Zhengqi Gao's Blog Posts

My Experience Applying for an ECE Faculty Position in the 2026–27 Cycle

I was on the academic job market for the 2026–2027 cycle, mainly targeting EE/ECE departments in the United States. For background, I am Zhengqi Gao, a PhD student at MIT EECS, working in design automation for integrated electronics and photonics. This cycle has been brutal due to widespread funding cuts. While the previous cycle (2025–2026) was already difficult — many departments opened positions only to cancel them mid-search — this year is different in a starker way: many ECE departments did not post openings at all. Duke, UCSD, Northeastern, Cornell, and numerous others simply sat out the cycle entirely.

I entered the market anyway, having decided I didn't want to wait another year. In this post, I want to share what I went through, in the hope that it might be useful for future applicants. That said, please keep in mind that experiences can vary significantly depending on the year, region, and field.

Some Notes Before We Begin

There are already many excellent blogs and guides covering the mechanics of the faculty job search — materials, timelines, and general expectations. I won't repeat what has been thoroughly documented elsewhere. A quick search for "faculty application tips" will surface plenty of resources. Here are a few links that were valid as of April 17, 2026:

What I want to focus on instead is the information I felt was still missing from those guides — things I wish I had known before I started interviewing. Everything below is drawn from my own experience and conversations with friends who went through the same process.

1. Does Networking Before Applications or Interviews Help?

Personally, I did no networking before submitting applications. By networking here I mean sending cold emails to professors at your target departments. I simply sent in my materials and waited for responses.

In general, the only purpose of networking is to make sure your portfolio will be seen by the search committee. Once your profile has been seen, whether your case advances has nothing to do with how much networking you did.

Moreover, if your profile already has qualities that ensure it will be noticed, networking becomes even less necessary. If you graduated from a top university, have a best paper award from a top venue, or have recommendation letters from someone the entire field knows — with any of those, I would argue there is no real need to network.

That said, there is no harm in doing it either. Sending a polite, professional cold email costs little. One type of outreach that can carry real weight: if you know a senior person who has a close personal relationship with someone at your target department, asking them to send a private, enthusiastic note of support can genuinely move things. But to put things in perspective — I received Zoom interview invitations from several top universities without doing any networking at all.

2. How Many Onsite Interviews Does It Take to Get One Offer?

Based on my experience and that of friends, a rough rule of thumb is:

If you secure 4 onsite interviews at universities that match your target level and perform reasonably well, you will likely receive at least one offer.

The key caveat is "at the level of universities you want to be at." Having one strong onsite and three at lower-ranked schools does not count the same. The match between where you interview and where you want to land matters enormously.

The number 4 has a natural interpretation. Suppose a department brings N candidates onsite for a single position. Now consider that you interview at schools A1, A2, ..., AM. In practice, your pool of competitors tends to overlap heavily across schools — the same group of N candidates (you and N−1 others) is often being evaluated at all of A1 through AM. If M ≥ N, you are statistically guaranteed to land an offer somewhere in that set. Empirically, N is typically around 4 — meaning M = 4 is roughly the threshold at which you can expect at least one offer.

This is, of course, a rough argument built on a strong assumption: maximum competitor overlap. In reality there is variation, and I don't intend this as a strict bound. But the intuition holds.

3. What Happens After the Onsite Interview?

This is the part I found least documented and most nerve-wracking. After all onsite visits are complete, the search committee or department chair collects feedback from everyone who interacted with each candidate. From there, departments typically follow one of two decision-making models:

(1) Search committee decides. A small committee meets, thoroughly discusses each candidate, and makes the final recommendation. MIT EECS follows this way.

(2) Full department votes. The entire faculty convenes. Your host or the department chair presents your case — anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, sometimes with slides — and then the faculty vote on all candidates. UC Berkeley EECS follows this way.

Selection ratios vary widely: it might be 1 out of 6, or 2 out of 5. If you are among the top candidates, you receive an informal offer at the department level, which then works its way up through the college and the university provost's office. Some departments will notify you as soon as the offer clears the department; others will only reach out after the full administrative approval process is complete. It varies a lot.

