The Seat of Learning, Indeed

I've got to take my, uh, hat off to this idea. Rebecca Schuman at Missouri-St. Louis, who writes frequently on academic hiring, made an offer late last week that directly addresses the problem that many aspiring faculty members find themselves facing: search committees apparently want bushels of stuff. And the strong suspicion is that they really don't look at most of it - they just want to see you sending it. So she simply offered to pay $100 to the first two people who submit proof that they enclosed a scan of their butt among their supporting documents. This had to be a legitimate application, and she (wisely) set herself up as the sole judge of whether the enclosed material was, in fact, a scan of the applicant's rear end. (Some things are too important to be left to anyone else). The "Buttscan" idea took off in a big way, and by gosh, there's already a winner. I must admit, although I've never applied for an academic position, that I can see the appeal. At a previous job I found myself having to write lengthy reports every six months about what I and my lab had been up to, and I always wanted to include, smack in the middle of yet another paragraph about SAR trends, an offer to pay $5 to the first person who told me that they'd read that far. But I never had the nerve, sadly. On a related note, a former colleague of mine once threatened to slip into my office while my semi-annual report document was open on my computer, and slip the phrase "Help, I'm a woman trapped in...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Academia (vs. Industry) Source Type: blogs