Your Second-Round Interview Strategy Guide

Congratulations on landing a campus visit. Now it’s time to up your game. Here’s how to get ready — and how to put

your best foot forward.

What to Expect in a Campus Visit

Campus Interviews, Community-College Style

7 Hazards of the Second-Round Interview

Grim Job Talks Are a Buzz Kill

Making the Most of Your Teaching Demo

Worst-Case Scenarios: Handling Awkward Moments

The Etiquette Minefield of the Interview Meal

Links and Resources

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What You’ll Find in This Booklet:

What to Expect in a Campus InterviewWhat you need to practice (repeatedly) to make a good impression.

By Julie Miller Vick and Jennifer S. Furlong

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It’s February, which means that some of our readers have had preliminary interviews already and others have them sched-uled; a few readers have already had campus interviews, and others are preparing for them now. Still others are hoping to land an interview of any kind.

Wherever you fall on that spectrum, this is a nerve-racking time for candidates on the academic job market. Things can feel very much out of your control. What is in your control: Doing your best during the interviews you do have, knowing how to talk about your own background in the context of a particular department and institution, and projecting a pol-ished, confident version of yourself (even if you don’t always feel that way).

First, for those still preparing for a preliminary interview —conducted either on the phone, by video conference, or in person at a scholarly conference — here are a few quick tips:

Because first-round interviews are short — 30 minutes to an hour—find out ahead of time how long the interview will be and who will be participating. Be able to succinctly talk about your teaching and research vis-à-vis the particular institution. Be able to talk about why you see yourself as a good fit for the posted position.

• If you are doing a video-conference interview, famil-iarize yourself with the technology. But have a back-up plan — a phone number you can call if the Skype connection is weak or if the committee fails to call you at the appointed time. That way, you won’t panic (or, well, you’ll panic less) if the unexpected occurs.

• If the interview is at a scholarly conference, scout out the location in advance, so you are not racing madly around trying to find it five minutes before the inter-view.

• Practice — out loud and with colleagues. Don’t fall into the trap of only rehearsing by yourself.

• Conference interviews lead to a shortlist for cam-pus interviews, which last a day or more and can be quite grueling for candidates. During the campus vis-it, you will have to demonstrate a wider range of skills and expertise than you did in the first round, not to mention being comfortable socializing at receptions, lunches, or dinners with potential colleagues.

Clearly a campus interview will be more challenging for you than for your interviewers, but keep in mind that they will find this a taxing process, too. The search committee is charged with choosing a colleague who might very well be around for the next 30 years if he or she receives tenure, a unique situa-tion in today’s working world where most people frequently change jobs. They may also fear that they will hire you only to have you leave for another opening in a year or two. Giv-en those two concerns, your goal is to stand out not only for your own qualifications, but also for your interest in the de-partment and institution.

How might you do that?

The first step bears repeating: Be prepared. Many of the questions you will be asked are fairly predictable, so be ready for them. You’ll mostly be asked about your research and teaching, so be able to speak with confidence on both. As ca-reer advisers for doctoral students, we run practice sessions with candidates who have a job interview coming up and we are sometimes surprised to find they still don’t have the ba-sics down about their own records.

Rehearse. Practice the way you talk about your scholarship with someone in your field. Make sure that what you say and how you say it conveys the importance of your work even to

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those whose research specialties are different from yours.

Develop a five-year research plan (i.e., the years before tenure). And be able to discuss your “research agenda” in a clear and convincing manner. That can be hard to do, es-pecially for those in fields in which you go on the job mar-ket while finishing a dissertation (or just afterward), but it is a way of signaling intellectual maturity to the search commit-tee. The last thing you want is for your projects to sound as though they have not grown beyond the graduate-student or postdoctoral level.

Have examples of your teaching style. Reflect on your time as an instructor, in the classroom or the lab, and be ready to discuss both your teaching methods and examples of what you can teach. Nothing helps paint a picture of your class-room effectiveness like an example. If the search committee is interested in encouraging undergraduate research proj-ects, it’s not enough to say, “I can see involving undergrad-uates in projects connected to my research.” Demonstrate with specifics how you might do that. Show that you under-stand the search committee’s concerns.

This is no time to sit passively. As an outsider, you can’t know everything that a department is looking for, but you can certainly make some inferences. A scientist interview-ing at a liberal-arts college, for example, would want to have specific examples of how undergraduates could contribute to the work in his or her lab (and how student research could be funded). Any job candidate who would be involved in developing a new major or minor in the hiring department should bring ideas about that curriculum to the interview. And all job candidates should be able to offer ideas on how to teach some of the basic courses in the field — and should seem enthusiastic about sharing that responsibility with po-tential colleagues.

You will want to learn as much as you can from the search committee during the campus interview. That means asking good questions of the people you meet. During your prelim-inary interview, the search-committee members may have volunteered information about the position, the department, and the institution. Use that information to develop ques-tions to ask during the on-campus interview.

What exactly will happen during the campus interview? You can expect to:

• Have one-on-one interviews with faculty members in the department, one or more members of the admin-

istration, and some students.

• Give a presentation, known informally as a job talk, about your research.

• Teach a class on the campus.

• Have an exit interview with the department chair.

All of those things take practice. So practice talking about your research and teaching — in the context of the hiring in-stitution. Give a practice job talk to peers who can ask you challenging questions. Do more research on the hiring insti-tution and review any notes you made during your previous interactions with the search committee.

Try to find out the schedule for your visit as far in advance as possible. The search committee should provide you with that information and other details (like where you’re staying). If it doesn’t, then ask. Knowing who you will be speaking with (and finding out more about them), knowing how your time will be organized, and knowing what to expect in terms of your job talk and any teaching you’ll have to do can help you be better prepared and set the stage for a successful visit. (Make sure you also know whom to call in the hiring depart-ment in case of an emergency; campus interviews often take place in the winter months and with that comes flight delays and cancellations.)

Many job candidates find the campus interview exhaust-ing. It’s hard to maintain your enthusiasm for the job over the course of a tiring daylong or two-day visit. As you have back-to-back interviews and describe your research for the umpteenth time, you can start to feel like you’re stuck in the academic version of Groundhog Day.

No matter how tired you are, however, your pitch has to sound fresh to whomever you are speaking with. One way to keep it fresh is to know something about the interview-er and frame your response in a way that will resonate with that person. Or try to incorporate what you’ve learned in in-terviews earlier in the day into your response. For example: “Grace mentioned to me that you’ve played a large role in the founding of the Center for the Study of X. Can you tell me more about the center?”

