You’re on the market:
Are you job search ready?

Michael Schoenfeldt (English)

I have a feeling that the job search in the humanities is a very different animal, although one of the goals is to make it like it’s been in other fields, other fields that have tracks as well as the academic one available. English has been a little better than other fields in the humanities, but that’s only because of things like composition. It’s still been a very tough job market. It’s been for almost every one of our people a multi-year job search. And that – just going in – is something that needs to be confronted.

The absolute necessities that you have to have – in the humanities, at least – before going out on the job market would be two thirds of a dissertation completed. Your dissertation director must be able to say unequivocally – not just optatively – that this dissertation will be completed by June of the coming year. Anyone who goes out with less than that done I think is being foolish. There are people who think they can go out – send off a few letters, not get involved, maybe something will happen, maybe something won’t. I’ve seen that attempted probably 20 times over the last couple of years, and every time it has knocked the candidate for a loop. She has lost time that she would have put in on her dissertation to the lack of sleep and the anxieties involved. You are so much better off spending another year writing a better dissertation than trying to go out a year early. I cannot stress that enough.

In terms of the humanities job search, you would very likely be asked to produce two writing samples and do a job talk, so that’s already a chunk of a dissertation that they are going to have right in front of them. Those things have to be clean. They can’t be things with brackets and ellipses and “to be done later.” This is your best self that is being put forward, and the thing that I would tell you – having been on both sides of the table – they are looking for reasons to get rid of you. I mean, we average 500 applications per job in the English department. We would love to have somebody have a misspelling in the second line of a writing sample – I mean, you wouldn’t stop reading then, but it would already be nudging towards the negative. So, the cleanness of these documents I can’t stress enough.

You would need, of course, a cover letter, and I would urge you – without being cloying about it – to craft the cover letter to the kind of institution you’re talking about, as closely as possible. If it’s a teaching institution, don’t spend as much time talking about the dissertation. Spend a little bit more time talking about your teaching commitments, and weave even the research into the teaching into the teaching commitment. I think that can be extremely useful, in fact, for both kinds of institutions.

You certainly need a curriculum vita that lists the highlights of your career thus far. Don’t inflate it with meaningless things, but don’t leave off things that are important either. One thing we do in English is give out a packet of sample vitas of people who have gotten jobs, so they just get to see lots and see the way that people have portrayed themselves before. And we give out copies of letters and let them see those.

We also urge a dissertation description – a single page, single spaced description – which doesn’t just use the language of the letter and expand upon it. A tricky thing about this process is being able to say the same thing freshly in four different vocabularies. And it’s one of the things you need to practice. One way to practice is describing to your nonacademic relatives what you’re working on. And if you’re still having trouble doing that, you’re probably not ready to go out on the market. Learning to describe the project in a single soundbite for a nonacademic audience seems to me to be the thing that separates out the people who do well from the people who don’t.

We also urge people to do teaching portfolios. There’s a lot of teaching that’s involved in the process in the English department and people put together their own syllabi. They put together their own list of requirements and grading sheets and things like that. The more that you can offer that to people as part of your letter, you can offer that to people at your interview (if you get that far), and it can be a wonderfully helpful document if you’ve got a nice packet there that shows how committed you are as a teacher in different ways.

Another thing we do for people – and I would urge you to do this whether your own departments offer it or not – is mock interviews. We actually institutionalize it; we have a blind matching of faculty and job candidates and really do make it as much like the official convention interview as possible. We also tape them and watch the tape with the people if they have the courage to do that. We always look horrible in these things but it has been enormously useful to watch these tapes with people. There was one woman – this was two years ago but it’s just a wonderful story. She didn’t realize it but she… was… speaking… very… slowly. She started watching the tape with me and she said, “I am really talking slowly.” And I said, “Yeah, you are.” She sped it up, went from 33 to 45 rpm. She had four interviews and got three offers. I’m not sure that at least one or two of those wouldn’t have happened otherwise but it was the kind of cosmetic polishing that can be enormously important in this act of self-presentation.

So, if you are torn between going out or not at a particular point, I would say that it’s better to wait. Make that dissertation better. Get a better hold of it. Figure it out. Know how you are going to pitch it. Go to conferences. One of things that I think is the absolute best preparation for this is going to conferences and giving pieces of your work and watching people’s eyes light up and watching brows furrow. Getting some sense of the response and getting some sense of the questions that the profession will begin to ask you as you emerge into the world. What really seems to work for people is when they learn that the profession is a conversation that they are entering and that they’ve deserved the right to enter because of this work that they’ve been doing. There’s maybe a small thing that they know more about than all but 5 or 10 people in the country. And it’s not just knowing that small thing, but make what’s important about knowing that small thing available to people who don’t know that small thing. Make them understand that. In the job letter, in the dissertation description, and again in the interview. If they can come off as collegial. If they can come off as somebody they’d want to have around. Somebody they’d want to be stuck in an elevator with, or somebody you wouldn’t mind being stuck in an elevator with if the elevators broke on campus, or sitting by at an interminable dinner party. Committees don’t talk about these things, but these are the kinds of things at that late stage in the process that do recur.

