Neogotiating your first academic job

You’re finishing a PhD and you’ve just gotten a phone call with a verbal job offer. Congratulations! And welcome to the bottom of a whole new pyramid.

But before you get to the new pyramid, you need to do something you’ve probably never done before in your life: negotiate a real job offer.

What follows is basically the distillation of advice given to me when I worked in management consulting, when I first graduated from my PhD, and again when I deliberated over my move to Columbia. Plus what I’ve seen watching friends go through the market, or coached students through. I think it applies both to research and many teaching universities, at least in my experience. Most of the good ideas come from others.

It’s that time of year (in political science at least) and will soon be that time in economics. In the midst of advising a few students, I decided to update my negotiation advice post.

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