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Victor
DiRita (Laboratory and Animal Medicine)
A great deal’s been touched on, and so I’ll try
to give a slightly different perspective and that’s the
perspective from the search committee’s side. Everything
that’s been discussed up until now for the most part
has been what it is that you ought to do and all the advice
has been in some cases a little bit disparate but it’s
reasonable since we’re talking about humanities versus
physical sciences or mathematics or even medicine. It’s
all been good advice, so I want to talk a little bit about
the process from the standpoint of the search committee.
So the issue of the cover letter has come up many times already
and there was a question about it and also there was a question
about whether you should apply or not apply for jobs you may
select yourself out of. You’re
all responding in most cases to ads, so there’s been
an ad written. I was just on a committee in my department
earlier this year. The whole raison d’etre of the committee
was to write the ad. We spent three months coming up with
the ad, and then that committee – which was not a search
committee – was disbanded and now there’s a search
committee that’s operating off of that ad. So, I can
tell you that those ads – this is not the word of God
coming to Moses, okay. This is basically an agreement; this
is the lowest common denominator that we could all agree upon
without killing each other of what should go in the ad.
That means there’s room for you, because if you think
– you’ll read that ad and think, “Well, it
sort of touches on me, but it doesn’t really say me”
in terms of what you’re doing – probably if you
think that you’re close, you were discussed at some level.
Maybe you didn’t make the negotiation for the ad, but
you should apply for jobs that you think you are qualified
for even if it doesn’t specifically mention your area
of research. If it’s completely outside of your sphere
of research or your sphere of academic interest, then you
shouldn’t waste your time and the committee's time, but
if you think you’re close do not restrict yourself from
applying because those ads are a compromise. They are not:
“This is the person we’re looking for.” There’s
a lot of gray in those things. So, when you send the cover
letter you should indicate what it is about the position that
attracted you to apply for the job. Obviously, at that point
you want to fold in some of the things that they said in the
ad with what you’re actually doing in life so it looks
like you’ve given it some thought.
So, once you’ve applied, there’s these 1200 applications,
so how do people go through them? It is true that letters
are very important so your CV
is going to list two important things – unless it’s
a job focused primarily for teaching – your CV will have
two important things on it. It will have your record of academic
output. In most fields, it’s papers, in some fields,
it’s books, but it will have that. And it will also have
your ability or your track record of having been funded –
fellowships, that kind of thing – and that gives a sense
of your ability to make it in the independent world. And if
you’re primarily looking at teaching jobs, it will have
a lot of teaching stuff on it. That’s important as well.
So what the search committee is going to look at is those
two things. Have you published a lot? Are you an academic?
I mean, are you putting out your research and it’s been
in peer reviewed journals and it’s respected, etc. So
that’s a really important component of the CV. If
you have a lot of things in preparation…there’s
always a controversy and Michael pointed out, “Spend
longer, write your dissertation, and get it out before applying.”
I’m not sure I agree with that fully.
If you have a lot of things in preparation or your thesis
isn’t – well, I’m speaking primarily from the
postdoc standpoint, if you’re applying from the postdoctoral
point, your thesis is already done. But the point is if your
work hasn’t been published, but it’s close and your
letters are going to support that. That’s okay, apply.
Now in the humanities, in particularly in English, it sounds
like that’s not the best tactic. But I think for a lot
of fields – certainly in the hard sciences and in medicine,
medical sciences – you can apply with a CV that says,
“Manuscript in preparation,” as long as it bears
out when they interview you that you’ve truly got these
things in preparation.
So, those things are
going to be looked at but the letters are very critical. So,
is it a good idea to have a very prominent person write a
letter that doesn’t say a whole lot about you because
they don’t know you that well, but it’s a prominent
person or somebody who’s maybe lesser known but will
write you a very good letter because they know you. I think
the latter. To have a prominent person in your field –
say the chair of your department, who’s well known, who
knows you because you present seminars in the department on
occasion or they know your thesis advisor, but who can’t
write you a strong letter indicating that your work is important
and that the things you plan to do, or your career, is going
to make a difference, then it’s not worth having that
letter just because the person is a name professor at the
University of Michigan. We interviewed somebody – or
we didn’t interview somebody, actually – who had
a letter from a chairman at a department at Harvard, and the
chair wrote a very nice pro forma letter saying, “This
is a good person…,” etc. and it looked like the
person was being damned with faint praise. People were wondering,
“Well, what’s he saying about this guy? There’s
nothing glowing in this letter.” So, do not have a letter
from a big name person, just because they’re a big name
person. The letter should really speak to your abilities,
speak to your contributions, what you’ve done in the
past and what you intend to do in the future. So, in other
words, get people who know you.
And so the search committee’s going to look at those
things and probably – I don’t know the numbers,
but a high percentage of the people who make it through the
first cut, make it through the first cut because of those
three things: what you’ve done in the past, your ability
to fund yourself or to generate fellowships, etc., and what
the letters say. All the other things – at least in a
lot of the sciences, although we spend a lot of time thinking
about them, etc. the other things that aren’t related
to those three items are less well-studied by the search committees.
So, once they come up with a general group of people that
is not necessarily their short list, then they want to fight
it out. And then it’s going to come down to this argument
of whether you’re matching the ad or whether you’re
in the pool of people that would likely contribute to the
department the way they had in mind when they first started.
