This season starts the beginning of job market Speed Dating in lots of academic fields. It’s when all of the schools who have jobs and all the PhD students who want jobs get together at their annual job market conference and speed date. If a speed date goes well, a school will call you in about two weeks and ask you out on a campus date. If that 2-day campus date goes well, you get the engagement ring and get the job. If the 7-year engagement goes well, you get married with tenure. But this all starts with the 45-minute speed date at the conference where there’s about a 1 in 3 chance that you’ll get called back. Two common questions: 1) How do I ace a conference interview, and 2) how do I know if I aced it? Your advisor and friends have given you a big list of “dos and don’ts” for your interviews. Things like do act interested and do know lots about their school, and things like don’t act smarmy or arrogant and don’t dress like Spiderman or your favorite D&D character. There's no perfect way to predict whether you’ll get a campus visit, but you hear lots of rules of thumb: • The best day to interview is the second morning. The next best is the first afternoon. • The two best interview times are either 10:00 AM or 1:00 PM • The more interviewers in your room (vs. skipping),the better your chances • The more “fun” the interview seems, the better your chances • The more questions they ask about your dissertation, the better When I was on the rookie job market, I thought it would be useful to know which of these was the best predictor of a call-back. If a person knew that, they’d know when to schedule interviews with their favorite schools, whether to be serious or funny, and whether to encourage lots of dissertation questions. A few of my friends got together, and we came up with a list of about ten things we thought would predict how well an interview went. We all then rated each one of our interviews on these 10 things. We then pooled everything together and ran a logit regression on whether we ended up getting a campus interview date at each school. Only 1 thing was significant. It wasn’t the timing of the interview or our subjective rating of how “fun” it was. Instead the only predictor of whether we got a campus visit was how many questions they asked about our dissertation during the conference interview. Makes sense – except this was negatively related. The schools that asked us lots of questions about our dissertations DIDN’T fly us out for a date. At the time, we thought maybe they realized we were doing a lot of handwaving in our theory section. Or maybe the deeper they dug, the more holes they found that we hadn’t yet plugged. I now think there is another explanation. If we spent 35 minutes of a 45-minute interview talking about only 1 thing, the school only has 1 thing to judge us on (other than our advisor’s letter). It’s like a speed date where the person spends 90% of it talking about their vacation to Hawaii or their doily collection. We end up learning a lot about Hawaii or doilies, but not enough about them to want to call them back for a date. A few years later, I was unexpectedly on the job market again as an assistant professor, and I did things a bit differently. Instead of spending 35 minutes droning on about a single project or two, I wanted to make sure we talked about a lot more than just Hawaii. That way, a broader set of connections could be made, and the people who hated Hawaii might find other things they could be interested in. For all of the adrenaline-pumped PhD students at their job-market conference, it’s probably not the best strategy to spend the whole time talking about only your dissertation or only about Hawaii. The more other “good fit” connections you can make in the interview, the more likely you might be called back for a first date. At this point, no last-minute finishing touches on your dissertation rap will help you ace your interview tomorrow morning. Instead, tonight's better spent learning more about your potential date – especially any unique overlaps you might have in common. Good luck on the job market! It was time to move this website over to this new account. Good news
It means having to rebuild every page from scratch. Bad news. The last three or four months of blogs are being transferred over and posted. Ones that are older than are available here (for now). Thanks for moving with me. Most grad school application deadlines are due around January 1 and after that they won’t reopen again for another year. If you’ve ever walked the halls singing “Yo ho, yo ho, a PhD life for me” in a pirate accent, it’s not too late to make the big decision: Should you ruin your Christmas vacation by working feverishly to rush out a less-than-perfect application, or should you wait until next year? If you really need the break next year and you’ve already got an incredibly awesome gig lined up, cool. Otherwise, take a deep breath, and take the 3-point shot. First, there’s no such thing as a perfect application – even if you wait a year. Second, you’ll either get accepted (a big pirate “Yo Ho!”), or you’ll learn what you need to do to improve your shooting percentage. Here’s some super-short answers to some questions you might have: • “How can I afford it?” Most PhD programs have assistantships that pay your tuition and living expenses. • “Should I retake my GRE test?” Probably not enough time. If you think you have a good score, but you think it could be better, go ahead and apply. You can always retake the test next year and really focus on prepping for it. • “What do I write in my Statement of Purpose?” Four things: 1) Why you want a PhD so bad that you are singing about it in the hallway, 2) what you will do with a PhD, 3) what specific topics or questions you’re interested in, and 4) why that school’s a great fit. • “Who should write my recommendation letters?” Ask the best-known researchers you know in the field that you are applying. Next, ask anyone you’ve done research with. Third, ask whoever knows you best and will write these before the deadline. • “How many schools should I apply to?” Since you’re doing this at the 11th hour, I’d limit yourself to three schools: Your dream school, your “best-fit” school, and a safety school. Otherwise, if you had lots of time, you might apply to as many as 10. (The third time I applied, I applied to 14). • “If I don’t get in to my dream school will it hurt my chance for next year?” Nope. They either won’t remember you applied (they might have 100+ applications), or they’ll think you’re persistent. And as someone once told me, "The P in Phd stands for 'Persistence.'" With three weeks to go before the deadline, the most important part of your application is your Statement of Purpose. At this point, you can’t change your GPA, you can’t retake the GRE, and you can’t hang out at the mall hoping to make best friends with a Nobel Prize-winning recommendation letter writer. What you can do is to write and rewrite your Statement of Purpose. Then have your recommenders give you comments on it. Many students are too shy to ask for this feedback, but it’s the most important thing you can do right now. I didn’t ask for feedback on my Statement the first time I applied, and I got into exactly -- hmmm -- zero PhD programs. If after reading all of this, you’re still humming “Yo ho, yo ho, a PhD life for me,” take the plunge. Being an academic is a tremendously rich and rewarding calling. Pick three schools, apply, and when you hear back from them, we can talk about course corrections. Good luck with a great career. Last night was Halloween. Taking my daughters and their friends Trick or Treating is pretty amusing. Since one of the couples from my Lab didn’t have plans, I asked if they wanted to join us in the 2-hour Viking-like pillage of the neighborhood. The woman showed up as a pink fluffy unicorn and her husband (a graduate student from another home department) showed up . . . as me.
This reminded me of grad student days. Even though I didn’t meet much with my advisor, I was really impacted by him. Not so much by how he did research (those days were past), but more by the way he viewed the world and the way he said things to me. Small example: When I was applying for jobs, he asked for a list of schools where I’d like to apply. When I showed up with my Top 30 list, he could have easily said, "Be realistic" or “Are you smoking crack again?” Instead, he said, “Let’s cast the net wider.” A subtle choice of words, but things like this must have made a difference. Here's why I say that. A couple years after I miraculously graduated, one of my PhD-school buddies visited me in New Hampshire for a long weekend. While visiting, he asked why I had replaced my broken-down grad school car with a different type of car that was just about as old. I said, “Because I really like the way it looks.” He then said, “Didn’t your advisor have the exact same car in that exact same color of white.” Why yes, he did. Hmmm . . . For Junior Faculty, it’s easy to develop tunnel vision that's only focused on your research. By doing so, we can overlook the legacy or long-term impact we will have on advisees, grad students, and teaching assistants. You can leave these students with a real gift, or you can leave them with a lump of coal. They may not remember the details of your theories, but they may remember how hopeful or excited you were about them or about the field. They might not remember any paper you published, but they may remember how you treated them when you were clearly distracted and stressed about something else. For Grad Students, don't worry about becoming the Mini-Me version of your advisor, but you might be influenced more by them than you realize. Fortunately, you can partly control this. First, you can have some control over who you have as an advisor or mentor. It might take some work to switch away from an abusive or disinterested advisor, but it can be done. Second, you can also choose what words from those encounters that you want to focus on, repeat to others, and replay over and over in your mind. "Let's cast the new wider" x 100 replays = Good. "Are you smoking crack?" x 100 replays = Bad. Last night was spooky Halloween. Today is saintly All Saints Day. No advisor or mentor is all spooky or all saintly. Fortunately, you can choose what you focus on. Choose carefully. You might end up with the same car they had. |
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