Polyglot

Our job candidate, who is a native speaker of Portuguese and a teacher of Spanish, greeted me today with a recital of a poem by Pushkin. In Russian. Then he greeted my colleague who teaches Chinese with a long phrase in Chinese. Then he spoke in Yoruba to a colleague from Nigeria. Then I felt so bad about the puny number of languages I speak that I retired to my office and almost avoided hearing him talk to other colleagues in German and French.

Alcohol on Campus Visits

I always think that there is nothing more American Puritans can do to surprise me but not to fear! They keep coming up with new ways of  making a show of their prissiness. It turns out that no alcohol can be had at the dinners we offer our job candidate during his campus visit. Or, at least, the university will not reimburse that part of the restaurant bill.

The reason why a person who has just gone through a grueling campus visit cannot have a glass of wine or a beer at the end of the day at the expense of the university that invited him for the grueling campus visit is something I will never be able to understand. If there is some crucial difference between a can of soda and a glass of wine, I am failing to see it. Is it the fear that somebody, God forbid, will have a tiny shred of fun on the university's money that's driving this policy? Is it the fear that after one drink the candidate will become a raging alcoholic and will sue the school for making him one? Or is it simply one of those manifestations that employees are actually human that terrifies administrators out of their wits?

And, of course, I will be offering the candidate a drink and paying for it myself. After everything we've put him through today and will tomorrow, that's the least I can do.

My Debut As a Bitchy Interviewer

Being on the job market is still very fresh in my mind. I remember very well how terrified one is during phone interviews, MLA interviews, and campus visits. Now that I'm on a real search committee for a job candidate (as opposed to those fake ones where the choice is predetermined and everybody just goes through the motions), I feel a lot of compassion towards the candidates. My first instinct is to be kind and reassuring with them.

However, this job search is extremely important. My own professional future might depend on it to a larger extent that I would wish for. For this reason, I will have to put my kindness aside for the moment (which isn't very difficult for me to do, as regular readers of the blog must know by now) and ask every tough question that comes to mind. I'm also not one of those academics who fears that people will see her as "too bitchy." My guiding principle in life is that people would worry a lot less what others thought of them if they only knew how rarely human beings think about others.

At my department, junior faculty members are treated as equals. Nobody expects us to sit there quietly and nod in agreement. Not a single senior colleague has ever pulled rank on me or declared that my opinions were not valuable because I was less experienced. Now, I'm going to have an opportunity to have a one-on-one dinner with the candidate where I will be able to find out everything I need to take an informed position on him. I hope I don't make the candidate suffer too much in the process.

Answer to the Dreaded Question About Weaknesses

Everybody dreads hearing the question "And what are your weaknesses?" during a job interview. I just discovered the perfect answer ever at the blog Stupid Motivational Tricks:

I am prone to sloth, pride, envy, anger, greed, lust, and gluttony, not necessarily in that order.

This beautiful answer is almost worth going on the job market again to have a chance to hear the question and find out if the prospective employers are intelligent people with a sense of humor.

What Not to Do at a Job Interview

After seeing a good, nice person in desperate need of employment butcher his chances at getting a very good job paying $100+K, I decided to share some advice as to what not to do at a job interview. If these suggestions seem too obvious to you and you are wondering what's the point of stating something so obvious, let me tell you that I have seen very intelligent, mature, highly educated people with decades of work experience make every one of these mistakes, alienating potential employers and destroying any chance at a job offer. 

1. No matter how badly you were treated at your previous place of employment, a job interview is not a good occasion to launch into a 15-minute-long diatribe detailing every way in which you were wronged by previous employers. Even if what you are saying is 100% true, it makes a really horrible impression to show resentment and anger. Psychological issues should be resolved during a session with your therapist, not during a job interview.

