FIRST PERSON

Dispatches From the First Interview

Two Ph.D. candidates experience a brief and unexpected respite from the usual coldness and bad manners of the hiring process

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By ANNE GALINA and LYNN ELLIOTT

We have now won minor battles in our continuing war on academic unemployment, having each made the initial cut for a tenure-track position. The reward for this routing of the enemy troops, who are fighting to employ us as barmaids and shop clerks? Preliminary interviews, one in person and one over the phone. However, while that victory has not yet improved our prospects for gainful employment next year, it has reaffirmed the value of simple things — integrity and the kindness of strangers — that so easily get lost in this ridiculous shuffle.

To recap from our first column, we are friends and colleagues from different doctoral programs at different universities in different states. Lynn is a Ph.D. candidate in English, and Anne is a Ph.D. candidate in an interdisciplinary program in the humanities.

When Lynn got The Call — for not just any job, but a dream job at a prestigious yet progressive research university — she was elated. She scheduled an interview with the department at a forthcoming professional meeting and bought that painfully expensive last-minute plane ticket. She polished her suit shoes and did her best to prepare for the impromptu cross-country adventure. Balancing this new priority with her midsemester teaching responsibilities, her dissertation work, and the remnants of her personal life was a challenge, but she told herself that this particular madness was temporary.

Fortunately, Lynn's experience at the convention was pleasant, not least because she was able to bunk with her old pal Anne, who did her best to be supportive, mostly with food. She also made some new friends, over a continental breakfast at the hotel, with graduate students from another institution, one of whom was interviewing later that morning, as was Lynn. Once the two discovered, after some delicate exploration, that they were not, in fact, interviewing for the same position, they became devoted allies. The post-interview margaritas to which she was treated by a favored mentor were another highlight of her experience.

The interview itself was not the nightmare that Lynn expected. Her hosts were pleasant and conversational, and they did offer her a much-needed bottle of water (as we hoped an especially considerate committee would). Nonetheless, her recollections, murky in a post-traumatic stupor, are mainly of stumbling through many of the questions but getting out appropriate responses, even if she was not at her articulate best.

She is, thus, almost certain that she engaged in the dreaded "rambling on" which so many sage advisers warn emphatically against, and is equally certain that she completely blew one of the key questions because she was asked the one thing for which she had not (but should have) prepared. Despite also feeling as if she had bumbled her way through a description of her research projects, she displayed a unique and spontaneous passion for her work and her students — the kind of thing that you just can't fake.

During the interview, Lynn focused on the clichéd-but-true advice to "be yourself." Later — after some moments of head-in-her-hands regret, some distressing blisters thanks to her suit shoes, and a spur-of-the-moment manicure with Anne by her side — she came to the conclusion that she had done her best and had, in fact, been herself. Her nervous, overdressed interview self, but herself nonetheless. She believes that the search committee received a fairly accurate representation of her strengths and weaknesses in that hotel-suite microcosm.

Despite the sleep deprivation, the crater-sized hole in her bank account, and the chipping purple nail polish (as anti-conference-interview-chic as it gets), Lynn is thankful for the experience, regardless of the results. She didn't compromise, pander, or let an inhumane process strip her of her humanity. Interestingly enough, it is the companionship of her friends, the generosity of her mentors, and the compassion of her family (who have no ties to academe but are bursting with pride nonetheless) that she will remember most about the experience and take with her to the next interview, whether it be on the campus of this particular prestigious yet progressive research university or in yet another hotel suite.

Anne's interview experience was procedurally different from Lynn's in almost every respect, but included plenty of stumbling and rambling (done and ... done!) and has so far resulted in the same ambiguous outcome.

When she received that first personalized e-mail message from a search-committee chair, Anne caught a whiff of the elusive reward that lay ahead for all of her hard work. However, unlike Lynn, who had the dubious fortune of having her first interview be for a job she really wanted, Anne did not have strong feelings either way about this position. Although the department was in a discipline that Anne includes in her bag of interdisciplinary tricks, it was not where she would have expected to land. She wasn't crazy about the location, either, and wasn't sure that the campus was a good institutional fit for her.

She poured herself into interview preparation nonetheless. Hours of answer-rehearsal, exhaustive Internet research about the college and members of the search committee (a degree of scrutiny that would be unjustifiable, if not totally creepy, in a different context), and a review of recent issues of the leading journals in the field. When the appointed hour came, she dressed up (minus painful interview shoes, her one concession to being interviewed by telephone in her own home), shepherded the dogs into the basement, and waited for the phone to ring.

And it did. Much to her surprise, the major hiccup came not from a mismatch between her eccentric credentials and the disciplinary needs of the department, but from a question about her research, which, as she realized almost as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she could have answered in about 100 better ways.

Other than that, Anne knows that questions were asked and answered, but she doesn't remember much. She is grateful that she has only fleeting shameful recollections of her stammering efforts at grandiloquence, and so has not subjected her performance to the ruthless dissection that Lynn has undergone at her own hand.

Anne's overwhelming impression was of the astonishing politeness of the people who interviewed her. From the chair on down, they were attentive, enthusiastic interlocutors despite the built-in weirdness of talking via speakerphone, and they even laughed when she tried to be funny. Although they told her at the outset that they were committed to helping her succeed in the process in whatever way they could, she was skeptical — but they really did work at it. Whether by making consistent affirmative noises as she spoke, inviting her to answer the questions in whatever way she saw fit, or offering occasional words of praise or encouragement, they went beyond mere professional courtesy (which can be a rarity in itself) to treat her like a person.

That interview was a brief and unexpected respite from the coldness, dehumanization, and bad manners (there, we've said it) that have otherwise characterized the hiring process so far. For months, Anne has been moping to long-suffering friends, family, and advisers about her stupid job search, muttering darkly about the existential crisis it has provoked. It's not so much the uncertainty of the process, though that is crazy-making in and of itself, but the fact that it requires her to flatten herself onto heavyweight paper and stuff herself into an envelope, where there is no room for her to be anything but an applicant.

Anne was excited about her first-round interview for very practical reasons: She fantasized about being able to afford a real couch and an occasional vacation. But the interview mattered more because it was affirming. While she imagines search committees all over the country looking at her CV and snickering, and copes with the daily annoyance of applications going completely unacknowledged, the interview was, quite simply, not in same vein. It's not so much that it restored her faith in her profession because, well, whatever. Rather, it was an opportunity to receive something that was good in and of itself: compassion from people who had no obligation to provide it.

In a job market where so much is uncertain, and the only peace comes with accepting the fact that the process is largely out of our hands and dependent on all kinds of hidden variables like undisclosed departmental needs and search-committee personality disorders, we have discovered that the most durable comforts come from elemental things. Those 30 to 45 minutes in a hotel suite or on speakerphone are awkward, intimidating, pressurized situations and not even close to an accurate depiction of our scholarly selves or who we would be as colleagues, much less who we are in the real world of jeans, flip-flops, and funky nail polish. So we seek refuge in those things that are smaller, and bigger, than lucrative offers and corner offices.

OK, we learned our lessons. Now can we have our jobs?

Anne Galina is the pseudonym of a Ph.D. candidate in an interdisciplinary program in the humanities at a research university. Lynn Elliott is a Ph.D. candidate in English at a different research university. They are chronicling their searches for tenure-track jobs. To read their first column, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/10/2008101601c.htm.