A final note on the job talk: It’s the focal point of a successful campus interview, and we cannot stress enough how import-ant it is to your success as a candidate. You can find a lot of good advice online about giving a good job talk. But the best preparation is to practice giving your talk before an audience

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of faculty members and fellow students from your home de-partment. Find out exactly how long your talk should be, how much time will be allotted for questions, and who will be in the audience. Then practice with those parameters in mind. Make sure your presentation conveys the context and impact of your scholarship in a way that is accessible to a broad au-dience. Answer that all-important “So what?” question about your scholarship.

For those of you interviewing at teaching-focused institu-tions, your teaching demonstration may be of equal impor-tance to your job talk, or may even replace it. Take the teach-ing demo as seriously as you would a research talk.

We all know how competitive the academic job market is, and how arbitrary the hiring process can seem. Interviewing is inherently subjective; institutions are looking for a candi-date who is “a good fit,” and “fit” is a hard concept to de-fine. It’s not easy to show that your intellectual interests and teaching experience connect with a department’s needs, but thoughtful preparation, advice from your faculty advisers, and practice are the only ways to improve your odds.

Julie Miller Vick has retired as senior associate director of ca-reer services at the University of Pennsylvania, and now works there part time as a senior career adviser. Jennifer S. Furlong is director of the office of career planning and professional de-velopment at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York Graduate Center. They are the authors of The Academic Job Search Handbook (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Campus Interviews, Community-College StyleHere’s what search committees at two-year colleges wish you knew.By Rob Jenkins

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Allison M. Vaillancourt’s excellent column “What Search Com-mittees Wish You Knew” got me thinking about the differenc-es between the four-year-college job search and the commu-nity-college version.

Much of what Allison wrote applies to community colleges, too. But I can think of a few additional pieces of advice that are unique to searches in our sector. Most community col-leges hold interviews between spring break in March and the end of the semester, so I’m hopeful that my timing will be about right for the majority of our faculty job candidates. So here’s what community-college search committees wish you knew:

We’re not a research institution. One of the biggest mis-takes that job-seekers make, when interviewing at communi-ty colleges, is talking too much about their dissertations and research agendas. No offense, but we aren’t really interested — at least not during the interview.

The fact that you wrote a dissertation, or that you’re in the process of writing one, might have helped you land an in-terview. Competition is fierce, and, as I’ve noted in past col-umns, having a Ph.D. could give you an edge at some com-munity colleges. But we’re not particularly curious about the details of your research, because we probably won’t view them as relevant to the work you’ll be doing for us—teach-ing service and survey courses to freshmen and sophomores.

Having a research agenda is fine, too, but it’s not something you want to spend a lot of time on in your interview. If you do, we’ll start to wonder if you know what you’re getting yourself into at our college — a teaching load of five courses each se-mester, minimal support for travel, no research assistant—and if you’re actually a good fit for us.

We’re a teaching institution. If you’re hired, you will spend

almost half of your time in the classroom. Did I mention the heavy course load? Most of the rest of your time will be spent keeping office hours, advising students, serving on curricu-lum committees, and fulfilling other teaching-related tasks.

That’s why you should devote most of your job interview to talking about teaching. We’ll help by asking a lot of varied questions about it, such as your experiences with diversity, educational technology, and classroom management. Stay on topic in your answers, and take every opportunity to high-light your experience and abilities in the classroom.

Give those issues some thought in the days leading up to the interview. If you don’t actually have a lot of teaching experi-ence, you should be asking yourself, “How can I emphasize the experience I do have?”

The teaching demonstration is the most important part. I can’t emphasize that enough. Yet I’m always a bit surprised and dismayed at how some candidates fail to take it seriously and prepare poorly for it.

Let me just say that, although trying to anticipate the ques-tions you might be asked and prepare good answers can be helpful, the very best use of your time leading up to the in-terview lies in putting together a killer teaching demo. That will tell us more about your ability in the classroom, and your suitability for our college, than any canned answer to any canned question.

We understand that we might not be your first choice. Few people, and even fewer Ph.D.s, end up teaching at a com-munity college because that’s what they’ve always wanted to do. Most of us entered graduate school with dreams of working with the best and brightest while doing important research at top-tier universities.

We’re not exactly surprised, then, that you had the same

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dream — or that you might still be pursuing it. We understand that you may be interviewing with us only because you really need a job, and the market is really bad, so you applied ev-erywhere you saw an opening. That’s OK. We get some of our best faculty members that way.

Yes, you should probably try to hide the fact that you se-cretly wonder if interviewing with us represents the death of your dream. But no need to go overboard with false enthu-siasm. We get it. Just be pleasant and professional, answer our questions thoughtfully and honestly, show a modicum of interest in the work we do, and we probably won’t hold your delusions of grandeur against you.

We’re not rubes, nor do we view ourselves as failures. You may have wondered why I bothered to say, “be pleasant and professional.” In an interview situation, isn’t everybody? You’d be surprised.

Personally, I’m always amazed at the way some candidates treat us. It’s true that most of us who serve on search com-mittees don’t hold doctorates, because only in the last de-cade or so have community colleges begun going out of their way to hire Ph.D.’s. But that doesn’t make us “rubes” (as a commenter on one of The Chronicle’s blogs once described us), and it doesn’t mean we take kindly to being patronized by some pup with a shiny new doctorate who thinks he or she has all the answers.

Furthermore, while you may view “settling” for a community college as a failure, rest assured that we do not. However we ended up in the jobs we have now, we’ve probably grown to like them a great deal. We believe the work we do is import-ant, and we think you’d be lucky to work here.

We certainly don’t expect you to fawn over us, but a little hu-mility and deference will go a long way.

Our interviews move fast. It’s not unusual for a two-year college to spend two or three consecutive days interviewing 12 or more people in one-hour time blocks.

So don’t expect to be one of four finalists, and don’t expect the daylong red-carpet treatment: job talk, lunch with the dean, etc. Maybe if you’re lucky your interview with us might last an hour and a half — assuming, of course, that you’re in-vited to the campus at all. These days, more and more com-munity colleges are conducting interviews via telephone or Skype. (But even on Skype, you likely will still be one of 12, and still get only an hour.)

In other words, by the time we get to you, we may have al-ready seen or talked to several other people. We might very well be tired, if it’s near the end of the day. Maybe a little bored. Perhaps more than a little annoyed, depending on who or what has come before you.

We will still do our best to remain attentive and give you every consideration. As professionals, we take pride in our work. We understand the importance of the faculty search process to our students and our institution. We’re looking for colleagues who will be good teachers, who will shoulder their share of the work, who will not steal our Diet Cokes from the department refrigerator.

