Career Update

So 4 candidates were interviewed for 3 positions here in what I called my "dream job". And 3 offers have gone out but not to me! But I am still the reserve candidate if one of them turns it down. There is some possibility that two of the candidates could get other offers that they would prefer. I heard this from the "chairman" today. I know who all the candidates are and all their info and have some info on where else they interviewed. The "director" wants to meet me at 4pm tomorrow. I suppose he'll tell me this and then discuss again the possibility of some other job for me here again.

Tuesday, I had an interview in a more northerly city. Really don't know how I did and more people will be interviewed next week. There, more normally, there are 4 candidates for one position. I'm not keen on a move to northerly city to say the least. But if nothing worked out here it would be better than nothing. I'd need to get used to hot humid weather (north here of course is closer to the equator). The job also sounded very hard as they want high performance in so many areas. Top universities focus on research and low ranked universities on teaching. Each wants to see some activity in other areas but you can focus more. In mid-level universities they want excellence in everything yet your infrastructure on the research side is weaker than in the elite universities. I think it would be hard to attract good quality grad students to my area at that mid-level university, when there are only 2 people in my discipline in the huge department. Yeah, there's a business school also at the university but they don't have a grad program in econ either. At the interview I said I would look to collaborate with 2 other unis in the city on a grad program possibly and benchmark practice elsewhere. I don't think they liked that. But in the fields of the people on the committee their department might be pretty good and practices might be different than in my field. Interdisciplinary communication is always hard...