are out there, and made a pretty convincing case that we would mostly not be getting the faculty jobs we were ostensibly trying to get. Matthew has a really great, dry sense of humor, so it was a lightly delivered blow, but literally no one wants to hear that, even if you suspect or know it to be true!

Once he’d spent the first five minutes of colloquium crushing our dreams, Matthew went on to tell us what happened when he found himself with a career not working out the way he’d planned– and how he eventually came to found the department he is currently in, which he served as director of for over a decade. His talk really stuck with me, because it had always seemed to me that everyone who’d arrived at a stage in their careers where they were giving colloquia at Berkeley had just breezily sailed their way through to there. I’d never heard anyone so much as acknowledge that they had struggled, I’d never heard anyone express vulnerability, and I’d never heard any discussion of what one does when those struggles arise. After the talk, we postdocs debated the relative roles of choice and chance 