A not-so-great experience
Well, strap in. I guess I wanted to write about this experience because it sucked... A lot. My wife cautioned me against it, fearing it might look bad for the job market. But as the academic job market is crumbling, I feel like it should be fine. I want to speak out. I don't even care. We have fascism at our doorstep. Let me have my petty rebellion so I can stay sane.
So I asked for feedback from some grad students and a faculty member on my academic website and CV structure. If you're not in academia, an academic website is a crucial part of building your reputation. It describes your current research, houses your publications, and gives insight into what your lab does. A CV is just a long-form résumé where you list everything you’ve done. These are crucial for getting hired and for recruiting mentees.
As an aside: for academic websites, if you're of the R persuasion, I really recommend using the Quarto framework for building a site. It's fast, it's easy, and I think it looks super slick. For the CV, I finally got an Overleaf template (ModernCV). It's a bit... tedious to get it to look the way I wanted it to, but it’s still a lot easier than the Word document I was using.
So I was sharing my materials, and the grad students—as always—were super helpful and gave me great feedback. When it was the faculty member’s turn, he ripped my CV to shreds. Not the aesthetics. Not the structure. Just the number of published papers I have. Then he went through each of my published papers and called them shit—literally—based on what journal they were in. (He never read the papers.)
Yeah, I have some publications in lower-ranking journals (more entomology-focused), and I’m a middle author on a Frontiers paper (again, whatever). What’s worse is that he pulled out his own CV, calculated how long I’d been a postdoc, and showed me how many more papers he had in that same time period. The grad students and I sat quietly.
As if that wasn’t enough, I also had a blog on my website. I love writing. I love sharing my code. And one of my blog posts was about critiquing the design of my old research posters. Then he told me he’d never hire me because I seemed immature and unprofessional—because I joked that my research poster’s color palette was based on Megan Thee Stallion’s Hot Girl Summer. I mean—it was a sentence. But I really liked the post because it made me reflect on some interesting design choices. (Read it here: A design critique of my research posters(tab:https://damiepak.bearblog.dev/a-design-critique-of-my-research-posters/)
So the whole meeting ended up being a humiliating experience. In the middle of the day, I sometimes remember it and my blood pressure goes up.