But you’re going to have to make a strong impression, and you won’t have a great deal of time in which to do it.

We’re pretty open-minded. Our job announcements tend to be fairly specific documents, in terms of degree, years of experience, and other qualifications required. And yet, there’s a good chance we may have fudged a little bit in invit-ing you for an interview, if we thought you were an excellent candidate but didn’t quite meet some arbitrary standard. Obviously, there are areas in which we have no wiggle room at all, such as minimum degree requirements, which are de-termined by our accrediting body. But if you only have two years of full-time experience, for instance, and the ad calls for three, we might be able to argue that your part-time experi-ence equates to an additional year.

That same open-mindedness tends to carry over into the interview. Sure, there may be a committee member who is dead set on only hiring people who believe exactly what he or she believes. But most of us are open to new ideas, differ-ent personality types, alternative ways of doing things. We want to be impressed by you, or we wouldn’t have extended the invitation. So by all means, impress us.

And yet we often face bureaucratic constraints. As Allison Vaillancourt pointed out in her column, search committees don’t actually do the hiring; they just make recommenda-tions. If anything, that is even truer at community colleges, which tend to be a little more hierarchical and concerned with “chain of command” than four-year institutions.

If, as a search committee, we believe that you are the best person for the job, then we will make a compelling argumenton your behalf to the administrator overseeing the search. If we do our job well, and the administrator in question does not have some other agenda, then chances are good that our

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argument will carry the day.

However, sometimes administrators do have other agendas — and sometimes those agendas might not even be appar-ent to the committee members. Sometimes other “political realities” supersede even the most compelling arguments about a particular candidate. That stinks, but it’s the world we live in.

The bottom line is that, if you understand who we are and what we do, if you’re well prepared for the interview, and if you perform well under fire, you have a good chance of get-ting the job. If you don’t, it’s not because you’re deficient but just because the competition was so fierce or because there were other considerations of which you could not have been aware.

Try not to let that discourage you. If you’re good enough to be invited for one interview, you’re probably good enough to be invited for another. And the next one just might be the right fit.

Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia Pe-rimeter College and author of Building a Career in America’s Community Colleges.

7 Hazards of the Campus InterviewHow to handle inappropriate questions, random comments, and offers of alcohol.

By Nancy Scott Hanway

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So you got invited on campus for a job interview. Awesome. That means you’ve already showed — either via a conference interview, Skype, or on the phone — that you’re well equipped to handle what comes next.

And what comes next is a nerve-racking slog. By this time, I hope you’ve readied your teaching demo and practiced your job talk. So it’s time to prepare for the potential obstacles. From the inappropriate question asked by a senior professor to the matter of whether to accept that second glass of wine, here’s how to deal with seven common hazards on the road to getting hired. I’m at a liberal-arts college so the hazards I de-scribe are focused on interviews at teaching-oriented institu-tions, but often apply at research-oriented campuses as well.

Hazard No. 1: Worrying too much about whether we like you.

I understand the irony of telling you not to worry about being liked during a job interview. But our personal feelings about you are less important than you think. We really are most concerned with whether you’ll do a good job. That’s what will make us happy to see you every day.

As a candidate, I was nervous about the prospect of campus interviews, because I smile a lot, in general, and it gets worse under stress. During job interviews, I always felt like a sim-pering idiot. But as an interviewer, a candidate’s personal tics are the least of my worries. Normally, they don’t interfere with the department’s evaluation, since the crucial part of the in-terview for a small college happens in the classroom, where teaching-oriented candidates feel most comfortable.

We have a wide range of characters in my department — from sparkling extroverts to kindly introverts. They’re all great teachers and colleagues. Don’t worry that you have to become someone else. Be your professional self: the slightly

more polished and organized version of you that we invited to the campus. And if you smile too much, we’ll just put it down to nerves.

Hazard No. 2: Answering the inappropriate and potentially illegal question.

A friend of mine was once asked in an interview, “I see you’re wearing an engagement ring. What does your fiancé think of your taking a job here?” My friend felt trapped by this ques-tion — posed by a senior faculty member during a reception — and so she answered honestly that her fiancé was another academic who would support her decision. She got offered the job, which she ended up turning down.

When I asked friends and colleagues how to answer a ques-tion like that, several told me that you, the candidate, should be using the interview to assess your prospective employer, too. But what do inappropriate questions actually reflect? Af-ter all, there’s at least one dud in every institution.

When that senior professor cornered my friend, I imagine his colleagues probably muttered, “Oh, God, what is he saying to her now?” That doesn’t make the question less inappro-priate or, in certain states, less illegal. (In a statutory splitting of hairs, it’s only illegal to act upon this information in some states.)

For my friend, the question about her fiancé was one of many unsettling moments during her campus visit. She was able to reject the college’s offer because she had another job waiting for her. Most candidates don’t have that luxury.

Many advisers tell their students to respond, “That is an in-appropriate question.” Hypothetically, it’s easy to imagine standing up for your rights. But what makes these questions — generally about your marital status, children, sexual orien-

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tation — so pernicious is that they’re always asked by some-one with power over your future, at a time when you feel truly vulnerable.

Of course, your personal situation could be a handy way of letting your prospective employer know that, if hired, you plan to stick around. At small colleges, we fear being used by candidates as a steppingstone to a bigger and more presti-gious institution. So don’t be afraid to answer an intrusive question honestly — or even to volunteer information — if the truth makes you look good, like having a partner who dreams of moving to an isolated little town like the one where the col-lege is located. Just know that once you mention a partner, that opens the door to more questions about him or her.

How do you answer an inappropriate question if you believe the answer would make you look less hirable?

One response is the classic turnaround, which I’ve modified to include blaming someone else. This should be said in a friend-ly tone: “You know, I was told by my adviser never to answer personal questions during an interview.” Most people will stop right there. If they persist, you can add, “Of course, if it’s important to getting hired, I’d love to know.” (If the question-er is awful enough to complain about you later, rest assured that in most departments it wouldn’t be you who looks bad as a result.)

Google yourself before you go and you may find that your in-terviewers know a great deal about you. If your sister creat-ed a website for your wedding photos and your spouse blogs about relationship issues, then your future department prob-ably knows that you cried at the reception and that you com-plain in bed about your students. Having a sense of what the department knows about you can help you decide how to re-spond should any of these questions arise.

Hazard No. 3: Misunderstanding the college’s re-ligious affiliation.

