And It is official: I will not have an academia job.

Stage 1: a suspicious insider joke

During the middle of March, I realized that I had not heard back from any schools I had interviewed with. It was not normal. Interview are like earthquake rescue: If I were not rescued in the first 72 hours, the time would be against my favor. At this time I was writing a review paper on bayesian prediction, and one key point I was making in the paper was that Bayesian prediction needs the sampling distribution while Bayesian inference does not. I told myself: hey, the interview application outcome prediction was a good example. See, I had been waiting to hear back from these schools for like a month. It used to be that the random variable is the binary result: offer or rejection. But here, I had implicitly knew that the outcome had to be negative and the only random variable was the time of announcement. Despite the likelihood principle claimed that the realized outcome would have the same likelihood evaluation under these two situations, I still had a tiny bit of hope.

Stage 2: a dream of self reflection

On Friday I emailed all schools I had interviewed with, and asked for the outcomes. Perhaps not surprisingly, I got negative news—None of the schools would make me an offer—the collapse of the tiny uncertain hope entailed a point mass of sadness. I had a dream immediately that night. In the dream I was the one in the hiring committee. I was criticizing my research in a conference room painted with walnut wood panels. I forgot the exact reasons I listed in that dream, but the conclusion was sound: this candidate had no potential and we’d better vote against. (To be fair, I do not think that is how the committee works, but hey this is my dream.)

Stage 3: the anger mode is real

Yes, the classical 5 stage grieving is real. I was soon in the anger model on Monday. I went to overleaf, and I changed my affiliation to “not have a job” in all drafts I was still writing. I also added an acknowledge that

“The author thanks New York Department of Labor, for the unemployment benefits he will soon receive to support this paper.”

Yes, I did look up the unemployment benefits on Monday, which was supposedly 500 dollars per week.

Stage 4: simulations

I started to talk to colleagues and friends about my sad news, and I kept asking them what I could do: tech or finance or stay at home. Reality was still better than my dream after all. I received many warm encouragements, and these encouragements were warmer than “I encourage you to resubmit.” I forced myself to think about what I would do. The journey of thinking was not pleasant. It mixed with a high dosage of regrets—and the regrets went more and more counterfactual—why I did not practice my job talk better as if it would make a difference, why I did my postdoc at all, and why I chose the academia path given it appeared so brutal. See it is hard to make a decision when you condition on other counterfactuals other than the observed data, but I guess sometimes the observed data are just too depressing to watch, so we either run unrealistic predictions in the fantasy, or repeatably check the model in the regrets.

Stage 5: TBA

Supposedly stage 5 should be acceptance. But I have not been there yet as I am writing, five days after the result being told. My impression is that pure acceptance or lack of grief is an ideal approximation. The grief stays there for a long while, presumably with some slow logit tail, or presumably it is eventually washed out by some next grief. I do not know. I lost my job to conduct that research.