2. Making your political convictions known during the very first interview might not be a good idea. Talking about "Obama" and "Clinton" as opposed to "our great President George W. Bush" will probably not make a very favorable impression. A job interview is not a political soap-box. After you get the job, you will have numerous opportunities to debate politics with your colleagues. But the goal of an interview is different.

3. If you are doing a phone interview, remember that when you are placed on loud-speaker, the noises you make become very loud. When you are asked a question you find stupid, it is a bad idea to make deep, frustrated sighs and click your tongue in desperation. People on the other side of the conversation get a very loud rendition of your exasperated sighs and scoffing.

4. It makes a really bad impression when you respond to a question that a prospective employer poses with "First, let me ask you a question." People often think that this makes them sound proactive and take-charge, when in reality it simply makes them come off as rude and pushy. 

5. Don't tell the people you interview what a shitty place they live in. Even if you went online and found tons of information about their state's debt, unemployment rates, nasty climate, corrupt officials, etc., it might be best not to share this knowledge in a triumphant tone with people you want to give you a job in that very state. They are living there and probably even enjoying it. What's the point of making the interviewers feel bad about themselves?

6. Don't suggest to the interviewers that the work they do is "easy." If such statements are supposed to make the prospective employers feel good about their super easy lives, they don't achieve the goal. They just make you come off as snooty and condescending. 

7. Don't go on at length about how fantastic, hardworking, overachieving, etc. you are and follow it with "But the most important thing you have to know about me is that I'm very humble." And then offer your musings on the merits of humility. 

8. Believe me, I understand the struggles of candidates who are not native speakers of English. Still, after decades of living in the US is it too much to ask that a candidate for a very responsible position avoid referring to people as "coloreds"? (Especially when the people in question are his students.)

Some advice specifically for those who are looking for an academic position:

1. It is really not a good idea to announce that you hate doing research and that teaching is also not your favorite thing to do, but other than that you are perfectly suited for this position. Research and teaching are two activities that all academics do. You can't avoid them. You are not supposed to want to avoid them.

2. Don't make fun of the research your prospective employers are doing. "Wow, I had no idea that anybody even did that any more. Isn't this topic horribly outdated?" makes everybody present dislike you.

3. Sharing how much you hate students because they are all lazy, stupid and unintellectual is probably a bad idea for somebody whose job description involves teaching on a regular basis.

These suggestions are based on what I have been able to observe while serving on several search committees at different universities. If you want professional advice, visit this great blog where professional recruiters who have placed hundreds of candidates in all kinds of positions will be happy to answer any questions you leave for them in the comment section. They don't place people in academic positions, though. If you have questions about the academic job market, leave them in the comment section to this post, and the academics who read (and write) this blog will share their insights.

Bad Job Interviews

So we interviewed a job candidate today, and it was horrible. We collectively felt extremely bad for this candidate. It's painful to see how a good, intelligent person can simply slaughter a job interview by saying every wrong thing possible. And I would have so liked to see this particular person get a campus visit, but the interview was too much of a disaster.

I know there was one phone interview I butchered when I was on the market. It was a position I really wanted at Temple University in Philadelphia. I love the city, and the position was made for me. And then during the interview I actually forgot the names of the authors I analyzed in my dissertation. I couldn't name a single one, which made me feel like a complete idiot. I can only imagine what the interviewers thought of me. I still cringe with shame when I remember it. There was also this beautiful moment during that interview where they asked me the question everybody asks you:

"So why do you want to work at Temple University?"

"Where??" I asked like a total fool.

"Temple University," they said. 'The place you are interviewing with right now."

That was pretty bad. But not nearly as bad as the interview I witnessed today. I feel really sad because of this.

Internal Candidates

Most of the academic job seekers who are preparing for their campus visits right now have no idea how many the jobs they are interviewing for in good faith have already been promised to internal candidates. Often, an internal candidate is somebody's relative or friend, which makes the entire process smell really bad. In other cases, however, there are legitimate internal candidates who are perfectly qualified for the position.