The other thing I would just throw out here that I’ve seen has helped our people immensely is when they had a kind of confidence that even if they didn’t get a job in academia, they would get a great job and they would have a great and interesting and exciting career. They didn’t go into that interview looking desperate – “I’ve gotta have this job!” That is not your best and most attractive demeanor when you’re that way. However you can get your mind around it. A friend of mine is now running the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and they’ve been assembling all kinds of resources, and I see you’ve got a panel later on alternate careers for Ph.D.s. I think it is so important. The danger is that you see somebody like me – sitting in a nice job at the University of Michigan – saying this. And you say, “Yeah, right.” In 1985 when I got my Michigan job, I was very lucky, and I was ready to do other things. I had taken my law boards and I’d even taken my MCATs. I wasn’t quite sure which way I was going to go at the time, but I knew there’d be something else I could do. I knew there’d be something else I’d want to do and that I would make interesting. This is what I most wanted, but I think that sense of confidence – that “Gosh, if this didn’t work, my life would be over, that it would have been a waste” – I had none of that sense, and I really think that helped. And I’ve seen that in so many of our people. I mean, one of our people last year had to choose between – I mean, the salaries were very incommensurate – between teaching at a small college and working for Microsoft. And he went for the small college, but it was a life decision rather than just a panicked, “Boy, I’m lucky I got one thing.” And it makes all the difference in the world, about yourself, the way you behave in the world. So, that’s actually pretty much what I have to say in terms of general principles, general warnings. 

Questions

Question about the difference between cover letters in the academic and business worlds.

Michael Schoenfeldt: I think they are different animals. One thing I’ve noticed is that people who’ve been used to presenting themselves in nonacademic environments quite often come off as overdoing certain elements of enthusiasm. We’re in this sort of funny profession that understates things, that wears tweed, that doesn’t want to look too outlandish. And so I’ve noticed whenever we’ve had people like yourself who’ve gone out on the market...quite often their way of doing things is saying, “I’m this kind of person. I do this. I do that. I take charge.” And that’s not really the way the academic letter works. It’s more like a sonnet. There’s a narrow little form that you have to play with and develop in certain ways.

Normally, it starts off with just a description of who you are, where you’re doing your work. My name is Mike X. I’m currently completing a dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Stephen Greenblatt. I and my committee are confident that I’ll be finished in June.

And then a new paragraph. This is just the template. My dissertation explores blah, blah, blah. Where people have read, you know, Herbert this way, I do it this way.

My teaching, too, is involved – a new paragraph – is involved in issues of the social locations of literature. In courses that I’ve taught at Berkeley, and on and on. The teaching paragraph is a tricky one to write. Again, it’s a place where people start sounding like some very bad violins are starting to play in the background. “I believe in students as individuals.” People say things where no one would take the contrary viewpoint. And they say them with great conviction, but it just doesn’t carry. Being specific usually is the best thing. My paragraph wasn’t good on that, so I can tell a bad one when I see it. I have read some really good ones. I’ve been really impressed at the way people can articulate their classroom presence – what’s important to them about the classroom. Veering from the ideal towards the pragmatic seems to be advice I would give.

And then just normally in my field you conclude by saying – you can see how many of these I’ve read, I can sort of do it in my sleep. “I will be attending the big convention in my field” – in our case, it’s the Modern Language Association convention in Washington – “and would be available then for an interview or at other times if you would like. My credentials are available from The Career Center at the University of Michigan” and conclude the letter. That’s the standard letter, and you can see that it does have quite a different format – quite a different feel in fact – from the one that one would use out in the business world.

Question about whether you should mention specific faculty in the department to which you are applying.

Michael Schoenfeldt: You can also overdo this. I’ve had students say, “It would be such a thrill to work on the faculty with X.” And I will tell you that comes off as bootlicking flattery that will not do you any good – unless X is on the hiring committee and is incredibly vain, which is possible. So you don’t want to be too specific. You instead want to think about niches, the kind of institution this is. You would send a different letter to Harvard than to Oberlin, to Oberlin than to Central Michigan. You figure out the niche of the university, what kind of person it might be wanting to attract and try to pitch to that, without being too cloying. It can be useful, though, on the websites, to look at the way the major is organized in your specific field. And they will probably, in an interview, ask you about what you would teach for them, and you could say, “Well, I noticed on your website that you offer this survey. I would love to do it, and I would do it this way.” That kind of engagement can be very useful. But it is easy to overdo the closeness, the intimate knowledge of a department in that regard. You might say that [that you are interested in being a colleague of a specific faculty member], and that person will have just left or who knows what but there’s just all kinds of ways in which that could go awry.

