My experience on the tenure-track job market
Published:
Before anything substantial
This causal write-up is heavily inspired by Prof. Rui Bai at George Mason who had a similar post in 2020. I think I should document the process before my memory, excitement and frustration fade away eventually.
I have to make a same disclaimer as Rui, that this is based on a sample size of 1 and heavily in statistics and computer science (CS) tenure track (TT) job market. I did apply for roles in the US, Canada, EU and UK. I was only able to get interview and offer in the US. I will focus more on the experience side and especially on how it feels at each stage and less on instructions of what to do.
I wrote the post and used Prof.C(hatGPT)’s help on grammar and flow.
Why academic job market?
This part is not about whether to choose academia, only whether to go on TT market. The tough call of academia vs industry is postpone, both in my real life experience and this post. To be totally honest to the reader, I was never academia at all cost, especially as I have interest into quant finance, an industry that has stellar pay and surprisingly reasonable work life balance in many places.
The reason for me is that I think intellectual freedom is a real thing that at least worth a serious try, and I want to understand the job market. The latter was enough to justify going on market, and the first, if works out, is simply great. So at least in August 2025, these two pillars prompted me to go on. Another minor reason behind the decision is that my time at Citadel Securities in summer 2025 was not totally aligned with how I work — I was handed a dataset without knowing what it is. I was able to get something work but I was kept away from the full story. This experience, at that time, made me think quant finance is like that everywhere. I remember my manager was not quite impressed when I said my main drive is to know how things works and how to do things rather than to win. This made me think I should at least give TT job a try.
Did I try anything else? Absolutely. In fact I went on all job markets I think I can reasonably get interviews, namely TT faculty, postdocs, quant finance and tech research. They are all quite different and worth their own posts. I was reasonably successful in most but tech research where I was only able to land a single interview with ByteDance and was not able to get an offer from them.
When to do what
What I did I did the search in a rush. Ideally the process should start quite early. For me it should start May 2025 (I was on market for Fall 2026 start). However, I was interning in finance and until probably early July I thought I would just stay in quant. The decision was made in early August and I essentially wasted the entire summer when I could be preparing materials.
Some places might say something like application is open until fill but still give you a date saying applicants will receive full consideration if submitted by that certain date. Treat the date as deadline and submit by then. My earliest deadline is from Cambridge ML lab, on Sept 20th 2025 and I did not start preparing stuff until end of August so I had essentially only 20 days for everything and that was not ideal.
In chronological order, I made the call I will give TT job a try at the end of August 2025. Prepared for materials until around mid October when many places were closed so I submitted half-baked stuff there. After COVID the interview processes usually involves a first round (30min) zoom interview that I will elaborate later. These happened to me early to mid December 2025 for most places. I did get one invite in April 2026 that is somewhat unusual. Onsite (or “fly-out”) happened for me mostly in January 2026 and I had two of those. The April zoom eventually turned into a fly-out in late April as well but I think this is quite late in the cycle. In general CS is later than statistics managing the two can be challenging. I heard back from the first onsite the day after I was back as I was the last one being interviewed, and for the other one I heard back several weeks after it happened.
In parallel, most of my quant interview happened Nov 2025-Jan 2026, a period with lower activity of material preparing on the academic side and the hope would be offers land at roughly the same time as academic ones. I ended up having both active academic and quant offers in Feb-Apr 2026 so it worked out for me.
One annoying part about TT market is that the timeline is very long and messy with things overlapping a lot. As mentioned, first application due I had is Sept 20th 2025 and last one I submitted was not due until Jan 12th 2026. By the time last application was due I already had a handful of interviews, many rejections, being ghosted by many places and the time was maybe 20 days before I got my first offer.
What should be done differently One should start in May, use the summer to get materials ready and apply during the fall. In the mean time of applying one can get job talk and stuff prepared or do part of it in the summer as well.
Materials
There are many resources out there about what to prepare, but for the most places you need
- Cover letter
- CV
- Research statement, some places say 4 pages, some 3, some combined with teaching. Read their instructions
- Teaching statement
- Reference letters, 3-5. Some of them require one about teaching but I heard that people without it can still get the job requiring it so I don’t really know.
- Less common things
- Sample papers: this is not that uncommon, about half of places I applied to wanted them
- Teaching dossier: evaluations, sample syllabi, etc.
- Diversity statement: more common in Canadian places
- Mentoring statement
- Service statement
Just in case you want to see mine, they can be downloaded here (large zip file).