This is my personal story & perspective on the topic (and some anecdotes), not general advice. If you are reading this for career advice, consider mine as one perspective out of many.
TL;DR? Since this is a rather long story, let’s put some conclusions up-front: First, if you are interested in an academic career, find someone who can tell you honestly what it is going to take to achieve your goals. Second, it’s good to have informed plans. Sometimes good things happen to people who have no idea, but don’t count on it. Third, most of us need a lucky break at some point or another, no matter how good the plans are. Fourth, the two-body problem is difficult to solve, and it remains a big concern for people who want to have a career in academia. Fifth, an interview is not the time to be overly modest as long as what you say is true. Finally, while some people appear to cruise effortlessly into academic careers at famous universities and on to fame, fortune, prizes, and academy memberships, for many others it involves considerable sacrifice and suffering. For example, you have to be able to deal with rejection quite a lot. However, a love of science can go a long way and keep you motivated when things are—or look like they are—not going well.
I do not come from a family of academics, so on that first point I did not have any advice from my parents. They both each had only about eight years of public schooling. In Germany, where I grew up, most people of my parents’ generation attended volksschule (‘people’s school’) and then became an apprentice with a local employer to get job training. These were the post-World War II years. My mother apprenticed as a typist in the accounting office of a local mattress manufacturer, and as far as I know my father trained as an accountant. My parents divorced before I was two years old. One of my two older brothers, Peter, and I stayed with our mother and lived with her parents, who also had no formal education past volksschule.
Because of the divorce, my mother had to go back into the work force. I had a lot of unsupervised time throughout my childhood and adolescence. I enjoyed this freedom, but I also often wondered why nobody at home seemed to care about what I was doing in my spare time, where I was, or with whom. I started smoking at age twelve and drinking not much later. We were also not well-off financially. My mother made very little money in her job as a secretary.
Where and when I grew up, every child attended four years of public elementary school and then went on to one of three secondary school types. I remember in third grade, perhaps, the teacher asked us to draw ourselves in our future job. I made a pencil drawing of myself in a lab coat, sitting at a desk with my fingertips on my temples. That was because I thought I would be a mathematician, and of course mathematicians wear lab coats and think really hard ... The point is that I liked math and seemed to be not too bad at it. Based on my teacher’s assessment in fourth grade, I went on to gymnasium (a school type, not a gym), which in those years ran from grade five through thirteen and was the only secondary school level in western Germany from which you could get general admission to a university.
Later, puberty hit me badly. I became a very lazy student, doing only the minimum effort in class, and trying not to get caught doing other things. As the end of secondary school approached I didn’t particularly like math anymore, but I also didn’t hate the subject, so I ended up learning some useful things. Among those were transformations among non-orthogonal vector bases, which much later turned out to be relevant for my research. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time and thought that these transformations were designed purely to torment school students. After finishing gymnasium, I spent nearly two years in compulsory civil service, which was a substitute for twelve months of compulsory army service. I refused to join the military because of Germany’s not-so-glorious (to put it mildly) past.
How did I get into chemistry? Back in the 1970s, almost every boy in a certain age range had a chemistry set. So did my brother Peter. Among one of the earliest experiments in the chemistry set instruction books of the period was the following: Take the beautiful blue crystals of copper(II)sulfate-pentahydrate and dissolve them in water. You get a solution that has a color not unlike the blue sky on certain days. Take some of the crystals and heat them in a dry test tube, and you see water droplets forming at the cool end of the test tube while the blue crystals transform into an off-white powder. Water coordinated to the Cu(II) ion in the crystal is expelled by the heat. In the process, the solid loses its blue color and the crystal structure falls apart. Take some of the white powder and dissolve it in water, and you get that beautiful blue solution again. These are examples of chemical transformations.
My brother must have done the experiments and then left a test tube with the blue solution in a stand on his desk. There were two small-diameter glass tubes going down into the solution through a cork stopper in the opening of the test tube. I was five years old at the time, and what looked like ‘straws’ in the test tube together with the blue liquid proved to be irresistible. So I took a mouthful and swallowed it ... I learned two things on that day: First, sulfate solutions taste horrible. Second, copper(II) solutions can induce rather violent vomiting, which is good because otherwise I might have poisoned myself. In the end, my brother got yelled at because he did not secure his chemicals while I thought about becoming a chemist.
I eventually did find myself enrolled in the chemistry program at our local university, in Siegen, Germany. Initially, the main reason why I was there was not my love of chemistry, which I had yet to rediscover. I was there to avoid working in one of the many local metal workshops. The economy was humming, the cold war seemed over, and these factories paid well, even if you had no formal job training. In those years, I wore glasses with a bright red frame, and I sometimes colored my hair blue or purple. I was also extremely shy. Let’s say that I didn’t fit in. I hated working in those factories even though it was easy money.
