Last updated on December 21, 2015
It’s that time of the year again, when graduate students who are in their final year are getting ready to go on the job market. Because going on the job market is a harrowing experience for most people, I thought I should help job-market candidates by sharing my advice.
This post is the last in a series of three. Today, I’d like to discuss what it’s like to interview on campus (also known as a flyout), and how you should prepare for it.
Interviewing on Campus
- A lot of my advice — about which flights to select, what kind of suitcase to buy, what to pack, whether you should check in luggage, what to wear, and sending thank-you notes — is the same in this case as for when interviewing at the ASSA meetings. You can find that advice here, in the previous installment of this series.
- The person who schedules your flyout will most likely be an administrative assistant who takes care of those things for your prospective department. Make sure you treat that person at least as well as you would treat anyone else interviewing you for a job. Job market candidates who are unpleasant to admin staff rarely get offers. At this stage in the game, search committees have typically identified three or more individuals whose research skills are close substitutes, and faculty are looking for a colleague they would like to have around for the next 30 years.
- Before you leave for your flyout, make sure your slides are done and that you have copies of them in more than one place: a copy on your USB drive for the day of the seminar, but also a copy on your Dropbox account and a self-emailed copy in case your USB drive fails. Bring a pen and notepad so that you can jot down the comments from your seminar audience. And make sure you do jot down those comments: someone who does not will look like they don’t care about other people’s opinions, and that is not the kind of colleague most academics want to have around.
- Some people need to practice their job talk to make sure it is within the time limit they are given for their job talk. Blame years of participating in parliamentary simulations, but I never, ever had to practice giving a talk. I can usually gauge my audience’s reaction on the spot and adjust my speed as well as the level of detail in which I go to fit my audience. But unless you are supremely confident that you can just wing it, don’t do what I do, and make sure your presentation is polished.
- That said, there is too much lip service being paid to the “Know your audience” mantra. When I first went on the market in 2006, I gave job talks in four economics departments and at a policy school; when I went on the market in 2013, I gave job talks in three applied economics departments and at a policy school. Yet even though I presented fairly technical papers in both 2006 and 2013, I never felt the need to change my talk for policy school audiences. My attitude has always been “if they don’t like what I do, warts and all, then I don’t want to be working there,” and not getting an offer is simply an easy way of knowing early what would not be a good match.
- Still, even when presenting technical material, you should try to provide as much intuition as possible. If you can keep someone not in your field interested in your presentation for the entire duration of your talk, that person will be much more likely to vote for you when the department has to choose who to make an offer to. There are few worse offenses than that of wasting people’s time; for an academic, there are few things worse than sitting in a seminar where the speaker has made no effort to be understood by as many people as possible.
- Before you leave for your flyout, make sure you get a schedule that is a close as possible to your final schedule from the assistant who is in charge of your visit. Go over it carefully to identify who you will be meeting with. Once you have a list of the people you will be meeting with, make sure you take a look at their CVs. You should do this so that you are broadly familiar with what everyone is working on, where they have studied, where else they might have worked, and who you know in common. This can also give you conversation (re)starters when, in one-on-one meetings, you and your interviewer run out of things to say to each other (not that that would ever happen between economists who have never met before, as we are all paragons of sociability…)
- A typical flyout begins either with a dinner (if you arrive early enough the day before your actual flyout day) or with breakfast with a few faculty members (if you arrived too late in time for dinner the day before your flyout). No matter what people say in order to put you at ease, your interview has already begun.
- At dinner, you can have one drink if someone else at the table decides to have a drink. But make sure you stick to only one drink, even if you know you would still be fine after another drink. If there is one case where you should err on the side of caution, this is it. It is also perfectly fine to say that you don’t drink if you don’t want to have a drink or are not a drinker.
- Then, your day will typically be split between individual one-on-one (though sometimes group) meetings and your job talk. Some places — liberal arts colleges, for the most part — will also have you do a teaching presentation. Having done one of those exactly once (and not at a liberal arts college), I’m not sure I can be very helpful with these.
- Meetings with faculty will be very similar to your ASSA interview, except that they will go into more details about your research. Just make sure you can talk intelligently about your job market paper, the other papers you are currently working on, the broader literature within which your work is situated, as well as what you see yourself working on in five years. The latter is especially important, since at most research universities, you will need to develop a second set of papers distinct from your dissertation in order to get tenure.
- Meetings with administrators (e.g., the dean) can seem daunting at first, but just have a good number of questions handy about the department and the university. Ask them where they see the university/college/department in five years, where they see the position you have applied for fit into the department/college mission, what the funding situation has been like for the college/department, etc. You can ask similar questions from the department chair. I have always been most stressed out by meetings with deans ex ante, but I have always found those to be the most pleasant ex post, because deans are typically smart big-picture folks who are not interested in quizzing you on your research.
- Some places will have you meet with students, usually graduate students. This is a great opportunity to learn what graduate students are excited about, who they are working with, and what life is like in the department and in the area. I spent my meetings with students asking everyone what they were working on, and trying to provide suggestions of papers to read whenever I could.
- One thing that might affect your level of stress is the timing of your job talk. In some places (e.g., my department), job talks are held in the morning or over lunch. In other places, job talks are held just before dinner. If your job talk is held early in the day, an early signal that you are unlikely to be getting an offer is if two or more people end up canceling their meeting with you after you have given your talk. It is difficult not to let a bad job-talk performance affect you, but remain professional, and approach the rest of your day as though it is practice for the next flyout.
- In the off chance you are asked to choose the wine at dinner, just defer to someone else (and if you don’t drink, say so). I have met some people who were convinced that knowing how to choose a wine at dinner was an important skills on the academic job market. From experience, this is something like a 20th-order priority. If you have to invest in some skills, it is best to invest in being the kind of person people want to hire (and retain) rather than in oenology.
- More than anything, however, try to enjoy yourself. Flyout are like a debutante’s ball. This is your one chance to put the exciting research work your are doing out there and to get good comments on your work. So have fun!