Jana Nidiffer (School of Education)

[Often people forget that the job talk is part] of the job search process. And maybe that’s because it comes relatively late. You worry about getting the dissertation done. Then you worry about your letters of application, then your letters of recommendation, and then you worry about getting called for an interview, and then you worry about what you’re going to do for an interview and after all of that, it’s hard to muster up sometimes or to think a lot in advance about the job talk. And I’m glad that Tom and his staff are making it a separate conversation, because I think my primary point is to say that they matter. I have seen people essentially torpedo their candidacy by an inadequate or problematic job talk. So despite everything that you have to prepare for – and it seems like you’re doing all the preparation simultaneously and it’s very nerve-wracking – it’s important to pay attention to the job talk.

I’m going to offer a few thoughts about what I think is a good job talk or good things to keep in mind as you prepare for your job talk, but I would also encourage you to know that the best way to prepare for a job talk is to observe others and practice one for yourself. If your department or a closely related department is doing any kind of faculty search while you’re a student here, go to as many of the job talks of faculty in your department as you can. And then listen to the buzz on the street, whether or not this was thought to be a good job talk or a problematic one and take the time to analyze why, what the difference was. So, let me offer a few thoughts, but please feel free to ask questions or ask for examples.

I think that one of the most challenging aspects of a job talk is that you are being judged on three criteria simultaneously, and that is you are being judged as a scholar, you are being judged as a future colleague, and you’re being judged as a potential teacher in the department. So, when you think about being judged as a scholar, I would encourage you to make sure that your job talk conforms to the norms of your discipline, and I would say that possibly one of the best models to look at if you’re unclear about the norms of the discipline are either job talks in your faculty or presentations at professional conferences in your field. And by paying attention to the norms of your discipline, I mean is it for example absolutely required for a talk in your discipline that you spend a great deal of time explaining your methodology. I’m a historian of education and that’s not typically as big a part of my own discipline as it is with some others. We tend to talk more about what we found and its significance and not spend much time, in verbal presentations, on our methodology per se. But that’s a norm in my discipline that may be different, so you should pay attention to your faculty norms.

The other thing that I would encourage – and I think this is very important – only – absolutely, under all circumstances – speak on a topic with which you are very familiar. It is not a good idea to talk about a work in progress or a beginning line of research. I think particularly for recent Ph.D.s, there’s an expectation that you’re going to talk about your dissertation work, and I think that’s fine, but you may in fact as part of the job talk or in the interview be challenged or questioned about your presentation and you want to feel on very firm ground to defend your ideas and describe your intellectual processes.

Now, most people when they think about a job talk are probably most aware of being judged as a scholar, and that this is a public presentation of your intellectual work, but I think it’s also reasonable to understand that search committees – and the panel before me may have spoken to this – when search committees are interviewing people, they’re not just interviewing scholars, they’re interviewing people. And they’re interviewing people that are going to be in the office down the hall from them for anywhere from 5-7 years and if you’re granted tenure for a lifetime. So, they are interested in someone with whom they feel they can be a colleague. Someone who would be interesting; someone who will contribute to the department. So, as you’re being judged as a colleague, make sure you convey a sense that you want to be there. That you’re interested in or invested in the people in the audience getting to know you. Make it clear that you have read about and come to understand the university where you are giving the talk, and particularly the department or the school or whatever unit is supporting your candidacy.

I would say that one of the times when I saw a candidate torpedo himself with a bad job talk was someone who was coming to a school of education as a historian of education and spoke as though he was in a professional conference of historians or only historians and he didn’t really know that his audience was going to be ed school faculty, none of whom were historians. He was going to be the historian of education in the program, and he didn’t take enough time to understand the school and the department to which he was speaking.

Following on that, just very succinctly, know who your audience is. Understand them. Many department chairs or deans or whoever is coordinating your visit to campus, may communicate to you some specifics about your job talk and it can be buried in the two-and-a-half page letter that the dean sends to you about this, but do pay attention. Sometimes they will say, “We will ask you to be in a seminar room” or “You’re going to be in the something-something auditorium” or whatever. But there might be information in there that will let you know the setting and some specifics about who the audience will be. If it’s only going to be your department, then you can talk in some ways much more specifically to scholars in your field than if an entire school or program is likely to be part of the audience.

The other thing is that when you get to campus, the job talk is usually not the very first thing. At some point in time, particularly if a graduate student in the department is going to offer to give you a tour, know where you’re supposed to give the job talk and ask to take a look at the room so you have a sense of how formal/informal, how close to the audience, etc. you’ll be. And also some expectation of the size of the crowd.

The last thing in terms of being judged as a colleague is to communicate that you’re likeable. And I know that can sound silly but how many times (changes voice to a low monotone) have you ever heard somebody give a talk where they just seem to talk like this and they go on and they drone and they really sound like they’re very nervous and they’re scared and you can’t really understand them and they don’t seem to be very happy that they’re doing it (normal voice) and it’s very hard to listen to an hour and fifteen minutes of that so communicate that you are interested in what you’re doing and that you are an interesting person. You can contribute to the scholarly discourse and you would be someone that it would be interesting to have an office across the hall from.

