A Chorus Line: Preparing for the Preliminary Interview

There are two songs that run through my mind at this time of year: one is the Blondie tune, with the blistering opening: "I'm in the phone booth/It's the one across the hall." Ok, graduate students have cell phones, but still. It conveys the sense of urgency that those of you who have job applications out there are feeling right now. You are waiting for the phone to ring but pretending you aren't while wondering if maybe someone else's phone......oh God, please let it ring.

But there will be interviews. There will. You have to believe that. Which is why my other song is from "A Chorus Line," but later for that. So I am going to take a little vacation from my unexpected engagement with the neocon world, and get back to what I do best: Giving Career Advice.

First of all, here's something you can control at this out of control moment. Do you have a message on your voicemail that is cute? Funny? Your favorite song maybe? Or perhaps it is your darling child who says, "Mahmee an' Daddeee an' - an' -- Fluffeee an' -- meee not home say who you are an' give a message. At da beep."

Get. Rid. Of. It. Now. Ok, it will not put you out of the running for the job: I want to emphasize that no little thing will put you out of the running for the job. But this piece of how you are perceived is something you can control without any significant damage to your essential self. A brief message like, "Hello, you have reached the cell phone of Marylou Graddie; please leave your name and phone number after the beep, and I will call you back as soon as possible," conveys the impression of a calm, serious person who is ready to be interviewed. And no, I am not a child hater, nor do I think it makes you unemployable if your essential self really is Mommy or Daddy: it's just that it is just as irrelevant as revealing your inner P!nk right up front in an interview situation. Your child is not being interviewed for the Cuteness Contest this December and January; you are in the first stage of being screened for the Intellectual Demolition Derby, where only one car drives away with the prize.

OK, now we have that settled. And the good news is, you have gotten the phone call, you are getting the conference interview! Now what do you have to think about? And since I just did a bunch of conference interviews with candidates who collectively did a stellar job, it has caused me to gather my thoughts about how you can prepare to do a good preliminary interview.

What to ask when you get the call. Let me just say -- all search committee chairs do not know what they are doing. So make sure to get the following information: Does the committee want to see more of your work before the interview? Should it be sent to the same address as the application? How long will the interview be and what other committee members will be there? What topics will the committee want to cover? What hotel will they be in and how will you find their room?

And by the way -- practice this, because when you get the call, your heart will leap and you will become momentarily dazed. What normally happens is the person on the other end says "Hi, this is Dr. Committeechair, and I would like to arrange an interview at the MLAHA," and the breathless candidate says weakly, "Oh -- hi." Try this instead:

"Why, hello, Dr. Committeechair," you say in a firm, confident tone. "I'm so happy to hear from you!" As if you expected to all along.

What should you wear? The most frequently asked question by female-bodied people who aren't particularly feminine in self presentation is, Do I have to wear a skirt? The answer is no, you do not: furthermore, I would argue that if you do not normally wear skirts, you should not even dream of wearing one because you will probably feel -- and look -- uncomfortable. For men and women, tailored trousers and shirts are basic items of apparel. Jackets are optional for both genders, and for my money a tie for men is optional too, although you need some way of making yourself look like someone who can be read as professional without one (a collarless shirt buttoned to the top is one solution.) Shoes should be polished and well-cared for. Female-bodied people who do like to dress in feminine ways, and effeminate male-bodied people, should also not butch themselves up for the interview: if feeling pretty also makes you feel smart and capable, go for it. Anyway, federal law prevents us from discussing what you look like, so the wise committee members will keep their opinions about your clothes to themselves or risk appearing unprofessional to their colleagues.

I have known men who have agonized about whether to take the earring out or whether the ponytail should go; women who worry about how high a heel will make them look like a hooker, or whether they need to invest in a suit. I think much of this, for a school like Zenith, at least, is irrelevant fretting, and that all clothing questions need to meet the following criteria: Am I comfortable in these clothes? Is anything I am planning to wear distracting to others -- in other words, am I wearing something that will cause the interviewers not to listen to what I am saying? And finally, does my physical self-presentation reflect the fact that I have prepared carefully for this interview?

Your entrance. Hopefully you will get to the hotel room door a little bit before the interview, but after the previous candidate has departed. It's hard to know whether your timing will be right, and if you should run into another candidate in the hall, smile graciously, as Bette Davis would if she were in your pumps. Before you enter the room, the following items should be stowed: hat and gloves, cellphone (turned off), iPod and water bottle. Even your Dr. Radical has capitulated to modernity to the extent that she walks around campus with white wires hanging out of her ears or pockets, but she wouldn't walk into a meeting of the dreaded Tenure and Promotion Committee that way, or leave the impression with New President that talking to him was a momentary break from listening to Pink Floyd or hydrating properly. These things are Distractions. Eliminate them. And you need to be able to walk into the room with at least one hand free for the conventional manual salutation, not fumbling with your various belongings.

