Castles and Coprolites

Following a discussion over on Twitter about whether you should apply for a particular academic job or not I decided to have a look through my archive of job applications. Having been a bit rubbish at blogging over the past couple of months, procrastination is back with a vengeance, as usual correlating nicely with many many deadlines. This analysis is something I said I would do if I ever got a permanent job - whilst the numbers are somewhat depressing, I hope it is informative. At the very least, it shows that rejection is the norm, even for someone who eventually did get a job. I finished my PhD in 2008, though due to an unusually long time between submission and viva, then corrections, I didn't officially graduate until 2010. I began seriously thinking about applying for academic jobs in 2009 (yes, AFTER I had finished; I was clueless). Looking back my first attempts were rubbish. I got some very harsh feedback from my first proper interview in 2010, which I found very upsett...

Warning, this post is going to be a long one. Well, relatively long as far as my blog posts go. It's the post I thought I'd never write, the one that so many others before me have written - it's the 'alt ac' career post! For those of you not familiar with the term 'alt-ac' is used to describe a career outside academia, specifically for those who were once, or aspired to be, on the academic career ladder. I myself am a bit of an odd case - on the one hand you could say I've had an extremely successful academic career so far. I've worked on some very high profile research projects, I've published over 30 peer-reviewed papers, some of which have been highly cited, giving me a h-index of 7 (apparently good for an early career reseearcher in archaeology, if you take notice of these sorts of metrics). I've won over £100k in grants to fund my research, despite being in a position where I have been limited in the type of grants I can apply for. My ...