Drumroll please...

... I will be gainfully employed in my chosen profession! I got an offer from SUNY New Paltz, yay. I told the Kentucky folks so they are going to get back to me ASAP. That would be a tough choice if I got it. I also emailed the education/outreach postdoc with the deadline 5 weeks ago, and they have only just started reviewing applications! They snooze they lose, I guess. So this might be it!

A fun part of the call was that they said I was the unanimous top choice, from the faculty, Dean, and Provost. That's exciting! Hopefully that means I will have more negotiating power. But they did say that there are two more candidates that are acceptable, so they will go down the list if I don't work out.

Once again I'll tell you all what the offer is. I know that money talk is taboo, but it's so hard to get a read on what faculty should expect to make and how the negotiation process works that I'll go ahead and share. The offer was for $48k (assuming I get the PhD). Remember that my advisor said that means I could get $60k, which seems crazy to me at 20% more than the offer. They offered $30k in start up money for my research and said that I could ask for more. They also said that they would be willing to discuss start up for the astro program, since part of my duties will be creating that. I'll need to get things like a CCD for the telescope and equipment for astro labs, etc. That means I have a lot of budget researching and writing to do very soon! (What dissertation?) They also offered $3k in moving expenses and they went over the very nice benefits they have - much better than EKU. Actually the whole offer sounds better than what EKU would be, which I'll write about sometime soon.

The Dean also went over reasons why this is a great school, city, and job. That is perhaps because he and I were playing phone tag while I was interviewing here, so I had to tell him that's what I was doing. That part of the call was kinda funny because the Dean is a bit of a blowhard that seems to get his way a lot, so I think it pained him to have to try to impress me. I told him that because I was just interviewing here I needed to think on it, and they gave me until a week from Friday.

When I emailed my advisor he quickly wrote back "CONGRATULATIONS!!" I really don't see my advisor as an all caps two exclamation point kind of guy so that was funny. He then emailed again offering to talk to me about negotiations and stuff. I think I'll ask to meet with our Department Chair too to get tips from him.

So yeah, that's the exciting news! Now I really need to go to bed for my early flight back to Austin tomorrow so you get to wait until later to hear about EKU.