Jenny: In preparing this series, we asked job candidates who found faculty jobs within the past two years to tell us why they thought they had received an offer. In Part 1, successful candidates talked about how they planned their search and prepared their application materials. Here we’ll turn to the campus interview. We asked these new faculty members about the importance of fit and about what they did to stand out during their interview and job talk.
Julie: A first, and obvious, recommendation from everyone we spoke with: Practice — especially your job talk. “I spent hours and hours preparing for my interviews,” said one recent Ph.D. in English, “both by practicing with colleagues (friends, professors, etc.) and by preparing sample syllabi to bring with me to the interview.”
Practice talking with those who know your work well, and those who don’t. Practice one-on-one conversations and panel interviews. As much as you can, practice in a way that simulates the format of your interview. For a first-round interview via Skype, practice with Skype. For a campus visit, practice a short research pitch that you can use in informal conversations (e.g., dinners and receptions). For those who haven’t been on the market yet, think strategically about where you can practice your spiel now. As one candidate in the social sciences wrote to us: “Before my on-campus interview, I practiced my research talk at a conference, which served as a practice job talk.”
Jenny: Why start an advice column with a piece of advice that’s fairly obvious? Well, as graduate-career counselors, we regularly see job candidates who fail to practice or wait until it’s too late to ask for help setting up a practice interview. These latecomers don’t have the time to manage all the logistics that go into setting up practice sessions with faculty, colleagues, or career-services staff.
Part and parcel of going on the market means practicing your interviews and presentation skills. Once you’ve started sending out materials, you should start setting up ways to practice interviewing — even if you don’t have any interviews. In a tight job market, doing so may feel futile, it may feel tiring, it may feel like a poor use of your already limited time. But time spent developing your scholarly (and teacherly) voice will never be time wasted, as strong presentation stills are useful no matter where your career takes you.
Julie: It’s critical that you be able to practice articulating — yes, out loud, not just in your head — a coherent agenda for your career. One candidate in education who conducted a successful search after a postdoc told us: “I clearly articulated for myself what my five-year plan was. I had been thinking about it for a while, but this was the point in my career where I really realized there was a strong thread in all of my interdisciplinary work. When you can clearly draw out your five-year plan, and the steps you will take to achieve each phase, you become a more attractive candidate.”
Jenny: Another element of successful preparation is taking the time to learn about the institution and the people you’ll be meeting. Several candidates said the interpersonal connections they made on the campus and at conferences proved crucial.
- “Once I got interviews, I tried to make personal connections with anybody involved with the programs. I was quick to respond to emails and phone calls from the search-committee chair, and I reached out to individuals I knew at the school, thanking them for their assistance and asking advice on elements of the school, department, and process that would be helpful in navigating the interviews. I used those conversations, as well as additional research online, to highlight talking points for the interview grounded in the types of courses they expected me to teach, research agendas they anticipated, and how I personally could contribute to the culture of the department. As well, I took advantage of an academic conference that my future dean would be attending to introduce myself and let him know I was selected for a final-round interview. Through that brief conversation, he let me know what he was looking for in a candidate (in this case a person with experience in working with middle schools), and I did extra prep on middle schools before the interview.” (From a candidate in the social sciences who focused on K-12 education.)
- “I also made sure to research both the institution and the people there. Knowing a little bit about whom I was going to meet made it easier to connect with them on a personal level. For example, it turned out that an administrator and I had both lived in the same Southern city a few years back. This made for an excellent conversation about favorite local spots. Being able to have this type of interaction, I would say, was particularly important at a small college.” (From a new faculty member in sociology.)
Julie: Take what you learn from your research on people you’ll be meeting with and turn it into a real, engaged conversation. Amanda Licastro, now an assistant professor of English at Stevenson University, told us, “The best part of my experience interviewing at the job I took was seeing the genuine excitement the faculty, students, and administrators expressed for my work.” Indeed, we’ve known many candidates who’ve taken some of the stress out of interviewing by reframing it in that manner.
Think of your interview not as a test with an unfeeling group of examiners, but as an opportunity to talk with an engaged audience about the research and teaching that excite you.
Jenny: A new faculty member in education said her enthusiasm about her work seemed to make a difference to the hiring committee. “I know it sounds cliched,” she said, “but don’t be afraid to be passionate in both your statements and your interviews. My passion for outreach in public schools, and my belief in the mission of the university, were huge deciding factors in my selection as a faculty member. In the end, there will be a few top candidates for a position, and your passion for a position could help you stand out from the pack.”
Julie: Use all of the resources available to you to prepare for the campus visit. Amanda said she turned for help repeatedly to people the department where she earned her Ph.D.: “Our placement officer reviewed my materials, set up a review with a faculty member outside my specialty, and arranged for mock interviews. I also had extensive feedback and support from my committee throughout the entire process.”
Jenny: Being able to articulate your scholarly identity is crucial to a successful job talk — one of the most important elements of a campus interview. Ask the hiring department how long your talk should be and who will attend. Both details are crucial elements in your preparation and practice. Your talk should not exceed the time allotted, and it should be grounded in enough context for everyone in the audience to understand. The experience of one successful job candidate who applied for interdisciplinary positions illustrates this:
- “People who were on the search committee as well as people who came to my job talk had different disciplinary backgrounds. Some were doing humanities studies, some were doing applied social science, some were doing theory-based social science, and some were doing policy research. It was such a challenge to do a job talk to this diverse audience. Fortunately, my dissertation (which I shared during my job talk) was very interdisciplinary, and I presented a little bit of everything (about policy, qualitative data, and theorization of the data by using philosophical theories). Many gave me feedback after the job talk that presenting on these different aspects helped all the faculty members to engage with my work, and it made the difference between my presentation and other candidates’.”
Knowing who was on the search committee, and who would be at the job talk, was crucial in making this candidate’s work accessible and approachable to most, if not all, of those in attendance.
Julie: Most candidates will not have to speak to an audience with interests as diverse as those. But many will, and, at some institutions, your audience may consist of faculty, graduate students, and even undergraduates. You will be presenting both to experts in your field and to people unfamiliar with your topic. That requires a delicate balance, and the solution, once again, is to practice.
Jenny: All of the candidates we interviewed had given serious thought to their research agendas and overall career goals. Those who had been on the job market a previous time were especially confident because they had learned about themselves and about the search process before.
Julie: That said, Jenny and I know well that even with careful preparation and experience on the market, an academic job offer is difficult to come by. We regularly work with Ph.D.s who haven’t received a job offer and are trying to sort out what’s next. For many, that “what’s next” process is intellectually and emotionally painful, in addition to the obvious stress it places upon one’s personal life.
At the same time, however, we also see lots of A.B.D.s and new Ph.D.s whose approach to the job market seems haphazard at best, and who need quite a bit of coaching. This column is meant to help you see the level of preparation necessary for a successful faculty job search, and to decide if you are ready and committed to your own search.
In the future, we will write about candidates who had a successful search for a nonfaculty position. (If you fall into that category and want to share your story, please contact us at: careertalk.ajsh@gmail.com.)