Many small colleges are affiliated with a particular religion, but whether your faith will affect your candidacy depends both on the denomination and on the culture of the place. Find out about that before you apply to avoid wasting time on an employer who may never hire you. Once you get invited to the campus, there’s no need to pretend — as candidates occasionally feel compelled to do — that you attend services every week, when the closest you get a house of worship is the Starbucks around the corner. You wouldn’t have made it

this far in the interview process if your religious beliefs were an issue. (And religious colleges are legally allowed to make hiring decisions based on your faith.) However, you will need to prepare to talk about how you will support the college’s mission, which may include a reference to faith.

In my campus interview with the dean at the Lutheran college in Minnesota where I now teach, I was never asked about any religious preference. The dean did ask how I would support one of the college’s missions, which is to give students a “ma-ture understanding of the Christian faith tradition.” I spoke frankly about the ways in which I teach the complex history of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America.

Hazard No. 4: Getting thrown by odd comments and random questions.

They can be very unsettling. One minute, you’re talking to the dean, who seems confused about your research and suggests you teach a class on “Marketing Concepts in Medieval Span-ish Literature.” The next minute you’re having lunch with de-partment members who demand to know your views on the crisis in the Ukraine and then quiz you on who will win the Superbowl.

Don’t be thrown. Sometimes faculty members don’t know what to say to a candidate. If they’re not central to the job search, they may have forgotten to read your file, so they come out with these lame questions in order to hide their own ignorance. At a small college, the dean may have just rushed back from a complex meeting on college finances, feeling completely spent.

If you’re befuddled by a question, you can fall back on, “Inter-esting. What are your thoughts on that?” The average faculty member is happy to treat you to a strongly held opinion on just about any topic. If the dean or a department member has confused you with another candidate, correct any misinfor-mation politely, without getting flustered.

Hazard No. 5: Telling different things to different people.

You will be interviewed by many people, all of whom will later compare notes. Don’t tell the dean that you adore teaching first-year students and then tell an assistant professor — a friend you’ve known for several years — that you can’t wait to get out of the Gen Ed trenches. Your old buddy has different loyalties, now. Your comment could easily make its way back

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to the search committee.

Hazard No. 6: Alcohol.

Departments shouldn’t put you in the position of having to aggressively refuse alcohol, but, sadly, some do.

If you do drink, don’t be afraid to have one glass of wine or beer during the evening, as long as your hosts do the same, and as long as one glass won’t make you fuzzy. Otherwise, you can simply say, “No thanks,” or, “I think I’ll stick to water. I need to keep a clear head.” If anyone presses alcohol on you, just keep refusing in a cheerful tone. Besides, the wine they serve at these things is usually awful.

Hazard No. 7: Etiquette and dress.

Nearly everyone I consulted for this article asked me to re-mind you: Don’t check for texts when you’re with your inter-viewers. They will think you incredibly rude if you’re constant-ly pulling out your phone. (One colleague passed on this ad-vice in all caps: “TELL THEM ONLY TO CHECK THEIR TEXTS WHILE IN THE BATHROOM!”

And please dress appropriately. You’ll be walking outside all day, on the campus tour and as you hustle from meeting to meeting. Wear shoes that will go the distance.

No matter what happens during the interview, stay upbeat and polite. Unless the department suggests it, don’t ask to meet with a real-estate agent—even if a faculty member told you that you’re the committee’s first choice. That may only be wishful thinking on the faculty member’s part.

At a small college, decisions are made by the whole commit-tee, so, conversely, don’t assume you’ve lost the job just be-cause of a few awkward — or even a few disastrous — mo-ments. Your champions on the committee will have an easier time winning the battle to hire you if you behaved with grace under pressure.

Now for a Quiz:

The following situations are adapted from real-life interview experiences (as told to me by friends). How would you handle these scenarios?

1. You’re at a department meet-and-greet held in your honor. A senior faculty member seems like one of your biggest sup-

porters. During the reception, she approaches you, leans over, and asks confidentially, “I notice that your Facebook profile picture includes a little boy. How old is your son?” How do you answer?

2. You’re at a meeting with the dean and it’s going really well. Suddenly, he smiles engagingly and tells you that he loved your dissertation about 19th-century French narrative. Your subfield is 20th-century Haitian poetry, so the dean has ob-viously confused you with another candidate. Do you correct him?

3. Your phone keeps buzzing in your pocket: It’s your dad tex-ting you about a family crisis. You have to keep your phone on, because the college where you are interviewing occasionally calls you with information about your next meeting. Should you: (A) Take your phone out of your pocket and explain gen-tly, “It’s my dad. He’s going through a tough time. I’ll just be a minute.” Or (B) Text your dad from the bathroom and ask him to please stop texting you until later in the evening.See answers below. And good luck on the interview.

Nancy Scott Hanway is an associate professor of Spanish at Gustavus Adolphus College.

Answers:

1. See Hazard No. 2. She’s the dud. But she’s your fan. An-swer in a nice way. 2. See Hazard No. 4. Correct him politely. You don’t want him saying, “I loved that candidate who wrote about Madame Bovary,” when he means you. 3. See Hazard No. 7. While the crisis is real, your interviewers may not under-stand this. Unless there’s been a death in the family, or the im-mediate prospect of one, your dad will have to wait.

Grim Job Talks Are a Buzz Kill

Here are five mistakes that candidates should avoid making during their research presentations.

By Dan Shapiro

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You were one of only a handful of candidates we invited to campus. We wanted to like you.

Hell, I wanted to love you. I am your potential future chair. When I became chair, I knew that bringing in strong faculty members was my best chance to leave a mark on the depart-ment and the college. I also knew that job searches were a drag on the little boat I would be trying to navigate through waters strewn with budget cuts, increased teaching loads, and fussy-somewhat-overworked faculty members. So I wanted the search to be over and for you to be here already.

But then your job talk started and my throat went dry and I felt that thumping in my temples.

Grim job talks are a buzz kill. And let’s be clear, your problem was not bad scholarship. Out of 70 or more applicants, only Houdini could get an invitation for a campus visit these days with terrible scholarship.

Instead, you stumbled in one of the following five ways.

You didn’t do any research on the norms of our campus culture. That misstep is easiest to illustrate with an example. I chair a humanities department in a medical school. One of our candidates came to the podium, pulled a file of papers out of a leather folder, and started to read his talk. And kept reading. And it was all over.

A humanities department in a college of medicine might seem like a good place to read one’s paper to the crowd. After all, many papers are delivered that way at humanities con-ferences. But in medical schools, papers are never read to a group. In fact, to a faculty member in a college of medicine, that is so unusual as to garner confused looks.

