What makes a good job talk? I think about this question almost every winter. Not only do I receive this question from junior scholars that are on the market, my department has hired almost every year since my arrival at UConn, so I have listened to lots of job talks by this point.
If you’re reading this post, then you’re probably familiar with the application process for tenure-track positions in academia. (If you’re not, a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education succinctly describes the process.) The process usually includes two rounds of interviews. My previous post focused on the preliminary interview, and this last one in the series will be about the campus interview. Most schools invite 3-4 candidates from the preliminary round to visit campus for a few days in February or March. Candidates may be asked to submit additional materials, such as a writing sample or sample syllabi, ahead of the visit. Although it’s called the “campus interview” and may include an actual interview, the centerpiece of the final round is actually the job talk, that is, an oral presentation of 40-50 minutes in length about the candidate’s research. There are exceptions, however. Many teaching-oriented schools will also ask candidates to give a shorter job talk or do a teaching demonstration in addition to or in lieu of the research presentation.
Job talks are tough to do well. They’re long, focused on a very narrow topic, and can be nerve-wracking. How do you explain your complex research in a way that makes sense to potential colleagues who aren’t in your field or even your discipline? How do you keep your audience from falling asleep? It is taxing on anyone’s attention to listen to 45 minutes of complicated research, let alone 3-4 presentations within the space of a few weeks. In fact, this applies not just to job talks but any other research presentation that is longer than 30 minutes. Long presentations are hard to craft, and job talks are even harder because there’s so much at stake. The job talks I have attended over the course of my career vary considerably in quality. About a third were amazing, about a third were comprehensible but unexciting, and about third were downright confusing or tedious. My early attempts at giving long talks undoubtedly belonged to the last category, but I would like to believe I eventually worked my way up to the first.
This is my formula for successful jobs talks and other long research presentations:
- Take your best, clearest, and most compelling conference paper, which is probably about 20 minutes in length. This is your empirical argument.
- Then, add 15-20 min of introduction explaining the research problem, the existing scholarship, your scholarly intervention, and theoretical framework, if appropriate. You can think of this as your conceptual argument.
- Last, add a 5-10 min of conclusion explaining the implications of your argument for the bigger picture. That is, return to the problem that you presented in the introduction and explain how you solved it and why your solution matters.
- Your powerpoint slides should have a master outline of the argument and mini-outlines sprinkled here and there because it’s hard for listeners to keep all those abstract ideas in their heads. Remember that your audience may have sat through many job talks recently, and they are exhausted, so you want your argument to be crystal clear and effortlessly comprehensible.
- If the talk is online, which was common during the height of the pandemic but less so now, then keep in mind that you can’t see the audience to gauge their reaction and can’t feel the energy in the room. So you have to work twice as hard to be clear and concise.
A special consideration for Vietnam scholars is that our field is obscure to most people, so it’s best to assume little or no knowledge on the part of your audience. Here are the rules that I developed for myself:
- All non-English words must be spelled out on the slide because people have a hard time remembering foreign names. Translate everything that can be translated.
- All foreign place names should be accompanied by a map, and all foreign personal names should be accompanied by a portrait. Your audience doesn’t know when a foreign word is a place or a person.
- I expect that my audience has heard of the Vietnam War and can identify the location of Vietnam, Hanoi, and Saigon on a map. But that’s it. I don’t anticipate any more knowledge than that.
Most job talks include a question-and-answer portion. This part of the job talk is unpredictable, creative, and spontaneous. At the same time, it poses unique challenges for Vietnam scholars because, again, our field is so obscure.
- My research focuses on Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and most people look at my work either through the lens of Chinese history or American diplomatic history, so I anticipate questions shaped by those fields. It may be helpful to think about the fields that are likely to shape how people look at your work and present a paper at a conference specific to those fields to get a sense of what sort of questions they ask.
- Audience members often struggle to articulate clear questions because their knowledge about Vietnam is limited, and it’s hard to answer unclear questions. My method for dealing with this challenge is to always start by repeating the question so that my interlocutor has a chance to correct me if I misunderstood the question.
- Every once in a long while, an audience member asks me a question that is just mean-spirited. This is can be unnerving, but I’ve learned not to read too much into such questions. If that happens to you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you did poorly. If you’re giving a job talk, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your potential colleagues are nasty people, and the reaction of other audience members will tell you whether they find such behavior acceptable. I think the best way to handle such questions is to treat them like they are smart questions asked in good faith. After all, academic presentations and even campus interviews don’t last that long, and it’s not that much work to act like the bigger person for a day or two. You can always laugh about it later.