Some advice for academic search committees

It is very easy to find articles and blog posts about how to behave as an academic job candidate. What not to say, how to dress, how to appear self-confident and flatter the egos of the search committee members at the same time.

I am not going to give another list, because I just got rejected at three different interviews and I do not exactly know what went wrong.

Instead, I will do the opposite and provide some advice for search committees as to how to behave with academic job candidates. This advice is written under the assumption that the search committees would like to make a good impression with their job candidates, which they selected for an interview from hundreds of applications, would like to treat them like human beings and would like to see them perform them well.

All points is based on my own very recent experience with four job interviews for positions above the postdoc level (junior reseach group leader + tenure track):

• Give us two hotel nights in a reasonable hotel before and after the interview, for Christ’s sake. For one of my interviews, they paid me no hotel at all, and did not inform me beforehand that the hotels in the city will be booked out and crazily expensive around this day. For another interview, they put me in the most horrible accommodation I have ever slept in: a very worn-out guest room in a huge, horrid biochemistry institute, with no toilet in the room or even in the vicinity of the room, so that I had to walk through very scary empty corridors at night, fearing someone might be hiding in the University building and slid my throat. The room costed them 20 Euros per night. I just don’t get it: If you will pay someone and a research group for 5 years, can you not spend a few hundred Euros on the job candidates, so that they can actually sleep before the interview?

• If we are supposed to talk to various people in the institute, and also if we aren’t, give us a program for the day some days in advance. Tell us what will expect us. They managed to do that only in one of the four interviews and it made a huge difference for me. An interview is very stressful anyway, and not knowing what is going to happen, if you are already at a foreign institute and under a lot of pressure, is really disorienting.

•  At the start of the interview, introduce all panel members to the candidate. This gives us time to settle in, and is just basic politeness. Again, they only did this in one of the four interviews and I could have kissed them for it. It immediately made me feel respected and I actually enjoyed the interview and even the tough questions afterwards.

• Stay polite. Do not shake your head during the presentation, do not turn your eyes at responses, do not radiate contempt. If you do that, why invite us in the first place?

• Send rejection letters. In one case, the chair told us candidates that we would only be informed if we got the job. One candidate timidly asked if he could not also send rejection e-mails please? To which the chair responded, annoyed: “No, that won’t be necessary, because if you do not get an e-mail by the end of the week you know you will have been rejected.”  Meaning: As a rejected candidate, you are not even worthy of one minute of our time. When I heard that, I actually decided I did not want the job anymore.

•  If the interview takes place at an institute, at least invite us for lunch to thank us for our effort. During lunch, please stop the interviewing for  half an hour. In one case, I was chatting with a professor about some small-talk topic and eating my salad when suddenly another professor asked me a critical question about my teaching experience. I found this was rude and unnecessary. The day was very long anyway and a half hour break does not seem too much to ask for.

•  Provide the candidate with water and maybe some cookies during the interview. Do not sit around the candidate to intimidate him/her.

In short: Keep in mind that even the candidate you will reject is a human being and deserves basic respect and politeness.

In one of my four interviews, they actually did all these things right. I loved them for it and I will always think well of this institute, irrespective of the outcome of the interview. I don’t think it cost them so much money or time and it made so much difference for me.

An academic job interview gone horribly wrong

I spent a large fraction of last year working out a proposal for a junior group leader positions in my field. Now I was invited for an interview for the one position that I wanted most.

It was a total disaster.

I would like to describe this interview as a warning for other people who are invited to similar interviews.

The interview took place with an inter-disciplinary panel of about 25 natural science professors, of which 24 were male, obviously. I was to give a 15-minute presentation about my project, understandable for non-experts, followed by 15 minutes of questions.

So I travelled to the city in question, slept in a hotel, spent the day waiting and being nervous until it was time  and my interview started. I was led into the room with these 25 professors, who were sitting in a U-shaped configuration — I had professors on both flanks and in front of me, which made me feel really cornered. My presentation was aready on the projector (I had to send it in before), and I was greeted with one sentence, dryly, without a smile, and asked to start.

I launched into my presentation and tried to make eye contact with the audience. To my surprise, almost all faces I saw looked at me with expressions of contempt and boredom. I have given many talks, and not once have I encountered such a negative atmsophere. I felt like I was talking to a wall of negativity.

This had a surprisingly strong effect on me. From other academic presentations and from a few other interviews I was used to faces which are somewhere between neutral and friendly, with always one or two friendly faces that I can use as a source of encouragement during my talk. I should have prepared for it being different; but I did not even consider it.

One professor, who is in a totally different field than me, even started to slowly shake his head while I was looking at him when talking. I started to get very nervous. I thought: “This is going wrong, but it can’t go wrong, it can’t… “

I somehow managed to finish the talk, knowing that I had not talked well, far worse than my worst talk ever, and that in such an important moment! Then the questions were starting. I had expected some sort of benevolence, critical, but interested questions. This was not the case. The questions seemed to me full of contempt, and accompanied by very bored, very negative faces. Not one question showed interest in my actual project.