Medical schools are moving toward interactivity, and reading

a paper reveals that the applicant doesn’t know our culture or, worse, is (gasp!) part of the old guard.

That may seem unfair. It is unfair. If the candidate had known our culture, he would probably have delivered his talk differ-ently. But he wasn’t the only candidate. And he’d been given the same chances as the others who took the time to ask us — in advance — what a good job talk might be like.

So ask about the details. Do people read their work during the talk? Do they use slides? Should I expect questions from the first moments or after? Who will attend? Will students be there, or just faculty members? Will the faculty be from a va-riety of departments or only from the one to which I’m ap-plying? Is there a specific audience I should keep in mind as I direct the major points?

You presented a single, well-thought-out project that had no future. As a chair, after hiring and investing in someone (including mentorship, space, and research start-up money), I dread the thought of having to send that hire packing a few years later. It’s brutal on the faculty member and on his or her innocent family, and it’s a morale killer in the department. And, selfishly, I don’t want to sit at an administrative meeting with the dean only to have one of the other chairs say, “Hey Dan, what happened to that rising star you were singing about a few years ago? (snicker, snicker).”

If you present a great idea but the future work is unclear, then I will be unable to support your candidacy. Map it out for me. Tell me about the next three projects that could come from that first one.

Even better, arm me to help you. If there’s grant money out there or some other relevant concrete data, tell me. I want to know if students are attracted to this area of scholarship, if re-search assistantships are available, or if someone won a prize

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for related work. Help me see what buying into your work will buy for us so that I will be prepared when I go to the dean to get resources for you.

You didn’t use the opportunity to demonstrate your teaching ability. Scholarship is critical to landing a job and getting promoted at research-oriented institutions, but as ad-ministrators try to do more with less in many departments, we need the double- or triple-threat faculty members who can be both successful scholars and good teachers.

At a minimum, I need low-maintenance teachers who aren’t going to generate a massive revolt by students when their professor is perceived as showing favoritism, giving an unfair exam, or taking an arrogant approach to learners.

The biggest giveaway that you, as a candidate, were teaching challenged was when you marched through the job talk like a scripted soldier, assuming we would all understand.

Good teachers say things like, “I notice there’s a range of ex-perience in the room. For those of you who haven’t been fol-lowing this area with the obsessiveness of a hound, let me just get everyone up to speed.” During the talk I hope to see inter-activity and an engaged audience. Ask us things like, “Show me hands, how many of you would guess. ... “ Give us a teaser at the beginning. Draw us in.

Then there is the way you handle questions. That is when I get anxious because I know my faculty are great critical thinkers and they are going to ask tough questions. Are you defensive or respectful of other good ideas? Can you dodge the overag-gressive faculty member? Are you self-deprecating or huffy? I don’t need you to know every corner of literature on a topic. I do need you to be diplomatic with colleagues. Respond to a challenging question about some obscure piece of work with, “Hmm, that’s a great point, and because I’m not immersed in that area, I haven’t read that work yet, but I’d be very interest-ed in learning more or even collaborating.”

You presented a great talk on a topic that was too far afield. No kidding: When we sculpted our job description, we meant it. We really are looking for someone with expertise in the ethics of genetics research, and we expect to hear a talk on that topic. We’re OK with some wandering, but if your talk is on fruit flies, our doors close.

This situation is especially touchy because the applicant often leaves the talk feeling fantastic. “Wooo-hooo, they loved me,”

the candidate thinks, and we were fascinated by your talk. But then a faculty member will stop me outside my office and say, “Well, too bad, if only we needed someone with fruit-fly ex-pertise.” And that will be that.

You shut down when something unusual happened. Life is unpredictable. Sometimes a computer that worked fine yes-terday decides to go on a holiday today. Sometimes securi-ty warnings, projector bulbs, microphones, or storms throw us a curve ball. When the unexpected happens, the applicant needs to smile, offer to do the talk using finger puppets, and get on with it.

Fragile faculty members are a drain on our system, and more important, on me. If they need a certain temperature in their office (within two degrees), can’t function if their mailbox gets moved, and panic if the class times change, then life will be hard on all of us. I need faculty members who can help nour-ish our fragile students even in tough circumstances, not suck away all the resources because they themselves can’t tolerate life’s normal insults. I will handicap a talk delivered under less than ideal circumstances. Stand up and teach me something.

I think many faculty members view job talks the way I do: I am giddy whenever I go to one. I’m high on the ether of potential, the magic I saw in your letter of introduction, your vitae, the fascinating things you’ve done and the promise of what you might do. I’m already rehearsing the negotiations I’ll need to have with the dean to get resources for you. So when it’s time for you to give your job talk, don’t let me down.

Dan Shapiro is a professor of medical humanism and chair of the humanities department at the Penn State College of Med-icine.

Making the Most of Your Teaching DemoIt can be scary and artificial, but it also presents a unique opportunity to communicate who you are as a teacher.

By Nicole Matos

The teaching demonstration is one of the most artificial seg-ments of a job seeker’s campus interview yet also one of the most telling and evocative.

Typically, teaching demos can range anywhere from a brief 15 or 20 minutes to a full class period. The better ones involve a class of actual students; the more awkward demos involve search-committee members pretending to be students. Often job candidates are given a set topic to teach; other times you might be given free rein to choose your topic.

Teaching demos are artificial for a number of obvious rea-sons:

• The students are not really “yours.”

• The demo time materializes as a sort of interregnum with no future and no past.

• And, perhaps most horrifying for the job candidate, the demo is a one-shot deal: There’s no taking a mulli-gan if things go wrong, and little chance ahead of time to predict the ways they might.

But having observed many teaching demonstrations as a community-college faculty member and administrator, I would still wholeheartedly defend the practice, perhaps for exactly these reasons — that it happens among strangers, in a kind of unpredictable, accentuated present. I think teaching demos communicate a lot about a would-be professor, and offer insights on classroom performance that interviews and more scripted job talks simply can’t.

The good news for job seekers, I’d also argue, is that the teaching demonstration is a forum in which your strategic decisions can make an enormous difference. Over the years, the most successful teaching demos I’ve witnessed have had a number of traits in common, and those traits are replicable regardless of how long your demo is, or who is in the audi-

ence. Taken together they represent a best practices of teach-ing demos. While I don’t think candidates should incorporate strategies that feel truly alien to their teaching style — inau-thenticity is a death knell that supersedes any other advice here! — it may be worth adding some of these suggestions to your repertory.

