© HUAN TRAN/IKON IMAGES/CORBIS
Yuki sat in my office at the Stanford University School of Medicine Career Center, as many graduate students have before, and detailed the two postdoc job offers she had received in spite of an ongoing recession. She had heard she should negotiate, but had no idea how to proceed. When asked what she wanted to get out of the agreement, she responded, “I’m not good at this. I mean, why would they want to hire me?”
Weeks earlier, one of her classmates, Ray (both Ray and Yuki are fictitious names to protect the identities of my students), was in the opposite predicament. He came to my office because all three of his job offers had been rescinded after he attempted to negotiate, which he had ...
