Going on the academic job market for the first time was a profoundly weird experience for me. The process seemed completely divorced from everything I learned in grad school. Why did the application process bear so little resemblance to the very training that was a necessary qualification for the job?
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 deadline for applications is typically in the fall, and the main interview season stretches from late fall to early spring. The process usually includes two rounds of interviews. The search committee usually conducts preliminary, online interviews with some 12-20 candidates between November and January and invites 3-4 of those candidates to come to campus for the final interview in February or March. Before each interview, candidates may be asked to submit additional materials, such as a writing sample or sample syllabi, and interviewers may pose questions that refer directly to the application materials. This post will focus on the preliminary interview and aims to supplement the abundant information already available online and in print.
The single most common piece of advice I received as a grad student about the preliminary interview was that I needed to practice my answers. So I found lists of sample questions in books about the academic job market, dutifully drafted answers to each one, and practiced my lines until I sounded reasonably natural. But I still had a hard time wrapping my head around what all this practice aimed to achieve. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to write a stilted script or deliver canned lines, but what exactly was I trying to do? And what if a search committee asked me a question I hadn’t prepared for?
TALKING POINTS, NOT ANSWERS
It was only through actual interviews during that first year on the market that I figured it out, at least for myself. I think the purpose of all that practice was to develop talking points rather than answers to the sample questions. To be clear, the difference between an answer and a talking point is not the content but how you plan to use it. I think of an answer as the response to a single specific question, but a talking point is an idea that can used in the answers for a wide range of questions, including ones I didn’t plan for. If I learned my talking points well, they would become tools in my metaphorical toolkit. If I mastered enough talking points, I would have a toolkit full of tools to address the vast majority of questions that might come up. Even if a question wasn’t a perfect fit for a talking point, I could still use it as starting point for my answer or reframe the question to fit the talking point.
Another way to think about it is what a question is trying to get at. For example, consider the following possible questions about graduate teaching:
- How would you design a graduate course?
- What’s your goal when teaching a grad seminar?
- How would you shape the graduate program in your field?
- How would you train grad students in your field?
- How would you teach grad students to write?
- What’s the most important thing you think grad students need to learn?
Those questions are different, but they all get at the same issue of how you would teach grad students and whether you are prepared to do so. Instead of developing answers for every imaginable question about graduate teaching, it makes more sense to prepare a cluster of talking points that address the various aspects of the topic and that can be used for different questions. In short, I think the objective is not to anticipate the infinite variations of interview questions but to prepare a robust toolkit.
In many ways, preparing for the preliminary interview is somewhat similar to studying for the oral exams (also known as the comprehensive or qualifying exams) that mark the transition to becoming a Phd candidate. When you prepare for orals, you have to master scholarly arguments. That is, you study these arguments so that you are able to articulate them, explain their relationship to each other, and offer your assessment on these arguments – and you have to be able to do all of this on command. Those scholarly arguments are like the talking points in a job interview. The difference is that the talking points for an interview are about your teaching and research rather than other people’s scholarly arguments. More generally, both the oral exam and job interviews are performances, and as with all performances, it is possible to practice and rehearse. Recognizing these similarities made me realize that the application process drew on my training far more than I had thought.
DEVELOPING AND PRACTICING TALKING POINTS
So how does one develop a sufficient number of good talking points? For me, the key was to 1) draft talking points that addressed a wide variety of questions and 2) practice those talking points with another person until I was fluent. To get a wide variety of questions, I think it’s helpful to consider the types of possible questions that you might face. Keep in mind the type of questions in any given interview may reflect whether the institution is a teaching- or research-oriented school, the location of the institution, and the particular strengths and weaknesses of the department.
Here is a rough but by no means exhaustive list of the types of questions:
- Stock questions that virtually every candidate is asked (What is your dissertation about?)
- Questions that are specific to you (Why do you use concept X rather than Y to in your research?)
- Questions specific to the institution and/or position (If hired, you will be our first faculty member in Z field. How would you build a graduate and undergraduate program in Z? OR Our university is located in a rural area, and most of our students come from rural communities. So how will you teach urban history to our students?)
- General interest questions (What do you think of the latest movie/bestseller/podcast that relates to your field?)
- Easy questions (How did you become interested in your topic?)
- Hard questions that target your weaknesses as an applicant (You have no experience as an instructor of record. How will you go from TA-ing for one course to teaching three of your own courses in a single semester?)
- Questions about diversity (How will you promote inclusivity and diversity in your teaching?)
