Interview Season

Over at Sivacracy Siva Vaidhyanathan has dispensed some very useful advice to those people who have campus interviews coming. But there are a couple places where I’d add and one where I’d heartily disagree. It’s a little awkward to make this post since there’s a big round of interviews coming up at McGill, and I’d hate to be looking like I’d be giving instructions to our interviewees (or interviewees in the other departments where I might be showing up for cross-appointments and the like) but here goes:

Siva says:

They are never fun. Never.

This is where I completely and totally disagree. For me, they have almost always been fun and learning experiences. The best interviewing advice I ever got from a mentor was to have fun on the interview. Partly it’s because, as Siva says, if they’re interviewing you they want to know if they like you. If you have fun and they have fun, there’s a better chance of them wanting to hire you. But there are other reasons to have fun. First, however gruelling the interview is, it is a special opportunity and a special occasion. Interviews are hard to get. Regardless of the internal politics of the department (some are very political, some are very collegial; don’t trust the rumor mill too much), it’s a tremendous acheievement and you should enjoy it. Sure, you’re trying to get the jobs, but the institution is trying to woo you. Let them do it. Enjoy the fact that they’re taking you to a nice restaurant and making you the center of attention for the day (okay, that may be easier for me to enjoy than some people, but still). Last, but not least, interviews are a chance to make friends and connections regardless of whether you get the job. You’re going to spend quality time with people who find your work interesting. By making friends, you may pick up some great colleagues whether or not you get or take the job. All of that is easier to do is you loosen up and have a little fun. Plus, you’re supposed to love doing the research you do. That should come through when you present it.

That said, Siva is abolutely right that the whole interview is an interview whether or not you want it to be. The job talk doesn’t end when the Q&A begins — sometimes that’s the most important part. It is an exhausting process, and there is a lot of stress involved.

Okay. With that out of the way. A couple footnotes.

Siva says:

They will be hunting around for hints about your family/relationship situation. They are not allowed to ask you outright. But they want to know whether your partner is an academic, which would mean major headaches trying to generate another job. So if you see an opportunity and feel comfortable about it, talk about him/her and what he/she wants to do for a living. They should be relieved.

Sorry Siva, this only works for straight people coupled with non-academics who have the kind of job where it will be easy to find work in the area of the school [exhale]. There are lots of schools that now have a system in place where it is possible to accommodate academic couples. There are lots of schools where faculty are hip to people in same-sex relationships. There are also lots of schools where this is not the case. Many schools are located in places where it may be difficult for partners in certain fields to find jobs. Tread carefully here.

Siva says

They think that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you.

This is actually true. It’s very true for faculty members who already have jobs, and you never know when a candidate will get multiple offers. So yes, you are interviewing them a little, so you’re going to have to think about what you really want to know about the school. If it’s of a different size, style or scale from a school at which you’ve worked, you should ask about everyday life at the institution for professors. You’ll get a different picture from different people.

One other thing, especially for grad students: faculty want to see you as a colleague, not as a grad student. It’s hard to know how to pull that off if you’re never been a faculty member before, but think about it for a moment. Faculty are solidly middle class. Some have kids, some own property. If either of these things interest you, it’s fair game to ask about buying a place or what the schools are like. Keep in mind they may or may not be research active if you’re interviewing at a teaching school, and that there are different ways of leading a fulfilling life as a scholar. At the same time, it’s important not to be too presumptuous. A common mistake is to assume that what you’ve learned about “how the field works” or “how the university works” at your doctoral institution or even later at a postdoc will translate to the new institution. For instance, in my graduate program, my teachers in Comm Studies seemed to think the main division in the field was the split between political economy and cultural studies. At Pittsburgh, the debate was about media vs. rhetoric. At McGill, neither of these splits seem to interest anyone as points of discussion or debate, and at the many schools I’ve visited these issues rarely come up in the same way. Similarly, university bureaucracies and procedures can work very differently from place to place.

