Invitation to Departments Seeking New Faculty

Potential candidates are gathering to meet you at the ACS National Meeting. This fall, 74 postdoctoral scholars and senior graduate students will gather at the Academic Employment Initiative (AEI) poster session at SciMix looking to meet with university recruiters on Monday, 8-10 PM, August 17, 2009 in the Walter E. Washington Convention Center – Hall D. The AEI Poster Session is a program designed to support the academic hiring process by making it easier for departmental representatives to make initial contacts and meet informally with candidates.

The first AEI Poster Session began in the fall of 2004 as an ACS Presidential Program funded by the National Science Foundation. Since then the AEI Poster Session has been a part of every Fall National Meeting’s SciMix session, continuing to provide a venue for lively face-to-face interactions between those seeking an academic jobs and those on the hiring front.

Come prepared to meet those candidates who best fit your department’s needs. ACS provides brief biographical sketches of this year’s participants, available at the AEI website. As in the past, these biographical sketches will contain contact, degree, and area of research information, as well as narratives indicating at what kind of institution they would prefer to teach and other information meant to help institutions assess their candidacy. To further assist the institution in accessing the potential of each candidate, the online version of the bios will be linked to the candidates’ corresponding technical abstracts. The biographical sketches and technical abstracts, like the poster presenters themselves at the poster session, will be arranged according to the division the candidates feel most classifies their research.

While the biographical sketches of the candidates will be available in hardcopy on-site, university representatives are strongly encouraged to check out the biographical sketches online prior to the session. As one university representative said “there were so many candidates, the bios were essential to finding the good candidates in correct field”. Indeed, one of the most oft-cited concerns received from AEI participants is that the two-hour time frame is too short.

At the event, you will find many great candidates to interact with. While the number of AEI poster presenters has fluctuated throughout the years, the ACS has continued to receive feedback from faculty recruiters denoting the its overall positive effect. To date, 98% of recruiters who have responded to evaluations following the AEI poster session indicated that they found appropriate candidates and almost half responded that they had indentified six or more. Positive feedback has also been received from candidates in regards to the AEI with 95% of candidates responding to evaluations recommending that the AEI be continued.

If your department is seeking the best and broadest pool of candidates to consider for open positions, we’d love to see you this August in Washington, DC!

Further information can be found at the AEI website or by writing to GradEd@acs.org.