How I Applied Rule #3

In the early spring of 2011, my academic-job hunt took an interesting turn. At the time, I had a verbal offer from Georgetown University, but nothing in writing, and as my postdoctoral advisor told me, “If it’s not in writing, it doesn’t count.” While waiting for the official offer, I received an interview invitation from a well-known state university with a well-funded research program. Deciding how to navigate this career conundrum was vastly simplified by my quest, which was under way at the same time. In particular, it was my investigation of the value of control, as detailed in Rule #3, that provided me guidance.

Rule #3 argued that control over what you do and how you do it is such a powerful force for building remarkable careers that it could rightly be called a “dream-job elixir.” When you study the type of careers that make others remark, “That’s the type of job I want,” this trait almost always plays a central role. Once you understand this value of control, it changes the way you evaluate opportunities, leading you to consider a position’s potential autonomy as being as important as its offered salary or the institution’s reputation. This was the mindset I took into my own job search, and it helped me reenvision my choice between accepting Georgetown’s offer or delaying it to go interview at the unnamed state university.

There were two important points I noticed when I started evaluating my options through the lens of control. First, Georgetown was just starting up its computer science PhD program as part of a more general campus-wide investment in the sciences. Throughout my job-hunt process, my PhD advisor at MIT had been telling me about her experiences, early in her own career, working in Georgia Tech’s computer science department during the period when it, too, was first transitioning toward a research-centric program. “In a growing program, you’ll always have a say,” she told me.

By contrast, at a well-established institution, your position in the hierarchy as a new assistant professor is clear: at the bottom. At these universities, you often have to wait until you’re a full professor, years and years into your career, before you can start affecting the program’s direction. Until this point you follow along with what gets passed down from on high.

The second thing I noticed was that Georgetown’s tenure process was going to differ somewhat from the pattern of standard well-established programs. At a large research institution, tenure happens as follows: Higher-ups in the administration send out letters to other people in your general field and ask whether you’re the top person in your particular specialty. If you’re not, they’ll fire you and try to hire whoever is. Some places go so far as to essentially tell their new hires not to expect tenure. (Academic-job markets are so tough, and with so much more available talent than open positions, they can get away with this.)

If your specialty is new—as mine is—and they can’t therefore find experts with an opinion on it either way, you’re going to have a real hard time keeping your position, as there’s no one out there to validate your stature. Because of this, the system rewards conformity for junior faculty: That is, the safest route to tenure is to take a robust research topic that already has lots of interest and then outwork your peers. If you want to innovate, wait until later in your career. In his famed “Last Lecture,” the late Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Randy Pausch captured this reality well when he quipped, “Junior faculty members used to come up to me and say, ‘Wow, you got tenure early; what’s your secret?’ I said, ‘It’s pretty simple, call me any Friday night in my office at ten o’clock and I’ll tell you.’ ”

Georgetown, by contrast, made it clear that they weren’t interested in this explicit comparison-based approach to tenure. At this stage in its growth, the computer science department was more focused on developing star researchers than trying to hire them away. In other words, if I published good results in good venues, I could stay. Without pressure to choose a safe, pre-existing area to dominate, I would therefore have much more flexibility in how my research program unfolded.

Viewed from the perspective of the control I would enjoy over my career, Georgetown was clearly more attractive than the well-established state university. Before finalizing my decision, however, I took some time to reflect on the other insights of Rule #3—insights that nuanced its otherwise enthusiastic endorsement of autonomy. During my quest, for example, I discovered two traps that typically trip people up in their search for control. The first trap was having too little career capital. If you go after more control in your working life without a rare and valuable skill to offer in return, you’re likely pursuing a mirage.

This was the trap tripped, for example, by the many fans of lifestyle design, who left their traditional jobs to try to make a living on passive income-generating websites. Many of these contrarians quickly discovered that the income-generating piece of that plan doesn’t work well if you don’t have something valuable to offer in exchange for people’s money. This trap might not seem relevant to my job hunt, as the academic-search process usually demands large stores of career capital—in the form of peer-reviewed publications and strong recommendation letters—before a candidate has a possibility of earning an offer. But there are departments lurking out there that will attract second-tier candidates (i.e., those without much career capital) with the allure of the autonomous academic life, but then, once they arrive on campus, saddle them with an overwhelming amount of teaching and service responsibilities. In other words, even in this rarefied world, one must still be wary of control mirages.

The second trap describes what happens when you do have enough capital to successfully make a shift toward more control. It’s at this point that you’re most likely to encounter resistance from others in your life, as more control usually benefits only you. Fortunately for me, my closest advisors at MIT encouraged me to pursue the flexibility offered by a fast-growing program like Georgetown’s. But there were certainly those farther out in my professional orbit who were more resistant to this decision. To them, pounding a well-trod path at a well-established university was the safest route to the desired outcome of tenure and a good research reputation. The personal benefits of having more control over my work were not on their professional radar, so any decision outside the safe decision was deemed alarming.

While researching Rule #3, I came across a useful tool for navigating between these two traps. I called it the law of financial viability, and described it as follows: “When deciding whether to follow an appealing pursuit that will introduce more control into your work life, ask yourself whether people are willing to pay you for it. If so, continue. If not, move on.”

Ultimately, this was the law that helped me finalize my own career decision. Georgetown offered much greater potential for control over what I did and how I did it. This seemed clear. Furthermore, they were willing to pay me well for this move toward autonomy, both financially and in terms of support for my research initiatives. According to the law of financial viability, I could therefore be confident that in going to Georgetown I would be avoiding both control traps: I had enough career capital to exchange for the potential flexibility and could confidently ignore the status quo–themed voices of resistance. So I turned down the interview request from the state university and held out for Georgetown.