Now, most job talks are relatively formal presentations – not always, but it’s been my experience that most are. And so it is sometimes difficult to imagine how you might communicate your skills as a teacher in a job talk particularly if your teaching style is not this formal presentation style. However, you are going to be judged on your facility as a communicator and therefore as a potential teacher. Now, we all know that – particularly if you are going for a job in a research-oriented university – one of the primary interests is going to be your scholarship, but other kinds of institutions may be just as interested in your skills as a teacher. And even research universities are becoming more and more interested in the teaching skills of the recent Ph.D.s that they’re interviewing for new faculty jobs. So it’s important to remember that you’re being looked upon as a future teacher.

Now, the first thing, of course, that you want to do then is to be understood. Because if you can’t be understood, then they may wonder how students will understand you. So speak clearly, speak logically and all that you’ve ever learned about a good presentation is important to have in this job talk. I think it’s perfectly acceptable – particularly if it’s a norm in your discipline – if you have a couple of overheads to make points clear, even a handout or two. I think that anything that makes it seem like you were prepared and invested and that you want people to understand you is perfectly reasonable. Again, that may be more of a social science norm, so you should pay attention to the norms in your own discipline.

It might be appropriate, depending on the department or the school, to even have a slightly more teacher-oriented job talk and again this is where you would need to be very savvy about listening to the signals that you’re getting from the department chair or the dean or whomever is inviting you to speak. By teacher-oriented, I mean something a little less formal, something that might more closely match your teaching style. Again, probably at a research one university this would not be a good choice, but there are institutions where this might be something that you would feel was appropriate. And it would help to communicate to them your interest in being a good teacher.

And the last thing about communicating your skills as a teacher: even if it is a very formal presentation, you can sometimes bring in issues of teaching into the formal presentation. For example, if you devote some time – not the majority of time, but a small amount of time – to some issues of teaching related to the work that you just presented in the content. Like for example if you talk about what are the ideas and concepts in your field or discipline that are difficult to teach to undergraduates, for example, if that’s going to be your primary teaching responsibility. You might also talk about somewhere in your job talk, the relationship of your ongoing research agenda with your teaching. In other words, how you were using your scholarship in your classroom and vice versa.

And my last point before I pass the microphone on. Absolutely stay within the time limits. No exceptions. If they say 40 minutes, speak for 38. If they say an hour, speak for 55 or less. The last thing you want to see people doing in your job talk is looking at their watches and shuffling in their seats. So that’s telling people that you read what they provided for you, and it’s also telling people that you respect their time. They’ve come to give you this hour, or this two hours, or whatever the cultural norm is for that institution and you respect that and you’re not going to hold them longer than that.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema (Psychology)

Those are great comments. You’ve taken half of what I was going to say, so I’ll try to add to it and not be redundant. But there are a couple of things I am going to be redundant on just because I think they are so critical to emphasize. And one of them is that this is a one item test, the job talk is. It is absolutely critical. I’m in Psychology and – other than Education – we’re the first people on earth who should know that a one item test is very unreliable, and yet I’ve seen it happen over and over and over again in Psychology that people sink their opportunities in a job by giving a lousy job talk. So, you can’t put too little emphasis on preparing for the job talk. There will be lots of people in the department – who are going to have a critical role in whether you get hired or not – for whom this is the only time they see you. They won’t have an individual meeting with you; they won’t even have read your papers or your vita when it comes time for the faculty vote. This is what they know about you, is what you did in that 45 or 50 minutes and they will form deep and abiding opinions of you based on this 45 minutes, so it is really critical to get this under control. So, that’s one of the main things that I want to say.

I’ll just add to a couple of the goals that you have – some of them already mentioned – for this job talk. One – and I don’t think this is specific to a particular area – but you want to present your research, your topic of study, within this job talk in a coherent fashion that shows you can think. And one of the critical mistakes that I’ve seen happen many times for very junior people giving a job talk is that they tell a chronological order job talk. They say, “Well, first I did this study, then I did that study, then I did the third study” or they give you the order of things rather than a coherent package that tells a story. Maybe you only have one study and that’s fine but what the listeners want to hear is the story that you can tell with your scholarship so it’s really important to put in the studies – if that’s the way your discipline does it – or the readings or the analyses but it has to be packaged in a coherent way that demonstrates your originality of thought, the fact that you can put this coherent piece of work together.

As Jana said, you need to demonstrate your speaking and teaching styles so practicing saying the words clearly – not too loud, not too quickly, not too slowly – and saying things in language which is sufficiently non-jargon-y that your audience is going to understand them is really critical.

