Earlier this year, Next Wave hosted an entertaining
evening for scientists looking for employment in academia and other
arenas. The event brought together undergraduates, graduates,
postdocs, and faculty from the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia
areas--all interested in learning how to improve their interview
techniques. Our four panelists that night included Andrew Morehead
and Kathie Sindt, who presented "good" and "bad" faculty
interviewing scenarios, and Grant Reed and Cindy Bouchez, both
patent attorneys, who revealed to the audience what kinds of
questions they can expect to face when interviewing for nonacademic
jobs--in patent law in this instance. Both types of role-playing
scenarios raised questions, suggestions, and advice applicable to
all types of interview settings. In this first of two installments,
we go through the academic role-playing scenarios; next week, we'll
follow up with the patent law interviews.
Andrew Morehead received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Duke
University, went on to do a 2-year National Institutes of Health
postdoc at the California Institute of Technology and, in 1998,
landed an assistant professor position at the University of
Maryland's department of chemistry and biochemistry.
With a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Virginia
already tucked under her belt, Kathie Sindt went on to enroll in a
master's degree program in career counseling at the University of
Maryland with the goal of establishing herself as a counselor who
helps researchers develop their scientific careers.
In both role plays below, Sindt is the interviewer and Morehead
is the postdoc interested in becoming a faculty member.
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The Bad Academic Interview
SINDT:Hi--I'm Kathie. Come on in Andrew. Take a seat. So,
I had a chance to hear your talk today and I was wondering: How do
you plan to get your research started here?
MOREHEAD:Um...well, I guess I hadn't really thought
specifically about what I was going to do right off the bat. I
guess, obviously, I'd have to start out by just getting equipment
together and just try and get the lab set up. I hadn't really given
a lot of thought to my first experiment...I might recruit a student
or two...but I hadn't really thought through about that yet.
S:So, how do you think you're going to be able to manage
the people in your lab?
M:Well, um, y'know, right off the bat, I really just want
a set of hands, I'm not really looking for, y'know, somebody who's
going to try to get too far off bat. I mean it's really important
to get these experiments run. I'll just say y'know, 'Do these
experiments' ... and, er ... maybe in a few years I'll start
thinking about expanding that role out a little bit.
S:Um ... Alright, so you need your students to do
experiments in the lab. How do you plan to recruit them?
M:Well, y'know, I think, y'know, success breeds success
in recruiting ... if you get some good results, people just come
without a lot of effort on my part. I really think, in terms of
reputation, I think you try to build a good one, people just come
without any considerable effort.
S:OK. You know, I know I'm not supposed to ask you this,
but um, are you married?
M:You reallyaren'tsupposed to ask me that!
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The Good Academic Interview
SINDT:Tell me a little bit about how you plan to get your
research started here.
MOREHEAD:Well, um ... y'know, there's a very clear
experiment about three steps in, so clearly right off the bat, we
need to, need to get this ligand made and there's pretty good
literature for us to let us do that. And of course, it's good to do
key experiments early on because if it doesn't work, I have several
alternative plans that I'll be happy to discuss with you. I've
already got a pretty good idea of what I need to do right off the
bat. We'll be ready to go when I get here. I would like it to be
that when I have some students join my group, that I'll be ready to
have things rolling so that they can join a project that's in
progress rather than just setting up the lab.
S:OK. So what other things do you have planned here that
you can do if this doesn't work?
M:I think the key really is flexibility, in a sense ...
y'know I have two projects that I've thought about, the one that I
talked about first today was clearly the one I think has the
highest chance of success, but, um ... as I said, the key
experiment is about three steps in, so if that experiment doesn't
go well, then I will go ahead and pursue the other plan of attack.
So I would think within several months I would have a good idea of
the progress of my work.
S:Alright. How do you view yourself as the manager of the
people in your lab?
M:Well, I've seen several examples of management styles.