If you fall just outside the cut — say, third place when only two positions are available — you will likely be ghosted or quietly placed on a waitlist until the top candidates make their decisions. The waiting time in this situation is highly unpredictable, as it depends entirely on what other offers those candidates are holding and when they decide.

4. What Are Really the Determining Factors?

This is a great question, and honestly, it is very hard to answer — largely because of how much randomness is involved. That randomness comes from many sources:

  1. Departmental need that year. If a faculty member working in area X just retired, the department may be looking specifically for a replacement.
  2. Donor influence. If an alumnus makes a large gift earmarked for a specific research area, the department may need to hire in that direction.
  3. Recent hires. If the department already hired someone in your area the previous year, they are unlikely to hire in the same space again so soon.
  4. The competition. If another candidate works in a similar area but has a stronger profile, it will be difficult for you regardless of your own merits.
  5. And many other factors beyond your control.

These considerations can eliminate you before an interview ever happens, and there is nothing you can do about them. So I would say: research direction is the pre-criterion — whether you even land in their candidate pool is largely determined by fit, not merit.

Once you are within their zone of interest, it becomes about research output (publications, impact, citations, awards), recommendation letters, and training pedigree — specifically, whether you graduated from a top group at a top institution. These things are fixed on your CV, and you have roughly five years during your PhD to build toward what you want to show the search committee.

Onsite interview performance is another factor. The job talk is certainly important — you should know your work deeply and present it clearly. That said, because of the diversity of research areas in any department, it can be hard for others to follow every detail of what you do, and the questions you receive may come from unexpected angles. The one-on-ones are similarly varied: some faculty members love to talk broadly about research directions and life in academia; others go straight to technical depth. My advice is to let the conversation flow naturally. Making the conversation enjoyable and genuine matters more than aggressively demonstrating technical expertise.

I'll be honest — I'm not sure I've fully answered the question I set out to answer here. The truth is there is no clean answer. The process is genuinely random. You might receive an unexpected, enthusiastic internal advocate from a faculty member you've never met, simply because your expertise fills a gap they've been trying to address for years. Conversely, someone you assumed would be supportive might end up raising concerns about you — perhaps because they perceive you as a future competitor in their own area. You can't fully predict or control any of this.

5. The Tricky Thing Known as the Vision Talk

At most places, the onsite interview consists of a public job talk and a series of one-on-one meetings with faculty. However, at a few institutions, I discovered there is an additional component called the vision talk. The basic format: you prepare roughly 20 minutes of slides about your future research plans, and then a room full of faculty members asks you questions for up to an hour and a half. The session is highly interactive and tests your ability to think on your feet.

In some ways, the vision talk is harder than the job talk. For most of your job talk, you can rehearse thoroughly and improvise during at most 15 minutes of Q&A. The vision talk is almost entirely improvised. Some departments use this session for deliberate stress testing — asking pointed, aggressive questions to see how you handle pressure — while others keep the tone collaborative and encouraging. And simply presenting a high-level research vision is not enough: if you say you want to pursue direction A, the faculty will push you on what methods you plan to use, what challenges you anticipate, and how you'd approach them. You need to have thought through the details.

I was vaguely aware this format existed, but when I started onsite interviews in January, I received several additional invitations from schools that included a vision talk, with interviews scheduled in February. That left me very little time to prepare, think through all the specifics, and feel truly ready — and I found it genuinely demanding.

If I were to offer a suggestion: decide early whether you want to prepare a vision talk before your interviews begin. Many people invest heavily in polishing their job talk slides well in advance, but whether we should do the same for vision talk is more debatable — only a minority of schools use it, and across all your onsites you might do it zero to three times. I'll leave the question open for each reader to consider based on their own situation.

6. Final Tips to Ease the Interviewing Process

I want to conclude with a few tips.

As a closing thought: I hope this post is helpful for those who will be on the academic job market. If you are on the fence, I highly encourage you to apply. You can always choose a different path in the end, but the faculty interview process is genuinely rewarding — it gives you a chance to visit very different campuses and meet a wide range of people.