And I think another thing that is very frequently ignored as people practice for their job talk is that as much weight is often put on how you think on your feet in response to questions as is on your formal job talk. And one of the things students fail to practice are those questions. So you’ve gone over this job talk – you’ve given it to your mirror, you’ve given it to your partner, you’ve given it to your best friends 50, 100 times – but what your mirror and your best friends don’t do is to hammer you with tough questions. They don’t say, “I don’t understand why you even took on this project” or “I didn’t understand the whole middle third of your talk.” They don’t slam you like you can get slammed in these question and answer sessions. And it is absolutely critical to practice thinking on your feet in response to challenging questions as much as the formal presentation.

So, in your departments, in the opportunities you get to practice your job talk – if it’s in front of your friends, your peer students – have at least one session where they try to model the most cantankerous faculty in your department. OK, what would Professor Son-of-a-gun say in response to this? What’s the most challenging thing somebody could get you on in this? Your friends are going to possibly be reticent to do this to you, but it’s one of the best things they can possibly do for you. And if you can get the faculty to do this to a certain extent, because they’ll be able to sort of second-guess what other faculty might pull on you. It gives you a lot of really critical practice at thinking on your feet, at maintaining your composure, which is really, really important. If you just fall apart in response to a really challenging nasty question, then they see that as diagnostic. It’s not fair, but they do. So you need as much practice responding to those difficult questions and having pat answers – having already formulated an answer to the question – as you do to standing up and reading your talk or giving your talk.

Some stylistic issues with regard to the talk. In some of the questions we were given, one of the questions was about technology, and I know that in some disciplines technology is not an issue. You don’t use technology in the course of a talk, but there are lots of disciplines where you are more or less expected to have overheads or slides or, these days, a Powerpoint presentation. I guess a crude way to put it is covering your butt. One of my first job talks, I had these gorgeous slides, and I put them in the slide carousel and I stand up to give this talk and the slide carousel doesn’t work. And it takes them 20 minutes to find another slide carousel in the department, and it was supposed to be a 45 minute talk. And at 45 minutes, half the audience got up and left because they had to go teach themselves. So, I lost half my audience half-way through the talk. It wasn’t my fault, but I suffered from it. So, one of the things that’s a good idea is that if you have slides, have overheads as a backup. If you have a Powerpoint presentation, for God’s sake have slides and overheads as a backup because they fail on a regular basis, as many of you know. And lots of universities are not as technologically sophisticated as Michigan is so don’t expect –especially if you are going to a smaller college – don’t expect them to have the fancy, nice technology that you may have become accustomed to in some of the lecture rooms around the university.

Another thing about slides or overheads – visuals – don’t make them too complicated. One of the most annoying things that you can get – you’re sitting there in the audience – is a speaker who says, “I know you can’t see this, but…” Well, then why do you have it up there in the first place? They’ll put up a slide with 175 correlations on it. “Well, if you could see in this column, it would show you…” That is not a way to win friends and show that you’re a good teacher. So, make one of the rules of thumb to never have more than 7 pieces of information on any visual, and that includes the title. Keep it as simple as you possibly can while still getting the information across. Make it as visual as you can. There are a lot of audiences – even scholars – who just read graphs a lot faster than they do big tables of something. So if you can translate your work into a jazzy color table, do it. Now don’t dummy it down, by any means, but – again this is something to practice – try out your visuals. Have people get really critical about your visuals. Have people tell you, “I have no idea what that’s telling me. When you flashed that up there, I couldn’t read it. I didn’t know what you were talking about.” Those kinds of feedback are really, really critical.

That’s most of what I wanted to say. The details are terribly important, and again what I think most people pay a lot of attention to is practicing the formal words of the talk and being slick in that way but these little details of technology, of style, and particularly of taking questions are at least as important in some people’s eyes. And particularly when you are trying to both demonstrate that you’re a scholar and a teacher, they’re going to want to know that the undergraduates are going to come away from your lectures understanding them and if they can’t come away from your lecture and understand what you did, they’re quite sure that the undergraduates won’t. I’ll stop there.

Jarrod Hayes (Romance Languages)

I guess even though this panel is focused on the job talk, I think I’d like to begin by situating the job talk in the overall interviewing process. Since it hasn’t been that long since I gave my job talk here at Michigan, it’s interesting now – also after having sat on a couple of hiring committees – to compare what I was thinking, feeling, going through when I was on the market to the different ways I look at it now. When I think back, I imagine myself always at every step in this fierce competition with people who were just absolutely brilliant, and wondering what they were going to see in me. From the other side of the interviewing table, I’ve been surprised at how often you do a first round of interviews and you’re actually very disappointed in a large number of the candidates. So, it’s been interesting for me to think about it in a different way – not as this kind of race, but when you arrive at one stage of the interviewing process, you’ve already managed to impress a committee enough for them to want to see more. What you need to think about doing is keeping up that momentum and not disappointing the people. I think it’s not necessarily an easier task but it’s a different way of thinking about it. 