I understand very well how a department might want to offer a tenure-track position to an adjunct who worked hard for the department for years or who is about to get a PhD. What is really wrong, though, is that even in cases when the department is 100% convinced it has the right internal candidate, it is still forced to declare a national search. Such searches waste university resources that are scarce as it is. They also exploit hopeful candidates who apply for the position in good faith, go through a gruelling 9-month job application process, interview at the MLA, kill themselves to deliver a great campus visit, and have no idea during that entire time that they don't have a hope in hell of being hired. I've seen such fake searches, and they honestly break your heart.

So my question is: why not dispense with fake searches altogether? They waste precious resources, undermine a university's integrity, and cause damage to job seekers. They are conducted for the sake of keeping up appearances, which is hardly a goal worthy of all this sacrifice and dishonesty.

A Campus Visit from Hell, Part II

Just as I reached the point of utter desperation, a prospective colleague appeared.

"Where have you been?" he asked irritably. "We have all been waiting for you in the classroom."

We rushed into the classroom, and I started getting the beautiful handouts I'd prepared at home out of my bag.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you," the person who teaches that course told me. "We actually covered all this yesterday. Today, you should teach pages 98-109."

The only problem with that plan was that I'd never in my life seen pages 98-109 and had no activities prepared to cover the unknown material contained in those pages. At that point, I had really stopped caring about the job, making a good impression, or the people observing the class. I decided to have a good time. The students in this Elementary Spanish course weren't prepared for a teacher who only speaks Spanish in class but I didn't care. I have one huge asset as a teacher: I immediately establish a great rapport with the students even when they don't understand a word I say. I don't know how it works, but students like me no matter what I do. So I used that. We played charades, and the walls of the classroom practically shook with laughter.

When it was time for me to leave, I had one of my proudest teaching moments when I heard a student say, "Could she stay? We'd rather have her than our regular teacher."

The next stage of a campus visit is a talk you deliver on the topic of your current academic research. My talk had been practiced at several other campus visits, so I didn't expect any surprises from it. That is, until the Chair of the department interrupted my lecture on contemporary Spanish literature to ask:

"So have you read Kafka's Metamorphosis?"

"Yes," I answered tentatively, unsure of what to expect.

"So what's your reading of it?" she continued.

I tried to offer my vision of the book, only to be interrupted by the Chair.

"Your reading of Kafka is very amateurish," she announced. "It's what I would expect from somebody who has done no research on Kafka at all."

I wanted to point out that I had, indeed, done absolutely no research on this writer for the simple reason that I am a Hispanist and have nothing to do with Germanic Studies. Contradicting the Chair, however, was definitely not a way to make a nice impression, so I just smiled impotently. A fellow Hispanist tried to save the situation and asked me about an article I'd published recently. As soon as I started responding, the Chair interrupted me in a voice filled with indignation:

"Well, I have to say, I'm really disappointed with your reading of Kafka!"

After the visit ended, a nice member of the department was driving me to the airport.

"There are still three hours until your flight," he said. "Let me drive you around the city, show you some landmarks."

"No, thanks," I said. "I just want to go home now."

I knew that these people must have hated me and that I was never going to work at that place.

P.S. It's my fourth semester teaching at this great department. Campus visits are deceptive. It turns out everybody really liked me. And after the first two weeks of working here, I knew that wild horses wouldn't be able to drag me away from this campus. And that campus visit I thought had gone so great? They hired somebody else and forgot to inform me that I didn't need to wait for a reply any longer.

A Campus Visit from Hell, Part I

As many of my colleagues in academia are gearing up for a fresh round of campus visits, I want to share the story of the worst campus visit I ever had. I'm hoping that whatever you have to go through in the coming months, dear colleague, will not be quite as bad. Keep this story in mind and no matter what befalls you on the road to academic employment, tell yourself: it could have been even worse.

The week I came back from what I thought had been an exceptionally successful campus visit, I was contacted by a Chair of one of many departments who had interviewed me at the MLA.

