People love giving unsolicited advice and saying they know someone who might be able to help during a job search. Here are a few major eyeroll moments. “But you’re a woman! and a woman of color, with a PhD in Physics, everyone should want to hire you!” — I mean, what? Hearing this during a brutal job search feels so horrible. Not only is it completely false, but it builds on the notion that people are being…

They’re always looking for physicists, right? — Some anecdotes . . . Whenever I go to job fairs (these have always been pointless for me) where a national lab has a booth, they always tell me, “oh yes, we’re always looking for physicists!” . . . this is not true. I applied to multiple positions at national…

Some background about my professional life and how I ended up in a horrible job search during a global pandemic. In the ten years since my partner and I finished graduate school, neither of us had ever had a permanent job. Yes, we’ve had full-time jobs in careers that we wanted, but they were 1–2 year contracts with specific end dates that we had no control over. In the winter…

I’ll be using this space to discuss my challenging job search in 2019–2020. This will not be a job seeker advice column. There will be no positive thinking affirmations, girl power, or proclamations about being a rock star. I will not talk about what I did wrong or right, because…