First and foremost, interact. The No. 1 thing I want to see from a demo is the manner in which teachers interact with students. Any teaching mode that will minimize or delay stu-dent discussion and inquiry — cough, lecture; cough, Pow-erpoint presentation — is probably not the best choice for your teaching demo. Students are often quite sympathetic to the plight of a job seeker and may be more forthcoming than you might expect. But it is equally possible that they will be reticent and unnerved, unsure how to negotiate this unusual scene.

For that reason, the best teaching demos I’ve observed find clever ways to call on students for answers and reactions, without waiting (sometimes interminably) for eager volun-teers. One strategy I’ve seen used to great effect is to bring materials for students to make name-cards. It is much more inviting to say, “Keisha, what are your experiences with that?” than “You — no, you in the red shirt.” Creating a kind of as-sumed first-name familiarity, even where longstanding famil-iarity doesn’t really exist, often works as a self-fulfilling proph-ecy.

Another strategy that works well is to poll the class at-large, perhaps with a verbal or written round robin (“What’s the No. 1 question you have about X?”). Remember, too, that quality interaction ought to follow patterns other than just “profes-sor, student; professor, student.” Gently encourage students to converse with one another: “Julia, what was the most con-vincing part of Keisha’s argument? Ted, what might be the weakness of Keisha’s argument if you were going to argue the

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other side?” Do that well, and you will never have to ask for volunteers — both because you aren’t waiting around for them and because volunteers will press themselves upon you, interested in entering an exchange already under way.

Manage your classroom. I do not mean that you should ex-pect disciplinary problems in your demo — with a cartload of faculty and administrators in observation, that is almost nev-er a problem. I mean, rather, that you should demonstrate a certain comfort level with your own authority.

One useful principle to remember: Own the classroom space. Don’t unconsciously limit “your domain” to the front of the room, or worse yet, behind a lectern or a desk. Plan a lesson that will give you excuses to work the room — to walk up and down the aisles, to teach from the back or the side, or to ap-proach small groups or clusters of students in a manner that is more up-close and personal.

Unless you are told otherwise, don’t be afraid to rearrange furniture or humans (with warmth and humor, of course) to better create the physical environment that would most com-pliment your teaching. A candidate who says, for example, “re-arrange your desks in a circle” and then waits to ensure that students comply (“Brenda, could you do me a favor and come to this seat; I just want to be able to see you a little better”) is exercising the right kind of judgment. And since these are not your students and their routines are not your routines, be aware that you may have to be a little more explicitly di-rective than you normally are. I have often seen candidates give a vague instruction, like “make some groups,” when a more effective statement might be, “Count off in groups of three beginning with Tyrese.” It’s better to be just a wee bit bossy than stuck in a classroom set-up that’s less than ideal for your demo.

Privilege the present. Some candidates overcompensate for the insecurity inherent in a teaching demo by trying too hard to plan and predetermine how students will respond. In the heat of the moment, I’ve seen candidates ask for questions, but with clear body language that suggests the last thing they want is any pesky, scary, unpredictable questions. I’ve also heard candidates bulldoze over an unexpected comment and twist it into the response they had hoped to hear (“Student: “I’d say no.” Professor: “Yes is just the right answer!”).

It is equally tempting to construct a lesson that is so tightly controlled, perhaps so predictable or easy, that there is sim-

ply no room for any sort of surprise or discovery. But without surprise or discovery, there is no learning. Perhaps the “teach-ing demo” should be better understood as a “learning demo” — in your demo, I want to see students learning, with all the immediacy and transformation that implies, more than I want to see you teaching in some intransitive sense.

Most impressive to me, then, are demos in which students are engaged in some kind of activity. Lessons that involve hands-on role-playing, case studies, scenarios, in-class debate, or in-class writing are all ones that tend to work well.

I am particularly impressed when a candidate reacts in real time to something that has just burbled up. Your original small groups of three are surprisingly divisive and unable to reach consensus? Stop the presses and explore that: Reseat the groups by “Pros” and “Cons,” or shift the lesson from “find agreement” to “articulate the complexities.” A student raises an excellent example you hadn’t considered? Take a moment to pull up a quick webpage or video, right there on the fly, so that everyone can benefit from this insight. In short, don’t be so wedded to your teaching plan that you miss the opportu-nities that the present affords.

Pretend a future and past. To combat the weird decontex-tualized form of a single stand-alone lesson, don’t be afraid to gesture toward or even explicitly devise a pretend “before” and “after” for your demo. The most canny candidates pro-vide the search committee, and sometimes even the stu-dents, with a suggested preliminary lesson plan (if this were really your class, what would have been the unit immediately preceding this demo, and how would you have gotten there?) and a suggested follow-up assignment or series of next steps (if you had had more time or were continuing this unit, what activities would naturally follow?).

This gesture toward continuity reinforces the understand-ing that real teaching is not a one-off act, and that effective lessons grow out of a unified whole. It also subtly primes the search committee to think more about your future and your continuity as an effective educator, which is not a bad thing when seeking a job.

Nicole Matos is an associate professor of English at the College of DuPage. She is a Chicago-based writer whose published work focuses on topics including higher education and special-needs parenting.

Worst-Case Scenarios: Handling Awkward MomentsHow do you deal with off-putting exchanges in job interviews and meetings?

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By David D. Perlmutter

A doctoral student on the job market described a truly un-comfortable moment during a campus visit. An assistant pro-fessor was giving her a campus tour. He stopped in front of an office filled with packing boxes and gestured inside, stating with a wistful air, “This is mine, or rather was. They are firing me; hence the opening.” Then he stood there, waiting for her reaction. My informant was so shocked that she responded, “That’s nice. …”

Academic job hunts can be full of incidents zany or mortify-ing. Thus this series on the hellish aspects you might encoun-ter as a candidate. So far we have considered how to handle “fake searches” and how to detect a miserable work environ-ment.

Now we turn to those moments in interviews (conference, phone, Skype) and campus visits that catch you by surprise — and not in a good way. Certainly, when you are on the fac-ulty job market, no matter how much you prep for the rote questions (e.g., “So why do you want to join us?”) and events (e.g., the research talk), you will find yourself in situations and exchanges that are not on the expected list.

The most obvious are illegal personal remarks or questions. A friend — not Mormon but from Utah — described being asked about “his” Latter-day Saints theology. Obviously, you should not be quizzed about your faith. Yet it happens all the time. Likewise, many candidates — more often than not female ones — are still queried about their marital status and wheth-er they have children. Variations of affrontery abound: A can-didate of Chinese-Anglo parentage recounted a search com-mittee member asking her, in all seriousness, “Are you Asian? We need to check the box for HR.” And so on.