The interview. This is a tough one, because there is actually no training that faculty receive in interviewing people, and some do it badly. I once became nearly hysterical during the course of a preliminary interview when the individual asking me the questions could not seem either to frame them coherently or to stop talking, and I saw my time to leave a good impression dribbling away as the odd interrogation proceeded, uninterrupted by me or anyone else. At the fifteen minute mark, I interrupted, seized the initiative and said, "Excuse me -- we haven't got much time left, and I'd like to make sure I tell you about my dissertation and some of the courses I would teach for you." Which I did. I then left the room and cried inconsolably because I had really wanted that job. And to my astonishment they gave it to me, and thus launched a Radical career.

But let's assume the interviewers know what they are doing. You should:

Have practiced a five-minute version of your scholarship, in which you describe your research, why it is important, what it does for the field, and its current state of completion. Why so short? Because after you give them the basics they will ask questions that speak to the specific intellectual requirements of the job and the department you might be hired to work in. They will get more of the information they need if you allow them to seek it in their own way.

Know something about who they are. This allows you to connect to them and convey that you are interested in working with them; it also demonstrates that you are not entirely self-absorbed, which is an attractive quality in a future colleague.

Talk about several courses you might teach. This can sometimes be the moment to remove sample syllabi from your backpack or briefcase: there is no reason you need to speak about courses without notes. This shows that you have done your homework about where you fit in the department, and that you are ready to teach next fall. At the end of your course descriptions say "I'm sure you have lots of stuff to carry home -- I can give these to you, or I could send them on later if you would prefer." You should absolutely be prepared to talk about courses mentioned or inferred in the ad, but also -- particularly for a school like Zenith -- a course out of your dissertation research that gives them a sense of your creativity and your potential as a teacher-scholar. It also gives you a sense of them: if you have a fabulous course in your head, and they don't respond by saying "Our students would love that!" you have important information. Because I hate to put this thought in your minds, friends, but in the end you might have choices too.

Make sure you pay attention to everyone in the room. Even if a member of the committee doesn't have much to say, make eye contact, or deliberately turn to that person and say "I noticed that you teach a course on...." Silent people are not necessarily people without influence; candidates who don't seem to care what women or scholars of color or untenured scholars think can be misperceived as self-involved, or sucking up to the most powerful person in the room. And the person who is the most powerful might be the one who is being self-effacing.

Keep your eye on the clock. Although you are not responsible for running the interview, make sure that you leave the room satisfied that you have told the committee what you want them to know. And finally.....

Be yourself. I understand why the question "What do they want?" haunts so many job candidates. But really, you wouldn't have gotten this far if there weren't a lot of things right about you. The strongest candidates will present in a genuine, not a contrived, way: some are a little shy, but articulate and thoughtful; others have an intellectually traditionalist, conservative or radical bent (departmental diversity comes in many forms you know); some don't know the answer to a question that has been asked and ask the questioner what s/he thinks; a really relaxed candidate might be able to share a laugh with the committee and cause them to say after s/he has left the room, "I can really see X in our department, can't you?"

But no one little thing will get you the job either.

OK, so here's the other song, the one from Chorus Line, that I think about at this time of year, because this is how I remember being you: no, it's not "Dance 10, Looks 3," silly. You know it -- the last verse goes like this:

God, I hope I get it, I hope I get it!
I’ve come this far, but even so:
It could be yes, it could be no.
How many people does he...?
I really need this job
Please, God, I need this job
I’ve got to get this show.
I have to get any moment
I knew I had it, from the start

Who am I anyway?
Am I my resume?
That is a picture of a person
I don’t know.
What does he want from me?
What should I try to be?
So many faces all around and here we go
I need this job
Oh God, I need this show.

I hope you get it. Good luck.

Another Brick in The Wall

Well, the shrapnel has flown among the literary scholars in Shoreline, I guess. A young acquaintance forwarded Helena Echlin's Letter from Yale, first published in Arete Magazine a few years back. Boy, and they say the blogosphere is mean. Doesn't hold a candle to what editors will approve for publication. At least those of us who blog have a range of enemies who read us secretly and write nasty, anonymous comments that hold us accountable for our sarcasm; and friends who call to say gently, "Are you sure you want....?"