Instead, they asked: “And what is your opinion about big open question XY?” (which has nothing to do with my talk and on which I have never done any work). And, probingly, as if I was a first year student: “Do you know what Professor XY has contributed to your field?” (who is a guy that I have heard of only in passing). “You say that you use method P, well anyone can use method P.  What is the point?” or “You say you use method Z to learn about T, but what is there even to learn? Don’t you get out what you put in?” (which is a totally absurd question for someone knowing even the smallest thing about my field…). In all, the questions showed a surprising lack of respect for me. I guess I am just not used to that anymore, with people in my field usually reacting very positively to my talks.

I could have answered these questions well, in principle, if I had a few extra minutes to think, or if I had been calmer and not so confused by the negative atmosphere. Another mistake was that I did not expect that they would question the basic methods in my field which are used by hundreds of groups around the world. I thought I would have to defend my own project, not my field. I started rambling. I noticed that I did not answer the questions well, noticed that I used the wrong verb here, sounded too insecure there. It didn’t help that people were making extremely negative faces, as if I was a total idiot, as if my track record, which is actually very good, had zero influence on them. It did not help to stand as a woman in front of older men who seemed to expect me to fail from the start.

Now why did I fail this interview?

My answer to that is: Because I felt that they expected me to fail. I am unfortunately a social person, instinctively keen on meeting other people’s expectations of me. And that is it; if you are a woman, you cannot, CANNOT be sensitive to these kind of expectations. You need to have a thick skin. I don’t have one, but if I had been warned, I would have prepared differently for the interview, and it would have gone better. So my hope is that maybe someone out there might profit from this warning: Throw away your  need for being liked and harmony if you go into a job interview like that, and be much colder, much calmer than I was. I will write up some more concrete ideas on how I should have done this better soon.

Doing difficult things does not make you a better person

Job-wise, things seem to be going downhill for me. I am not sure what is going on with me recently. I have problems to work, and if I try to work, I get migraines. I make mistakes that I would normally not make. I forget deadlines. I feel an unexplainable, overwhelming resentment against most of my colleagues and collaborators. I cancel appointments and work visits and conferences because I just really really do not want to go, with a force that I have not known before.

For so long,  I have worked so hard for this job, I have tried to hard to get along with people, I have fought and struggled and tried to swim. Now I am sinking towards the ground looking at other people’s feet kicking and trampling and hitting each other if they can.

There is one thing  that keeps coming to mind. Maybe this is the big thing I am learning now:

Doing things that are unpleasant, painful, difficult for you does not make you strong. It makes you weak. It does, however make you strong to do things that are easy, enjoyable, fun.

I have not known this for most of my life. I thought that if I took the hard route wherever I could, I would learn more, grow more, improve myself more, and I wanted to improve myself so much. What I did not know is that the amount of time and energy I had was more limited than I thought, and that using up energy to take the hard route means that you have no energy to do even the things that would be easy for you.

I wonder if it perhaps it is not always the best choice to “follow one’s dream”. Where does a dream even come from? It might be the real calling, but it might also just be who you would like to be if you could choose to be another person. But you can’t!

I think what I did not fully understand when I was younger is that one can not just pick from a huge supermarket of options whatever one wants, and then become this person. Instead, one should try to become whoever one truly is. I had no idea about this difference. Perhaps, if I had just done what was easy for me, and enjoyable, I would be much happier now.

I am like an overweight person dreaming of this beautiful dress which only fits a very skinny person, exercising like crazy, eating little, saving money for the dress, and then finally fitting it on and seeing that the fundamental body shape and the dress still just do not match, and the colour is wrong for her skin, and actually it is very uncomfortable, and actually she has started to hate the dress because of all that she had to do to get in.

Culture clash between introverts and extroverts

I’m an introverted person coming from an introverted family of computer programmers, bike mechanics and accountants. On top of that, introversion is quite accepted in the country I come from, which is probably one of the most introverted countries in Europe.

As a consequence, I never saw my introversion as a problem. I only ever had introverted friends and my strategy with dealing with extroverts was simply to avoid them. Of course, I did not do this consciously and I never thought about the introvert/extrovert divide in any detail. There were just noisy and self-confident people I did not like and that did not like me either and I stayed away from them.

In the last two year, this has changed.  My colleagues are mostly Northern Americans and some Dutch, which are decidedly more extroverted cultures like the one I am coming from, and most of them are either extroverted or act like them. The introverted people at our institute are so freaked out by the extroverted culture that they have mostly totally gone into hiding.

Consequently, I have been spending a lot of time with extroverts for the first time in my life, which has been surprisingly difficult.

Of course, maybe there are extroverts which are different, but my extroverted colleagues just seems to want to get as much airtime as possible, telling their stories, presenting themselves in a good light, and no real conversation ever seems to occur. People do not ask each other follow-up question. There is never a real, honest reaction to what someone else says. When I spend time with extroverts, I am first entertained to some degree, but then things start to feel increasingly unreal to me. I feel like no actual contact between human beings is occurring, I feel like everyone is totally on their own and that scares me. I start to crave human connection. I try to ask questions, to give an honest reaction to something someone says, but I continually feel like I am sand in a machine which has a purpose that I just don’t get. After an evening with extroverts, I honestly feel like life has no meaning. Probably because for me the meaning of life is people understanding and empathizing with each other, which most extroverts are not very interested in.

