Interviewing for Academic Jobs

Questions

Question about whether candidates should frame their future plans in terms of the work they've been doing with their advisor or not.

Matthew Shapiro: I think it probably depends on the field. Some fields have – especially the sciences – have mentor-student relationships. I would think in the sciences you should sort of have a plan for setting up your own lab. There are some really big research programs and if you’re going to pick up a piece of it, explain why this is your own piece, if that’s the nature of your discipline. Question about how academic couples should deal with the couple issue in the job search.

Sonya Rose: As Matthew was talking about this, I was thinking about a recent experience that we’ve had and my own experiences on the job market. If you’re a serious candidate – most people know enough now to know that it’s illegal to ask whether you are married or have children – and sometimes it doesn’t come up over dinner. Sometimes movies come up over dinner or the latest book you read in the New York Times or whatever the New York Times was saying that day – oh, actually that’s another thing. Make sure you read the newspaper in the morning. Seriously, because you are going to have to make small talk, and it’s better to have small talk around issues other people can engage in.

If they’re serious about you, they might say something like, “Are there any issues we need to know about if we want to recruit you? I can’t tell you whether we’re going to offer you the job, because we’re going to see two more people, but you’re clearly high up on our list.” This is at the campus interview. Usually you’re one of three people. Usually, you don’t have the money to bring more than three people. You know that you’re one of three people. And they will say, “I can’t tell you whether we’re going to hire you at this point, because we have two other people to see, and there’s all this committee stuff that we’ve got to go through, but I’d like to know now what sort of issues we may have to deal with should we want to recruit you.” You may not be asked that. My feeling is that I would not bring it up. This is my feeling. I would bring it up when you’re offered the job. When you’re offered the job, then it’s appropriate to say, “Listen, one thing we didn’t discuss is the fact that I have a partner, and my partner’s field is blah-blah-blah. Before I can actually give you an answer, I need to explore a little bit what’s available for my partner.”

Matthew Shapiro: I think it’s very idiosyncratic both for individual situations and for the schools. I think of recruiting at the University of Michigan. We’re sort of in the middle…there are places that are much better off – like in New York, where spousal issues are easy to resolve – and there are places that are a lot worse off – big universities that are more isolated than us. So, we’re sort of in the middle and we often try to work hard, sometimes it’s within university, sometimes it’s a referral to business. It depends what your spouse is in, too. If your spouse is just in a profession or a teacher or something that’s not university related, then it doesn’t need to come up. But if your spouse is in your same field or another field doing the same kind of search, often that does come into play and it can be helpful if the school can foresee that, “Ah, we can get you because we might be able to resolve your spouse issue.” So you have to play it by ear; seek the advice of your advisor. And you might handle different schools separately. If it’s clear that they can’t do anything but you’re still interested in the job, don’t mention it. If you are already sitting on a job but might vaguely prefer this one if it worked out better for your spouse, you probably want to tell them. So, it depends a lot on where you are with your search.

Reg Williams: My experience with this issue is that it really comes down to how attractive do you appear to that school. If you are a really top-notch candidate, and they say, “Listen, we’ll go to any extent to get you here,” then it’s not an issue. I’ve seen deans bend over backwards to find a spouse or a partner a job. And it’s amazing sometimes what they can come up with. They got connections that I don’t even have sometimes, and that’s kind of neat. I don’t know if I’d go as far – as my esteemed colleague has said – to wait until you’ve been offered the job. In our school, that would work against you. It would be better to know that you’re really needing some help with that to bring you here, if that was the case. But, again, what I really think it comes down to is what I think all of us are trying to say and that is that it’s very situation-specific. There are so many variables in here, to give you a single way to do it would be misguiding.

Sonya Rose: You may not know yourself whether having two jobs at one place is the absolute limit or whether you’re willing to do a fifty-mile commute or hundred-mile commute or something else. Or the job is so great that at this point you can’t turn it down though there’s not another school around for the next two hours.

Matthew Shapiro: From the hiring point of view, unless the person basically says as happens occasionally (mainly with people who already have other job offers), “I’m not coming unless X,” then we’ll just evaluate the person based on the individual.

Question about how candidates should frame their accomplishments.

Sonya Rose: That’s a really good point. Be honest. I shouldn’t have to say it, but since I’ve had the experience…it’s really important to be honest. Be honest on the CV. If you’ve sent something out and it’s under review, say it’s under review. Don’t gild the lily. Be dead honest, because people check and you want to make sure that everything you are giving them is verifiable.

Question about whether postdocs should discuss their current research or their dissertation research in their application.

Sonya Rose: I have two students that have postdocs right now, and my guess is that you talk about the research you’re just completing and plans for the future. And you can say, “And then my dissertation was…” I think it shows a trajectory.

Reg Williams: What I would add to that is that if your dissertation and then your postdoc builds on it, you’re actually showing a program of research. A search committee or anybody who would be interviewing you would just groove on that, so going back to what Matthew was saying, is keep it short but make it very bulleted in terms of the kinds of work that you’re doing and how you’re building on it.

Question about how to deal with age discrimination.

Matthew Shapiro: You seem to be implying that there is a lot of age discrimination out there. It hasn’t been my experience. It depends on what you mean by "older." It so rarely comes up in my field. I would just say that you’ve got to put yourself forward and hope people judge you based on your merits.

