The USPA invites you to a socially-distanced social outing Thursday October 15 afternoon-evening! We will be tide-pooling at Natural Bridges and then eating dinner at the park/on the beach.

To be there at low tide, we will arrive at the park at 3:30 pm (low tide is at 3:58). After an hour or so of exploring the tide pools, beach, and park, we will order dinner to eat at the beach (sunset is at 6:31).

If you are interested in joining us, please fill out this form. We’ll be meeting at the entrance to the park on West Cliff and Swanton Blvd.

If you need to drive and park, there is free street parking along Swanton Blvd (at least the east side of the street; the left has been opening and closing randomly).

So nice to meet the new postdocs and see some wildlife! Thanks for coming to our socially-distanced social event today @jahoey13 @FraserLaser1 @SumanKBera @jess7son @AlliNCramer @MeteoretteFinds @glodewijk_sci and others pic.twitter.com/XEtWELZ4Vk

— UCSC STEM Postdocs Association (@UCSCPostdocs) October 16, 2020

We are organizing a small virtual gathering on Friday Sept 25 at 4pm to chat, socialize and meet new postdocs.

Join us at: https://ucsc.zoom.us/j/96171940570?pwd=bmg1MGZ3bWh3dWMrelVyM2JOQ04rUT09
(Passcode: 249241)

If we feel playful (or competitive!) we’ll make a team and join the Games & Trivia event organized by the National Postdoc Association at 4:45pm.

There are a lot of events organized by the NPA for the next three days, check out their event list.

When: Fri July 24, 12:00 pm
Where: Zoom https://ucsc.zoom.us/my/jferna10
PLEASE REGISTER here: https://forms.gle/8ehPEkgnNXRkHvKE6

We will be holding a Zoom seminar on “A survey-based analysis of the academic job market“, a collaborative effort between Jason and postdocs at other institutions from around the country that was just published in eLife. This paper is likely of interest to students, postdocs and staff considering faculty career paths, as well as faculty interested in faculty hiring practices (please note most of our data is related to the life-sciences). We hope to have members of the audience share their thoughts, experiences and feedback during this informal presentation.

Abstract: Many postdoctoral researchers apply for faculty positions knowing relatively little about the hiring process or what is needed to secure a job offer. To address this lack of knowledge about the hiring process we conducted a survey of applicants for faculty positions: the survey ran between May 2018 and May 2019, and received 317 responses. We analyzed the responses to explore the interplay between various scholarly metrics and hiring outcomes. We concluded that, above a certain threshold, the benchmarks traditionally used to measure research success – including funding, number of publications or journals published in – were unable to completely differentiate applicants with and without job offers. Respondents also reported that the hiring process was unnecessarily stressful, time-consuming, and lacking in feedback, irrespective of outcome. Our findings suggest that there is considerable scope to improve the transparency of the hiring process.