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Questions

Question about what aspects of his or her training a candidate should emphasize.

Denise Kirschner: That’s a really good question. I can tell you that there’s been a strong change in mathematics and certainly in physics over the past five to ten years and that is that – although there’s been a lot of balking about it – application is winning out over theory. So, it’s very hot now to apply your mathematics to really wide ranges of areas – to physics, to biology, to medicine. I would hone in on that. The key word that I’m sort of dancing around here is “interdisciplinary.” It’s a really big topic, and if you can use that word anywhere on your application, use it because it’s hot. Universities and the government and NSF and NIH, they’re all throwing money to interdisciplinary work. So, if you can show that even though your PhD is in math, you’re really interested in economics and you’re going to bridge these two fields and do something really cool that no one’s ever thought of before, they’re going to want you there because they can see right away funding, new areas, exciting, she can find stuff to do for the rest of her life, because that’s a new area, no one’s ever forged that road before. So I’d say if there’s any interdisciplinary twist, take it. And do you want to be at a place that will only let you do commutative algebra – a really focused area of mathematics? It’s up to you. If that’s what you want to do, then you want to focus more on the more theoretical aspect of your background and training, and that’s your decision, but you’re going to define yourself by that stance you take, so you have to decide what you want to do. 

And along those same lines, let me just go back to this idea that both Michael and Vic talked about with regard to your question in terms of conformity or not. And I think – somebody gave me advice when I was starting out that you have 5-6 years until you come up for tenure, and once you get tenure, then you can start being an individual. Play the game as much as you can for that 5-6 years and then after that point if you want to just say, “I’m going to revamp teaching; I’m never teaching a course like that again,” that gives you the freedom to do that. That’s what tenure gives us, right? Intellectual freedom. So if you can play the game to get into the door – not lie, I’m not telling you guys to lie – but I’m telling you to play the game, and we all have to do that, we all have to conform somewhat. But once you get tenure, then you can have the ability to be free. So if you really want to go to MIT, and MIT only does this one specific aeronautical engineering using these certain techniques, then you better make your application be stellar in that area. But then, when you get tenure, then you can start branching out. Or perhaps once you get there and people see that you have ideas, then they are very happy to help you foster that and you can get tenure because you have forged a path in that area. But it’s so hard to say these things in general because it’s very dependent on the kinds of place that you guys are applying to. 

Question about how to find out whether a department rewards only its most stellar members.

Victor DiRita: I think I’d want to get a sense of what the senior faculty members at the institution or the department that you’re looking at who aren’t at the cutting edge of their field are doing. How are they being treated? In other words, are they the ones teaching all the grunt courses that nobody wants to do? Are there opportunities for their careers to rekindle wherever they’re at? I think you want to look at the people who have tenure but who are essentially – not resting on the tenure – but are in a situation for whatever the external forces that have gotten them to the point where they’re at where they’re not super-productive anymore – see how they’re being treated. See what their prospects are. Talk to them; get a sense from them. Because it’s people in that position that very often – I don’t mean to sound cruel, but it’s true, sometimes the truth is cruel – but it’s people in that position that are often the catalysts for these discussions about whether there should be tenure and whether it should continue to be this job security that can sometimes turn into a sinecure. You know, you can’t be gotten rid of and you’re not really doing anything. So ask those people how they feel. You should ask that of everybody, because you can’t say, “Well, you’re basically dead wood here, so tell me about what you’re up to.” You have to get that sense from everybody, because that’s a good question anyway to be asking people in the department. 

One thing I want to say – and it sort of gets into this but even broader – in your careers you should always behave and always act as if you were at the next level. So, if you are a student, you should behave – if you are an incoming student, a new student, behave as if you were a senior student. Find out what they do. How are they getting by every day, every week? What are they up to, their research? How do they read papers, etc.? If you are a senior student – if there is a postdoc concept in your field – what do the postdocs do? That’s how you want to behave. So you should always be behaving as if you’re at the next level already. And then, when you come for a job interview and you’re really a postdoc or a student on the job market, you’re already thinking like a colleague, a junior faculty member in the department. When you’re a junior faculty member, you start thinking, “Well, I’m going to have tenure here soon.”

