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.
.