Friday, January 15, 2010

A long and winding road

For those of you not in academia, I thought it might be interesting to see what a job interview for a faculty member is like. It's a long process. This following is a distillation of a schedule for one of the searches our department is running this semester:

Day 1: Dinner with the search committee.
Day 2: Breakfast with two faculty members. Four half-hour meetings with four different faculty members. Lunch with three more faculty members. Four more half-hour meetings, three with faculty and one with the dean. Late afternoon, the job talk. Dinner with two more faculty members.
Day 3: Breakfast with yet another faculty member. Lunch with students. Meeting with department chair.

Except for a three-hour gap the last morning, there aren't any real breaks in the schedule - there are a few 15-minute gaps between meetings. Long enough, if things are running on time, to use the restroom, but not enough to clear your head or stop being "on." This schedule is pretty typical, although sometimes the first-night dinner is dispensed with.

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