There’s nothing you can do except do the right things to get tenure, and you can’t focus on tenure you have to focus on the things that the tenure committee focuses on, which are “Are you producing?” “Are you publishing?” “Are you graduating students, training students, teaching?” If you are a junior faculty member, you should be focused on doing those things, and tenure will take care of itself, but as you do those things, you need to think about what are the people who have tenure do around here. They get on committees; they behave as if they’re contributing members of the department’s life. Many academic departments have this sort of antiquated notion that only senior faculty make decisions on hiring and tenure and all that stuff. Many departments have become a great deal more progressive than that, and if there are opportunities available as a junior faculty member to be on promotions committees, to be on whatever committees are available in the department, then you should try to do those things. That’s the life of the department; it shows that you want to contribute and be part of the life of the department. 

Question about the warning signs that tenure is going to be cut.

Denise Kirschner: I think the state universities are the ones that are at most risk initially, because the whole state is deciding what happens at that particular university. So I would say that private universities probably have a little bit longer, they’ll have a delay in there. But I don’t think we should worry about that right now. I think we’re safe for the next ten years.

Victor DiRita: It’s a really good question, because it’s certainly come up. “Should there be tenure?” In a lot of departments, there are even people who are very productive and have tenure feel, “Do I really need this? Is it something that is not really working in your interest even if you have it?” Now having it, it’s very easy to sit up here, very blithely on a lovely Friday afternoon, and say that. Nevertheless, I think that’s a good question, what are the warning signs? Very often administrators want to be in the top five of everything. So they go to conferences where they learn that they ought to be in the top five – this is deans and above – and they recently got the word “multidisciplinary” in their lexicon and they’ve all briefed each other on this one, so we’re all multidisciplinary now and we all have to be in the top five.

And so if you get a letter from your chairman – as we recently did about a year ago – asking who the top five people in your field are and what the top five departments in your field are, I’d start to wonder what tenure meant at that point because if they’re starting to look at people who are heavily tenured somewhere else – the top five people usually are the best people in the field – they may be starting to think that our senior faculty aren’t the top five, what’s going on with that? I’d start to wonder when the conversation began like that. Although we had a letter like that come by about a year ago, as I said, nothing seems to have come from it, at least as far as I know. I checked my mailbox today. But that’s a really good question. There’s a public sense that tenure is a sinecure. People can sit there and do nothing after they’ve gotten tenure. We all know differently because we know we’re working very hard.

Question about whether candidates can try to explain why they would be good for a particular job when they are not in the preferred field the ad specifies.

Victor DiRita: Yes, you should definitely address why you’re applying for the job. There’s no question about that, particularly if you’re not a good fit. That word “preferred” probably took about three committee meetings to come up with and the environmental chemists won, basically. And so they want to have somebody. If that word’s there – “environmental chemist” versus “environmental chemist preferred” – the “preferred” very likely means that they’re really looking for an environmental chemist, but that does not mean that if you’re not in that area that you can't make an argument why you would be worthwhile for them to look at, and you shouldn’t apply for it. You should apply for it.

Question about whether a candidate should send extra materials.

Denise Kirschner: I think it is. But again you should gear each packet individually to whatever school. So spend a lot of time thinking about the cover letter and writing that and once you’ve done that then you know what else you need to include to let them know about you. For example, if you have never had a manuscript published but you have one submitted and you’re applying to the University of Michigan, then I would definitely include that manuscript, especially if it’s going to Cell or a really good journal. That lets them see the quality of your mind, and how well you write and lots of things like that. So the schools that were more four-year teaching colleges, when they asked for a teaching statement, I included those immediately with that.

Question about whether it is okay to send more than exactly what the ad requests.

Denise Kirschner: I think it is, but now remember these committees are getting 1200 applications, so you don’t want to send 13 publications and every teaching evaluation and ten letters. Be prudent about it. But, yes, if you think that it’s going to help them know that you’re a really good teacher, then I would say include it.

Question about telephone interviews.

Denise Kirschner: I’ve known people who have gotten jobs on telephone interviews, for sure, at both the government level as well as in academia. There’s usually a lot of people in the room, with a speakerphone, and so they’re all listening. It’s hard not to giggle and cough, but just try to be yourself and answer as honestly as you can. 

That’s the other thing, too, take time to think when people ask you a question. There’s nothing wrong with a pregnant pause at all, and that also let’s somebody know that you are thinking about something and that you don’t just have pat answers and are trying to answer the question as quickly as you can. There is something to pregnant pauses, and I think that lets them know that you are a thoughtful person and that you care a lot about what you are going to say.

