Career Development : Articles

• E-Mail This Article
• Print This Article
• Share This
  • del.icio.us
  • Digg it!
  • Facebook

Academic Job Interviews: The Good and the Bad

Vid Mohan-Ram
United States
12 May 2000

Earlier this year, Next Wave hosted an entertaining evening for scientists looking for employment in academia and other arenas. The event brought together undergraduates, graduates, postdocs, and faculty from the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia areas--all interested in learning how to improve their interview techniques. Our four panelists that night included Andrew Morehead and Kathie Sindt, who presented "good" and "bad" faculty interviewing scenarios, and Grant Reed and Cindy Bouchez, both patent attorneys, who revealed to the audience what kinds of questions they can expect to face when interviewing for nonacademic jobs--in patent law in this instance. Both types of role-playing scenarios raised questions, suggestions, and advice applicable to all types of interview settings. In this first of two installments, we go through the academic role-playing scenarios; next week, we'll follow up with the patent law interviews.

Andrew Morehead received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Duke University, went on to do a 2-year National Institutes of Health postdoc at the California Institute of Technology and, in 1998, landed an assistant professor position at the University of Maryland's department of chemistry and biochemistry.

With a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Virginia already tucked under her belt, Kathie Sindt went on to enroll in a master's degree program in career counseling at the University of Maryland with the goal of establishing herself as a counselor who helps researchers develop their scientific careers.

In both role plays below, Sindt is the interviewer and Morehead is the postdoc interested in becoming a faculty member.

"The basic difference we wanted to present," explains Sindt, "was that in the first interview, Andrew wasn't prepared. He hadn't thought about the type of questions that he would be asked." Preparation is key to establishing competent interview discussions, so what kinds of questions can you expect to face?

So Many Questions, So Much Time

"Well, some questions you can almost certainly anticipate," reveals Morehead to the audience. "We concentrated on the question of what was I going to do first when I started: That's what about half the people who I interviewed with asked me. The other half asked me 'what are you going to do 10 years from now?' That's actually a harder question because it's pretty easy to plan a short-term plan of attack, the longer-term ones are not so easy."

This Time It's Personal ...

"You're going to get some personal questions," he continues. "The bottom line is they're going to have to put up with you," so you have to expect them to try to get to know you during your conversations, says Morehead, who found his own real interview sessions "pretty informal." A lot of people, he says, were "very casual talking about their families, they're interested in you as a person, because you're going to work very closely with them for a long time. I think the best policy is just to be prepared if they ask those sorts of questions and to be--not brutally honest--but at least open."

Slides of Overheads and Overheads of Slides

Morehead prepared "very strongly for questions about my research and for questions about how I planned to get funded and how I planned to perform it," he explains. "I also prepared very strongly for my presentations because presentations are critical--this is the only time the whole department sees you. I had my slides for my research talk, I had my overheads, and I had overheads of the slides in case the slide projector didn't work." Some people want to know the details of your first and second experiments that you're going to run and many ask why is your project different? To address these interview and seminar questions, Morehead prepared three 10-page proposals that laid out the introductory set of experiments he planned to do. He had separate slides and overheads for each proposal that outlined his key ideas and schemes. "You have to be prepared for very wide-ranging questions and very specific questions," he tells the audience. "I also prepared a budget, because you don't want to come in looking like you haven't given considerable thought to the actual start-up costs."

During his job search, Morehead reveals that interviewers were more interested in what he was going to do to sell and perform his research than anything else. Your interview success hinges on how well you present yourself and your research. "I would say it's critical to present yourself as somebody who's going to fit into the department: Dress well and come across as confident." Ask yourself, Morehead concludes: "Are you going to be able to go out and convince people that you can do what you think you can do?"

In an upcoming issue, we'll check out more interview scenarios, tips, and hints with patent attorneys Grant Reed and Cindy Bouchez, who discuss what it's like to sit on the other side of the interviewer's desk.

• E-Mail This Article
• Print This Article
• Share This
  • del.icio.us
  • Digg it!
  • Facebook

To Advertise   |   Find Products