, or for some-to-all of the startup package to be discretionary (e.g., “I will be able to live with the amount of money you’re offering me if you allow me to spend it any way I like”).

This is easier if you can justify your request(s). For example, Claire blocked out some travel plans (for some reason, SE conferences in 2013-2015 were all in far-flung locations) and detailed computing equipment. When negotiating, Madeline provided universities with a detailed spreadsheet outlining her desired startup budget. This budget included line items for travel and research group morale activities, such as lab lunches. The largest part of her budget related to equipment that she needed for her research. Depending on the school, she requested funding for a combination of an eye-tracker, an fNIRS machine (a neuroimaging device), and several Apple Vision Pros. The specific combination varied based on the existing resources at each school. For instance, at one university, she requested a smaller fNIRS machine designed to integrate with an existing one, allowing her to focus the negotiation on other aspects of her budget.

We recommend that if you are negotiating with universities for equipment, you first inquire about the equipment the institution already possesses. This will allow you to justify the necessity of new equipment and explain how it will complement the department’s existing resources. For large purchases (e.g. Madeline’s fNIRs machine), we also recommend that you reach out to a company representative to get an exact quote that you can forward to departments. Overall, Madeline was able to more than double allotted equipment or discretionary funds at multiple universities.

Beyond equipment, we also recommend that you ask about: (1) the degree to which TAing can cover a student cost, and policies/norms (e.g., do all first year students typically TA? Does that render them free to their advisor?), (2) department policies on faculty/student equipment, (3) the computing facilities, and what kinds of availability guarantees they provide, and (4) whether costs such as IT support, compute time, or printing are charged to faculty funds. Some departments replace faculty and student computers every couple of years out of a dedicated fund. In others, all such replacements come from faculty budgets. By the way, everyone will tell you that they have state-of-the-art computing facilities that will meet your needs perfectly. Your goal is to identify exactly what you need to make sure that it’s actually available. It’s a good time to plan to get a beefy compute server, or ensure that your equipment funds can be spent on, e.g., EC2.

Find out when your startup funds expire. You can ask to push that date out. In addition, make sure (in writing) that your grad student funding includes the summer months. A friend of Wes’s ended up in a situation where he “took their word” that it did, and they came back to him later and made a fuss because it wasn’t written in the contract. This advice (“get it in writing”) applies to basically everything, perhaps especially anything about lab space, and the teaching leave you can expect as a new hire.

On the subject of Canada: you can definitely negotiate with Canadian schools just as much (if not more so, in some cases) as you can with US schools. Note, however, that offers from Canada are basically incomparable in every way to offers from the US, because their funding system is completely different, so comparative negotiation is hard. Note also that Canadian schools are especially careful about avoiding salary inversion, but that, like the vast majority of US state schools, their salary information is public. Look it up for your negotiation purposes.

Results

By some combination of these approaches (considering and comparing across all offers) Wes was able to increase his (lowest) starting salary by 3.6% and double his (lowest) startup funds. Claire did not track her “haggling success” in this way, but she negotiated at least a little bit with every department that made an offer on both salary and startup, and in all cases was met at least in the middle on at least some portion of her requests.

Industrial salaries are effectively incomprable to academic salaries and departments will usually be unwilling to discuss matching them, though may raise a starting salary a bit in response to such a competing offer. Note that raises in industry are much more common, as is job switching, and jobs often include bonuses and equity.

Company Trivia: Friends of Wes’s at IBM have suggested that you should ask for another $10,000 right off the bat (and that they’ll do it without blinking). If for some reason you can’t bring yourself to do that that it would be “criminal” not to ask for $5,000. However, multiple data points at Microsoft Research suggest that it is very difficult to haggle for starting salaries there because of internal strictures; the same goes for Google. Wes only knows of one success story haggling at Microsoft, and Claire has never heard of anyone succeed at Google.

Finally, if you think you want to haggle but you need more advice about it, email your local department head (or past department heads). They have probably seen it many times from both sides of the fence and are often willing to give advice (it worked for Wes).

Dealing With Rejection

After you have had an interview with a place there are basically only two reasons for them to reject you:

• They “couldn’t build a consensus.” Variants on this phrase are common.
• You were their second or third choice, and one of the candidates they offered the job to first, accepted.

Many of the factors that can lead those situations have nothing to do with you. For example, research area is often a big concern in hiring. If there’s only one position available, and there was also a really amazing Theory candidate, and the existing theory faculty won the argument, you may be out of luck, no matter how great you were.

Additionally, hiring decisions aren’t typically decided by a strict majority vote. A new hire is a big investment of departmental time and energy, especially since they’ll (hopefully) be around for a long time (e.g., with tenure). It’s therefore important that everyone be more or less on board. Perfect agreement amongst a group of professors is rare-to-unheard-of, but if more than a couple of people are relatively less enthusiastic (or a couple of people are opposed outright), no matter the reason, a department is unlikely to be able to make an offer.

Rejection can be hard. Try to remember that the fact that you were offered an interview at all means that at least a few people there think highly of you, and almost certainly still do.

You should tread carefully in the time period after your interviews but before your official offers. Many department chairs have told Wes that they view it as part of their job (or their responsibility to the department) to put the brightest face on this possible and essentially to “string you along” or “never say no” (and thus keep as many good options for the department open as possible). Thus a department chair saying “we’re still deliberating” may well mean “we’ve made a job offer to someone else already and we’re waiting to see how that goes”. It has been suggested that grad students who are naive about the interview process will interpret “we’ll get back to you in a week or two” the wrong way and may thus end up waiting too long for a job offer that never arrives. In such a case you should talk to your host or other department members in your area to get the inside scoop.

Deciding

If you’re having a hard time deciding, it’s quite legitimate to go on a second visit (or two). Claire found these quite informative. She and her partner went on such visits together and arranged a “date night” at each one in an effort to simulate what it might be like to live in the place in question. As mentioned, Claire’s partner also did onsite interviews with companies or otherwise consulted with department members or others about employment opportunities on such visits.