"We want to offer you a campus visit but it has to be right now," she said. "Can you get on the plane the day after tomorrow?"

I don't like to say no to any opportunity to get a job in this tough economic climate, so I cancelled my classes and bought an airplane ticket. The department faxed me some pages from the textbook I was asked to cover in the class I had to teach as part of the job interview, and I stayed up all night before the trip preparing some really fun activities for the class.

The flight lasted 6 hours longer than we'd expected. Campus visits are only offered in February and March, which means that the chances of you getting snowed in somewhere along the way are high. The schedule of my 3-day-long campus visit was extremely tight, so every time my flight was delayed I could practically feel the chances of getting anything useful out of the visit slipping out of my reach.

After a sleepless night and a 14-hour flight, I arrived at my destination and was immediately taken to a restaurant for a meal. Only the most naive and inexperienced job seekers expect to eat or drink anything at such gatherings. Every sip you take is scrutinized, and your job is to make a good impression. If you think that academic hiring is about how good your CV is, how rich your research agenda might be, or how great your teaching skills are, then you are in for a huge surprise. It's all about making a nice impression. That is, if it's even a good faith search and not one of those sham searches that are only conducted to save face in a situation where the job has already been promised to somebody's relative or an internal candidate.

From my MLA interviews with the members of this particular department I knew they were a pretty spacey bunch prone to long silences. During that first dinner they seemed even more out of it than at the MLA interview. I summoned all the chirpiness I possess to fill in the long bleak silences. The main topic of conversation at the table was about the high prices of food at that particular restaurant, which made me feel horrible about every bite I tried to take. It might have been my imagination, but it felt like everybody was looking at me with resentment whenever I tried to swallow anything.

Next morning, I was told that because of the delay of my flight several activities had to be taken off the agenda.

"So you aren't going to get to see the campus. Or the library," a member of the search committee announced. "But not to worry, you are still going on your excursion with the real estate agent."

I made a couple of timid attempts to suggest that a real estate agent was of no interest to me but to no avail. The agent arrived, I was packed into her car, and sent off to explore available properties. At that time, I had exactly $112 in my checking account and $32 in savings, so the agent's spiel about the really cheap properties that were available "just for $325,000, imagine that!" left me cold. I was scheduled to give my trial class right after the real estate excursion. It is very tough to teach a class where there are more people observing and judging you than actual students. All I wanted at that point was to get some alone time to have a cup of coffee, go over my class plan, relax, and get into the teaching mode. I teach in Spanish, so it's necessary to take a moment to tune into the Spanish-speaking side of my brain. The real estate agent, though, was relentless.

"Oh, there is plenty more time left before your class," she said as she finally let me out of her minivan 3 minutes before the trial class was scheduled to begin.

I was expecting somebody from the department to be there to take me to the classroom where I was going to teach the class. Imagine my horror when 10 minutes into the class I was supposed to be teaching nobody arrived to lead me to the classroom. The visit had been planned in such a hurry that nobody put the actual classroom number on my visit schedule.

(To be continued. . .)

Academic Job Interviews

One thing that really annoys me about getting sick at this particular moment in time is that I will be missing an especially important round of interviews for an academic position at my department. This is such a crucial hiring process that I considered dragging myself there anyways but it didn't seem like a good idea to scare the candidate with little yelps I emit every time I move without being extra careful or try to take a deeper breath.

I have been part of academic job searches quite a few times either as a candidate or member of a search committee. The main issues that academic job searches run into are a) nepotism and b) a gradual seepage of corporate job interview practices. As for the latter, we are now seeing academic job interviews being gradually poisoned with inane, corporate-inspired questions, such as "Name 3 words that your colleagues might use to describe you" or "What are your biggest strengths/weaknesses." Everybody knows that the only purpose of such ridiculous questions is to make the candidate feel like a fool while scrambling for an answer that is not too trite. While corporate environments use such questions in order to haze the candidates, their purpose in academia remains unclear.