The truth is that given my upbringing I cannot avoid seeing the extroverts as the ones being not normal and deficient to some degree. How sad that they cannot listen to each other, that they do not tolerate being alone well, that they always want to have more people around them to distract them from some kind of inner emptiness. I wonder if they are unable to be really close to another human being and I feel sorry for them.

Of course, the extroverts coming from extroverted cultures, on the other hand, are convinced that they are like people are supposed to be, and my way of being introverted and not trying to at least appear to be extroverted, seems to irritate them greatly. I am probably not very good at hiding when I am annoyed or bored with the conversation, and when I say my opinion it is often the opposite of what every one else is thinking. Consequently I  get comments about “being negative” or even “being aggressive”, and it is clear from many small signs that my colleagues do not really like me. This was, I think, what triggered my social anxiety and what made me so unhappy during my time here.

At the moment, I mostly stay away from my extroverted colleagues. I eat lunch alone, I avoid coffee breaks, I have stopped going out with them. To an extrovert, that sounds probably like a massive disaster, but it is a huge relief to me and I feel more at peace with myself. It is as if I have tried to have a conversation with another species for two years, and it never worked out in the least. I am just glad to be able to accept this now.  It is neither their fault, nor mine. It is just a huge cultural difference that I cannot get over. Now that I know, it seems very interesting to me that the Dutch and Northern American cultures are so different than my own. Their preference for extroversion that is so strong that even most scientist are extroverts or try to behave like they are. I always believed that scientists must be introverts by default, but apparently I was completely wrong.

Thinking about leaving science

“Are you applying for tenure-track positions?”

“Hm. Not really, actually.”

“Why?”

I have had exactly this conversation about 100 times by now. The problem is that I cannot give a good explanation why I am not applying, so I usually mumble something and tell myself I need to come up with a good reply.

Why am I not applying?

I know my track record is good enough that I would have a chance to find something somewhere. I do not want to do a  third postdoc and I am consequently not applying for any postdoc positions. I have invested a lot in this career and it seems like madness to throw it away so shortly before something permenent could get into sight. While it is clear that science is a very difficult career path, I am not (yet) totally disillusioned about a career in science like some other people in my situation (that I understand well).

Yet I have a huge psychological block. A few deadlines have already passed without me handing anything in, and the next are coming closer.

The main reason for my block seems to be that I do not see myself settling down for good in a foreign country. If I think about applying to Leeds University or to Toronto University my gut reaction is pure dread. What if they actually offer me the job? How could I turn down a tenure-track position?

I do not find in myself the energy to move to another country again, and even less can I accept the idea of actually having to settle down far away from my home country. I have always been prone to homesickness and it is not getting better.

For most people in science, this is crazy talk. A permanent position anywhere, especially if their partner finds one too, seems to be the best thing that could happen. I am ashamed that it is not like that for me, and I feel like this makes me a narrow-minded person who is unable to step out of her comfort zone.

And don’t I love my job? Haven’t I given so much for it already that it will be worth to make this last sacrifice to spend my life abroad? Wouldn’t I be absolutely unhappy in a job outside science? I ask these questions again and again to myself.

But all I can come up with is the same gut feeling: I want to go home. I want to have people around my that I understand clearly, both culturally and language-wise. Given the paucity of jobs in my field in my home country, this means that I will have to leave science.

I do not have much gut reaction to that prospect, which is mysterious. I am fairly passionate about my work and quite successful. I feel like by now I am really contributing something to science, having ideas and insights that not everyone has, and I love mentoring younger colleagues. I would also like to give lectures about my topic, and I think I have a good long-term research plan.

Yet the idea of leaving does not shake me very much. My head tells me that it should — after two postdocs, I should be invested in my career — but somewhere inside of me a small voice gets very happy and excited: “So I could leave?” Oh, what a relief I sometimes feel at the idea! How happy I get when I imagine doing something totally different, learning something totally new, seeing professional life outside of science!

And I love the idea of going back home. Ever since I arrived in the Netherlands I am dreaming of the day when the moving van in front of our house will load all our stuff and drive back to my home country.

This is so hard to explain to others that I am, for now, actually again considering writing a few applications for tenure-track, to keep up appearances and appease my boss. Of course, I also understand it makes sense logically, as people have explained to me numerous times. I can always turn down an offer, but if I don’t apply, I effectively already leave science now and could stop working on my projects (which would feel wrong). Also, my feelings about leaving science might be delusional, might just indicate that I need a break, might just come from the loneliness I feel as a woman in my field, might be a form of “fear of success” that might be typical for women.

Nevertheless, my heart tells me not to bother applying, and I am not sure if I can get over this inner resistance. Maybe it just means that there is another job somewhere out there that is meant for me.