- Questions about teaching undergrads
- Questions about teaching grad students, which is important only for institutions with graduate programs
- Etc., etc.
The most important type of questions for my preliminary interview at my current institution was the specific ones about my project, and it helped immensely to have a partner act out the role of the search committee. I drafted some sample questions and talking points on my own, and my (now) spouse, who is also a historian, read my application materials (including my cover letter) and drafted additional questions that were specific to me and to the institution. During the week before my preliminary interview, I practiced the talking points aloud for at least an hour every day by myself, and my spouse grilled me for four hours on top of that. By the time I got to the actual interview, I found it almost relaxing because the search committee was nowhere nearly as tough as my spouse.
Below, I’m sharing my notes of the questions and talking points that I used during those endless hours of practice so you can get a sense of the specificity of the practice questions. This was my third year on the market, so both the questions and talking points were far more refined than my first year. (Unfortunately, I deleted my notes from earlier years. They would certainly make an instructive comparison.) As with all of my old application materials, these notes reflect my research interests and the scholarly debates at the time, not my current work. The job was advertised as a position in Southeast Asian history, and UConn is an R1 school with a graduate program in history, so my notes reflect that.
SAMPLE NOTES FOR THE PRELIMINARY INTERVIEW
How did you become interested in your topic? [stock question]
- grew up with competing discourses about the Vietnam War and South Vietnam
- Vietnamese-American discourse: South Vietnamese were patriotic, virtuous, and rightfully anticommunist
- From American popular media: South Vietnam was not nationalist but corrupt and cowardly
- ask: How should we understand South Vietnam? Was it nationalist, and, if so, how? Why is there such a contradiction between the American & South Vietnamese perspective?
What is your next project? [stock question]
- for my 2nd project, want to focus on the democracy movement and military rule in the mid-1960s – from 1963-67
- looking at this period is an chance to examine to what extent it was external forces like the Americans and to what extent it was internal pressures like the democracy movement that pushed the gov’t into reestablishing democratic institutions, like elections, and civilian rule
What is your long term research agenda? [stock question]
- my long term research agenda is to build a build a historical narrative that spans the entire existence of South Vietnam
- a 2nd project on period of military rule in the mid-1960s
- a 3rd project on the period known as the 2nd Republic, from 1967-1975, on the reestablishment of electoral politics
- a few articles on the side that focus on attitudes towards women, interaction with the Americans
If they want me to continue…
- fascinating period in modern Vietnamese history
- single most sustained attempt to challenge communist hegemony in Vietnam
- most prolific period of Vietnamese literature
- arguably the period when Vietnam came the closest to having democratic institutions
- really deserves to be incorporated into the master narrative of Vietnamese history
Why do you focus intensively on the state? [specific to my project]
- 1) nationalism in an authoritarian state
- the state dominates all public discourse, including nationalist discourse
- 2) the state plays a significant role in partitioned countries
- b/c both N/South Vietnam shared the same ethnicity, the state became the primary locus of political identity
- that said, I plan to expand the dissertation by adding 2 chapters on non-state nationalism: 1) more humanist conceptions of anticommunist nationalism promoted by intellectuals, 2) ideas about nationalism coming of the Buddhist movement
What’s your ambition for graduate teaching?
- train both primary & secondary field students in Southeast Asian history
- primary field
- give them training comparable to that of students in more developed fields
- virtually all Southeast Asia grad students do not have undergrad background in Southeast Asian history
- so I hope to help provide them both the basic narrative and a grounding in the historiography at the same time
- 2nd field
- provide students with the background in Southeast Asia that allows them to examine events from a Southeast Asian perspective in addition to the more conventional American or European focus
What would you provide to grad students interested in American diplomatic history? [specific to institution that has a strength in American diplomatic history]
- open up these students to a different way of viewing the same events from Southeast Asian perspective in addition to the American one
- help them think about the significance of their research topic not only in American history but also in Southeast Asian history
- for those that are interested, I want to help them prepare a teaching field in Southeast Asian history that would make them more attractive on the job market
How would you shape the program in Asian/Southeast Asian history? [specific to institution that previously offered East Asian but not Southeast Asian history]
- most ambitious – Southeast Asian history as primary field
- foundation for this would have 1 faculty who works on the mainland and 1 faculty who works on the island Southeast Asian (meaning [name of existing faculty member at UConn] + me)
- Vietnam is a large mainland country with a fairly developed body of scholarship (more than Cambodia, Laos)
- must build some infrastructure: instruction in Southeast Asian languages
If they press me…
- a possibility for the future…
- Broad field of Asian history
- but with a concentration in a particular region of Asia
- support transnational topics in Asian history
- my experience on the job market suggests there’s a high demand for people who can teach broadly within Asia, but there’s few if any schools that prepare future faculty for this
- most programs train students only in Southeast Asian, East Asia, or South Asia
How would you train grad students in Southeast Asia as their primary field?
