Academic Interviews

Interviewing is difficult for everyone.  Imagine interviewing while managing a mental illness and dealing with low grade psychotic symptoms.  Indeed, some people would hypothesize that the stress of interviewing would make the symptoms worse.

For those of you who are not familiar with academic interviews, the process requires some explaining.  (This description is specific to North America.)  Early in the fall each school wishing to hire someone will convene a search committee.  The search committees job is to

• locate candidates for hiring by advertizing the open position, 
• invite the best ones for interviewing, 
• interview the selected candidates in one- or two-day interview, and 
• recommend the best candidate to the hiring authority (usually the dean or the department chair/head).

From the applicant's perspective, they put in their applications to as many schools as they feel will consider them and wait to hear if they have an interview.  The application usually consists of a cover letter, a research statement that describes the applicants research aspirations, a teaching statement that describes the applicants teaching aspirations, some samples of the applicants academic writing such as journal articles, a CV, and letters of recommendation.  Getting all of this material collected together can take time, and submitting an application is considered the easiest part of the whole process.  Once an applicant is selected for interviewing, they need to prepare a 45-minute job talk (sometimes a short teaching lecture or chalk-talk is also required).  Again, preparing these talks is considered to be part of the due diligence of accepting an interview invitation.

The difficult part for the candidate and for the search committee is actually having the interview.  The search committee spends a significant amount of time preparing a one- or two-day schedule for the candidate.  This usually involves arranging numerous 30- to 45-minute meetings with various busy faculty members who each have their own tight schedule.  Typically all these faculty members are from the department that is considering hiring the candidate, but in interdisciplinary situations, meetings might be scheduled with faculty from diverse departments.  To fully understand the level of planning involved in this scheduling, it is necessary to explain that that everything is choreographed from the time the candidate arrives at the local airport to the time that they leave.  It is not uncommon for the candidates every meal to be scheduled and for faculty members to shuttle the candidate from appointment to appointment.  It is considered polite and hospitable for the interviewers to manage the candidate's schedule like this.

After interviewing several candidates like this, the search committee makes a recommendation of the best fitting candidate to the hiring authority.  The candidate, knowing little of the machinations of the search committee, is simply left to wait and wonder unless they are the lucky candidate that receives the telephone call letting them know that the school will make them an offer.  For the interviewed candidates that do not receive the telephone call, there typically is no indication that they have not been selected except silence.

For the candidate receiving the lucky telephone call, the process is not over.  They have received what is called the verbal offer.  Next they are required to negotiate with the hiring authority over salary, start-up, and other terms of the contract.  It is not uncommon for the negotiations to be completed before the paper offer is printed and sent to the candidate.  Until receiving the paper offer, the candidate must be careful, because the verbal offer could be rescinded at any time.  For example, offers can be rescinded,  because funding for the position is not granted.  Therefore, the candidate must be careful not to count their chickens before they hatch and continue to make a good impression.  Once the paper offer has been given, the candidate typically has a deadline for accepting the offer and for negotiating any remaining items that have not been agreed upon prior to the paper offer being extended.

Now, having described the process of getting an academic job, I will discuss interviewing from the perspective of the candidate.  The academic interviewing process is almost ideally designed to foster extreme emotions.  The amount of ambiguity, the lack of clear communication (i.e. deafening silence), and tricky negotiations can easily inspire feelings of uncertainty, insignificance, and nervousness.  On the flip side, being invited for interviews, perhaps many of them, can inspire feelings of grandeur.  In short, academic interviewing is not for the faint of heart, because nobody feels normal during the interview process.

For myself, I felt anxious over double scheduling and missed flights.  I worried about whether my taxi drivers were driving me directly to my destinations.  I felt indicted by the people who fell asleep during my seminars.  I worried over every little mistake that I made.  I double scheduled interviews by mistake.  I hated all the travel and the many time-zone changes.  And, I felt the rush of exhilaration over being invited to interview at good places.

There are many challenges one might face during such an interview process.  I will list each along with potential strategies for overcoming the challenges.

1. The anticipation before an interview can cause insomnia.  I find it most useful just to take something that encourages sleep.  Benadryl can be perfect for this.
2. Worries about travelling, getting stuck in snowstorms, missing flights, double scheduling and other hiccups in the schedule.  I find it most useful to pad the travel schedule with a bit of extra time, so as to avoid anxiety over being late.  Beyond that a Zen approach to uncontrollable events works well.  In the worst case, medication can be adjusted slightly and anti-anxiety medication can help ease the obsessive worries.
3. The demanding schedules can cause stress due to the constant demand of trying to impress people.  I found it useful to insist on bathroom breaks frequently.  This gave me a chance to catch my breath.  Some interviews scheduled some free time to prepare for the talk.  I did my best to be alone during that time.  The most demanding schedule that I had was a 3 day interview at one university, and I got a break by asking for the dinner on the second day to not be scheduled.
4. Good news like interview invitations and offers can be stressful.  I made sure to stay immersed in work when I wasn't interviewing, so that I had something besides the job hunt to focus on.
5. Flying around a lot can be very stressful due to noisy plane, busy airports, late or cancelled flights and time-zone changes.  I dealt with this by making myself as comfortable as possible on flights.  I got a small blanket, eye cover, and ear plugs.  I made sure that my carry-on contained all the essentials, such as medications, emergency food, my computer, and power cables.  I travelled light, so that most of the time I had everything I needed in my two carry-on bags.
6. Decision making can be hard.  The offers are when you begin to see your hard work paying off, but there is still decisions to be made.  I tried to deal with this by making them as quickly as I could.  Certainly, one might be stuck waiting for more information before making a decision, but it is best to let the hiring authority know as soon as you can what your decision is.  No's are important because they might allow the search committees to pursue other candidates.

Despite difficulties of the academic job search it is likely worth the effort.  The stresses can be managed with a little care, foresight, and fortitude.