In my field – I’m not that knowledgeable about other fields – but we have a first round of interviews at this huge convention, the Modern Language Association, which we refer to affectionately as “the meat market.” So, it’s fairly uniform across the various humanities – at least literature, modern literature – departments. And then we may – in our department – interview 8 people, and it’s not usually difficult to decide the 2 or 3 that we’re going to invite to campus. This is particularly at the assistant professor level; it’s slightly different in senior hires. So, when I think of it that way, the same way of thinking about the job talk I think also applies. One of the major tasks is not to let down, first of all, the hiring committee but also the whole department, because a larger number of people are going to be looking at you as a candidate at this stage. 

Another thing which I think is really crucial advice: you’ve done all this hard work, you’ve made it so far, I think you should relax and enjoy it. You’re going to be wined and dined; you’re going to meet really interesting people. So if you think about sort of enjoying the process and I certainly enjoyed most of my experiences, not all of them, it will help you relax, I think. You’ll be less nervous when you’re giving the job talk and you’ll make an even better impression. My advisor – to add to what someone said about looking for a colleague – my advisor put it this way, she said, “They’re wanting somebody new to play with.” And so you want to show them that you’re going to make a good playmate. 

One of the things were were particularly asked to speak about was how to balance what may seem to be contradictory demands: sophistication, accessibility, esoterica, generality, depth, breadth, on the one hand detailed methodology and data and on the other larger issues and implications. It seems sort of like an impossible task. Particularly in a research institution, you’re being asked to show off your brilliance. Yet on the other hand, you have to show – as the other panelists have mentioned – you have to show that you can present your ideas to a wide audience. When you think about it the reason – particularly in departments that tend to be smaller, such as mine – the reason there’s a job search in my field – say, francophone literature – is because you’re going to be the person, hopefully, to fill that position. So your perfect audience, in terms of a scholarly community, is not going to be in the room. That’s why there looking for you or someone like you. So, never is the case that you will be speaking – or rare is the case that you will be speaking to fellow scholars in your field. In my department, for example, we have French, Spanish, and Italian. So you’re speaking to people in slightly different disciplines, and those people have an equal voice in terms of who is going to get hired, so that is one thing you should keep in mind. 

In terms of balancing between impressing your audience as a scholar and impressing your audience as a teacher, I think those seem to be kind of contradictory demands but one thing I noticed as I was preparing the job talk that I would eventually give here. I started to think about my teacher version. I’d worked on it and I’d made it clear, and then I sat down and I said, you know there’s no reason why I can’t say the same things at a research institution. I hadn’t sacrificed any of my ideas, I had only made them clear. So the only difference between my teacher version and my research institution version was actually that one was longer and one was shorter, because often the length corresponds. The smaller institution tended to want a 20-25 minute talk and the research institution tended to want more like 45 minutes. So, I actually had the same talk which I used 4-5 times with orange brackets around what not to say when I had to give a shorter talk, so I think the sophistication/accessibility dichotomy is a false one if you’re in a really good job talk. 

In my field – and I really always hated doing this, and I don’t know how many disciplines have this – for smaller institutions, I was asked to give a sample class. This is a very difficult thing to do. I was given a number of offers at institutions that required it, so I must not have been that bad at it, but this is also a kind of tricky thing. It’s like the question and answer session but for a whole hour. So, one way of preparing for that is to think about all of the things you’ve learned in your teaching methodology courses and how you are going to fit all of those things into a single class. That’s a very difficult task, I think, and I’m not sure that I have many easy answers. One reason I’m glad that we don’t do that here in my department at Michigan is it seems – at least for professorial searches – there seems to be a bit of hypocrisy involved. The hiring department expects the candidates to be fabulous teachers, often better than they themselves are. There’s a set of unrealistic expectations and you have to figure out how to meet those. 

I won’t add anything else to what my colleagues have said about writing the job talk, about presentation. I think they both made very important points that you will need to keep in mind. I will relate one anecdote, a sort of confession or a mistake I made in a job talk I gave on my first year on the market. It was a sort of difficult situation. Actually, before I describe that anecdote, I’ll mention as you go on the market – in my field at least – you’re asked to provide a writing sample. You might think about why you’re choosing your writing sample. You don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket. So if you give away all the goodies at the very beginning at the job process, you won’t have anything left to impress the department with when it comes to giving the job talk. So that’s something you might keep in mind. 

In the particular case of the institution where I gave the bad job talk, I had given a writing sample – I wasn’t quite finished with my dissertation yet. I had given another chapter that was perhaps a stronger one at the MLA so I couldn’t use that. I think it’s sort of bad to use a talk for a job talk that already appears somewhere else on your CV. So the same job talk in a single year before you update your CV or before other people have heard about it, that’s fine. But once you have given a talk at the MLA and it appears on your CV, I think it’s – at least in my discipline – it’s sort of bad form to recycle. It says to your audience, “Well, we’re not good enough to get something new.” So, I’m not totally in disagreement with the statement about doing something that’s polished already, but in some disciplines at least, there can be a contradictory demand being placed on the job talk. 