- give them a strong grounding in the classics of Southeast Asian studies
- about the major themes that unite the region
- this is necessary b/c all of the subsequent scholarship on Southeast Asian is based on it
- strongly encourage grad students to sit in on my undergraduate lectures and try to arrange to opportunities for them to TA
- the majority of Southeast Asia grad students do not have an undergraduate background in Southeast Asian history
- when they start grad school, their sense for the master narrative of the region is weak outside of their specialization
- push students to prioritize language acquisition if they are not already fluent
What are the new trends in Southeast Asian history? What dissertation topics would you suggest to graduate students in Southeast Asian history?
- happy to work with students interested in 20th century Southeast Asian history, and I would encourage them to develop their own dissertation topics
- some topics that students might be interested in that would be valuable for the field:
- 1) new area of growth: early post-independence period, esp nationalism, ethnicity, & religion
- theory of nationalism came before case studies: Anderson came before studies of individual countries during the post-independence period
- (sample dissertation topic: May 13 riot in Malaysia in 1969)
- 2) local & regional histories, regional here meaning a region within a country
- example: more regional histories of the Khmer Rouge
- 3) topics that cross chronological periods and national boundaries
- example: history of political violence in Vietnam, both before and after the Vietnam War
- topics that place Asian & Asian American studies within the same analytical frame
- Example: Southeast Asian refugee crisis & Southeast Asian emigration out of the region – this has been done for Chinese Americans by Madeline Hsu
- 1) new area of growth: early post-independence period, esp nationalism, ethnicity, & religion
- that said, I would also support for more “traditional” approaches Southeast Asian
- Southeast Asia is an underdeveloped field, and the field still needs more basic work on political history, intellectual history, social history, religious, labor history
How would you train grad students in Southeast Asia as their secondary field?
- give them a strong grounding in the classics of Southeast Asian studies
- emphasize readings that focus on the specific theme or country that they’re interested in
- if want to teach Southeast Asia as their 2nd field, I would also strongly encourage them to sit in on my undergraduate lectures
What dissertation topics would you suggest to graduate students in this broad Asian history field?
- Transnational topics:
- comparative partition: India, Vietnam, China, Korea
- ideas that “travel” throughout Asia
- translation of western ideas (“society,” “democracy”) into Japanese, then introduced to Chinese reformers (like Liang Qichao), and then to Vietnamese reformers
- how Maoist thought (“semi-colonial, semi-feudal”) comes to and is applied by the communist parties of Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Burma
- inter-Asian migration: Indians to Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam; Chinese to Southeast Asia
- inter-Asian diplomatic history, such as Bandung Conference with India, Indonesia, Burma
- worldwide Buddhist “revival” in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Japan, Vietnam
How would you design a graduate course?
- balance of classics & recent scholarship
- 1, sometimes 2 books a week
- assign weekly response papers that require students to explain the main argument of the reading
- less than pg
- every session begins with a short student presentation on the main argument in the reading
- as a grad student, it was these short papers & presentations that helped me master the main argument and built my reading repertoire to prepare for oral exams
- research paper
- flexible: either historiographical or an original research topic
- Southeast Asian history programs are small, few courses available, and students will come from different levels
- want it be useful to both 1st & 2nd year as well as 3rd yr students
How would you teach grad students to write?
- when we read monographs, we would discuss how the argument is structured and how effective it is
- assignments that prepare students for the different types of writing that they will do:
- short papers as practice for writing book reviews
- often the first type of writing that grad students publish
- assign prospectus in a research seminar
- practice for writing grant proposal
- research seminars:
- exchanging rough drafts at different stages of the paper to get feedback multiple times
- abstract
- an introduction
- and then the full paper
How would you prepare grad students to publish?
- would talk about my own experience
- grad student’s earliest publication often comes through their network of contacts
- network while doing fieldwork & at conferences
- begin by offering to do book reviews, often for smaller or online publications, to establish your name
- tell students to consider what journals has articles that they are most likely to read
- most importantly, give students regular opportunity to write original research, which is why I offer that option in reading seminars
How would you prepare grad students to teach?