Such questions are illegal or borderline at most public and private universities. (A private religious institution, on the oth-er hand, has the right to ask you about your faith and may

even ask you to sign a profession of it.) Yet no matter how rigorously a campus HR office or a department might police its own faculty, staff, and students about what they can and can’t ask a candidate, the inappropriate is not unusual.

Why are these inappropriate queries so common? The good news is that, for the most part, they stem from a desire to be helpful. For example, a search-committee member might be genuinely interested in letting you know how great the local schools are. Or the department wants to let someone of a reli-gious minority know that there is indeed a local house of wor-ship option. Illegal? Yes. Innocent and innocuous? Very likely.

Of course sometimes there is bad intent in asking candidates for illegal personal information. Many female academics have wondered whether to tell a search committee that they have a child or are pregnant. Legally, that’s none of the commit-tee’s business. But candidates know that prejudices about hiring mothers early in their career on the tenure track can factor into a committee member’s decision.

Why haven’t such practices been stopped? A simple answer: In my 25 years in higher education, I have never heard of a sin-gle case of a professor being fined, put on leave without pay, or fired because of violating the rules of a search. Maybe it has happened somewhere, but not often enough to deter idiocy, carelessness, or malice.

Another species of inappropriate moments and remarks on the job hunt falls into more of a gray area. These situations occur when you are asked a question that is not necessarily illegal but is unfair or even hostile.

I once sat on a search committee at another university. We were looking to hire a new assistant professor and, like most public universities, we wanted someone who excelled at both research and at teaching undergraduates. Hence my irritation

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when a member of our committee asked a candidate, “You seem to be a great researcher. So that means you must be short-stinting your teaching, right?”

I have also heard of — but not witnessed directly — candi-dates who sense that they are being grilled for their potential recruitment for departmental politics rather than their actu-al qualifications. An acquaintance described an interview at an anthropology department that was riven by a civil war be-tween the “quants” and the “quals.” The position for which she was applying was methodology agnostic, but both sides were trying to gain a pledge of allegiance from her in return for their support.

So how can you avoid being tripped up if the inappropriate happens?

Expect the Unexpected:

During a visual ethnography I conducted of a police depart-ment, I learned that the best way to survive being a crime vic-tim was to rehearse possible scenarios (like being jumped in a supermarket parking lot) and think through the range of pos-sible reactions you can commit to. Likewise with the unhap-py pop-ups of the academic job hunt. You can’t be surprised by something you expect to happen and for which you are prepared.

Your prepping strategy can be simple and straightforward. Spend a few hours searching The Chronicle’s forums on job hunting or other blog forums and wikis on the topic. That will give you a pretty comprehensive itemization of the wacky, offensive, off-putting questions that job candidates have re-ceived during the hiring process. Meet with some fellow job seekers — either locally or online — to go through the list of obnoxious questions and discuss reasonable answers.

If you’re preparing for a campus visit by giving a mock job talk or rehearsing your interview, make sure someone asks you an illegal or inappropriate question, so you can practice your answer. It happens, so the more you get used to it the less it will fluster you.

Remember That Context Is Important:

Some job candidates are so incensed at being bushwhacked by an illegal question that they protest to the campus HR of-fice. And action is certainly within your rights. In fact, if every victim decided to formally protest, it might occasion greater

professionalism in job searches. But you have to keep in mind what your ultimate objective is.

Consider the context and the culture. If you spent two pleas-ant days on a campus visit and fell in love with the environs, were attracted to the cohort of faculty and students, and genuinely felt that the position itself was a good fit for you, is it worth going nuclear over one awful impropriety? Maybe the interrogator is a minority of one; or maybe that person slipped up, with good intentions. If so, you might just decide to forgive and forget.

However, if you are met with enough inappropriate or offen-sive questions and statements that you begin to think they represent not the accidents of individuals but the mores of a dysfunctional culture, then you might elect to step back and consider whether you really want to commit yourself to join-ing these knuckleheads, possibly for life.

Decide what you want based on the cues you are given and react accordingly.

Be the Professional in the Room:

One of the most important aspects of becoming a professor — and something that, unfortunately, we rarely deal with di-rectly in graduate school — is how to act like a profession-al. People who get their Ph.D.s without spending any time in the nonacademic world are at a disadvantage because they don’t know what a normal white-collar workplace looks and feels like. But you can increase your chances of being hired if you exude an air of being in control of your thoughts and emotions. Think of those inappropriate or offensive moments as a test of your own character that might actually score you some points.

Most of the time, the lobbers of the inappropriate do not rep-resent the voice of the whole faculty. Say you are asked about your religion during a dinner. You may notice a lot of other people at the table wince, roll their eyes, or shake their heads. That’s a good sign that the questioner is a rogue. Try not to stumble, but rather, take the question in stride. Perhaps make a little joke or answer the question straight and then move on to the actual topic at hand. You may win over the crowd even as you stymie the odd man out.

See What Works for Next Time:

Most searches are good training grounds, no matter the out-

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come. Awkward moments, unfair questions, and sheer loon-iness can guide you on what to do — and what not to do — next time.

During one of my first campus visits as a doctoral student on the tenure-track quest, I was in the middle of my research presentation when an assistant professor in the department ambushed me. As I recall he pounced on my methods, the-ory — everything. I felt his only motive was to grandstand.

My response was addled; blood pumped to my temples, and my thoughts were murky. I was sure he was way off base and I argued back strenuously. The result was not a shout-ing match, but it came close. Even then, I recall taking a mo-ment to read the room. The onlookers registered a “both these guys are crazy” look of distaste. Needless to say, I was not offered the position.

For weeks afterward I plotted revenge — until it dawned on me that, well, “stuff happens.” The trite self-helpism is true: Other people can try to upset or rattle you for nefari-ous reasons, but you have the power to stop yourself from being rattled or upset. In retrospect, I should have kept my composure and just stuck to arguing the theory and meth-ods. Many times in academic life, that lesson has helped me, from job talks to curriculum committee meetings. In the original case, if I had remained cool, I think it likely that the crowd’s reaction might have been, “Our guy is trying to showboat; what an insecure jerk. The candidate, on the oth-er hand, is really showing professionalism.

Keeping your cool is your best option if you get a zinger that seems crazy or hostile, or if something awkward or even of-fensive happens during an interview. Usually, it’s not you — it’s the nature of the game and of some of the players. Rehearse ahead of time what your philosophy, tone, and manner will convey about you and your character. Take whatever happens — even if you lose it — as a lesson for the future. After all, while it may be your first big interview, it is unlikely to be your last.

