Dealing with the psychological stress of faculty applications I am applying for faculty jobs. As you all know, it is a stressful and frustrating experience. Many institutions explicitly state that they will not contact candidates who were not selected for an interview. It is like feeling my way around in the dark: I do not know if I was already rejected, I can only suspect it. If I was rejected, I can never be certain about why this happened, and whether it is because of a reason that I have any control over. Is my application simply weak, and if yes, can it be improved at all? Did they have a particular profile in mind even if they did not state it? Did they already have a preferred candidate? Am I too old, in real or academic years (it matters, regardless of what they say)? Am I being disadvantaged by not having networked enough (which does not come to me naturally)?
I have not yet managed to secure any interviews. I am losing hope that I will ever succeed. I have no doubt that this is what I want to do, and I think that I am capable of doing it, but I find it more and more difficult to believe that it will work out for me. This causes a psychological block that makes it difficult to keep going, to keep rewriting applications, to keep working over weekends to get papers out in time to include in applications, etc. Don't get me wrong, I am not consciously giving up, but again and again I find myself having spent a day in front of the computer trying to work but not making much progress. This should not happen, it's been a while since I was a student. Yet writer's block and unintentional procrastination are worse than ever. By the end of the day I loathe my documents and find it hard to trust that they are any good, and just can't make yet another revision. What makes the application experience stressful is that I do not have a very solid basis to judge how realistic my chances are. My supervisor is generally encouraging, but that is not sufficient at this point.
To make this question concrete: I am certain that my problem is far from unique. How have you dealt with this, and how did you manage to keep positive and keep pushing forward? How do you decide in a non-emotional way when it's time to stop and give up?
I sometimes wonder if the fact that I am affected so badly by the situation, up to some psychosomatic symptoms, is a sign that I am simply not suited for a career in academia. One must have better resilience to stress and a better fighting spirit. A professor is responsible not only for themselves, but also for their students, and must support their students and postdocs through similar crises. If I cannot manage myself, how could I support others? This thought does not help at all.
I'm in a field where some positions get close to 1000 applications.  Here are the two pieces of advice I have for everyone on the job market.

Probability does work.  If you're a slightly above average applicant, the odds of getting any job from your point of view (in other words, not having any insider information) are at most 5%.  For most jobs, it's considerably lower.  However, if you send out 100 applications, all those 2-3% chances, plus all those 0.5% chances, actually do add up to something approximating a pretty good chance for a job.  (In particular, they are actually pretty close to probabilistically independent.)  This means you really should not think about any particular job; your chances of that job are tiny.  It's the mass of applications that gives you a chance.

Before the whole process even starts, you should have some idea what you will do if you don't get an academic job.  Having a plan is more reassuring than having no plan.  Also, having a plan gives you some baseline to compare any prospective job against, so that you don't end up in an unsuitable job.


As a professor at a university with a low-ranked PhD program, I make sure students understand how bad the job market is before agreeing to advise them.  I will only agree to advise a student after I've made sure they understand they most likely will not find an academic job after their PhD.