Convention Interviews

The convention interview – limited in time and serving to screen possible on-campus interview candidates – bears some similarity to the on-campus event, but has rules of its own. The following is a summary of advice on this topic given by Professor Matthew Shapiro (Economics) and Professor Sonya Rose (History, Sociology) at the Academic Job Search Symposium held on September 22, 2000. You should check it with members of your own department to confirm its applicability to your discipline.

The setting

Half-hour meetings in a hotel room scheduled back-to-back during a discipline’s annual conference. Half a dozen faculty present, preferably from the specialty of the candidate but not necessarily.

General advice

• Try to show some excitement about both your work and your teaching, though don’t overdo it. If you can’t get excited about your interests, no one else is going to do so.

• Graduate students often ask about what tone to take in the interview. You’ve been a student all of your life, but now you are addressing potential future colleagues so you don’t want to talk to them like you are a student. On the other hand, you don’t want to presume that you are going to be in their faculty lounge in six months. You want to strike a balance, and give the people you are talking to the sense that you would be an interesting person for them to interact with in the departmental corridors or faculty lounge.

• In general, dress conservatively. Faculty members with a busy interview schedule can only remember a few things, and you don’t want one of those things to be how you dressed.

• Do not check your luggage. Particularly if you do not have a direct flight, there is no guarantee that your luggage will arrive when you do if you check it. Keep it with you.

• Try to schedule some time for relaxation during this process, which can be exhausting. If you exercise, bring your running shoes or swimsuit. If you like eating out or going to movies, try to find time to do that. Often the interviewees that fail do so because they are exhausted, so take precautions to avoid that.
  

Possible questions

• This is your opportunity to demonstrate to your interviewers both that your work is interesting and that you possess the necessary communication skills to make that fact apparent. This is important to most committees because they are interested in candidates who both research well and teach well.

• Since the entire interview is only a half-hour, you should answer the question briefly. Take about two minutes to summarize your findings, and bear in mind that you are providing members of the committee who favor your candidacy with “talking points” to help them convince their colleagues that you merit a campus interview.

• The anatomy of an answer:

  • Name your topic. A surprising number of candidates fail to do this.
  • Explain why it is important. What is its significance in the realm of public policy or science or English literature?
  • Describe your findings. Have you confirmed or rejected some important preexisting conjecture?
  • Describe how you reached your conclusions. What was the nature of your research? Did you work in archives or create a new econometric model or design a new experimental approach?
  • Relate your work to the literature of your field. However, be aware that graduate students often refer too much to the literature. You don’t want to argue that you build on the literature, rather you want to explain how you encompass the literature. Explain to people why your work is important in the context of the literature rather than the nth iteration on a well-worn topic.

 

• To prepare to answer this question, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Practice with anyone who will listen to you. Prepare to speak for two uninterrupted minutes, but plan for the possibility that you will then have another 8-10 minutes to describe your work in more detail. At that point, pause. You will either get questions about your procedures, evidence, and conclusions (more active interviewers) or your interviewers will want to hear you describe more aspects of your work (more passive interviewers).
  

• Start with the grad courses you might teach given your specialization and work your way down to undergrad courses. You don’t want to offer to teach a course on your dissertation. This suggests to the committee both a lack of awareness of its departmental needs as well as a lack of imagination about the intellectual universe. But you could mention any core required course or any advanced field course on the graduate level and then perhaps name the allied undergraduate courses.

• Interviewers often want to hear how you would conduct one of your classes. They are usually not interested in a full recitation of the syllabus but rather in the three to six major topics that you would cover – their order and any teaching devices you would use to communicate them.

• If you are interviewing at a teaching-oriented institution, you might have in mind some interesting advanced undergraduate courses you could teach. These could be related to your specialization, and they might be related to issues currently in the news. If you are in biology, you might propose a course on the human genome. Or if you are an economist, you might suggest a course on social security reform. This demonstrates that you are sensitive to the notion that students are customers and departments are marketing courses to them.

• In answering this question, you want to explain what you can do for the school. Many people have several subspecialties, and you want to figure out which might interest your interviewers and mention that you could teach that.

• You don’t want to answer this question with some trivial extension of your dissertation or some totally new topic that couldn’t be done by someone who wrote your dissertation. You want to describe a topic that is sufficiently different from your dissertation to be a distinct project but similar enough (either in topic or methodology) that you could reasonably accomplish it. You should spend some time pondering this, so that you know if your proposed project would require a new archive or a different piece of equipment. Essentially, they are asking you what the contents of your first grant application will be.

• This question will come some 25 minutes past the hour, when your interviewees all want to get a cup of coffee or use the bathroom before the next candidate comes in. It’s only 9:30 in the morning, and they have to do ten more interviews to do. It’s not unreasonable to answer, “No, thank you.” But if you do ask questions, be sure you ask reasonable ones. You don’t want to ask something like “Do you have computers?” “Do you ever get outside speakers?” These will make you look like you know nothing about the world outside of the University of Michigan. You should have done research on the school and department (perhaps using the internet or more informal information sources), and try to ask questions that will give you useful information and convey some interest. You might ask about interdisciplinary aspects of the program, links between departments, the nature of the student body or about the existence of area centers (should your work have an international flavor). You likely will not have time to ask more than one question.

• However, often it is just best to leave the interview. It is imperative that you not run over time, keeping other candidates waiting and tying up the schedules of interviewers.

• While you should try to find out who will be interviewing you at the annual conference when the department secretary calls to schedule the meeting, she or he will often be unable to provide you this information. In this case, you should make sure you know who is in the department and might be your interviewers. If you do find out, there is no need to go out and read all of their work in preparation to ask them research related questions at this point unless it happens to be genuinely related to your topic.