I'd like to rant about how poor the MO community is in giving career and teaching advice.

What brought about this rant today is the question on thinking about REU projects for the job market. Currently, the two most upvoted answers are both by mathematicians who have probably never applied for a teaching college position (except maybe the very top liberal arts colleges) in their whole life. They are indeed both fine and useful answers (even if they don't directly address the question), and indeed I do know that both mathematicians know more about these matters than their CVs might indicate, but having them as the most upvoted answers seems to me to be a lack of judgment if not worse by the community.

In general, despite the best efforts of some people around who do know more (and indeed far more than I do), it seems that the MO community might understand what goes on at Wisconsin or Oregon or even Oklahoma State, but it has no clue about what goes on at Valparaiso or Saginaw Valley State or Endicott. This is understandable; most people here don't know much about what happens at those places. However, there is a general tendency to give advice as if such places simply do not exist, never mentioning that the advice is strictly limited to the better universities. At best this failure to note our ignorance strikes me as quite misleading, and at worst, it strikes me as contemptuous, giving the air that when we teach or give advice we only should worry about the best students and the research universities, leaving the weaker students and the more teaching oriented schools with their own distinctive missions to fend for themselves.

In our research, given the nature of pure mathematics, we can only address ourselves to other people in the research community. When we teach or advise, formally or informally, however, we have a responsibility to everyone in the room, not just the current and future research mathematicians.

It's a fine rant.

Let me add the observation that not only do some of us have little idea what goes on at Valparaiso or Saginaw Valley State, some of us also have little idea what goes on at Wisconsin or Oregon, and some of us don't even know what REU means. That's because some of us haven't spent much time in the US. I'm sure the US is the best-represented country on MO, so that even discussions steeped in American educational terminology attract plenty of participants. The rest of us have probably picked up quite a lot about the American system - e.g. I think I know that REU is some kind of undergraduate summer project, I think that the R in R1 stands for "research", and I guess the "1" is somehow good. But sometimes entire discussions happen without it being acknowledged that not everyone on this international forum works in the US, which is ever so slightly wearying, and also doesn't cast the participants in the best light.

As the OP, I figured I should come on here and defend the question. But actually, it doesn't look like the question is really being attacked. @voloch: these types of questions have come up plenty of times before on MO. I don't have an account on the AMS blog, and I don't know anyone in that community. Conversely, I know MO and I know whose opinions to value here. Additionally, this seems like a question which established mathematicians are better suited to answer than grad students, e.g. those who have been on hiring committees, run REUs, applied to many jobs, etc. I already asked other grad students about this, and none could answer. So that's why I posted here rather than on the AMS blog.

@Tom Leinster and the International Crowd: I edited the question to make it clearer and define my terms. Your advice is also welcome, especially if my assumptions about undergraduate research in other countries is wrong.

@Alexander Woo: I appreciate your rant, having gone to Bowdoin for undergrad and now Wesleyan for grad school. I wish these places were more visible to the community at large, but there's not much I can do about it. I also appreciate your answer to the question. My experience with these advice questions is that mostly people give pretty decent advice and a given MO users votes up every answer. This means whoever posted first (or is famous) gets voted high whether or not their answer is really better than the others. However, as time goes on this tends to even out. For instance, at this moment you have 5 votes and the top has 7. I'll bet at least 3 of your 5 votes also voted for the others, which means it'll take longer for your answer to rise in the ranks. However, I fully expect your answer will continue to gain on the others and overtake them, because it's a really good answer. So my response is mostly: give it time. As for JSE, I value his answer as well because I may be applying for post-docs at a Wisconsin or an Oregon or even an Oklahoma State. If my research sky-rockets then I may even be applying for more permanent jobs there.

EDIT: No one yet has linked to the question:
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/75180/how-important-is-it-for-one-on-the-job-market-to-have-thought-about-suitable-reu

Hi David,

just a couple of remarks.

1. The opinion on career-advice questions is quite mixed. (As I said, personally I consider yours a really good one.) Yes, they are around on MO, but various people believe they actually should not be (see also this blog post of Ben Webster ).

2. Regarding the voting. In my opinion CW invites the type of voting you describe as slightly problematic. And, as said, I think such a question thus should not be CW.

3. Believing to be somewhat informed on PostDocs in Europe (or let us say continental west-central Europe, think France, Germany, but not UK) I think your idea that willingness to supervise undergraduate research activities won't be relevant for this is correct. On the one hand, the idea of undergraduate research is not wide spread (and some people even consider this as a 'bad idea'). On the other hand, typically one will not expect much (or any) student-related activity of whatever form from a PostDoc. Depending on the precise circumstance it could happen that you become involved in something along these lines; but then this should develop naturally and not be a criterion for the recrutement. This assumes we are speaking about an actual PostDoc and not a temporary (teaching) position; but even in that case the teaching then would rather be standard teaching (and rather this is not the type of position to which one hires a candidate from abroad, but one that will be familiar with the given system). [The 'not UK' means that I am not familiar with the UK-system and in some aspects I perceive it as sufficiently different to not generalize to it; yet this should not mean that it is different in this aspect, actually I rather doubt it, only that I do not know.]

Alexander Woo, in my opinion the voting on soft questions in particular but voting more generally seems sufficiently unreflected that I would not draw too many conclusions from it; I mean, a picture of a cat just received something like 50 upvotes.

Everybody take a walk outside and enjoy some fresh air before this degenerates further...

Not everybody, please! If you're in Scotland (as I am), it may be better to stay indoors.

What I would appreciate is if people were just aware that someone with a somewhat different background might read the system-specific question and be actually interested in them. So inclusion of some short explanation here and there or at least avoiding acronyms and alike (if feasible).

To give an example: I believe to have a reasonably good idea what a Liberal Arts College is; yet it took me a while to figure out what LAC was supposed to mean in JSE's answer. Or also the R1, is this top 20, top 50, ... , everything with a PhD programme.

And, as an aside, one Europe tag would be way too broad; the academic systems of, say, France, Germany, UK do not have that much in common.

To follow up on quid's latest comment, I'm from the US and I didn't recognize the abbreviation LAC at first. I had never seen it before.