Another huge issue is, as I said, nepotism. Many young academics have no idea how often the results of the campus interviews they prepare for with such an outlay of effort and time are predetermined in favor of somebody who didn't have to interview at all. I was once forced to participate in a round of sham interviews where candidates went through a gruelling 3-day-long campus visit without realizing that nobody ever had the slightest intention of hiring them because the position had been reserved for the wife of a senior faculty member. It is needless to say that said wife never offered to teach a sample class or answer anybody's questions about her credentials (that she most probably didn't have). Seeing those hopeful job candidates killing themselves for a fake hiring process that was only needed to justify hiring somebody's unqualified wife was heart-breaking.

The interview I'm missing today is different in that we are interviewing for a real position, very few corporate-inspired questions that make me cringe with shame whenever I hear them made it onto the question list, and it's the kind of hire that will determine whether I will want to remain working at this institution for the foreseeable future.

Funny Excerpts from Job Application

Here are some really hilarious excerpts from ACTUAL job applications that I found at proNexia's blog:

“I am a happy-go-lucky student, graduating this December from University ___ “

“I am fully bi-lingual English and Spanish and conversational french...”

“More than a professional, i am a girly girl at heart”.

“Here i joint my resume,and hope some of your news soon!”

Real people sent these to actual job recruiters. Scary, huh?

 Find more of these here.

Beware of Letters of Recommendation

If you are asking people to write you letters of recommendation, my advice is to make every effort to read these letters before they go out to their intended recipients. If you need to cheat, lie, and commit minor criminal acts to get access to those letters, consider doing it. Because letters of recommendation are often mean as hell. I don't know whether it's true that one isn't allowed by law to write a negative letter of recommendation. I do know, however, that most people are smart enough to write a letter that seems to be nice on the surface but ends up hurting the candidate's chances of employment severely. Here are a few examples from the letters of recommendation I have seen with my own eyes. I have changed some factual details in them, but the nasty digs at the candidates have been preserved in their entirety.

• "You might have heard about the numerous conflicts this candidate has had at her previous places of employment. You don't need to believe all of these accounts of strife, however." - No, we never heard anything like that about this candidate but I guess we have now. Thanks to you, kind colleague.
• "The only thing I can tell you about this candidate is that he is a really nice guy." The only thing?? So he isn't a great pedagogue, an important scholar, a talented administrator? He is just a nice guy? And we are supposed to pay him 100K per year for being a nice guy?
• "I am happy to recommend Professor X for the position of Full Professor of German. His command of German is quite good." "His Spanish is quite good" is what I say about my B- undergrads. Is it possible that the recommender honestly doesn't know that a Full Professor of German is kind of expected to be better than "quite good"?
• "This candidate is often disliked by his colleagues. Some people might refer to him as stubborn and conflictive. I, however, have never had a slightest problem with him." Right. And that slight problem that you never had with him is now making you characterize this candidate in a way that will make him unhireable everywhere in the world.
• "All I can say about this candidate is that if you need to discuss anything trivial - like where to do the laundry, or where to take your kids during summer holidays - he is the person for you." Of course, if this were a position in Trivial Studies we might be interested. But offering a Full Professorship with tenure to someone whose main contribution will be to discuss the best place to do the laundry might be a little hard to sell to our Dean.

So once again: be very very careful about whom you ask to write your letters of recommendation.

Job Search Tips

There is this great blog that was started recently that offers very insightful professional advice on job search. If you are looking for a job, do visit this great new blog. If you have any questions about job search that haven't been addressed yet on the blog, feel free to leave your questions in the comments section.

This is not a paid advertisement of any sort. The author of the blog is somebody I know and love, and I can testify to the fact that this person really knows what she's talking about in terms of job search process.

