So you want to hire a professor!

Abstract

It's hard to believe that 20 years have passed since I wrote "So you want to be a professor!" (see PHYSICS TODAY, April 2001, page 50). I laid out the procedural steps that one goes through on the way to landing a tenure- track assistant professor position from reading the ad to signing the offer letter. Much has changed since then, particularly with the shrinking number of tenure- track faculty slots, the rise of video interviews, and the global pandemic of 2020. Nonetheless, I'm still on the physics faculty at San Diego State University. Figure 1 marks the achievement: I'm standing on campus at the same spot I was on 20 years ago in figure 1 of my previous PHYSICS TODAY feature.