Well, I wasn’t willing to follow David’s lead in titling a post “Go Ducks!” but I am following his lead with good job news: I’ve just accepted a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon, to start in 2010.   I think the department is an excellent match for me, both in terms of research and in terms of location, so hopefully this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

By the way, don’t bother rushing over to the wiki.  I totally beat you all to it (though I guess I had a bit of an advantage).  We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.

I thought I’d let you all know my plans for the future — I am staying at MIT one more year and then moving to the University of Michigan in Fall 2010, where I will be an associate professor.

I visited Austin, UMass Amherst, Duke, Minnesota and Stony Brook, and I would have been tremendously happy to work at any of these schools. They all made me feel very at home, and excited about the collaborations I could have there. I wish I could split myself in six!

If you are a combinatorialist who is going on the job market next year, particularly one whose interests blend into various flavors of geometry and representation theory, you should be thinking about Austin. Obviously, I have no capacity to speak for Austin, but everyone I talked to was very excited about bringing in someone in that direction. And, with Sean Keel and David Ben-Zvi around, you will never lack for interesting problems to discuss!

Most of my co-bloggers also did fairly well. I know AJ will be at Stony Brook next year, and Noah at Columbia. Any other news?

A colleague of mine spoke to the deputy director at AIM, and while he mostly found out what you expect, there was one intersting tidbit in the email he circulated afterward.

She also told me that AIM postdocs will be asked to teach, possibly at places like University of San Francisco or even local community colleges.
There will also be workshops to help postdocs be more marketable on the tenure track market.

It seems strange that they would want people to teach, but not let them go to institutions that are more used to having postdocs.  Do local community colleges even want research mathematicians teaching their classes?

Also, this led to a discussion with my officemate about what actually happens in “workshops to help postdocs be more marketable on the tenure track market.”  I’m rather curious…

EDIT: OK, I was a little too snarky in my initial post.  There certainly are some valuable things one could do in such a workshop.  Just explaining what the various application materials consist of, with examples, could well be useful.  It does seem rather odd to emphasize it as though it were a perk of the job.

It seems that there is a second wave of postdoc positions opening now, administered through the NSF’s Math Institutes.  It sounds like they will be some kind of weird mix of the usual NSF postdoc and a position at one of the institutes, and specifically aimed at those who have struck out this year.  As we’ve discussed, I’m a little skeptical about inflating the number of temporary positions without creating permanent ones to match, but, in the short term, good news for anyone still looking.

So, maybe it’s a bit late in the season to be worrying about CV grooming, but I’m curious: what are people’s opinions on the talk list in one’s CV?

Obviously there’s some point where one wants to include every public talk one has ever given, and then clearly some point where one stops. Once one stops, then one has to decide which are worthy of inclusion, and it’s completely unclear to me how one decides this. How many is too many?  Does one slant toward recent talks? Toward a diversity of different talks? Toward particularly prestigious fora? This is the sort of point for which there seems to be no guidance online, so let’s create some.