15 years experience, 2 Oxbridge degrees, had a great research management position, many publications before DC came along. I took a break from academia and have been working in an unrelated job for the past few years to fit around DC. I decided to return to academia and have had 7 interviews but no job offers.
I'm feeling disheartened for a couple of reasons. I am not finding many jobs similar to the ones I had. I see an 'ideal' job about once a month and apply to it which leads to... ridiculously competitive interviews. The last one I had a pre-interview task, a test, a presentation and an interview with 4 people in what I can only describe as 'aggressive interviewing'. I had so much direct experience but felt a bit insulted by the whole process. No friendly approach whatsoever and I was even thinking about walking out at the time! Two interviews did go very well and the feedback was positive. But of course, someone with more experience beat me to it.
Job applications and interviews take so much time and I was expecting a job offer much sooner. Should I drop my standards or keep applying for similar jobs at the level I had in the past? It's been about 8 months now, countless applications, 7 interviews and no job offers. I feel like giving up. After these interviews I'm also not sure I want to return to academia at all and am losing confidence... Is it to do with my career gap or is everything more difficult in academia these days? Or maybe I've changed since I've had DC and shouldn't return to the academic environment after all. I loved my previous job but these days it seems all about REFs and meeting targets. Is it? Help!
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Returning to academia and feeling disheartened....
8 replies
Newjob19 · 05/05/2019 21:06
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