Denise Kirschner: I would also say that there’s not an expectation – at least when we interview job candidates that they know everything about the department, the ins and outs. They are coming to Michigan, to our department, for a particular reason – maybe our faculty has a focus in a certain area – but we don’t expect them to know the vita of everyone in the department. So, the expectation really isn’t even there.

Michael Schoenfeldt: That’s good. One of the things we have to tell our people, though, is that so frequently in our field – I think this isn’t true of either of these [scientific] fields – people aren’t going to be getting a job at an institution like Michigan, simply because that’s not where most of the jobs exist in my field. I was just reminded of that point.

Question about what you should do if you decide to delay going on the market.

Michael Schoenfeldt: How could you best use that year? I would say going to a couple of conferences, submitting one or two pieces for publication to the major journals in your field. All of that would serve you much better. People get turned down at all stages of the job search for not being finished. So, if you could hit that fully armed in terms of your academic accomplishments: an article or two published, a couple of major conference presentations, that would be so much better than to hit it early and relatively empty-handed.

Question about the expectations for the statement of teaching philosophy.

Michael Schoenfeldt: I’d say what you expect to see is evidence that this person is committed to teaching, has clearly thought about her teaching, and that her teaching is connected to the same part of her brain that produced this smashing dissertation of the candidate that your thinking about hiring. And beyond that it’s really hard to say. We don’t require the full statement but I know that people do and our people have produced them and they are enormously difficult documents to write. Again, I would try to ground whatever generalities seem necessary to produce this particular statement of commitment in as many particulars as possible, and actually then that page can go by rather quickly for both the writer and the reader.

Question about the extent to which you want to present yourself as an individual or as a company man (or departmental woman). 

Michael Schoenfeldt: This is an area where you have to make the call yourself. You have to figure out how far you are willing to play the chameleon who adapts to the environment in order to hide successfully in it. And I’m not sure – it was funny, two years ago I was doing the placement with Valerie Traub in English and I was telling people, “Tone it down. Be more adaptable. Be available.” She was saying, “No. You have to figure out where you’re going to draw the line.” And I think both are legitimate. I would remember always that this is not a confessional moment. This is a rhetorical moment. The whole point is not in you scouring the truth of your being, but in making that being attractive to others, and where then you draw the line between those two potentially contrary goals, I think it’s a tricky one. If it’s a job you would do anything for – your partner would thrive in this place and otherwise, he’ll leave you, you know – you’ll draw the line lower than you would if it were in some Godforsaken part of the country, that no one wants to go to. Although even there, I would ask you to reconsider deeply and think hard. I’m from one of those places.

Question about whether you should submit an application to a department which is not advertising a position.

Michael Schoenfeldt: About the only thing that might come from that, at least in my experience, is the possibility of an exploitative lectureship, when somebody gets sick. So, it’s kind of how things used to work about thirty years ago, and at least in the humanities to my knowledge really doesn’t work that way at all. Now, I do know one person who worked her way through an exploitative lectureship into a tenure-track line. Six years later. They relied on her and she became an important part of the department. I know lots of people who thought that would happen and it never did. After a while, the department got a tenure-track hire and that person was immediately disposable. So, it doesn’t work very often. I mean, I know people have geographic limitations and sometimes have to think hard in those terms. Unfortunately, this market is so darn tight – where you could do that in law, where you could do that in lots of other fields – the academic market is so rarely open in that regard. I’m sorry to say.

Denise Kirschner (Microbiology and Immunology)

Let me touch on lots of different things, fill in some of the comparisons and contrasts with what Michael outlined with the humanities in terms of both mathematics and perhaps physics and engineering as well as compared with more medically-oriented sciences. So the first thing that I would say is don’t rush your graduate career. I think there’s no reason. I mean, you’ll have a job for the rest of your life. So, there’s no reason to rush your career. And if you’re still not sure about when your end date is for finishing up your thesis, if you’re in those stages, I think there’s no reason to push it. The job market will still be there the following year. 

And then you have to make a decision at that point, certainly, whether you are going to go into academia or not. So, I think I’ll focus more on talking about academy, but if there’s questions about going into industry or the government, I’ll address those as well. 