My personal feeling--I feel that, for the students' success, that
one of the advantages of being an assistant professor is that you
spend a lot of time in the lab yourself, so I want to interact with
them almost daily. And I'll be there to help supervise them, or
assist a group of young scientists that have had only, y'know, only
undergraduate experience for example. I think that I will have them
write a research report at the end of each semester: That will
allow them to polish their writing skills and also, when the time
comes to start writing papers, they'll have all the pertinent data
already in a form that's publishable. I feel that's an important
consideration. And I'd like to have weekly meetings, this allows me
to update myself on what's going on, not just in the lab but also,
y'know, with other issues of classwork and stuff.
S:OK. How do you think you can manage to recruit the
students to your lab when you get there? Nobody's going to know who
you are.
M:That's a very big concern, I think, for assistant
professors. Obviously you have to be pretty outgoing. ...You have
to go to as many seminars as possible, you have to take every
chance you get to do presentations, poster sessions, that kind of
thing. You want to be active in the recruitment itself. You want to
meet students, have a chance to talk to them. Also, this may or may
not work out, but I mean, I would be interested in potentially
teaching a graduate course early on, so that the first year will
allow me to get to know them well in a classroom setting.
S:Alright. Y'know, Andrew, I know I'm not supposed to ask
you this, but can you tell me, are you married?
M:Um ...Yes, yes I am. I have two small children, one is
4 and one is 2 and, y'know obviously, family is very important to
me and so, one of the things that I do is, I take one day a week
off to be with my family. My wife has a pretty good understanding,
I think, of the time constraints of the job.
S:OK. Thank you.
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"The basic difference we wanted to present," explains Sindt,
"was that in the first interview, Andrew wasn't prepared. He hadn't
thought about the type of questions that he would be asked."
Preparation is key to establishing competent interview discussions,
so what kinds of questions can you expect to face?
So Many Questions, So Much Time
"Well, some questions you can almost certainly anticipate,"
reveals Morehead to the audience. "We concentrated on the question
of what was I going to do first when I started: That's what about
half the people who I interviewed with asked me. The other half
asked me 'what are you going to do 10 years from now?' That's
actually a harder question because it's pretty easy to plan a
short-term plan of attack, the longer-term ones are not so
easy."
This Time It's Personal ...
"You're going to get some personal questions," he continues.
"The bottom line is they're going to have to put up with you," so
you have to expect them to try to get to know you during your
conversations, says Morehead, who found his own real interview
sessions "pretty informal." A lot of people, he says, were "very
casual talking about their families, they're interested in you as a
person, because you're going to work very closely with them for a
long time. I think the best policy is just to be prepared if they
ask those sorts of questions and to be--not brutally honest--but at
least open."
Slides of Overheads and Overheads of Slides
Morehead prepared "very strongly for questions about my research
and for questions about how I planned to get funded and how I
planned to perform it," he explains. "I also prepared very strongly
for my presentations because presentations are critical--this is
the only time the whole department sees you. I had my slides for my
research talk, I had my overheads, and I had overheads of the
slides in case the slide projector didn't work." Some people want
to know the details of your first and second experiments that
you're going to run and many ask why is your project different? To
address these interview and seminar questions, Morehead prepared
three 10-page proposals that laid out the introductory set of
experiments he planned to do. He had separate slides and overheads
for each proposal that outlined his key ideas and schemes. "You
have to be prepared for very wide-ranging questions and very
specific questions," he tells the audience. "I also prepared a
budget, because you don't want to come in looking like you haven't
given considerable thought to the actual start-up costs."
During his job search, Morehead reveals that interviewers were
more interested in what he was going to do to sell and perform his
research than anything else. Your interview success hinges on how
well you present yourself and your research. "I would say it's
critical to present yourself as somebody who's going to fit into
the department: Dress well and come across as confident." Ask
yourself, Morehead concludes: "Are you going to be able to go out
and convince people that you can do what you think you can do?"
In an upcoming issue, we'll check out more interview scenarios,
tips, and hints with patent attorneys Grant Reed and Cindy Bouchez,
who discuss what it's like to sit on the other side of the
interviewer's desk.