So, again back to my anecdote. At this particular institution, I had given a good part – what I thought was a strong part of my dissertation – in another form. The committee wanted an extra chapter of my dissertation, so I was sort of running out of things to use for the job talk. It was a very prestigious public institution – which I won’t name – also known for being quite liberal so I thought what I will do is something that will distinguish me from the other candidates. It’s a job on post-colonial studies, francophone studies. It was split between Comp Lit and French. So, they don’t need to see how I’m like every other postcolonial scholar. What I need to show them is what I’m really good at. My work has been at the intersection, so to speak, of queer theory and postcolonial theory, so two contested fields already, but I started to realize in the market that once you put two contested fields together you sort of get double jeopardy, a double whammy. People who might not be uncomfortable with one or the other get very uncomfortable when they start to see things put together in that way. So the talk I decided to give was entitled, “The Joy of Castration: Maghrebian childhood narratives and the demise of masculinity.” So I thought to sort of set the tone, I would begin with a clip from a Tunisian film that shows a circumcision. The talk was about circumcision and childhood narratives. I think this was sort of a mistake – probably a big mistake – because I made my audience quite uncomfortable and I ended up not getting that job. But on the other hand, I used that same text as a writing sample the next year and it worked very well. So, that’s another thing, in writing without the visual, it was less threatening but also effective. So those are little things you have to think about and my one piece of personal experience that I hope will be useful in some way. Anyway, I think I’ll end there and we can have questions.

Questions

Question about how a job talk would differ from writing sample or a chapter.

Jarrod Hayes: I’ll take the second part first: “Should it be a chapter?” In my experience, usually that kind of thing is made very clear, and it’s usually in a personal conversation with either the chair of the department or the chair of the hiring committee. They’ll say, “Could you please give us an informal presentation of your research?” The way I handled that was: I think “general” doesn’t make much sense if you don’t have a little specific, too. So I basically had a longer introduction and an explanation of the overall project but then I gave a specific example, or two, which could come from one chapter or two different chapters. For a larger research institution, you’re usually asked to present a piece of your research. Even then I think it’s very helpful to have a general introduction, but that part will probably be a bit shorter. 

As you’re thinking of the job talk – this is the first part of your question – how different is the spoken versus the written – I think that’s a difficult question and it also has to do with your own writing style. One thing I found myself doing was I’d take a chapter and I’d say, “OK, how can I turn this into a good talk?” And I’d think about how to explain things more clearly, not having sentences that are ten lines long. That kind of thing you are going to have to change. If you write with really long sentences, you are going to have to cut them up. What’s interesting, I think, is that sometimes when you have to do that to make the talk understood – like it’s hard to have a parenthesis in a talk, for example, so you have to figure out ways to do that – but sometimes you realize when you’re writing the talk you realize, “Well, I should have written it this way to begin with, actually.” So, in an ideal world they’re not going to be that different, but the process of translating from the written work to the oral presentation, I think, is also another interesting way of looking at the writing process. 

Jana Nidiffer: Another thing to think about. I know that for many of you the major piece of writing that you’ll be talking about is your dissertation, which is divided into chapters, but remember – again, depending on how you’ve written your dissertation – that that chapter makes sense in the context of the full dissertation, and that is not the situation for a job talk, so I think a better metaphor would be an article or a paper, where within that confined space is the full story and argument and you can use an opening sentence or two to describe where this enclosed idea fits within your larger research or you can conclude with a couple of sentences about the implications and further directions of your research, but it is extremely difficult when your head has your entire dissertation in it to remember that if you take this chunk out of the middle it might not make sense. And this is where I think Susan’s advice of giving these talks not just to your mirror but to someone who’s going to understand is helpful. And it might be helpful if rather than a partner or maybe even your advisor who’s read it, it was somebody new, somebody who would be hearing this piece of work as an independent, finite piece of scholarship.

Question about how to present yourself as a good teacher during your job talk.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema: Well, I think the main point is that you don’t have to act like a teacher. You don’t have to act like you would – style the job talk as you would if you were teaching it to undergraduates or even graduate students. The main point is that you’ve got to prove that you can be clear, you can be coherent, you speak well, you’ve got good visuals, that you are a good speaker. And most people will assume that a good speaker translates into a pretty good teacher, at least in terms of giving the lecture. So it’s not a matter of turning your job talk into a pseudo-lecture, it’s a matter of being a good speaker which will then imply that – at least on some level – you’re a good teacher as well.