Academic Job Search Tips, Part II

These are some more useful things I discovered during my process of looking for a tenure-track position in Humanities:

1. Do the research. When preparing a job talk, it is crucial to find out whether any of the faculty members at the hiring institution have written anything on the subject you will address. Probably, everybody in the world realizes that this needs to be done except me. Once, during a campus visit, my job talk was demolished by a senior faculty member who spent her entire career proving (incorrectly) that what I was saying was not true. The next day, the hiring committee that was very excited about me before started treating me like a leper. Many specializations have theoretical issues that are deemed ideological. You need to find out on what side of the fence members of your hiring committee are located and either say what they want to hear or avoid the subject altogether. In my field of Hispanic Studies, for example, uttering words like "Spanish Enlightenment" or "Spanish Modernism" makes you unemployable at many institutions.

2. "Evidence of active research agenda." These mysterious words that appear on many job announcements are often interpreted incorrectly by many grad students. Working on your dissertation does NOT count as evidence of an active research agenda. You need to have other things going on research-wise. Conferences you attend or organize, articles you submit (hopefully on subjects that differ from the topic of your dissertation) constitute evidence of active research.

3. Teaching and grant-related workshops. I always considered such workshops a complete waste of time, so I never attended them. It came as a complete surprise to me that having a couple of letters stating that you have attended (simply as a listener) this type of workshop boosts one's chance of getting a job tenfold. If you attend a grant proposal writing workshop, that counts as evidence of an active research agenda (see previous item). As weird as that sounds, it's true. A workshop only lasts a couple of hours and can be snoozed through effortlessly. Every workshop you attend sens you a letter confirming your attendance. If you can attach this letter and an explanation of how you implemented what it taught in your teaching or grant applications, that will help you a lot.

4. Tailor your cover letter to the specific institution. It's an incredible drag, I know. The temptation to create just one good letter and send it everywhere is massive. However, taking the extra time to find out what this particular institution needs and addressing it in the letter pays off big time. It is especially useful to address the geographical location of the school where you are applying. Hiring committees are afraid you won't want to live long-term in the often very backwater places where their schools are located. Talk about why and how much you want to live in this particular area. Even if you dread living there.

5. Apply everywhere. Even if a position describes somebody completely different from you, still apply. Hiring works in mysterious ways. I once applied for a position of a specialist in Latin American colonial literature at an Ivy League school. I specialize in contemporary Spanish literature. As you can see, the position advertised and my area of specialization could hardly be more different. The next time I heard from this school was when they sent me a contract to sign.

Some people use this weird strategy of choosing 4 or 5 schools they think will fit them the best and only apply there. In my experience, it is a colossal mistake. Even if your credentials are absolutely fantastic, this is a huge gamble. It is so much smarter to apply absolutely everywhere and have several offers to select from. Any Assistant Professor position is better than to be forced to accept a crappy instructor position where you will work for a pittance and with no benefits teaching a 6:5 course load. Besides, once you get into that track, it is extremely hard to get out of it.

6. Don't get discouraged. Remember: it is probably not your fault. You can craft a perfect letter of intent, gather a brilliant portfolio, finish your outstanding dissertation on time, have a stack of publications to your name, interview beautifully, give the performance of your life at the campus visit, and still not be hired. This is no reason to get discouraged and start doubting yourself (or crying on the phone to your boyfriend for 8 hours about what a screw up you are and how nobody will ever want to hire you if even such a dinky, bakwater place doesn't want you). In all probability, this has nothing to do with you. Only after you work for a few years at a couple of different institutions will you realize how often positions that are advertised are not really available. Hiring committees go through the motions of interviewing people and sitting through their campus visits because that's what the laws require. In reality, they often know already that they want to hire somebody else (a spouse, a friend, an internal candidate, etc.)

Good luck, dear colleague!

Part I of this post is located here.