David D. Perlmutter is a professor in and dean of the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University. He writes the “Career Confidential” advice column for The Chronicle. His book, Promotion and Tenure Confidential, was published by Harvard University Press in 2010.

The Etiquette Minefield of the Interview MealHere are some dos and don’ts on bread, wine, and conversation with your potential colleagues.

By John Cawley

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As you prepare for the job market you are undoubtedly focus-ing on your research, polishing your job market paper, and honing your presentation skills. Those absolutely should be your highest priorities. However, when you have time, you should also be sure to brush up on your dining etiquette. It can save you stress and embarrassment later.

When you visit a campus to give a job talk, your hosts will take you to a nice restaurant and you may be confronted with et-iquette issues that you rarely face. During graduate school your typical meal may consist of eating pizza off a paper plate while watching PowerPoint slides in a lunchtime seminar, but now you’ll need to be polished and professional during a mul-ticourse dinner.

At one recruitment dinner I attended, after the waiter brought a bottle of wine to the table, the candidate picked it up first and filled his glass to the brim — then looked on, visibly em-barrassed, as everyone else filled their wine glasses only part-way. You don’t want to feel ashamed or out of place when you should be fully engaged with your dinner companions.

For guidance on this front, I sought the help of Alex Susskind, an associate professor in Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration and a hospitality industry expert who teaches business-etiquette seminars. Below is a summary of his best practices for the interview dinner.

The Preliminaries:

• Be on time.• Practice good grooming — men should shave.• Turn off your mobile phone and do not use it at all

during dinner.• Say your name when you introduce yourself to some-

one, and shake hands.

Immediately After Sitting:

• First, put your napkin on your lap.• Know which bread plate and glasses are yours. A good

mnemonic device: Make “OK” signs with both hands. Your left hand makes a b — the left side of the table is where your bread plate is. The right hand makes a d — that side is where your drinking glasses are.

• Know which silverware to use. For both forks and knives, work from the outside in. A dessert utensil may be placed horizontally at the top of the place setting.

Bread Basics:

• Offer common foods on the table (e.g. bread, appetiz-ers) to others first before you help yourself.

• Do not spread butter on your bread with the commu-nal knife; use the one at your place setting.

• Butter only an individual bite of bread; do not butter entire slices at a time.

Conversation:

• Research your companions prior to the dinner, and bring two to three talking points for each of them. You should have something to discuss about the research of each person, and you could also discuss issues re-lated to their teaching and alma mater.

• There are three things you should never talk about: religion, politics, and sex. Just because other people open the door to those subjects doesn’t mean you should walk through it. Hold your tongue and discreet-ly change the subject.

• Never talk with food in your mouth.• In the old days, men would stand when a female guest

stood to leave the table. A man should not do this to-day — it might signal that he has anachronistic gen-

der views and that he would treat women differently in other ways as well.

• Elbows on the table are only forbidden while eating. After the table has been cleared, when you are in repose and chatting, it is fine to put your elbows on the table.

Wine:

• Your hosts may ask if you’d like to choose the wine. Don’t feel pressured to do so. In fact, unless you’re a wine ex-pert, you should probably decline. It’s highly likely that someone there has strong preferences and will be eager to choose.

• In many cases, the waitstaff will refill your wine glass. That may make it hard for you to gauge how much alcohol you have consumed. Be careful you do not overindulge.

• If you’re filling your own wine glass, fill it no higher than a third of the way up.

Food:

• Order food that’s easy to eat. Do not order messy foods, such as lobster, crab legs, French onion soup, or pasta.

• Also err on the safe side and order familiar food. It would be awkward to send the food back because you don’t like it, or to eat very little of it, attracting the attention of your hosts.

• Wait until everyone has received their food before you start to eat. In general, don’t be the first to eat.

Alex closed with his adaptation of Emily Post’s Top Ten Table Man-ners:

1. Chew with your mouth closed.2. Don’t making slurping, smacking, or other eating noises.3. Don’t hold your fork in your fist.4. Don’t pick your teeth with a fingernail, toothpick, or floss

(even if behind your hand).5. Put your napkin in your lap after you sit down.6. Wait until you’re done chewing before you take a drink.7. Cut your food one piece at a time (not all at once).8. Don’t slouch over the place setting or put your elbows on

the table while eating.9. Don’t use the “boardinghouse reach” — ask to have things

passed to you.10. Say “excuse me” when you leave the table.

A few final thoughts:

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• There may be times during dinner when your hosts will talk amongst themselves about departmental matters. While you might feel ignored, and perhaps anxious that you are a boring dinner companion, don’t panic. This hap-pens often and is no reflection on you. Just politely listen and participate when it feels natural.

• Be polite and courteous to waiters and waitresses. No matter how nice you are to the interviewers, if you are rude to support staff no one will think you’re a nice per-son.

• After dinner, your hosts may ask you first if you want des-sert or coffee. It’s hard to know if your companions are hoping you’ll say yes (so it’s more socially acceptable for them to order some, too) or no (because they’re tired and want to go home). Say what you truly think, but also indi-cate that you’re flexible.

John Cawley is a professor in the department of policy analysis and management, and in the economics department at Cornell Uni-versity.

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What to Expect in a Second-Round Interview http://chronicle.com/article/What-to-Expect-in-a/130491

Career Talk columnists Julie Miller Vick and Jennifer Furlong offer advice on

campus and corporate interviews.

Academic Job Hunts From Hell: Timing Is Everything https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1254-academic-job-hunts-from-hell-timing-

is-everything

How to juggle job interviews and campus visits and stay focused and sane.

An Academic Bestiary for the Intrepid Job Seeker http://chronicle.com/article/acaemic-bestiary/63478/

During the campus interview, predator, prey, and pedant alike come together,

and woe to those ill-prepared for the encounter.

Demonstration or Demolition http://chronicle.com/article/Demonstration-or-Demolition-/44842

The teaching demo is arguably the most important part of the communi-

ty-college interview — and the most terrifying.

The Professor Is In: Good Question https://chroniclevitae.com/news/813-the-professor-is-in-good-question

So what should a candidate ask a department at the end of an interview?

Don’t Dodge the Diversity Question https://chroniclevitae.com/news/610-don-t-dodge-the-diversity-question

“Describe your experiences with diversity”: It’s the single question that job

candidates are most likely to answer ineffectively. But it doesn’t have to be.

Here’s what academic hirers look for in a response.

Front photo: Meet John Doe/Frank Capra/Warner Bros (via Wikimedia Commons)

Links and Resources