<p>I have been interacting with a professor at a solid east coast university for over two months now on a post-doc position that I am genuinely interested in. It is an engineering post-doc. He has not made me an offer, but has interviewed me, expressed considerable interest, and checked my references including my advisor. My advisor assured me he gave a good reference too. </p>
<p>This professor I'd like to post-doc with keeps sending me e-mails that I should wait, apologizes for taking so long to get back to me, and tells me I should have patience. I don't really bother him much except for a couple short emails back. From all I can tell, this professor does have the money to fund a post-doc, and money really isn't this issue.</p>
<p>The question I have is whether this is normal or I should be concerned. If a professor has the money to fund a post doc, why should it take nearly two months to make a decision? If I actually do get an offer, should I be concerned about this delay. Was this professor concerned about a "fit" in his lab. Anybody have similar experiences that could shed some light on the subject?</p>
<p>For a variety of reasons - that professor may also be vetting other candidates and is waiting to hear back from them; or perhaps he’s waiting on a decision from a funding source to see whether he’ll have the money for either you or the new project he wants you to work on (or both); or maybe he needs to get approval from the university before he can actually hire you (my offer letter took a couple of months to come through); or maybe he’s just wishy-washy.</p>
<p>It’s really impossible to tell. Some universities just have a lot of red tape, so it can take several weeks or months to get approval for things. It’s also just about response season for NIH grants that were submitted in September, so perhaps he’s waiting to hear from his program officer about his score or chances of getting funded. (I don’t know much about the NSF cycle, though.) I would say that this is more of a pink than red flag - delays happen, but the courteous thing to do is to tell you WHY there is a delay especially if it’s been 2 months. Even “We’re interviewing other candidates, so you should proceed with other postdoc applications” is better than silence. Telling you you should be patient when he hasn’t responded to you and this is a chunk of your career on the line is a little insensitive, but not a whole flag IMO.</p>
<p>But here’s the key: He hasn’t yet made you an offer. It’s not like he told you you definitely have the job and you’re just waiting for the paperwork; you don’t even have the job for sure (or that you know of). So I think you should do as you would when searching for any other kind of job, academic or not: Apply to other positions/post-docs. Treat this like a regular corporate job that you interviewed with but haven’t heard back from yet. If he gets back to you with good news, then great! You can withdraw your applications and go work with him. If not, though, you need other options. Postdoc applications will be due soon, so I’d apply elsewhere.</p>
<p>juillet, thanks for the good response. It helps me to know what to look for in the interaction with this professor that I’d like to post-doc with. Come to think of it, recently he did tell me something about the delay being due to vetting other candidates. He also told me I would here a firm “yes” of “no” very soon and again urged my patience. When he sent me this, I had kind of forgot about this post-doc and hadn’t e-mailed this professor in weeks. It sure seems like he offered the post-doc to somebody before me, who likely turned him down. Even if I do get the offer, this seems a little disappointing, however if I didn’t accept jobs other people didn’t want, I would never be employed. </p>
<p>Also, there is no doubt this professor does have the funding for a post-doc.</p>
<p>Anyway, my question is for your post-doc (or anybody’s out there) how long did the professor who wanted to hire you give you before you had to make a decision. I can’t imagine they’d let you sit on a post-doc offer for more than two weeks…maybe I’m wrong. In general, how long will professors let you sit on a post-doc offer?</p>
<p>When I applied, they weren’t explicit about the time - the program coordinator (it’s an NIH T32) just asked me to take a “couple of weeks” to decide. I didn’t ask how long I had, but I think I got back to them within 2 weeks. I assumed and treated it like a corporate job offer where you really don’t have that much time. I think it’s good to assume that you don’t have more than 2 weeks to decide, so ideally any postdoc you apply to should be one you wouldn’t hesitate to say yes to if the offer is right.</p>
<p>I agree with your assessment - good postdocs and academic jobs are competitive, and you have to be prepared that you may be the second or even third choice. That doesn’t matter, though: first of all, what matters is the job (and the paycheck!) and secondly, you may be #3 out of 100 applicants or more. That’s a good sign, not a bad one.</p>