And then, I think, the decision becomes postdoc or no postdoc. In the sciences, certainly the medical sciences, it’s almost a necessity if you want to be at a top level school. But in mathematics and physics, for example, it’s becoming much more popular. So, in the past where it wasn’t necessary to do a postdoc in math, you are only competitive on the market now if you have one. And again, this is directed towards lots of different levels of application, so you can send your applications all to Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Princeton, and then you can send them to the next tier school and you can work your way down, and I’ll talk a little bit about that – what your MO should be in that regard. Clearly, if you want to end up at a school where research is important, doing a postdoc is only going to facilitate your acquiring of that position. It’s going to give you more time to either hone the skills in your area or perhaps to broaden them – add new tools to your toolbox, and that’s always looked upon in a very positive light. 

And the length of time that you could spend in a postdoc can vary anywhere from a year to five years, depending on what the norm is for your individual discipline. I can advise you that a one-year postdoc is probably a really bad idea. That’s because you’re just getting your feet wet at about six month and then you have to get on the job market right away, and when you’re on the job market it’s really hard to focus on other things. You’re spending lots of time doing paper shuffling, hopefully going and doing interviews, finding out about the places where you’re going to be, so putting a lot of energy into other things is difficult. 

I can tell you that when I applied for my first faculty position at Texas A&M in the mathematics department, there were 1200 applications received for the position I got, and I can’t even imagine how they found me in a pile of 1200 applications. You have to imagine what it is that makes you stand out over other individuals. But there are a few things that I think are important. 

I think your research letter is extremely important in the sciences. Again, this is geared more towards universities where research is part of your expectation. With regard to that research summary, people are looking for what your potential is for future independent research as well as for acquiring grants. That is the major mainstay of science and medicine today is acquiring grant funding and you have to have potential for that. Whether you had it as a graduate student – you were funded on a special grant – that should be highlighted in your application. If you are going for a postdoc, whether you were able to get that funded independently – you were hired on with a faculty member who later helped you acquire a grant independently. And then afterwards, that you have potential for grant funding on your own after that. That is so important in the sciences and the medical field, I can’t stress that enough.

Again, at the upper lever schools, but certainly even at the schools where teaching is the priority. There is so much funding out there nowadays for teaching initiatives that involve current research, incorporating that research into the classroom. Because – face it – there are a lot of smaller schools that are stale in their curriculum. And what they want to do is to breathe new life into that, and they’re looking for this next class of people to do that. And so it’s up to you all to impress them – whether it’s on the teaching side or research side or both – that you are the one who can do that. You have to impress them that you’re the one in that pile of 1200 that they should hire. And so I think while you want to stay away from the sales approach, which is the more resume oriented, bullet cover sheet that says, “I do this and I’m great” and all of this. You still want to make that known – through all of your documents – that you really are going to contribute something very important to that university or college where you’re going to go. 

The other thing that I would suggest – given today’s market in science and medicine – is not to limit your search. I never intended to come to Michigan. Even though I’m born and raised in Brooklyn, I decided never to come back to the North again; it’s just too darn cold. And when they called me about this position, I actually said, “No, I’m not interested. I’m not coming up for the interview. I don’t want to live in Ann Arbor.” Which, of course, was just a ludicrous idea. So, I was convinced that it was a good idea to come. I’ve never been to Ann Arbor. Come, check it out. And within twenty-four hours, I was just in love with this place, with the university, with the town, with everything. So, don’t limit yourself for stupid reasons. I mean, if your ex-husband lives in a certain city and you never want to live there, then that’s probably a good reason not to move someplace, but otherwise leave yourself open. And that goes not only for geography but also for the level of schools. I applied to everywhere from Ann Arbor down to community colleges when I was on the market. I sent out 75 applications, and that was ten years ago. So, I would say, be willing to make sacrifices, and a lot of times you’ll find out that it’s not a sacrifice at all. You’ll get someplace and it was exactly where you were supposed to be. That’s happened to a lot of colleagues of mine and to myself as well. 

I would also say that along with this research summary, I think it is important to do a teaching summary. And, I’d say almost every university is interested in what you have to say about teaching. It doesn’t have to be lengthy unless they actually call for a lengthy one. And I think it should be completely based on – to stay away from the generalities that Michael was describing – based on your own experience. If you’ve never had any teaching experience, then it’s almost ludicrous to sit down and try to write a philosophy about your teaching. But if you can say, “I taught part of this course, and I thought it was really interesting, and I was a little frustrated by the way I had to interact with freshman, but my interactions with the sophomores…” Whatever it is, you can formulate it in a way that will let them know that you’re drawing on experience and you’re not just being grandiose in your ideals about it. That’s important and that will come too, but it’s probably not going to be determinative in making you stand out in the application process. Again, if the university that you’re applying to or the college is teaching-oriented school then you’re going to want to focus a lot more energy on that document. I know that mine was two pages long and I was applying for all tier schools, and I included it with every one of my applications. So, I think that it is extremely important. 