Victor DiRita: I want to point something out. You know, when you’re visiting the department, you are definitely there because you want to show your wares and you want them to hire you – maybe. But you’re also looking at that department, and so you have to ask questions about your own career interests and goals as well. If you find out, for example, that junior faculty members have no say in the department or do all the teaching, those may be things that you can live with but you need to make decisions yourself on whether this is a good fit for you. So, you should go into these interviews as if you are a visiting expert or a visiting scientist or a visiting scholar coming to a department to have a look at it. You have to make a good choice. 

Question about how a candidate can mention relevant but not exactly on target experience.

Denise Kirschner: This is what I would say. Clearly, it’s going to be on your CV. It should be somewhere on your resume. And then in the cover letter you can add a paragraph that starts out and says, “My experience as an environmental biologist…” or it was a wet lab or whatever “has broadened my perspective on how important chemistry is in the world today” or something. So, you can have a sentence that brings that in. And then it’s a really good thing to talk about in the personal interviews. So, you can elaborate there. So, that’s probably the two places. Unless it really ties in well; if you were at a weather station up in Alaska and you’re applying for an environmental job or something, and it really fits in, then you’ll want to elaborate a little bit more. But if it’s only tangential then I would just mention it.

Victor DiRita: I agree. I think if it’s truly made an impact on how you’ve developed as a scholar then your rec letters will raise it as well because those people will know that you’ve done that and that it made a difference and that will be very good. You’ve got this nontraditional path and it’s really made a difference in the way you think.

Question about what ads mean when they refer to a placement file.

Victor DiRita: Getting back to this point that Michael made about starting a conversation. Sometimes that’s very literal. If you’re not sure exactly what they’re looking for, call the department. This is not a Star Chamber; there are people on the other end who are deciding what they want in these packets. Call and say, “Could you clarify exactly what it is” or send an e-mail. These days e-mails are great. But if there’s something you’re not sure about then by all means you should contact somebody in the department where you’re applying.

Denise Kirschner: And they’re not going to keep a record of who they talked to. Don’t be shy. Administrators are really helpful.

Question about how many publications a candidate should include with his or her application.

Denise Kirschner: I think it depends where I’m applying. I would probably only include only one really stellar document.

Victor DiRita: The other thing is that what I understood when Dr. Kirschner mentioned sending a publication was that it particularly was important if the paper was in the process – it’s been submitted or it’s just about to be submitted – because it shows that it’s real. I mean, we all have thirty more papers on our CVs that are “in preparation.” But if it has truly been prepared and it’s been sent out but it’s still in the process; there’s no reprint yet. Then it’s definitely important; you should put that in your application. I think it’s kind of a judgment call, too, about whether you put reprints in your application.

Denise Kirschner: Unless it’s an obscure journal, maybe.

Victor DiRita: But since you’re at Michigan, you’re not publishing in obscure journals.

Denise Kirschner: Yes, so then that’s probably okay. But you want them to be able to find a sample of your research if they want to. If they can go to the web, click on Journal of Chemistry and bring it up real quick that’s great. But if they can’t because it hasn’t appeared yet… You know, the web has facilitated that whole thing. Before you used to send 3-4 papers with your application. I don’t think you have to anymore.

Victor DiRita: Also, very often the cover letter will ask for a statement of research interests. You should take that very seriously. What is it that you plan to do? Don’t just abstract all your papers. So, that’s another place where you can tell them about yourself in terms of your scholarly activities.

Question about funding for teaching initiatives.

Denise Kirschner: Michigan has lots of initiatives within the University of Michigan for promoting good teaching, but at the national level it’s there as well. If you go to the NIH’s homepage – www.nih.gov or www.nsf.gov, either one – and type in “teaching,” you’ll get lots. There are some geared towards all different fields. I don’t know about the humanities, but for engineering there are lots of initiatives for engineering. And there are foundations like the Whittaker Foundation and lots of other foundations who support this. 

