A recent conversation I had — starting with a postdoc (not one of mine) and then continuing with others — has me curious about the factors that influence when people start applying for tenure track jobs. I’ve created a poll to try to get insight into those factors. Please fill out this poll if you have considered applying for tenure track positions (or their equivalents in other countries), even if you haven’t actually applied for any yet. I’ll leave the poll open for a few days, and hope to have a post with results appear some time next week.
Update: For the questions, if you applied/got an interview/got an offer before getting your PhD, choose “0”. If you applied/got an interview/got an offer after getting your PhD, but within a year of getting your PhD, please choose “1”.
Dynamic Ecology 
From your experience as mentors/supervisors:
After a postdoc/PhD-student decides to stay in academia and wants to apply for TT, did you ever gave that person the advise to wait (one or two years) to apply for TT? If yes, why?
No, I disagree with that advice and would never give it.
Really? What if you had a senior grad student or a postdoc with no publications?
To combine Jeremy & Meg’s points, I guess I would say I could imagine scenarios where I would tell a student not to apply because they were nowhere close. But in practice I’ve never been in that scenario. Its much more common that a student thinks they’re not ready but they are. So the default advice for me (e.g. to random people I talk to at conferences but don’t know very well) looks like Jeremy’s. Even if a student is a little on the short side of getting a job (which is the worst case scenario I think is likely), I think the experience of applying is still useful (and probably educational about what they need to work on to make themselves more competitive).
The poll works very poorly on a smart-phone (at least my android); can’t access the options that apply. This may skew the results somewhat….
I’m sorry it isn’t working well for you! I don’t know if there’s a way for me to fix it, but will try googling it to see if there’s a solution.
After some perseverance I managed, it took some elarging and shrinking and clicking and eventually it would scroll to where I needed. So no bias here! Thanks for your concern 😉
Glad it worked! I wonder if part of the problem was that I changed the default size settings, thinking it would help keep people from needing to scroll as much. But I wasn’t considering phones when I did that! Next time, I will stick with the default!
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