Also, there are a number of places where Siva sounds like he is suggesting that one go along to get along. “Order steak at the restaurant” (I’m a vegetarian and would never advise someone to be fake about this kind of thing; OTOH, if you love steak, you’re probably going somewhere where you’ll get a good one). He talks about fake smiles. I would be very, very reticent to suggest anyone be fake on an interview for one simple reason. If they hire you but they think they’re hiring someone other than who you really are, you are going to have a difficult time there. Possibly a very difficult time. Obviously, you want to be polite, you want to make friends, you want to impress them, and you want to get the job, but don’t let these things turn you into someone you’re not, as you’ll then have to occupy that position for quite awhile. I realize it’s harder if everyone there is white and you’re not, or they’re all men and you’re a woman, or they’re all straight and you’re queer, or they’re all “able” and you’re disabled, but those kinds of differences can be overcome in the workplace (indeed, they ought to be) if people are comfortable talking about them, all the better. i’m not telling people to come out or self-disclose indiscriminately, I just think that too much going along to get along hurts the candidate more than the committee if he or she actually lands the job.

That said, being a professor is a job that our occupational ideology says is a vocation. Obviously, I’ve bought into that one. But at some schools, it is more like a job, either because you don’t fit in with your colleauges (not every dept is a community, and something you’ll have a bunch of people in their late 50s hiring a 20something, which may mean some distance — though I find age differences matter less and less in this business) or because everyone in the department punches in and punches out. It may come to that, if you are looking for something else, an interview is not a time to try to be someone else.

Short of personal injury, harassment, or other trauma, there is no such thing as an interview disaster. You go in without the job, you leave without the job. Your worst case scenario is that you won’t have the job, which means you’ll be the same person you were before you got the interview. I recently spoke with a student who was worried because he might get hostile questions on the interview or the job talk. There’s nothing to worry about. If they’re good critiques of your work, you learned something. If they’re lame, the criticisms probably aren’t about you. They’re probably about something going on at the school. This is why I say you can and should enjoy the event. The bad stuff if usually stuff you can’t control (well, you should buy some comfortable dress clothes and practice your jobtalk), and there’s a lot of good stuff that comes out of the process whether or not you land the job.

Finally, there’s more on interviewing at http://sterneworks.org/Academe/

Q&A on Being a Scholar and Musician

This is one of those blog entries from an email exchange. Someone asked:

Someday I’d love to hear anything you have to say about being a musician/scholar.

I’m probably the wrong person to ask since I’ve been doing serious admin for the last 2.5 years and at the same time I’ve been playing the jet-setting academic giving talks all over and as a result my music has really suffered. I’m not in a band — ironically, I have time to be in one but not to find one, since finding a band is a lot like dating, which is completely unappealing to me. I content myself with the home studio. I’m finishing about 2 songs or in 1 case a piece of audio art in a year. I’m very close on mixes of songs I recorded in 2004 with Mike Witmore, my lo-boy partner in crime, before I left Pittsburgh, so I guess I will have a record coming out after he makes it up here to visit. Plus the social life here is really intense.

Basically, I decided early on that I didn’t want to commoditize my art, I wanted it to be something I did for the love of it (same with my work for Bad Subjects), a free part of my life where I didn’t seek professional recognition. It appears on my CV in a very low-key manner, I don’t try to pass it off as equivalent to my scholarship and research, and I don’t ask to be professionally rewarded for it as an academic. In exchange, I don’t have to justify artistic choices intellectually or intellectualize my art. Since I started out as a rock musician, it’s probably better that way.

That said, until I started doing admin and getting flown all over, I always found time to make music and be involved in some kind of political or volunteer organization; if I had kids (not a baby, obviously), I could probably have done one of those two things in addition to being a prof.

If you want to get professional credit for your music, you need to get a job that involves some component of sound production (and maybe teaching sound) in a Comm Studies department — there aren’t many such positions but they exist. In Canada, there’s this whole research-creation thing where at some schools you can do theoretically informed art and get it treated as scholarship in departments other than art departments. There are a lot of issues in research-creation (which I will someday write about in public if I can find a way not to sound like a jerk doing it). For instance, as of yet, I don’t know of artists getting jobs meant for traditional scholars, but it’s a different way to address production.