Jana Nidiffer: I also think it’s important to realize that even though professional conferences often have styles and expectations, that there are a lot of people in fields who may comply with those styles and expectations but can also find them dreadful and at times wish that a style or an expectation at a professional conference involved more of the kinds of things that they’ve talked about, which in essence are fundamental skills to any form of communication: clarity, brevity, organization, good thinking, clear enunciation. And if you have those things, that I think is the first level of communicating that you have the potential of being a good teacher. The other is some standard presentation skills, and those are looking at your audience, connecting to your audience, and one of the big places where you can demonstrate yourself as a good teacher is in the question and answer session…

Let me just say, in the School of Education is housed the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning, and the director of that is a woman named Connie Cook. One of the things in the Higher Ed program and in the Center that we’ve become increasingly aware of is that even at research institutions search committees and deans are under more and more pressure to make sure that they hire scholars who can also teach. So the fact that you haven’t seen it a lot but that it may be desirable or you may see it more in the future could be absolutely genuine to your experience. The other thing is that if you’re concerned that this is an environment that isn’t going to welcome a long discussion of this, you can do it – my own experience is that I did it in a couple of sentences. I introduced what I was speaking about as a historical dilemma that I felt was critical to students who want to understand how the work of historians of education is done. That’s all I did; that was my intro sentence and so it was connecting that I’m aware of issues in the field. I’m connecting my research to teaching. I’m aware of some of the issues in teaching and learning in terms of the way students process information. That’s all it was. Now, that was for the University of Michigan. They must have liked it; they hired me. For another institution that wanted more information about me as a teacher, I actually had a longer conversation – what they called the pedagogical seminar – about my ideas about teaching. So, is this getting at your question?

Question about how you should pitch your job talk.

Jarrod Hayes: I have one colleague who calls this the “So what?” question, like “You’re doing this work, so what?” At one campus interview I had – it was a smaller college – there were chemists in the room listening to me talk about North African literature. This might be another helpful way of thinking about it: how do I make my work seem pertinent to a chemist or to a physicist? That “So what?” In the larger scheme of things, why is my work important? I don’t know if that helps also. When you answer that question, you also make your work accessible to a much wider audience.

Question about whether or not you can approach a department (after you have interviewed there) for feedback on a failed candidacy.

Jana Nidiffer: I think it’s perfectly fine to contact the department chair and say, “I enjoyed my experience, and I’m a new scholar and I understand the decision you made, but I’m trying to learn as much as I can from this experience, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to offer some feedback?” And then say, “Could we have this as a telephone conversation?” And I think it’s fine to do it. I think you need to understand that the person to whom you’re addressing this may be wary of it. Either because their interpersonal skills are not something that makes this kind of conversation comfortable for them, or they are afraid that you are going to go ballistic. And they are afraid that you are going to be attacking, or maybe even – in this day and age – they’re afraid of litigation. So, I think it’s up to you to make it clear that this is part of your learning process. You’re not questioning the decision; you’re not trying to be a pain in the ass. You are trying to learn from it. Basically, you’re inviting this person to be a mentor. And if you cast it language like that and you act like that – in other words, you listen as though you’re getting advice from a mentor and you’re not in a confrontational mode, and then I would absolutely recommend that you thank that person formally for their help – I think it can be fine and I think it can be a very good learning experience, but you need to be very gracious and very sensitive in how you ask for that.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema: I think sometimes it helps, too, if your advisor knows people in the department – knows them well – if she or he can call their friend in the department and say, “I’d like some feedback on how my student did,” and do it through those channels. Sometimes you get much franker feedback that way, much more honest. But that depends on the relationship between your advisor and somebody in the department. I’ve done that where I’ve gone to departments where students of mine – especially when they thought they did well – and then they were surprised that they got a rejection letter the next week after they came back. I’ve called up friends in department and said, “OK, tell me what happened and what your perception was,” and sometimes you find out they did just fine but there’s some political issue in the department that basically ruled out your student. And that can be very heartening information to have. You don’t really need to retool yourself. It had nothing to do with you essentially, but sometimes advisors can get a lot more useful information out of friends in the department.

Jarrod Hayes: And that’s probably the kind of information that the chair of the department will not tell you.

Jana Nidiffer: Yes.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema: They’ll never tell you.

Jarrod Hayes: Another sort of in-between, if your advisor doesn’t have any contacts in the department. Very often it will be the case that before you get there, you’ll have fans and people who are totally opposed to you. They’ll sort of be on each end of the spectrum of opinions, and it’s often – at least in my experience – very clear who the people who support you are. Because they want to help you; they want to give you all the necessary information to help you do as good a job as possible – it’s sort of in their interests to have you on the team. If you’re uncomfortable talking to the chair, and you’ve established a rapport with one of these people, it’s often easier – I’m not very good at doing that kind of thing, calling up and having a more formal conversation – but if you have a rapport with someone that you think supported your candidacy, maybe they will also give you some information that the chair – who is sort of an official representative of the department – couldn’t really give you. That’s part of the networking that we all do in our various disciplines.

Jana Nidiffer: And you might want to start the conversation with the kind of contact Jarrod was suggesting with a graceful way out, saying, “Would you feel comfortable…?” or “Are you at liberty to share…?” In some schools, in some departments, technically nobody but the chair is supposed to communicate with candidates. I mean, it happens informally, but you just want to try to get a sense of the situation, and obviously if your advisor knows somebody or another mentor other than your advisor knows somebody, that’s great. It’s just that there may be several circumstances where that doesn’t fit in. But anybody that you feel like you have an “in” with and that you feel like you can say, “Do you feel comfortable helping me out or talking to me about this?”

