A friend of mine in a philosophy department at an Ivy League school asked for my advice in helping students on the market for academic jobs prepare for their interviews:
One of the things our students asked us about was preparing for interviews at schools quite different than this one (e.g., state schools, liberal arts schools, satellite campus, etc.). In particular, they want to know what kinds of questions to be prepared for. The first question one student was asked last year, for example, was “Can you tell us what you think about the ideal teacher/student relationship?” This is not what he was expecting to hear!
As someone who had a whole passel of interviews with departments at schools very different from the university where I completed my graduate degree — and as someone who has interviewed job candidates for my current department — I have a few words of advice to the job candidate.
The biggest piece of advice I’d offer is to actually know something about the student population of the school interviewing you. Even at schools that prioritize research relative to teaching, there’s usually some teaching required. Since teaching is effectively communicating your subject matter to an audience, getting some information about that audience can only help you.
Poke around on the college/university website to see how they describe the student body (or what interests or needs they seem to be anticipating from the students the website is addressing). Are they mostly “traditional” college students (18 – 22, starting college right out of high school) or “nontraditional” students coming to college after working/having a family/serving in the military/doing time? Farm kids or city kids? The first ones in their families to go to college? Recent immigrants? Holding down full-time jobs while going to school?
Look at the course offerings in the department you’re hoping to join and see what they tell you about the traffic through the department’s classes. Is it mostly directed at majors? At general education courses (lower and/or upper division)? At courses that support other majors (e.g., business ethics, engineering ethics, etc.)?
Then, think about how you would try to communicate to the kind of student population you think you’d face in this position. Having something like a concrete strategy for helping students understand what you’re teaching and why it matters to them is a very good thing, and the kind of thing we ask about when we interview.
Also good: teaching experiences you can point to as evidence that you have some experience with a student population like the one you’d be teaching — or at least, that you’ve given serious thought to how the population you’re trying to reach matters when you’re planning your pedagogical strategies.
Candidates who clearly don’t know anything about what kind of students we have give the impression either of not caring very much about teaching well (a problem for us, since teaching is central to our mission), or of not being that interested in us as a university (also a problem in a prospective colleague, especially given that we would rather not have to do another search after someone we’ve hired ditches us for the job he or she really wants).
On the other hand, candidates who can share good strategies for making general education students care about some philosophical issue, or for getting students really engaged in the material even when they’re packed 40 or 60 to a classroom, or for responding effectively to essays from those 40 to 60 students without going mad with the workload — those are candidates who seem to really be working out how they would do the job we’d want them to do, and how to contribute to the larger mission of the department.
We like that a lot.
Speaking as an undergraduate who would like to become a math professor, this is excellent advice to have! It may be a while before I have to face such interviews, but I try to think about these kinds of questions even now.
Also, I don’t know if your school and others do this (though I hope they do!), but many of my school’s departments put together a committee of a few students to interview the candidates that reach the top level, and they listen to our evaluations and incorporate them into their final decisions. My school is small and largely focused on teaching, so this may be unusual, but I think it’s a great idea and every school ought to do something like it. We students sometimes have a different perspective on what we’d like in a teacher than do many of the current faculty, and we’re the ones who are supposed to get the benefit of a great new professor. At any rate, anyone applying for a job should be prepared for the possibility of one or more student interviews as well as the interviews with faculty of the school.
Prof Stemwedel, let me expound a little on your point about website information. Being back on the academic job market for the first time in 15 yrs, it is amazing to think how many more resources are at hand when compared to my pre-NCSA Mosaic job search. There is so much public information on the internets about specific programs and depts that make it incredibly easy to tailor your application materials and allow you to be very knowledgable about the school/dept/program at interview time. In fact, I’d argue that lacking any information in your cover letter on specifics about your perceived fit with the program and its students is grounds for the search committee to put you in the circular file. If you can’t expend the effort to find out about the institution and department, there’s no reason to expect the search committee to expend effort on you.
That is very good advice.