For as long as we have been married and on the path toward a professorship for Jonathon, we have talked about how amazing it would be to work at Brigham Young University. We both graduated from BYU and believe that it is home to the very best students when you consider both academics and morals. It is also an undergraduate university where Biology professors get to teach classes AND do research. It seemed like the perfect combination for Jonathon, who is an excellent teacher, and will make a great Principle Investigator (i.e. lab boss). Well.... now it is official!
Jonathon's new appointment as an assistant professor in the Physiology and Developmental Biology Department (PDBio) was not without many twists and turns and drama. He originally applied for a position a year and a half ago right as I was going through my cancer struggles. Because of the emotional stress and time he spent taking care of me during recovery, he did not turn in his application until several weeks after the position opened. They emailed him back saying that they had already chosen who they were going to interview, but wanted to keep his application for a position that would be opening the next year. We moved on.
The next Spring, Jonathon was one of three who was chosen to interview for a position in Bioinformatics at BYU. The department wasn't a perfect fit because they were looking for a person with more programming experience, but he was a good enough candidate that he came in second. It took months and months of waiting to hear back, and we were almost convinced that we had gotten the job. It was extremely disappointing to come in second, but again, we moved on. (You can read about the interview here.)
Last fall, Jonathon felt like he was ready to go on the job market. The two previous times, he had applied at BYU because there was an open position, but he didn't quite feel ready. In August, he decided it was time to make the push to find a job. He applied at around 30 different schools. The job market for new professors is extremely flooded right now. The number of post-doctoral fellows far exceeds the number of professorships available. Several universities emailed him back saying that they had an enormous amount of applications (680 in one case), so it wasn't looking good. Then BYU contacted him and told him they were hiring for a new position in PDBio and asked if they could put his application in the hiring pool. Of course, he said yes.
On November 12-13, 2014, Jonathon again was chosen to interview at BYU, this time in the PDBio department. It was an intense two days full of interviews. He had one-on-one interviews with the majority of the professors in the department. He also had to teach a class (Developmental Biology) and give two hour-long talks to the department. It was stressful, but his previous experience seemed to help him feel a bit more prepared. Since we had already been interviewed by a General Authority, we did not have to be interviewed again. They said the hiring process would take 2-3 months to get all of the approvals from the University and the Board of Trustees (The First Presidency, 3 apostles, and a few of the General Presidents). Only then would we hear if we got the job or not.
Those 2 months were very long. We waited and hoped and got more and more anxious as the weeks passed. In late December, we got an email message that BYU was requesting a full background check on Jonathon. That was encouraging, but nothing official was ever said. Finally, at the end of January, Jonathon received an email asking for more information from him in preparation for an offer. Jonathon and the search committee chair, Dixon Woodbury, corresponded back and forth for several weeks. On March 6, 2015 we got the offer letter-- 4 months after he interviewed. It took two more weeks of back and forth negotiations before everything was signed and official. Jonathon's start date is June 15, 2015. He will have the first semester to set up his lab, and then will start teaching his first class, Physiology, in January.
It was a long, stressful process, but we are elated! Everything we have been working toward for the last 10 years is finally coming to fruition. Not only do we get to go back and work for our alma mater, but we also get to move closer to Jonathon's parents, stay within easy driving distance of my family, stay close to my cancer doctors, and get a substantial increase in our income. We are feeling so blessed and happy.
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