After the civil service was over, my father offered me a monthly stipend so I could attend university. Universities had a small per-semester registration fee, but the burden of tuition payments was collectively carried by tax payers. I would have been eligible for government student assistance to pay for food & rent, but my father was doing well financially in those years and I suppose the government would have clawed back any student assistance from him anyway. The stipend was hardly enough to live off, but it came without strings attached and I took it happily. (Throughout my student years, I was able to supplement the stipend with income from tutoring.) Thus I became a university student enrolled in chemistry. I also had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life. Nobody I knew could tell me what a career in chemistry actually looked like, and I was too shy to ask one of the professors.
For the first year at university, I kept my minimum-effort attitude. My domestic situation didn’t help with coursework either; I’ll spare you the details. The University of Siegen had a somewhat unusual curriculum, compared to other German universities and perhaps also compared to most universities elsewhere, in that there was a strong focus on the quantum mechanical foundations of chemistry. Because of this, already in the second year I took my first class devoted to quantum theory and the underlying mathematical techniques as used in chemistry. To my amazement, this was the first learning topic ever that I found truly, deeply fascinating. On a whim, I decided to find out whether I was capable of getting top grades in my courses. Relatively quickly, I became one of the best students in my cohort.
One thing that for some reason didn’t deter me was the very high workload that you have as a chemistry student. Looking out of the windows of the teaching laboratories where we took courses during the summer, you could see students of other subjects who always seemed to have time to spend on the lawns and enjoy the nice weather and each other’s company. Many of my fellow students realized at some point or another that chemistry wasn’t for them. Another difficulty was the outlook toward the final set of exams at the end of the undergraduate degree. The grade listed on the degree certificate was determined solely on a set of final oral exams, one each in organic, inorganic, and physical chemistry, and one in an elective subject which in my case was theoretical chemistry. One of these exams took about 40 minutes, and any topic of the curriculum, from the first to the last semester, was fair game. I knew several students who braved all those summer labs and passed every required course for the chemistry degree, but that mountain of final examination proved too challenging in the end and they never even attempted it. Others, including myself, spent up to six months full time to study for the final exams. (This is a good moment to reflect upon the fact that this would have been extremely difficult for someone who needed to work a job to cover living expenses.) Because of the workload and the final exam scare, the drop-out rate in the program was abysmal. We started in the Spring semester in 1990 with over 30 students. Only a handful of us finished the undergraduate degree, as far as I know. After graduation, I stayed on in the PhD program.
There I was in 1999 with a PhD in theoretical chemistry but still no idea what to do long-term. I knew that I loved the quantum theory of molecules, and to my surprise I had learned (by doing it) that I was not bad at computer programming. I also knew that I liked teaching, and I enjoyed spending long periods of time in a library researching things. There was a short-lived attempt at getting a job in the chemical industry. The German economy was not doing well in 1999, and the few jobs that were advertised for someone with my skill set didn’t look interesting. How about becoming a science librarian? The additional multi-year training required for such a job were not enticing. I applied for a position as a computational chemist at a research institute near Berlin and was offered an interview. Around the same time, I also received an offer to become a postdoc with Prof. Tom Ziegler in Calgary, Canada, following my application in response to a job ad in the Amsterdam Density Functional (ADF) program user’s mailing list. I thought that a stint as a postdoc would buy me some time until the economy in Germany recovered, so I canceled the interview in Berlin and took the job with Ziegler. I thought that I would stay for a year and then return to Germany to figure out what to do next.
Tom later told me that he hired me because I had programming experience with ADF but he thought that I was ‘one of those people who never get anything published’ (his words). It is true that at the time when I applied for the position there were no publications listed on my CV. Helpfully, my PhD adviser explained that this was his fault and not mine. Tom therefore offered me the job, but with a very low initial salary. In hindsight I can’t blame him. To his credit, he soon raised the salary substantially without me asking and told me I could stay for another year if I wanted. I guess it helped that I had my first paper with Tom, on the development of a scalar relativistic analytic-derivative DFT code for NMR indirect spin-spin coupling, submitted less than 5 months after my arrival in Calgary.
My postdoc research turned out to be incredibly productive, and I also fell in love with a student in the group, Eva, who was working toward her MSc degree. Therefore, I accepted happily when Tom offered me to stay for a second and then for a third year. During the second year, I decided that I would attempt to get a position as a professor and keep doing research. There was another postdoc, an extremely talented and productive theoretician and programmer, with whom I shared a house. We both applied for 20 or 30 positions in the US and Canada that Fall (2001). I ended up with one interview at a predominantly undergraduate institution (PUI), and I recall that the other postdoc got no interview. This was very disappointing and also worrisome. My interview turned into an offer, however, so I sat down with Tom to get some advice. I was very concerned that it appeared so difficult to get invited for a faculty interview. I was tempted to accept the offer and try to make the best of the situation even though it would have been challenging to continue my research at a PUI. Tom thought that I could land a job at a research university and asked whether I was ‘afraid of flying’. I understood this to mean that I should be more tolerant of taking risks. I declined the offer circumspectly and got back to my research.