Now, I also want to get back to the curriculum vita a little bit. Now every field is different in terms of what is expected on the CV. I don’t really think there is a general CV that covers all academia. My CV when I was in a mathematics department looks very different from the one now that I’m in the medical school. So, I would say, get a copy of your advisor’s CV if you want to be in that area. Of course, yours won’t be 50 pages long, but you’ll understand what the categories are. And I would do it today, and then I would find out which categories you have nothing to say about. And I would try really hard to at least get one item in that category before you send your CV around. And it’s actually pretty easy to do. You go to one conference, you present one abstract, you try to give one talk. Even if you can get your advisor in English to get you to give a talk next door over in the Humanities department or something. You can make it happen in the short amount of time that you may have before you are applying for jobs. But I think that’s really important. 

And I would also say along those lines, each individual discipline has its own way of getting jobs, and so there’s no way I can sit here and tell you what it is for every discipline. I can tell you that in mathematics, you have to attend the joint meeting – the AMS and the SIAM. If you don’t go to that joint meeting, then you’re probably not going to get a job in the math world. In medicine, it’s very different. You have to network more and come from labs that are really well known if you want to be at the high tier places. So you really need to discuss this with your advisor and your mentor and find out exactly what the MO is. And also where the best advertisements are for your particular area. In mathematics, all jobs are advertised in one particular place. In medicine, they’re all over the place. So, I think it’s really important to find out what happens in your discipline, and people know the answers to those questions. A lot of the time, the administrative assistants in your departments actually have all this information, and they’re really helpful at supplying it to you. 

There’s one question here that I thought was really interesting, “What pieces of information carry the most weight in the packet?” On the search committees that I’ve been on, it turns out that the letters are really important. I think people read those first and foremost, because somebody in your department will know one of the people that wrote for you. And so that letter is going to be really determinative. So finding out who to write you a letter is really important. Now, if you don’t have a letter from your advisor, and then you don’t have one from your postdoc advisor, it sends up a red flag immediately. So, if you don’t have a letter from those guys – and there’s probably a good reason for that – and so you might even want to discuss that in the interview process if it comes up. You know, “Well, you came from Jerry’s lab, why don’t you have a letter from him?” There may be a reason why you’ve chosen not to get a letter from your advisor. But, for the most part, certainly a letter from your advisor should be in there. 

And probably – again, depending on what type of university you’re applying to – someone in the department has an idea about your teaching; they’ve read all your teaching evaluations, they’ve kept up with your teaching. Try to get somebody to get a letter for you just focused on your teaching, and usually the first sentence is, "This will not deal with Sally’s research, it will only deal with her teaching and my critique of her as a teacher." What you can also do is everybody who does teach gets evaluations. I photocopied all my evaluations and put them in my packet when I applied to schools where teaching was really important. Particularly if there were comments – you know they used to hand write the comments on the back of those evaluations – I photocopied those all and cut and pasted them and put them in there. Because I thought – well, you know – if you want to know about teaching, ask the students, and there's what the students' comments were. And so I would have a little caveat, explaining "Well, that guy – he got an F in the class. He said that about me but he really didn't do very well anyway." And again you can discuss these things more in person. 

So, that brings me to the interview, and I think that the interview itself is probably the determining factor. So, all this stuff will get you invited there but if they don’t like you as a person, then you’re not going to get the job. Most of the time, people are thinking about that being the first date and then the commitment is to be married after that point. So, you have decide after the first date if you want to marry this person, because you’re going to be spending faculty meetings, decision, lots of things with them for a long, long time, and if you don’t like them or you don’t think that they’re going to contribute then it’s a turn-off right away. So, the best advice then is to be yourself. You really have to be yourself. Don’t try to impress anyone. Don’t work really hard. I can tell you when I came from that Ann Arbor interview, I still wasn’t convinced and I didn’t care at all. And it was the best interview I ever gave, because I didn’t care, and so I could completely be relaxed and be myself. So, try to do that old proverb of everybody’s in their underwear and I don’t really care about what’s happening here and it can be really successful. If you can step outside the situation and just take a deep breath and do that, I think it will work to your favor because going in tense and uptight and trying to think about what the right answer is to questions and discussion where there is none is not helpful. So just be yourself and be the best scientist or best academician that you can be.

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.

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 the Career Center 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.