Academic Job Search - Prologue

Before I started graduate school, I thought I had a clear plan what to do for my dissertation and thereafter. I was so lucky that I had great professors as advisors during my undergraduate study. They were clear examples to me how to be a researcher and how to succeed. Then I went to two different countries for my MA and my PhD studies. I had worked on and around the same topic for all of these studies, which made my student life easier and which also made me a little bit obsessive about the topic. Anyways, it went by all the ups and downs. You can hear a similar story, I guess, from most of the recent graduates.

Before I graduated, I helped writing a grant proposal at the university I was about to graduate. My plan was to continue my lovely research topic and to contribute to the tiny field I am in. I thought my research proposal was good enough to attract the reviewers. I also thought staying at the same university with my wife was a wonderful idea. But, unfortunately, it didn't work. There could be plenty of reasons why the project wasn't funded (there was and is and will be an economic recession in the US after all). Past is past. Yet, I didn't have a plan B. Since I am good at what I am doing, I thought *somebody* might help me find a post-doc position. Apparently, that was too much expectation.
I didn't know what to do. Meanwhile I received my PhD degree but wasn't that much happy because I didn't have a job. Somebody would say why I didn't postpone my graduation. I couldn't because I received a dissertation fellowship which simply required the recipient to graduate in 12 months.