The Philosophers' Cocoon

Unusual Interview Questions

By Trevor Hedberg

Later this week, I will be helping with a workshop designed to help ABD grad students prepare for job interviews. There are some questions that are asked in almost every job interview, but almost all the ones I've done have also featured at least one rather unusual or idiosyncratic question. Here are a few such questions that struck me as odd when I was asked them:

• What does "social justice" mean to you?
• Wouldn't you agree that the way you described [a specific study mentioned in my writing sample] was inaccurate? (I reread the study after the interview and discovered that, as I suspected, I had not described it inaccurately, but I didn't feel comfortable saying that so straightforwardly in the interview.)
• When I teach [subject in the job ad], I teach it through [modality A], [modality B], and [modality C]. What different modalities do you use to teach that subject? (Given how the faculty member described them, the "modalities" were sort of like different disciplinary perspectives, but the course under discussion was common philosophy course.)

These are relatively mild compared to some of the stories I've been told, however. I was hoping that some of you might have particularly rare or unusual interview questions that you are willing to share so that I could give workshop attendees some examples. If you have an example of an unusual interview question that you were once asked, please post it as a comment.

Good questions for job applicants to ask?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, tj asks:

Could those who have served on hiring committees say what are some important questions they would expect job applicants to ask the hiring committee members during an interview?

Good question! ;) I suspect this is something that many job-applicants have puzzled over, as indeed I did when I was an applicant. Any search committee members care to weigh in on the kinds of questions that might come across well (or poorly)?

Job market do's and don'ts: Zoom interviews

I'd like to continue our new job-market do's and don'ts series today by asking search committee members to weigh in on what job candidates should and shouldn't do in Zoom interviews. I wrote one post on phone and video interviews back in 2015 in our Job Market Boot Camp, but I think it would be good to hear from search committee members on what they think are do's and don'ts for Zoom interviews. 

Are there things that you’ve seen candidates do in interviews that worked particularly well? Are there particular things you want to see in a good interview? What about things you don’t want to see? What are the most common features of a 'good interview' or 'bad interview'? Are there any common mistakes you’ve seen candidates make that you think candidates should know to avoid?

Finally, job candidates: feel free to ask search committee members in thread below any questions that you have about interviews (and search committees, feel free to answer)!

Reflecting on the Job Market Journey

Several weeks ago, I learned that my most recent job search yielded what should be a long-term position. In the upcoming fall, I’ll be joining the University of Arizona as a member of both its philosophy department and the W. A. Franke Honors College as an Assistant Professor of Practice. While the position is not tenure eligible, it carries the same promotional ranks as a “standard” Assistant Professor position and operates on long-term contracts. My hope and expectation is that the University of Arizona will be my home for the foreseeable future. (Prepping for this transition is part of why I've been preoccupied the last few weeks and have not posted anything in that time.)

The post-COVID job market was not favorable, even by the appallingly low standards of the typical job search in academic philosophy. While the number of tenure-track job openings returned to near pre-COVID levels, the market seemed even more saturated with candidates than usual because the job offerings the previous year had been so meager. While I had a few interviews heading into April, none of them had yielded any tangible results. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it was eerily similar to what transpired last time. But April yielded a new cluster of interviews – a combination of visiting jobs and long-term positions. I even got invited for a campus visit midway through the month. Ultimately, I missed out on that particular job but was offered a visiting position near the end of April. In early May, just before I had to make a decision about the offer in hand, I got the news from Arizona.

I’m thrilled with how it all ended, but having reached this juncture, I have been thinking about how much it required. Here is a short encapsulation of each time I was on the job market and what the results were:

• 2016–2017: 90 applications; 4 interviews; 1 job offer
• 2017–2018: 19 applications; 1 interview; 0 job offers
• 2018–2019: 118 applications; 13 interviews; 3 job offers
• 2021–2022: 54 applications; 7 interviews; 2 job offers

You may notice that there’s a great deal of variance in the application numbers each year. My second job search was a soft search: my postdoctoral position was guaranteed for a second year, so there was no pressing need to find another job. I applied selectively to tenure-track positions for which I thought I was a good fit. My first and third searches were more strenuous endeavors where I went to far greater lengths trying to secure academic employment. The 2018–2019 search almost destroyed me, however. It was simply too time-consuming and emotionally taxing to apply for that many jobs, so on this most recent job search, I opted to be more selective. My target number of applications was 60, and when I received my first offer, I had exactly 6 jobs left in my spreadsheet that I intended to apply for.

Predicting fly-outs on the basis of interviews?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

Now that readers are doing interviews, I was wondering if we could field thoughts on how well, in your experience, your sense of how the interview went correlates to success in getting job talks (or from job talk to offer). Have readers ever gotten offers from truly terrible interviews? Or not gotten offers from interviews that seemed guaranteed to go through? Can you get a sense of how interested the committee is in your application based on how they act in the interview setting? Curious for your thoughts!

Another reader submitted the following response:

I think that job candidates can tell almost nothing from (1) their sense of how an interview went or (2) how interviewers act. First you may not have a good sense of how the interview "went." That's because how an interview goes is not just about your own performance, but how others perform. You can't know that by your own sense of whether your answers were good, whether you presented yourself as a collegial candidate who knows your material, has thought carefully about teaching, etc. It's also because we often misjudge, in either direction, how well we've done. Interviews I feel that I bombed were perceived by the interviewers as awesome and vice versa (I know this from later conversations). Sometimes they are looking for things you just don't know about. In one interview, I answered a question very carefully in a way that aligned with my sense of how I "should" answer. Apparently that answer was the direct opposite of what they were wanting (and what I'd been prepped to say in grad school). But I felt like that interview went well--I didn't get a flyout.