Sonya Rose: That’s what I would do, too. I don’t know how you would prevent age discrimination. All I can say is that if one of my colleagues was indicating that they were going to do that, I would be really mad. I think you can also bank on the fact that another member of the interviewing team or someone else in the department is not going to go for it, for the discriminatory attitude. I have heard that – actually not in the United States but in the UK where I sometimes have students applying for jobs – that in the UK there is really blatant age discrimination. There – because people finish high school younger and they finish college younger and they do everything younger – that if you’re 30 you’re already old. After all, what were you doing between 25 and 30? After all, you should have been finished and writing books!

Reg Williams: In my field the average age of faculty is 40, so age discrimination I frankly haven’t seen. But you can also do what I do and that is tell people that I actually am very young, I just look older because I’ve had a hard life. You can always use that as your backup.

Question about how candidates should have letters of recommendation sent.

Sonya Rose: My experience is that it’s field specific, actually. In Sociology, they’re all individual letters. In History, most people use Career Services. Usually people in history are used to dealing with job placement. So, I think you need to ask other people in your specific field. I really do think it’s field specific.

Question about whether a candidate should ask what a department's future plans are.

Matthew Shapiro: Probably not. That’s an inappropriate question. If you have a couple of things you might teach, I think it’s permissible to say, “Well, I could teach labor economics or public finance. How would you see these slotted?” I think to ask where you would fit into their plans is okay, but asking about, “Oh, are you going to make a bit expansion to try to break into the top ten?” is not what you want to be asking. It is inappropriate from someone so junior.

Reg Williams: It’s fascinating in terms of how I would respond versus how he would respond. And again I think it just shows you the difference in fields of how they would react to a question like that. In my field, they would probably look at you and say, “That’s a very good question,” and then they would have to sit and think about what is it that they are planning to do. It makes them think and that actually works to your advantage. But I think you have to be very careful, and you have to sort of know the institution a bit in terms of have they been giving thought to where they’re going in the next five years. Some schools have really been doing a lot of thinking about that and for you then to be able to ask that question and get an idea about where they are planning on heading and how you could fit into that and talk about that could work to your advantage, but I think again you see the differences between fields and the importance of talking to others as to what might be an appropriate question to ask.

Question about whether you should ask questions about the department.

Matthew Shapiro: It really depends on whom you’re talking to. If you have an interview with Harvard. You’re supposed to know about Harvard. Now, at Michigan we sort of have that attitude, too. So unless you really have a good question, I think it’s better – again, it depends on the clock – but I think there’s nothing wrong with not asking. When I run these interviews, I prefer not to ask the question, “Do you have any questions?” because I’m really not interested.

Sonya Rose: Not at the screening interview. If it’s the on campus interview, then you should have something you can ask them.

Matthew Shapiro: Oh, yes. And at that point, there’s a lot more things you really do need to know. It’s not just small talk, “Oh, what would I teach?” You really want to know what you’re going to teach.

Reg Williams: In my field, screening interviews like this don’t occur. What does occur is that you might be at a meeting, and you meet a faculty member from a particular university, and they want to sit and talk to you and they’re not interviewing you in the strictest sense of the word, but they are checking you out. So it is important to be engaging and to act like a human being and act interested and all the things we’ve been talking about still apply. Even though it’s not a formal interview, in the strictest sense.

Question about what the panel finds to be good questions from candidates.

Sonya Rose: I honestly can’t think of any…Oh, I do like people to ask me what I’m doing, what my research is about, in the individual interviews. I really want to see that the other person is interested in what I do. And if they have something interesting to say about it, even better.

Question about whether a candidate should bring up family or other connections with the state a particular university is in.

Matthew Shapiro: Depends where it is. I mean, if this is La Hoya, or Santa Cruz, you probably don’t want to say that. But if your family is from a state and it’s one of the less populous states, sure, say that. It’s showing an interest. The perception of the students is, “Oh, it’s very hard to get a job.” But it’s also very hard to hire good people, so if there’s a good person out there who actually might want the job, that is useful information, that is if it can be done in a low-key sort of way.

Reg Williams: When you get that question of why you want to come here – my colleagues may not have seen this as much as I’ve seen it in search committees that I’ve been on as well as when I’ve interviewed myself – it just seemed invariably that that question came up. I know that most of the time the search committee is wanting to hear the answer to that. They’re often asking the question because they can’t think of anything else to ask at the moment, so it becomes an easy question to ask. That’s one of the dynamics there, but the other dynamic is that they do want to hear what is it about here that attracts you. And you want to have thought that through, and you shouldn’t just make it one thing. Because if you say it’s just because you have better weather than where I live. Well, that’s not a very good reason. So you want to have thought through why is it really that you are attracted. And there are a whole number of things. It could be that they’re doing some cutting edge research or they just built a new building with all the latest teaching tools that are available and you really would love to be part of that. I mean, the list goes on and on.

Matthew Shapiro: If it’s a major research university, they’re going to assume that you want to be there because you want to be a professor at a major research university. It might come up for a college. Often, we’ve found that colleges are skeptical of our students because they’ve been graduate students at Michigan. Everyone assume that the model of success is being like your advisor and your advisor is clearly not at a college. On the other hand, we do have a number of students that are quite interested in going to colleges and often colleges offer a more attractive mixture of teaching and research. Often colleges tend to want people who write fewer articles but actually write ones that have some impact, whereas a second rate research university might be more into quantity. So, if you want that, they might be interested. So, saying you are interested in teaching. If you went to a liberal arts college…so if you went to Swarthmore and you’re applying to Wesleyan, let them know. It shows that you know what it’s about, and you show that you know it’s a very nice attractive life, and you show some understanding that these places value research, although a different mix of research and teaching.

Question about whether you should ask about the politics of a department.

Matthew Shapiro: How many offers are you going to have? You only need to know about the politics when you have your second offer, and then you ask your advisor.
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