Academic Job Search Tips, Part I

The reader sarcozona, whose great blog can be found here, asked me to share my experiences during an academic job search. I was on the job market for two years. The first time, I got a Visiting Professor position and the second time, a tenure-track job. In the process, I discovered how unprepared we, the ABDs and the newly-minted PhDs, often are for the demans of an academic job search. If I were to go on the job market now, I would do pretty much everything differently. So here are some of my suggestions:

1. Forget about the dissertation. Contrary to what they drill into us at mock job interviews in our grad schools, prospective employers couldn't care less about our dissertations. They care that the dissertation a) will be finished and defended on time and b) that our research will allow us to teach a wide variety of courses. So if your cover letter includes a detailed description of your dissertation topic, throw it out. Instead, say things like, "Three chapters are already finished and approved by the thesis director. I am absolutely positive that I will submit the entire dissertation on March 15 and will defend it in May. My thesis adviser agrees with this timeline." Whenever you are asked to talk about the dissertation topic during interviews, make sure you explain that this research will allow you to teach several different courses on different levels.

2. Make people forgive you for being an Ivy. If you happen to be doing your PhD at an Ivy League school, you have to know that instead of offering you this huge advantage you always hoped it would, it might turn out to be an equally huge liability. People thing that Ivies are stuck up, condescending and superior. You need to be as humble, self-effacing and modest as you can to let people see that is not the case with you. Never say things like,"What we do at Princeton is . . .," "The way this course is taught at Yale is . . .," "We have these great facilities at Harvard that  . . ."

3. Make yourself useful. As much as we want to believe that the purpose of an academic job search is to provide us with employment that will allow us the freedom and the resources to pursue our research, that is not really the case. Employers want people who will serve employers' purposes, not their own. You have to state very clearly that you love teaching lower-level courses and courses outside your area of expertise. There is a high probability that you will not get to teach a course in your area of specialized interest for years. You need to make clear that you understand this and are happy about this.

4. Remember that it's the person who gets hired, not a list of credentials. Between a candidate with fantastic credentials and the one who isn't as well qualified, the one who will get hired every single time is the one who has the nicest personality and who looks like they would fit this particular department the best on a personal level. I'm very proud of my CV, my degrees, my teaching experiences, and my publications. But the reason I was hired as stated by the Chair of my department was that I'm "nice, outgoing, and fun." People who have been reading this blog for a while know that I have autism, so I'm neither of these things. So as they say in sales, "Fake it till you make it."

5. Don't complain. Another useful slogan I borrowed from people in sales is "Less bitching, more pitching." No matter how lousy your grad school experience has been, you can never ever give even a slight hint of that during job interview. Everything is perfect, everybody is great and kind, your colleagues are fantastic, and your thesis director is helpful. Even if you know that the person interviewing you has been involved in a mortal feud with a senior faculty member at your department, you still can't even hint at disliking them. Say you haven't had much contact with that person because your focus is on finishing the dissertation as fast as possible. Which you plan to do by March 15 and defend it in May. And your thesis adviser agrees.

Part II of this post is located here.

Unemployed Job Seekers Need Not Apply

One of the scarier tendencies that have surfaced in the job market as a result of the current economic crisis is that many companies are refusing to hire people who are unemployed, irrespective of the reason for the unemployment:

In a current job posting on The People Place, a job recruiting website for the telecommunications, aerospace/defense and engineering industries, an anonymous electronics company in Angleton, Texas, advertises for a "Quality Engineer." Qualifications for the job are the usual: computer skills, oral and written communication skills, light to moderate lifting. But red print at the bottom of the ad says, "Client will not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason." In a nearly identical job posting for the same position on the Benchmark Electronics website, the red print is missing. But a human resources representative for the company confirmed to HuffPost that the The People Place ad accurately reflects the company's recruitment policies.

Read more about this completely insane and self-destructive tendency here.

I have to leave right now but I will blog soon about my analysis of what this tendency means for us and where it is likely to take us. In the meanwhile, feel free to leave your own interpretation of this troubling phenomenon in the comment section.