Jarrod Hayes: But that kind of feedback was very helpful to me my first year on the market in terms of how I – I wouldn’t say I retooled myself – but I thought about a number of things in very different ways. My second year was much more successful.

Question about whether candidates should summarize the text they will discuss in their talk.

Jarrod Hayes: When it comes to Shakespeare, probably a plot summary wouldn’t be necessary. I deal with literature that most people in my department haven’t read. Even with other Francophonists, we have a convention of giving a brief plot summary. I think that’s a tricky question. One thing that happens a lot – at least in my department, and in my department there’s an additional difficulty. That is, when you’re dealing with texts that are not in English, how do you present them to an audience, all of him don’t read French, or may read French but don’t understand [spoken] French. So, that’s where I think the handout comes in. I always give my job talks with the passages translated, but I always have the French version and I hand them out. You might also think of having both versions and handing them out. That way, they can sort of follow along. And it’s also kind of nice to have something to take home. I think that’s helpful, too. So, plot summary with a text that’s very well known might seem to be talking down to your audience and that’s another tricky thing. The only person who could really answer that question for you would be your advisor or the other Shakespearian specialists in the department. But I think the handout can be very useful. It also becomes a question when in pre- and early-modern periods where the language isn’t the language that we’re used to, so when you have that in front of you and you look at the passage, then you can say, “Well, this word doesn’t mean…” Little details like that. I don’t know if that totally answers your question.

Jana Nidiffer: You know one thing I just thought of that none of us spoke to – it just occurred to me – and that’s the title of your job talk. I know that sometimes it’s fun to have something that’s sort of provocative or something that’s kind of an “in” reference to people who are familiar with your work – and that’s fine – but somewhere in the title it should be absolutely clear what you’re talking about. I have a student who loves the phrase “pre-colonic” or “post-colonic” but whether you put it before the colon or after the colon, it doesn’t matter. But somewhere – and I would encourage you not to have titles that are way too long – but in a succinct and clear manner, tell people what you’re going to talk about, so they can remember what you talked about. Because the other thing to know is depending on how things are scheduled, you might be giving a job talk that is separated by two weeks from the meeting of the faculty who sit and talk about the candidates and begin the decision-making process – well, they’ve already begun it – but the formal conversations about the decision-making process. So it depends on where you were in the calendar of the job talk and everything. So a handout, a clear title – these things help keep you and your work in the minds of the people who are making decisions about you.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema: Can I just add one thing, too, that none of us spoke to? This is the clinical psychologist in me coming out. And I hope those of you who attended the previous session on the whole job interview process – they talked a little bit about this. This is one of the most physically grueling processes you will ever go through. They will have you scheduled – you’ll come in at 7:00 on an airplane. You’ll go out to dinner, and then they’ll have you up and starting meetings often at breakfast, at 7:30 the next morning, and then sometimes your job talk isn’t until 4 or 5 in the afternoon. So every half hour you’ve had a meeting with somebody different – straight through – and then at 5:00, you’re supposed to just stand up and be brilliant, right? It is just so important to know your body and take care of yourself as much as possible over the course of this process. 

Some tips in that regard. One is don’t drink. Other people may disagree with me here, but if they pour you a glass of wine, fine, take a polite little sip out of it. But be very careful about alcohol, not only because you can get stupid on the alcohol, but it depletes your energy – it’s a depressant – and it’ll depress your energy the next day. And you can basically lose it mid-afternoon because you had three glasses of wine the night before – or even one if you’re not much of a drinker. So be really careful about what you eat, what you drink, don’t do anything that’s really outrageous for you – like eat a huge corned beef sandwich for lunch. Know your body; know what is good for you in terms of energy level and what’s not good for you. 

I’ll give you an anecdote, a really dumb way I violated this just two days ago. I was giving a colloquium at my alma mater – my undergraduate alma mater – and it wasn’t until 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon. And it was one of those things where they’d had me up until midnight the night before, and then we started at 8:00 the next morning with half hour meetings all day long, and I was wiped by 2 in the afternoon, so I finally got around to asking for a cup of coffee at about 3:30, and my talk was at 4. Well, I downed this cup of coffee as fast as I could and then I stood up to give my talk, standing in front of my undergraduate thesis advisor and a bunch of very prominent people in the field, and for the first time in years my voice was quavery at the beginning of the talk and I had the jitters. It’s because I don’t drink coffee in the afternoon – usually, unless it’s decaf – I usually don’t drink cafeinated coffee in the afternoon and I was stupid enough to violate my personal rules about how to regulate my body. 

So this may seem trivial but that first five minutes when you stand up there and start your talk, if you feel like you’re falling apart in those first five minutes, it can be kind of hard to pull yourself together, so knowing your ebb and flow of energies. If they give you any opportunity to schedule your talk at a particular time, schedule it according to your body flow, your biorhythms. Usually, you don’t have that much control, but really try to maintain your energy level as much as you can, and take care of yourself for several days leading up to the talk and over the course of the interview process as much as possible, so that you have the attention and the energy to get through this talk at your peak performance. 

