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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

Semi-related anecdote: when I was choosing between several grad school offers in math and physics, I visited a couple of top institutions, and at one math department I told the department chair about my dilemma of whether to continue in (pure) math or theoretical physics. I was basically told: look, if you graduate with a math PhD you'll likely find an assistant professor position right away, whereas if you graduate with a theoretical physics PhD you'll likely be looking at at least two terms of postdoc (assuming you're successful in both cases, that is). (I chose physics in the end.) There was one of the first instances of ideal clashing with reality for me.

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This is so simply not true, or highly subfield-dependent. Unless you are a superstar, there is no way you get a TT job without a postdoc in math.

> Unless you are a superstar, there is no way you get a TT job without a postdoc in math.

Seeing that my institution and lots more do have assistant professorships for new PhDs in math, and I even have friends who have attained such positions, this is very much true. Of course one needs to be relatively successful.

Edit: Okay, it appears that some people consider those positions “postdoc in disguise”.

This is exactly one of the points raised in the text. Non-TT assistant professorships are indeed postdocs, which often come with more teaching load than other fellowship-based postdocs. This is for example the case of the "Hills Assistant professorship" at Rutgers

Szegö Assistant Professor is one such example. For more on this, https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/15969

I was in a similar position with Physics and did several years of postdoc, toward the end doing some teaching too as it promised a better chance of a TT position. In the end, got the position but got disillusioned with the horrible politics along the way, I'd moved research area toward computational biology meanwhile and found that politics in Biology was way, way worse than I could cope with. Moved to industry with some collaborations still going on low key, onlly regret being that I didn't switch to industry sooner.

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