This was another thing I was thinking about for that person who asked about if you take a year off and what to do in that interim. Write a grant during that time. Try to get your own funding and that way you can go anywhere you want to. Because you can call the University of Michigan and you say, “Hey, I want to come to your lab, and guess what? I’ve got three years’ worth of funding.” I mean, we will welcome you with open arms to our laboratories to work. And then you can do great training, so it’s a really good opportunity. If you go to wherever you get your degree – here at Michigan – there’s the DRDA [Division of Research Development and Administration], they have these things called SPIN searches [Sponsored Programs Information Network]. Actually, they even have it online now, so if you go to the homepage at the university, find DRDA, you can do a SPIN search and it will have you type in everything about you – from what size jeans you wear to what your research area was, everything – and then it will bring up every possible grant that you could possibly apply for in whatever topic that you typed in. So, you could type in teaching and engineering and postdoc, one-year experience, blah, blah, blah. And it will bring up every single grant. And we do that all the time, for every different level. So, that’s a really good way to show that you’ve even thought about these things. You could say, “Hey, there’s this initiative out there that I plan to apply for as soon as I get here. Because I see you that guys have maybe a weak link in this one area of teaching and I really want to fill that gap and this is the way I can do it. I’m going to get money and grad students to do that.”

So, if you really want to take the bull by the horns, that’s one way to do it.

Question about whether it makes a difference if a candidate makes his or her recommendation letters confidential.

Victor DiRita: I often ask people if they’re interested in seeing their rec letters. It’s kind of a personal decision.

Denise Kirschner: I think if you’re worried that someone’s going to write you a bad letter then you shouldn’t ask them to write you a letter. You can tell them – if they’re your advisor or someone you’ve been with for five years – if there is something in particular you want them to focus on. You can say, “Hey, can you focus on that because I’m going to have Joe focus on this” and you have everybody fill in all your different niches. So, you can guide it. Sometimes, I’ll even say to a student, “Can you just summarize for me in a paragraph what you did about that thing?” and then I’ll just sort of work it into my own letter that I’m writing for them. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Victor DiRita: One problem with rec letters these days is that they all look great. So, from the standpoint of the search committee, it’s really hard to get. That’s why this issue of if you’ve done something a little different and that makes it into the rec letter because it’s made a difference in your career. Anything that makes you stand out with the rec letter guys – the people who are writing them – if those letters really show you as a potential scholar – somebody that you’d really want – that’s great. Those letters all look so good these days.

Denise Kirschner: But even if your mother is president of Merck, do not have her write you a letter. Because we have had that happen before, because they figure well, head of a big pharmaceutical company – it doesn’t matter that she’s my cousin or mother – she can write me a letter, but we tear those up and throw them away. So, don’t do that. Use judgment.

Question about whether it makes a difference to the letter writer if the letter is confidential or not.

Denise Kirschner: When I get the form from Career Planning & Placement to write a letter, I always look to see what the student checked, and I don’t know if it influences me. They always have checked so far “confidential,” so I don’t know how I would feel if they checked “non-confidential.” I would think maybe they didn’t really trust me, what I was going to say, so maybe that would influence in an indirect way how I would write the letter. But I don’t know for sure.

Victor DiRita: Very often there is an assumption on the part of the students, “Well, they’d want this to be confidential” so it’s just checked off automatically. Sometimes people don’t want to write letters if the student’s going to see them, and that should be a flag in your head. It’s like lawyers, they don’t ask questions they don’t already know the answers to. You ought to have a sense of what those rec letters are going to say.

Question about the characteristics of the cover letter.

Victor DiRita: If there’s an ad and they also ask for a statement of research purpose or intent or whatever. Very often, the cover letter is “I’m applying to this ad that was in the January issue of Science…” or whatever and that’s the cover letter. And you have to have someplace where you tell about yourself and why you’re applying to that job and what it is about that department and job that your research will dovetail with.

Denise Kirschner: I’d say they should be one page long. I wouldn’t make them two pages. Remember, we have to read 1200 applications. So if it’s short and it’s sweet and it’s to the point, we’re really happy about that. But if on the second page, you’re thinking, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh…” Keep that in mind. You have to be sensitive to us weeding through all those documents. But I wrote down some ideas about the cover letter. I wrote, “Be focused, be careful, and be earnest and sell yourself a little bit.” I always had this sentence in the end of all my cover letters that said something like, “Well, rest assured that if you do hire me you will be getting a colleague that is enthusiastic about research and teaching.” I had one sentence in there that was a little bit of cheerleading, because in the end you want to leave on a positive note. But I think, as Vic said, in the first paragraph you can just tell what this is. “It’s my packet. Everything’s included” but for the next thing you can say, “As you can see from my research and teaching, my interests lie in this area. I’m excited about this…” You know, you can wind that in. But middle paragraph and then concluding paragraph. Three paragraphs is good. Something like that.

