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chemantics
New Contributor

Difficult Career Choice

I am a physical chemistry grad student, planning on defending soon, with a wife and two kids.  I have lined up a very nice post-doc in Germany.  But, I recently applied for and made it past the first round of cuts for an "emergency opening" assistant proffessor job at a non-research university in my home state.

I love teaching, and I want to end up close to my family, so the teaching job sounds pretty nice.  On the other hand, the post-doc in Germany is an awesome opportunity.

My question is, supposing I am offered the assistant proffesor job, do you have advice on what I should consider in making my choice?

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2 Replies
jmunster
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Re: Difficult Career Choice

Is the teaching job a tenure track?

Sometimes you can defer your start date, but since it's an emergency opening I'm guessing that's not an option.

I think you'll have to weigh your options and decide what is most important to you and your family. Do you think there will be other opportunities in your home state soon? I know in my city the job options aren't great so if something like this came up I would take it because this is where I want to live.

If you are worried about the non research part of the job, sometimes at non-research universities there are still opportunities for professors to work with undergrads and do some reseach projects.

Good luck.

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seifertke
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Re: Difficult Career Choice

Matthew, which path did you decide to go down....teaching or the post doc?  I found deciding what to do after grad school to be challenging, especially because I needed to take into consideration my husband's career.  Whatever you decided to do, it all seems to work out in the end!

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