Boss-boy

A job-seeking candidate sent his CV to a recruiter. Among his work experiences, he listed being a bus-boy for a restaurant. Only he spelled this profession as "boss-boy." :-)

Either this person has an amazing sense of humor, or he has a very high self-esteem, both of which are great characteristics to have.

Using Puzzles in Job Interviews

Puzzles are the latest fad in the job interview process that the corporate world has taken on recently. A candidate for JP Morgan or Microsoft is subjected to a humiliating process of being asked to solve a really weird puzzle that has absolutely nothing to do with their area of expertise. Many people who have been through this type of interview compare it to hazing.

There are many examples of such puzzles. There is an entire book and website industry dedicated to preparing you for this type of job interview. The one you see on the left is particularly popular, although there are many others (How to Ace the Brainteaser Interview, The return of the brainteaser interview: puzzles that challenge your logical thinking are back. , Brain Teasers, Book of Puzzles & Brain Teasers, etc.). This is an example of such a puzzle:

Three men and one woman find themselves on a deserted island. They only have two condoms between them. How can these 3 men have safe sex with the woman?

Believe me, people, I am not making this up. This is an actual question people are asked during actual job interviews. I am not even going to address the entire set of nasty, hateful assumptions that inform this so-called puzzle. Like, who said these men are necessarily interested in having sex with this woman, as opposed to with each other. Or, why would the woman want to have sex with all of them.

The main question here is what is the purpose of making this type of idiotic puzzle the central part of the job interview process. Contrary to what Microsoft and Wall Street companies claim, the goal of introducing puzzles into the job interview process is not to find the most creative thinker among your candidates. The real purpose is to find the most obedient, robot-like one. No self-respecting person with a degree from a respectable university will tolerate being asked stupid, irrelevant, and often offensive questions like "How many piano-tuners are there in New York?" or "How to design a spice-rack for a blind person?" The goal of such companies is precisely to weed out self-respecting, intelligent candidates. All they need is employees who would obey any humiliating task they are given without questioning their bosses on the legitimacy of the assignment.

MLA Experiences

If you thought I was done narrating my MLA experiences, you were really wrong. There are too many of them. And as much as I suffered in the process of actually living them, it's kind of nice to remember them now.

This was part of my most horrible MLA experience.

Interviewer 1: (Asks me some question).

Interviewer 2 (under his breath): God, here he goes again with the idiotic question.

Interviewer 1: Did you just call me an idiot?

Interviewer 2: If you insist on asking the idiotic question all over again, then what does that make you?

Interviewer 1: So you are saying I'm an idiot?

Interviewer 2: Yes, I guess I am.

Interviewer 1: You know what? YOU are an idiot.

Interviewer 3 (leaning in to me, in a whisper, visibly embarrassed): I'm so sorry, we all had a very long day. Please don't mind us.

Me: Oh, it's ok. (An uncomfortable pause with Interivewers 1 and 2 glaring at each other). So... should I answer the question?

MLA Dialogues (Part III)

This is the extremely intimidating hotel where I had several of my interviews last year (Fairmont San Francisco.)

Now, the worst ever MLA experience happened to me the year before. Neither immigration nor divorce have traumatized me quite as much. Here is a tiny little part of this horrible interview:

Employer: I see from your publications that you are interested in nationalism. What is your approach to national identity?

Me: The essentialist approach to national identity...

Employer (interrupts me with an exasperated look): Oh, so you are one of THOSE!

Me: I'm sorry?

Employer: You are an essentialist!

Me: No, just the opposite!

Employer (waving his hand in my direction): Enough, enough! I don't want to hear any more of these essentialist theories.

Me: I was only trying to say that the essentialist approach has long been intellectually and ideologically bankrupt...

Employer (obviously not listening and still very exasperated): Let's just move on to the next question.

[TO BE CONTINUED]