Question about whether a young PhD might enter industry and then return to academia.

Victor DiRita: You’ve got to stay publishing. If you’re in industry, very often that’s an issue or can be an issue. That would be tough. It’s not impossible. Certainly people do it, and often do it quite well, but if you’re in industry and you’re in a research position and then you’re applying for a faculty member who’s going to be writing grants – an independent investigator – it’s totally doable. One strategy is…you’re going to have to manage your finances differently, because you’re going to take a huge pay cut, but it has to show career advancement. Very often you are bringing something quite nice to the department. You’re bringing a more applied expertise and networking connections and things like that. So, it’s not like it used to be, where “never the twain shall meet.” You were an academic or you were in industry, and if you went an industrial route or nonacademic, you were sort of a failure. It’s not like that at all anymore. There’s so much interaction across academics and industry these days.

Question about what letters of recommendation a candidate should use if he or she takes time out of the academy.

Victor DiRita: Well, they shouldn’t be the same letters you were using ten years ago, by any means. Letters should be people who have judged your work in the most recent time you were employed.

Question about whether you should include in your application a list of courses taken.

Denise Kirschner: So they don’t require transcripts any more for jobs? Right. So, I would say…the only reason I would think that a school would want that information is for teaching purposes, and most of us teach courses that we’ve never taken. I mean, I teach graduate pathogenesis courses, and I couldn’t even say that word when I got my Ph.D. They’re hiring you because of your research and your insight and whether or not you’ve taken a course in organic chemistry might not matter. But it’s hard to say exactly.

Question about how many letters of recommendation a candidate should send.

Victor DiRita: I think three is sufficient. I think if you had four, that’s not a big deal. Particularly – it depends on your career, I think – if you’ve had something a little bit different in your career. Maybe you worked in two different labs, like you were a student who was being mentored by two different people in different fields, then you’re obviously going to have an extra letter in there. Avoid having too much. There’s a certain St. Bernard-jumping-up-and-licking-your-face aspect to all this, too. You don’t want that kind of enthusiasm. You want it to be professional. Don’t try to overwhelm the committee with too much.

Denise Kirschner: But actually three research and one teaching is probably a good combination. If you really have three really solid research letters, and then you want one on teaching. They probably didn’t ask for one specifically on that, but if you do get one on teaching – separate from research – unless there’s someone who can write about both in the same letter.

Question about how candidates who've spent time in industry compare to those who have stayed in academia.

Denise Kirschner: But I really think there’s a caveat here. Your applications are going to be compared to everybody in the field. And if you’ve been at Parke-Davis and you invented micro-arrays then they don’t care if you published at all. I mean, if you’re up on the current technology; you know what’s going on; you’re doing great stuff. So you have maybe one publication and this guy has ten but that is really going to weigh a lot because we know this person can think, is innovative, is going to bring all this new technology to our department. So, I think that there’s a balance there. So, just do the best you can at whatever you’re doing, and it’ll probably work out and you’ll end up where you should be. It sort of happens that way.

Victor DiRita: I will say though. I tend to agree with your professor, and I’m going through this with a student now who’s about to finish, and she’s trying to decide on where she wants to go for her postdoc – my field has postdocs. And it’s the same question, though. Do you want to do an industrial postdoc or an academic postdoc, and I have this feeling in my stomach that she’s better of in terms of options later on to go for an academic postdoc, and I told her that, though it’s hard to give specifics about it. And it may be just because when I started training 20 years ago, that was just it. You didn’t do industrial postdocs – there weren’t any – so I’m sort of tainted by that old feeling, but when we had a recent committee meeting for her, a couple of other people on the committee – maybe tainted exactly as I am – felt just the same way, that the academic career path gives you a little bit more fork possibility than the industrial path. I’m really not sure that that’s so true any more. Specifically for the reasons Dr. Kirschner brought up. I mean, industry’s doing such great stuff now. It used to be industry – certainly in a lot of clinical areas – was non-intellectually challenging, it was quality control and not really basic research.

Denise Kirschner: And actually in the middle of the road there are government labs. If you can get a job at a government lab, they’re sort of in between industry and academia because you’re publishing and you’re doing high quality research. The only thing you’re not doing is teaching. So, they’re actually a good place to do postdoc work as well. And they pay really well.