but I spent a hilarious evening perusing the "universities to fear" on Academic job wiki. I cannot imagine how I would be haunting the job wiki should I be unfortunate enough to be on the market in this crap economy. However, as I'm not it made for some dman funny reading.
I have a toss up for my worst on campus visit
1. remote rural uni, which I will always think of as Bubba U, required me to front all the money for every single thing, which was bad enough, stayed in a hotel full of partying teenagers, so no sleep, then arrived on campus to find factionalized dept split between the good ole boys, and lovely people trapped in rural locale. The latter set out to recruit me immediately, informing me that all prior candidates had 'blown' it and the job was mine to lose. Trust me by the second day I wanted desperately to "blow it" too. After a job talk where the "bubbas" sat in a row in the back of the room, looking for all the world like truculent undergrads, I was then taken on a tour by the pervy dept chair, which included massive sports complex, but not the library. Then toured the "town" such as it was. Suffice it to say, since I decided I too wanted to "blow" it, I finally confronted him, asking how on earth any young-ish woman would ever expect to be taken seriously in their dept.
2. prestigious midwestern campus, picked up by lovely lovely woman, thoroughly enjoyed ride to campus, only to be put in some odd sort of "family style" campus housing (no private bath, sharing with other candidates), dropped off at 6PM without any mention of food. As it was snowing, I ordered a take out pizza and fielded other job offers (thank GOD). Dept visit was grueling, as the faculty vacillated between trying to convince me that taking a 1 year renewable job was actually a good thing, and offering despairing remarks about the state of the dept. Got left standing out in snow for like 20 minutes waiting for some person taking me to yet another "quaint" campus building to talk to grad stus, none of whom wished to come out in the snow apparently. Next morning I had a super early flight to another on-campus, no transportation arrived. Finally called a cab on my own and made it to airport just in time. Thankfully dept secretary was appalled by dinner/transport situation and got me reimbursed for both.
care to share yours here (as I'm not clever enough to disguise who I am online to contribute to the wiki, I figure you may not be either!)
7 comments:
Let's just say that after a dinner in which I learned ALL about a potential colleague's foot fungus, I was really hoping I would get a job elsewhere. (That was after a day in which they hadn't actually scheduled any interviews and were surprised that people were teaching when they stopped by to have me talk to them. I was the third candidate. I spent a lot of my time relaxing and checking my email. Also the chair filled me in on how all the dead wood, who had refused to meet with me, would find me a threat if they did hire me.)
So I haven't any job interviews yet, but I did have some fairly horrendous grad school interviews.
For starters, it's never good when you're accepted before they meet ever meet you. Or so I learned when I visited what I thought was a fairly prestigious cancer center on the East Coast. In addition to most of the interview being centered around sports (not science) and the crumbling infrastructure (think Little House on the Prairie schoolhouse style rooms with torn wallpaper and missing ceiling tiles). Several students told me that they didn't want to go to said school, but that "it was the only one that would accept me." For evening entertainment I was asked if I wanted to go to a strip club. I could tell they were horribly disappointed when I told them that I was too tired....
1) the initial interview where a woman told me all about how she wants to divorce her husband but won't because he's bipolar and might commit suicide. (She somehow thought it was relevant to the research I did.) It was a painful interview.
2) The interview where when I asked questions I was told "well we just told the last canidate that." great. super. Let me call him up ok?
3) when I was asked about handling faculty fights. Several times. In 15 minutes. (which after talking with others seems to be a trend with this school)
Since my work is somewhat interdisciplinary, I was invited for a faculty interview of a dept. with a split personality, because I could potentially be a "bridge" person. I was told by faculty from one group that if I seriously wanted the job, my research direction should fall in line with their interests and they would be guiding me to make sure that happened. Faculty from the other group took me out to lunch and told me not to worry about whatever they (the search committee) were telling me, but to work on what I wanted to (meaning what they were interested in). I got the job offer, but I could tell it would have been a bad scenario from the get go....
1) The interview where I was told to pick a cab from the airport to the hotel, have dinner there, and pick a cab for the school the following morning and be at 9:30 am at the Chair's office. The Chair shows up at 10am with a beautiful Golden Retriever, tells me ze has to do a few things around campus, and if I could look after hir Golden Retriever until ze comes back (which ze did, half an hour later). That half hour was actually the best part of the whole campus interview.
This one wasn't a bad interview per se, just a bad fit. Campus visit to small college in rural PA, where the Chair of the department told me that the greatest thing about working at said college was that he could get up at 5 AM, milk his cows, have breakfast and then come to work. I am sure that was very attractive for some candidates that like small towns. I wasn't expecting a job in NYC, but somewhere where I could milk my cows wasn't my idea of paradise either.
Oh, I like this thread! I'm tempted to post this one on my own blog:
One time I was interviewing for a Student Affairs position right out of my first master's program. I had first and second interviews for a position at two conferences and was then invited to campus. It's a California college, and I had to go through LAX. Well, it was the night of the Rodney King verdict and there were fires and snipers throughout the city (I saw the fires from the air as we landed). Because of all of this activity, all flights were being routed over the ocean, which was making everything delayed.
So I arrived in my small college town at 1:30am. No one was there to meet me. Campus staff had left a folder with airport personnel that included information about my hotel and interview times. I called a cab from the pay phone (this was 1992--no cells) and went outside to wait because the airport was closing. So I sat on the curb, in the dark, after all the stuff in LA, and it was my first time in CA ever.
Fortunately, the cab arrived, because I really had no way of calling if it hadn't (the phone was inside).
I spent a couple of days interviewing, and on the second day, I had to be debriefed because there was some internal weirdness going on. Apparently, some disgruntled employees were the the process of a) suing some of the staff for sexual harassment and b) sabotaging the hiring process. I was told that one of the other candidates, after the interview, had received a letter in the mail that included accusations about some of interviewers and middle management. I was informed that I might get such a letter.
When I got home, I did, in fact, receive a letter in the next few days. There's more weirdness, too, but I won't belabor it here--maybe I'll post an extended version on my blog.
You won't believe this, but I took the job anyway. It was a cool, well-paying job in dream location, so I just went for it. Today, I'm still in the same town, but now I'm at a different school and on the academic side of the house.
But the next year, when we were hiring, I volunteered to wait for candidates at the airport no matter WHAT time their planes arrived.
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