Wasting paper
Posted by Damien Pollet Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:12:00 GMT
Today I sent my applications for assistant professor positions in the french academic system. Well, that was fun.
Rant and photos after the jump.
To be an assistant professor (maître de conférences) in France, you first have to be qualified. Basically that means writing an extended résumé and use it to persuade two reviewers that you are worthy of applying. Because then you are only qualified, and you must apply in the next 4 years because qualification is a perishable goods.
So qualified people are allowed to apply. Which means: sending nearly the same extended résumé to positions you could fit in. Because it’s a national thing, all positions are announced at the same time and the applications are due with a common deadline one month later, but the precise descriptions are distributed over the hiring labs and schools. And because the final hiring decisions are highly unpredictable, all candidates apply nearly everywhere they can.
I applied for 16 positions, and in computer science this is the (lazyish) mean. By the way, you have to send 3 copies of the résumé for each position, even if they are in the same lab. Yes, that means 16×3×40 = more than 1900 pages and 64 envelopes…
In the end, I don’t know how common sense can be pushed into the system … Thankfully there are really useful initiatives by graduate students and just-hired doctors but they are more like workarounds rather than actual fixes.
Update: I just prepared two more applications so the page count is now more that 2100 pages (so just over two 500-sheet reams).
Update, april 24: Not stopping, are we? I just sent one more application…