One other thing, too. If you’re a person prone to anxiety, especially in the first few minutes, sometimes one of the things that can help is to write out – for those of you who are in disciplines where you do not read a talk, you have to do it spontaneously – still, write out the first five minutes of your talk so that you don’t have to think, basically, while you’re trying to get the anxiety level down and the arousal level down. And if you have it in front of you and you’re basically on auto-pilot while your body is trying to calm down a little bit, it can get you through that first five minutes to the point where you are then calm enough that you can kick in and start being a little more spontaneous about it. But those are some of the things that are very idiosyncratic to you, but it’s really, really important to pay attention to them. 

Jarrod Hayes: Also this may seem kind of picky. I remember one or two meals on a campus visit where I ate some really hot food, or once in a Italian restaurant I got fresh, ground pepper – and it was a big chunk. Usually I don’t think about these things, but basically every meal then becomes an interview and if water is pouring out of your eyes, it probably won’t affect the decision but it’s very embarrassing and uncomfortable. But mostly what I wanted to offer a differ opinion on whether or not to drink. Being in French…

Jana Nidiffer: Well, it’s a cultural requirement.

Jarrod Hayes: Precisely, because drinking the wine in many of our campus visits is part of the socialization process. You know, I sometimes wonder about people who don’t drink, are we discriminating against them to a certain extent? But personally I think a glass of wine – particularly later in the day of the process of interviewing – has always sort of helped me to relax and perform better, actually, so I think that’s a personal question. But you should definitely – regardless of what the answer is going to be – you definitely have to think about it before you get there.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema: It can be really easy – especially when you first get there, and you’re really nervous and it feels really good to calm yourself down with a little alcohol – to over do it. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.

Jarrod Hayes: Definitely.

Question about when candidates are asked to teach a sample class.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema: It actually is happening more and more especially if you go to a liberal arts teaching college. And in that case – in psych – basically what they’ll say is, “Give the social psychology lecture for Intro to Psychology” or “Give a lecture on your general research area but for undergraduates at a sort of mid-level course.” Something like that.

Jarrod Hayes: Oh, I didn’t understand your question. You mean a lecture to a class. When we have to teach a class, we don’t give a lecture, so that’s why I didn’t understand. Once I was asked to give an informal presentation of my research in French to undergraduates, which means that you can’t write it out ahead of time, and when you’re not a native speaker – particularly in French – you’re at your worst, basically, and they’re going to be counting your French mistakes. By the time I finished that, I didn’t want it.

Jana Nidiffer: Departments and schools and chairs and search committees vary enormously in their skill at being search committees. The better they are, the better it will be for you, and that is they will build in break times, they will offer you an opportunity for some alone time before you give your talk so you can think about it, center yourself. From my days of performing, one of the last things I always did before I went on stage was to brush my teeth, and now that’s a ritual before I teach or before I give a job talk, is the last thing I do is brush my teeth. And it’s a centering kind of activity. I get the rest of the world out of my head so I can concentrate on what I’m talking about. The other thing that a good search committee should provide you with is information. Who will be at this talk? If you’re giving a class, is it a class of 20 seniors? Is it a class of 120 freshman? Who is going to be at the talk? Is it the whole school? Is it just your department? Do they invite the whole school, but they only expect 10 people to show? These kinds of things. I think that if you don’t get this information before you come to campus, it’s a perfectly reasonable set of questions to ask of the search committee chair or whomever has been assigned as your – for lack of a better word – escort through the process. And I’d ask them early so you can get this in your mind before you give the talk.

Jarrod Hayes: It’s often hard, right at the moment when you’ve just been given the invitation to come to campus to think about all these things, but as you start to think about it, it’s totally appropriate to call back the head of the search committee or the chair of the department to say, “I just have a few questions about the format that I’ll be speaking under,” and ask those questions.

Jana Nidiffer: One of the things to keep in mind and I think it’s time probably – we need to close down – as Jarrod alluded to, there’s a certain sense in which this process is a blind date. And they are as interested in impressing you and putting a good foot forward as you are. I know particularly in an assistant professor search, you can feel like the one without any power in this circumstance, but remember that that’s not really the case. They want to fill this position. They have a need; they have to get somebody in to teach these classes and they want a new colleague, and they’ve looked at anywhere from 10 to potentially dozens of applications and they’ve made a decision to bring you here and often as one of maybe 3-4 people. So, you have their attention, and they’re trying to have this be the kind of place that you would want to come to at the same time that you are trying to convince them that you would make a good scholar and colleague. So, I know it’s hard to keep that in mind, but you’re not powerless in this. You’re half of the date in terms of making that work out. If knowing that – even somewhere deep in the back – helps keep you relaxed, all the better. I think what Susan was talking about is anxiety is your worst enemy – in the clarity of your talk, in the way you interact with people – anxiety is your worst enemy. So whatever you can do to keep that to yourself. Stay in a hotel, not someone’s home. If the hotel has a hot tub or a place to exercise, do that. That can help a lot.
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