Sittin', Waitin', Wishin'

Lish and I have been waiting a lot it seems. Waiting for something or someone to tell us where we should go at the end of the summer. Lish is finishing up his PhD program, yay! He has been working on his dissertation since last summer, and he's making some good progress. He applied for jobs last fall, and we're still waiting to hear back from several schools. (Reminder: he wants to be a professor.)

The application process for becoming a professor is very long. The applicants apply a year before they want to teach. They have to get the curriculum vitae, published papers, letters of recommendation, letter of intent, etc. all together, mail them all off, and then it's completely out of our hands. For months. It's very annoying to not be able to have any control over the situation.

Then the schools start going through their applicants. They narrow them down and call several who they are interested in. After the telephone interview, they narrow it down even more, to three or four candidates. The schools invite these few people to come onto their campus for a campus interview. The campus interview lasts all day, usually. The candidate meets most of the faculty, talks with them, dines with them, and then teaches them. They either teach a class or do a presentation about their dissertation, depending on what the school asks of them.

After the campus interview, the candidates are sent home and told to continue waiting for a few more weeks while they make the decision. The faculty then votes on a candidate, the name gets passed to someone higher up in the college or university for approval, the approval moves back down to the department chair, the department chair then calls the approved candidate, the candidate takes a couple days to decides yay or nay, gets word back to the school, and then the rest of the candidates find out their fate.

Waiting and waiting and waiting...

I'm tired of waiting! I know we don't have much longer to wait until we can finally determine our near future, but my patience is being pushed. We're hoping for some very good news! We shall keep you updated.