Now, if you are excellent, and if you are really good and
your letters glow, you’ve made it to that point. Even
if you are not necessarily aimed exactly as the ad suggested,
you’ll stay in the pool because the idea ultimately is
get good people in the department. And I think all departments
feel that way, that they’re after very good people, even
if they’ve written an ad that’s fairly selective.
Now, if it’s a humanities department that needs somebody
to teach sixteenth-century whatever and you’re a specialist
on post-civil war literature, you’re not going to make
the cut. But in the sciences, there’s a lot more gray
area. If you’re very good – we’ve had searches
where the person isn’t exactly the person we were looking
for but they’re excellent and so we want them in our
department. What happens in some cases is that search committees
will make an appeal to the chair who will then make an appeal
to the dean and say we’ve got a great pool here, can
we get another slot available, and that can occur. So if you’re
that person that’s very good, if you’re the person
that the department is after so strongly that you’ve
made them go after another slot in the department – mortgage
retirement later on or something – there’s a lot
of play that departments can do with the dean, depending on
whether there’s resources ultimately available.
So, ultimately you want to get to a visit. And at that point
you should determine that the job is yours to lose. So, if
you’re going for a visit, it’s very important to
assume you can get the job. You’re confident enough that
this is a job you want and that you can get it. Both previous
speakers have indicated, don’t look desperate. You should
look like – not like you don’t care, maybe, Dr.
Kirschner’s experience notwithstanding, although it was
apparently successful – you should not look like you’re
desperate. I completely agree with that piece of advice. What
you should look like, and Michael, I think, raised a very
interesting point. He said, you’re
basically being asked to join a conversation in this profession,
and I think that’s a really good point. When you come
there, you are no longer a postdoc, you are no longer a student,
you’re a job candidate, and what that really means is
that they’re looking at you to see whether you should
be a faculty member. And so you should behave as if you were
a faculty member. You’re there as a visiting expert to
talk to them about their department, to get a sense of what’s
going on in the department, so that they can get a sense of
what you’re up to, what you plan to do in the future.
It should be a collegial interaction. You are now a peer of
those people. Even if there are senior faculty members on
the search committee, you’re going to be a colleague
of theirs if they so choose. So you have to behave as a peer
in the field and not as a junior faculty member who knows
a certain little area.
So, from that standpoint, you need to get something of a
sense of what’s going on in the department. I agree that
you shouldn’t come there with a list of everybody’s
publications and ask all these leading questions to show how
smart you are and how much you’ve done literature searches,
etc. But you should have an awareness of what’s going
on in the department because those people are going to be
your colleagues, and those people are going to be people who
ask you to sit on their students’ dissertation committees,
etc. So you should have a sense of what’s going on in
the department, and it also shows you to be a broad generalist
in the field of whatever that department covers. It just makes
you look more like a peer if you have some sense of other
things going on in the department – if you come there.
You’ll also present a seminar or something to show what
your research has been what your work has done. The reason
that you’re doing that is twofold. You’re doing
a seminar in the department in order for them to see what
you’re up to, what your work has been, but also even
if it’s at a place like the university of Michigan, where
teaching is sometimes secondary and research is primary, you’re
going to be teaching and so they want to see how well do you
do that. You’re presenting your work to a broad audience;
how well do you do. So that seminar – even though you’re
looking to show what your research has been, what your output’s
been, what you know as an expert in your field – it’s
also being used to see how well you can teach, how well you
can get your ideas across. So, you should take that seminar
very, very seriously. You should practice it a lot, to your
peers, to your colleagues at graduate school or your postdoc.
You should not go into this seminar taking it anything other
than it is: the most important seminar you’ve ever given.
And remember, you are the expert, so you should feel very
comfortable, and that comes from having practiced it. So,
it’s incredibly important.
Now, Dr. Kirschner raises the issue of a courtship, I think
there is something to that in a job search. There’s the
first visit, which is really the first date – in her
terminology – where everybody’s getting the chance
to feel each other out. Then if you’re lucky you’ve
made it to the second visit which is very often the call-back,
they want to see you again. That is often an indication that
they’d like to make you an offer. And so when you come
back for a second visit, then they really want to know –
okay, the first visit was great, what do you look like the
next day? Are you somebody that we really want to interact
with now?
That’s when they might start asking you questions like,
“What do you plan to do in the next five years?”
Certainly before the first visit you should have thought about
this. What are you bringing to the University of Michigan,
to wherever you’re going? What are you bringing with
you as a career? What are you going to do for us? What are
you going to contribute: you’re a colleague now, what
are you bringing to our mixture of different individuals here?...So
we all have to interact: collegiality means we all have to
interact with each other. So, having a strong opinion about
a teaching method, that should come out when you’re there,
when you get a sense of what the department is all about.
If it comes out in the very beginning, then that’s how
you’ve chosen to define yourself. So you have to decide;
that’s why it’s a judgment call. Do you want to
define yourself by your teaching philosophy or by any of your
philosophies until you get there and they can see that you’re
going to be somebody that we want to have around? So, I think
I’ll stop there, just having given a sense of the process
from the standpoint of the search committee with all the other
stuff that went ahead and we can turn to questions.
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