- encourage them to sit in on the type of lecture course they plan to teach some day and take notes
- when possible, arrange TA opportunities and do classroom observations of them – so I can speak to their teaching ability when they go on the job market
- if TAing for my course, I would have weekly meetings about the upcoming class and give them an opportunity to give guest lecture
- if possible, encourage them to teach their own course, esp a survey course
How would you prepare grad students for the job market?
- beginning in the early yrs of grad school, encourage students to attend and present at conferences to network and get their name out
- this helps you prepare for future presentations, like job talks, when you won’t be talking to people in your field
- if possible, encourage students to teach their own class during very late stage dissertation writing
- if they’re my TA, I would have them give a guest lecture
- teaching experience is necessary for being competitive for jobs that aren’t at research schools
- encourage students to go to job talks
How would you shape an undergraduate program on Southeast Asian history? [specific to institution as it did not have a tradition of teaching Southeast Asia]
- teach regular lower div courses
- [draw from other talking points to fill out this answer]
How would you teach an undergraduate survey course?
- Structure:
- lectures that are structured as arguments and provide a strong narrative
- if there’s less than 40 students, I would alternate between lecture & discussion
- lectures that are structured as arguments and provide a strong narrative
- Readings:
- choose readings that I find interesting & engaging
- balance primary sources & secondary sources
- emphasize a variety of themes: ethnicity, gender, religion, violence, economic change
- Journals:
- assign weekly journal responses to the readings
- for a very large class, I would randomly collect 5 or 10 journals every day to make it the grading manageable but still give students an incentive to do complete them
How do you lecture?
- lectures are structured as arguments and provide a strong narrative
- integrate questions into the lecture so create a back-and-forth
- look at short primary sources as a class
- would like to work towards using powerpoint
- more effective than handouts for helping students learn foreign place names and personal names that are historically important
- better for maps
What are some possible service courses?
- survey: Modern Southeast Asia, Premodern Southeast Asia, History of Vietnam
- upper div: Vietnam War, develop course on the Khmer Rouge
What sort of assignments would you assign to undergrads?
- Lower div survey:
- Journals:
- assign weekly journal responses to the readings
- for a very large class, I would randomly collect 5 or 10 journals everyday to make it
- gives students regular writing practice
- short paper analyzing a primary source we read in class
- longer research paper based on library research
- Journals:
- Upper div seminar:
- book reviews
- helps them master the argument of a book in a holistic way
- paper critiques
- helps students become more critical readers of their own work, their classmates’ work, and scholarship
- long research paper
- book reviews
What do you think of Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves? [General interest question. At the time of my interview, this book had recently come out and received a lot of critical attention in popular periodicals and newspapers.]
- haven’t gotten my hands on it yet but have read about it
- Turse argues that American atrocities against Vietnamese civilians was a pattern and Mỹ Lai was one of the largest incident but represented the norm rather than an exception
- argues that the “body count” approach by military leaders led directly to the indiscriminate murder of civilians
- military leaders deliberately tried to cover up these incidents – investigated but didn’t prosecute
- it’s a very important topic, and it sounds like the author did excellent empirical research
- I’m impressed that the author interviewed Vietnamese survivors
- I hope the book paves the way for more research on the topic that will place these atrocities in the context of Vietnamese history in addition to the history of American imperialism
- specifically, I think it’d be useful to place it in the history of the ongoing warfare from 1945 to 1975
- Vietnamese civilians throughout these wars faced violence from not just Americans or French but also other Vietnamese, both communists and anticommunists
- much of this Vietnamese-on-Vietnamese violence has been whitewashed by Vietnamese nationalist narratives of resistance against foreign aggression
Do you have any questions for us?
- How does the oral exam or qualifying exam work in your program?
- How is the graduate program structured?
- How large would a Southeast Asian history undergrad lecture be?
- What kind of support is available for research?
- How might I contribute to library holdings in Southeast Asian history?
- What is the minimum number of students in an undergrad class necessary to get a TA?
AFTER THE INTERVIEW
While you may or may not be invited for the final interview, preliminary interviews can still be very useful for you as the job-seeker. An undergrad adviser gave me this advice when I was in college, and I have found it to be very helpful throughout my years on the job market. He explained to me that interviews are such intense exercises that it’s common for your mind to replay the interview for a few hours or days afterwards. This is especially true for your first time on the market. But you can take advantage of your mind’s annoying habit. He advised me to write down every question that I was asked and each one of my answers after the interview. Then, I could use the interview experience and my notes to revise my talking points, develop new ones, and add more sample questions to my list. This exercise improved my toolkit for future interviews in the case I didn’t get the job or preferred a different one.