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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