Entering my third year in the Calgary group, I felt that it would not help my career if I stayed much longer. Research was still going very well. However, I also heard from multiple people that it was potentially problematic to get too comfortable in a postdoc position because people might think that you are not sufficiently flexible or employable. (A perception that you’re not a hot commodity can cause real problems.) Eva had always wanted to spend an extended period of time in Europe, and I wanted to head back to Germany and attempt to find a faculty position there. Accordingly, I applied for a junior researcher fellowship in Germany, and Eva applied to a number of schools for a PhD. She was soon accepted at a new international PhD school at the beautifully named Max Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung in Stuttgart, and I received word that I would receive an Emmy Noether Fellowship to support me in a semi-independent junior researcher position at the university of Erlangen. In celebration, we planned a month-long trip to Thailand right before moving to Germany at the end of October 2002. Shortly before we went on that trip I also submitted two more faculty job applications. One was to the University at Buffalo (UB). This was in response to an email to Tom by the UB search committee chair Philip Coppens, who was an avid user of ADF. The other application was in response to a job ad by Harvard University.
The Thailand trip took place before either one of us was able to afford a mobile phone. Internet was not available in the hotels in our price range, and in any case we didn’t have a laptop with us. Eva and I spent quite some time in internet cafes to stay in touch with the rest of the world. A week into the trip, I received an email from Coppens asking me to come to Buffalo for an interview before the end of October. I explained that I was in Thailand, would travel from there back to Calgary near the end of October and a few days later move to Germany, and asked if I could visit in the middle of November instead. The reply was that they couldn’t wait that long and he would put me on a ‘reserve list’. I thought ‘reserve list’ means no interview and no job, so I replied to Coppens that I would really like to show them that I was the best candidate and whether there was a way I could stop by on my way to Germany. This, apparently, made an impression and so Coppens suggested that after our arrival in Calgary I should fly to Toronto, drive to Buffalo, do the interview, fly to Detroit, and there catch the connection of our flight to Germany that was already booked (via Detroit).
So this is what we did. On our long flight from Thailand back to Canada, I sketched my research plans on a piece of paper. Then I had two days in Calgary, with the worst jet lag I ever experienced until then, to prepare slides for my research talk, write my proposal ideas on an overhead projector transparency, and arrange the additional car rental and flight. When I arrived in Buffalo, I was completely exhausted and still had massive jet lag, so I told the search committee that they would never see me performing worse than on that day. To add to the misery, in the evening of the first interview day I received a call from Eva telling me that she contacted the airline, and they would not let me board our flight connection in Detroit if I failed to show up for boarding the first leg from Calgary. She therefore booked me a flight from Toronto to Frankfurt, and I would have to take the rental car back to Toronto. The interview continued the next day, and at the end the committee asked me if I had some final words to say. I realized this was not the time for modesty, so I said ‘yes, I do have something to say’, and told them how I thought I was ready for the job and would do fine. When I left, I had a very good feeling about the interview.
A week later I arrived in Erlangen, after crashing at my mother’s place and sleeping off the exhaustion. I told my host, Prof. Bernd Hess, that I would perhaps not stay long because I thought I would be receiving an offer from Buffalo. Hess seemed quite happy to hear that; he had told me on another occasion that the majority of people trying to get into faculty jobs in Germany end up being unemployed... The offer from Buffalo indeed arrived a couple of weeks later, and I accepted it soon after. A rejection form letter from Harvard arrived a few months later. On August 1, 2003 I moved to Buffalo. However, Eva had just started her PhD research in Stuttgart and did not want to leave, so we ended up in a very-long-distance relationship. One of the major reasons why I took the job in Buffalo was that it was clear that Eva would some day also be looking for an academic position. We thought that our chances of solving the academic ‘two-body problem’ would be better in North America, compared to Europe where faculty spousal hires were basically unheard of at the time.
(67 semesters and counting, at the time of writing this piece)
Things went well for me in Buffalo, and I got promoted quickly. Eva eventually finished her PhD and took a postdoc position with Prof. Roald Hoffmann at Cornell University. It was great to be within driving distance again, after being separated by the Atlantic ocean for more than four years. Then, in Spring 2009, Philip Coppens and our department Chair came to my office and said ‘we need to do something about Eva’. Indeed, I had taken every opportunity to tell my colleagues about her and our long-term plans, or perhaps someone heard rumors about us looking for a joint hire. In the end we didn’t have to move. Eva started in the Fall of 2009 as an assistant professor in UB’s chemistry department and quickly rose through the ranks. I’m allowed to call her my favorite colleague. We finally got married in 2011, and we have three children together. “Happily ever after” and all that.
© 2023 J. Autschbach.