The Quintessence of Ham

While I am squarely in the “don’t-go” camp when it comes to grad­u­ate study and the inevitable night­mar­ish job search, I also rec­og­nize that I am the extremely for­tu­nate recip­i­ent of very good pro­fes­sional advice all along that rocky path. Roy Rosen­zweig pro­vided some of the best such wis­dom, and few days go by at CHNM when we don’t try to chan­nel his common-sense prag­ma­tism. Roy drew on decades of expe­ri­ence in the machi­na­tions of depart­ment pol­i­tics and hir­ing, and he knew exactly where job can­di­dates should focus their energy. In the spirit of Roy’s intel­lec­tual gen­eros­ity — and per­haps in the hope that you’ll be inspired to repay it in more tan­gi­ble ways — I’d like to share a bit of it here, at least as it has remained pre­served in mag­netic amber for the past four years. It might not look like much, but it’s pure gold — it worked for me and the only other per­son with whom I’ve ever shared it.

Other than very min­i­mally expand­ing my orig­i­nal tran­script into more read­able prose, what fol­lows is pure Roy, though the foot­notes are mine.

Job Talk
The talk should not be read but should be very well mapped out. It needs to fin­ish on time.¹ It needs to be directed at peo­ple out­side your field (i.e. Amer­i­can­ists, etc.) who have not read any of your work. The talk needs to show rel­e­vance and impor­tance of work out­side of field, i.e. “why should i care about this?” It needs to have enough sub­stance to gen­er­ate ques­tions. How you han­dle ques­tions is the real test.

Class Lec­ture²
The class lec­ture rarely sinks a can­di­date and is never the decid­ing fac­tor in favor of one. The bar will be lower for you if you don’t have much teach­ing expe­ri­ence. You should aim to do some­thing solid that doesn’t require too much work or prepa­ra­tion. It should be at an appro­pri­ate level: maybe just slightly advanced (i.e. include “some­thing for the grown-ups”). It should involve some amount of inter­ac­tion – ask ques­tions, show an image – but do not be dis­ap­pointed if stu­dents don’t get very enthu­si­as­tic. It should be the appro­pri­ate length, not run over or end ter­ri­bly short.

Gen­eral Advice
You need to give peo­ple a nar­ra­tive about your­self. You need to show your desire to be at the hir­ing institution.

That’s it. After you’re hired, please con­tribute gen­er­ously.

1. This could scarcely sound sim­pler but is almost never fol­lowed. If the com­mit­tee asks for a thirty-minute talk fol­lowed by an hour of ques­tions, you not only win zero points by run­ning over the thirty, you antag­o­nize the few peo­ple who might have been lis­ten­ing and who would now like to pose a ques­tion. [↩]
2. Refer­ring here to the odi­ous prac­tice of ask­ing job can­di­dates to teach a sam­ple class while on cam­pus, cold. What a great idea! [↩]