Not that I hold such a brief for the old alma mater, you understand (full disclosure: I took a B.A. in English there back in the New Criticism days and loved every second of it. Then went into a doctoral program in history.) One of the individuals named as a culprit for ruining Echlin's desire to get a Ph.D. in English literature is an old classmate from those happy undergraduate days at -- oh, all right, for those of you who have not guessed already -- Oligarch (Yale) University. And really, I can't believe he isn't the decent, sweet fellow he always was, and a marvelous teacher. Fortunately for all, Echlin has already left Oligarch's program, but her complaints range from the familiar (too much tongue-twisting, inpenetrable theory, not so many jobs) to some zingers that I haven't heard before: that literature professors no longer view fiction as a laudable pursuit in and of itself; that they live in the suburbs ("The bastards!" you exclaim); that you can barely hear yourself think in a room full of graduate students because of the smacking sounds of lips landing on tenured behinds; that Echlin's professors did not read for pleasure and that the profession cares so little for the written word that an Eng Lit graduate student at Oligarch can receive credit for a course in quantum physics but not in creative writing.

Well Helena, I have two words for you: American Studies. OK? Take the "English" out of "English literature" and you have a group of people that are hot-smart, but spend most of their spare time going to the movies, watching TV, and reading mysteries. They also love to party: visit the ASA meeting in Philadelphia this October if you don't believe me.

Seriously, are things that bad in English Departments that it is just theory, theory, theory 24/7? Really? See I wouldn't know. In the first place, I am a historian, and in the second place, I idolize English departments. Historians as a professional group value theory almost not at all, to the exent that when they worry that they are missing something, they complain that history doesn't have "a theory" (this is when scholars in other fields fall over laughing because the idea that there is one theory that could explain everything is incomprehensible to anyone but historians.) People write whole books about why theory is valued so little in the modern historical profession. And then people like Joan Scott, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Hayden White, brilliant and field-changing as they have been in their very different ways, have gone through prolonged periods of getting dished by other historians because what they do is so theoretical, according to their critics, it is "not history." This little drama is often played out on the departmental level as well, as many of my readers who are historians have, I am sure, observed. Unless you claim to do philosophy of history, in which case people leave roses at your door whether they understand what you have written or not. Go figure.

And of course we all know that familiar complaint by the ideologically or disciplinarily driven: "I don't understand it, therefore it is useless drivel!" as if these two thoughts necessarily follow one another. Nobody understands everything. And really, it isn't necessary to understand everything, even if it is written in English. I read French pretty well, and if I tried to read Derrida in the original my head would explode trying to decode it. As it is, when reading French theory in translation I wear an ice bag just in case.

Your Radical is not one of those who dish, you see: she is one who Has Been Dished, although without, unfortunately, becoming famous. I went through a period of reading every bit of feminist and queer theory I could get my mitts on, and now I can't because too many people are writing it. Oh yeah, I also went through my Marxist theory and neo-Marxist theory stage (people have more or less stopped writing that), not to mention my sociology period and my cultural studies phase-- both pretty theory-driven if not entirely theoretical, which is a blessing of sorts. While I am not famous or cited constantly like the luminaries noted above, I think it is fair to say that I profited from reading theory immensely, and still do when I am moved to make the effort. Because history does not seem to be receptive to producing overarching theories - except, of course, Marxism, the original Modern Theory of History -- so, like those silly birds who put eggs in the nests of other birds, we have to travel around grafting our work onto theoretical traditions produced elsewhere, especially in English departments. Where would history be were it not for theories thought up by all those birds in other disciplines? And why should the rest of us care how they lay their eggs, as long as they continue to do so?

So this leads me to my point: Literary criticism, in my view, can be a field for the masses, but you might just have to go somewhere other than Oligarch to be that scholar and get that education. Going to a school because it is famous, and not because you know that what they teach there is going to suit your intellectual desires, is a huge mistake and it is yours, Helena, and no one else's. And actually, English departments like Oligarch's do a great service, which Echlen has failed to note. While the rest of us are reading the latest Alice Munroe and catching up on our TV shows so the DVR won't erase them automatically, at Oligarch and Duke and Santa Cruz they are thinking up all those hard theories that we can just borrow and footnote! How great is that? So people should stop kicking English Departments around for -- not to mention that what they do for a living is a lot like being those people who built armour in seventeenth century Europe without knowing whether anyone would be using it twenty or thirty years hence. One does hope for a better outcome, of course, even though all culture and the history of the entire world will be available for iPod download in early 2010.

So Helena, lighten up, girl. Leave those kids alone.

Hat tip to Anonymous Untenured Colleague.