My guess is that if you’re going into other fields besides music, art or a few Comm Studies programs, you should think more in terms of a double life and reserving time for music than getting credit as a scholar who makes records. That said, it’s nice when your colleagues like the idea of you being in a band. They did in Pittsburgh, and I’m sure they would here if I were in a band. Though they might not like the band. . . .

Chuck Norris in HD

One other thing. Strange as it may sound to those who don’t own HDTVs, HD sets have a feature that stretches the edges of a regular 4:3 image to fill the entire screen. Most viewers I know leave this on even though it can be shut off.

When Chuck Norris was standing next to Mike Huckabee, I said to Carrie “wow, Chuck Norris has a really wide head.” That’s when she reminded me that I was watching a stretched image.

Also, Huckabee is very scary.

and now for a few words on time. . .

(this is not a post about football, so stick with me)

As some of you know, last Saturday the New England Patriots won their 16th and final game of the regular season, making them the first team to go undefeated in the regular season since the 1972 Miami Dolphins. The ’72 Dolphins were the first team to do it since the ’42 Bears.

This got me thinking: why is it that 2007 seems closer somehow to 1972 than 1942? That’s 35 vs. 30 years, and yet the 40s and 70s seem much more different on some level than the 70s and the 00s. Now, of course some of that is perceptual. As a friend pointed out last night, if you’d turned on the TV in 1972 you would have seen lots of stars from the 40s, and certainly older adults in the 1970s might still feel quite connected to the music or cinema of the 1940s. Perhaps it’s that some transitions in history — like the baby boom — seem to be a bigger deal culturally than others. Perhaps it’s an observation that however unfashionable ideas about postmodernism have become, there is something about the current age (David Harvey placed it in 1973, which is odd to think in such exact terms) that is less forward looking than other recent eras. And of course it depends upon what you’re talking about. Popular culture is one thing; yet a professor’s job at McGill or another “R1” university was probably more similar in 1972 to 1942 (or at least 1945) than it is to today. . . .

Québec, Québec

We lived in Québec for about 3 years without visiting Québec City (or the wonderfully redundant Québec, Québec) but with plenty of good intentions. This summer, we finally managed to make the 3-hour drive for a much needed weeekend away shortly before our move. We stayed at the Auberge St. Antoine, which I mention only to point out that it’s quite possibly the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in (it’s expensive but we managed to score a cut rate).

The Aueberge — and most of the tourist attractions — are situated in the old town, which is like Old Montreal. I’m not a fan of Old Montreal. The streets are beautiful, the buildings light up nicely at night, but everything’s overpriced and the whole place just seems like an exercise in facadism in that the old buildings are intact only on the outside. On the inside, it’s basically a giant shopping mall with everything from kitch to upscale consumer goods. Of course, while facadism is messed up, so is its critique, since very old buildings quite often go through many different uses in their lifetimes. Anyway, Old Québec was at least new and worth a walk around and a ride up and down the funicular.

At the top of the hill we encountered the real Chateau Frontenac (for those not local, we’d given our old rental loft on Frontenac the nickname “Chateau Frontenac” for party invites and such). We didn’t stay at the Chateau Frontenac mostly because it was expensive and not well-reviewed on trip advisor, which is a site I read religiously.

and here’s “our” Chateau Frontenac (we lived on the 2nd floor):

One day was spent wandering around Québec City, the other was spent driving around the adjacent area, which includes ÃŽle d’Orléans, an island that remains mostly undeveloped and is also the source of a good bit of the produce we pick up in the summer at farmers’ markets. It has, of course, also been touristified, so we were able to drive around the island, sample some of the local food and see how maple syrup is made (the lecture was in French, which started out as intelligible because the guy kept it slow for us. Then he sped up . . . .).

On the way back, we visited Montmorency Falls, which locals like to point out is 30m higher than Niagara Falls — but not as big. There’s a footpath you can take to scale the top of the falls. I took the following two shots from directly over the falls. The first looks back at the placid-looking river which suddenly accelerates and the yellow warning rope, which basically says “if you’re floating by in a barrel, you might want to switch directions now.” The second shot is 180 degrees in the other direction, with me leaning over the handrail on the bridge over the falls looking straight down to watch the water plunge.