Second, that kindly nodding interviewer? The one who seems to be listening intently, smiling, and sending out good vibes? They may be your worst critic. The one with furrowed brows may think you are their best candidate. Unless you already know these people and how their visible cues are linked to their internal states, you can't tell were you stand with them. And, again, after the interview, a lot happens. You may have interviewed "the best" (whatever that amounts to) that you possibly could have for that position. But the committee has to then navigate questions about fit, about internal politics and whose favorite candidates get invited, etc. So you can't read anything from how you think *they think* the interview went. The best advice I can give (having been interviewing for about six years now, with success at all stages, though shy of an offer) is to interview having prepared as well as you can, and then set it out of your mind. You have no control over what happens next, nor can you anticipate what the search committee will decide.

As frustrating as it may be for job candidates (which I appreciate, as I was one for seven years!), this response sounds broadly right to me, both as a former job-candidate and (now) as a search committee members. As a job-candidate, my judgment of how my interviews went seemed to bear little (if any) correlation to whether I got a fly-out. Sometimes I thought I bombed an interview but got a fly-out, whereas in other cases I was sure that I "killed it" in the interview only to get a PFO. To me as a candidate, this seemed rather baffling. However, now that I've served on like five search committees, it makes more sense to me. Let me explain.

Asking for interview feedback?

In our job-market discussion thread, a reader asks:

Do interviewees usually ask for feedback on their performance from search committee members after they've been ultimately rejected? And if so, what is the best way to do this?

These are good questions. Another reader, Andy, responded:

It can be helpful to ask for feedback. What you get can vary a lot. I have had one line of just "it was a strong field" all the way to the chair of the search committee organising a 30 minute zoom meeting with me to give feedback. I know others who have had similar experiences. I think it is usually worth asking (unless you just got a really bad vibe at the interview).

I'm curious to hear from other job-candidates. If you have asked for interview feedback, have you received helpful responses? Also, for search committee members: what do you think of candidates asking for feedback? Is there a best way to do so?

Interview on Micro-Digressions

This is just a quick note that Micro-Digressions: A Philosophy Podcast has a new interview up with me on my approach to morality and moral epistemology. I hope some of you find it of interest!

Interview w/Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA)

Brad Cokelet (Kansas) has a new podcast interview with Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) up at Ethical Theory Review on her book Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals (Princeton University Press, 2020). Check it out!

The 'any questions for us?' question

In our October "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I'm curious if folks who have been on hiring committees can shed some light on the oft-used concluding question at interviews: "Do you have any questions for us?"

My understanding is that this is, in one sense, a genuine ask: does the candidate have any questions we haven't addressed? But, clearly, it is also a signaling opportunity: what sorts of things does the candidate care about, and what can we glean about them as a colleague, teacher, and philosopher from these questions?

There are obviously terrible answers: "How much is the pay?" "Can I wear jorts to work?" "Are the students there really as bad as I've heard?"

But it's much less clear to me what constitutes a *good* question to ask here. I've heard of folks asking about developing courses, research funding, and extra-curriculars, but these seem overdone now (since we've all been taught from the same playbook, so to speak).

Maybe those who have served on committees could offer some more specific advice/commentary on this. Are there any answers to this question that have really struck you as *good*? What sorts of things make you cringe? What are you tired of hearing? What sorts of things make a candidate stand out here?

Great questions! Any search committee members willing to weigh in? I'll just share three brief thoughts: (1) In my experience, good questions show that you have done your homework on the institution and actually thought in some depth about ways that you might contribute; (2) As a general rule, I think questions about the philosophy club tend to be cringeworthy (as it can seem to betray a kind of laziness in terms of learning anything more substantial about the institution before the interview). Beyond this, I'm not sure though. I think it would be great to hear from other search committee members!

Networking and 'Leaving Academia'

I just came across this really interesting interview of Christopher Caterine, author of the new book, Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide (Princeton University Press). Here are a few choice bits of the interview focusing on networking:

Q: Networking is a subject in your book. How is networking different for nonacademic careers than for academic careers?

A: I was such a firm believer in meritocracy that it never crossed my mind to network while I was in academe! At best, I saw it as an imposition on other people's time; at worst, I viewed it as a type of cheating -- trying to convince someone to hire you because of a relationship instead of for the quality of your scholarship. I think part of that block was that I assumed networking was solely about helping yourself get a job. That's one of the reasons why you do it, of course, but if it's your only goal, you won't get very far. To be good at networking, you need to make it about learning from others and positioning yourself to help them. Enter every meeting aiming to learn as much as you can about your contact’s professional history, goals and current challenges. That knowledge allows you to connect them to people who can help them solve their problems faster than they could in a vacuum. At that point, you’re returning value to them on the time they invested in your meeting. The benefit to you is information about their line of work, the skills required to do it and an improved perception of what it would be like to do that job on a daily basis.

To my mind, scholars could be much more effective and efficient in their work if they applied these skills inside the academy. But the culture of grad school seems to condition most people not to behave this way. When I first started networking, I was terrified that I would annoy people by asking for their time. Most -- maybe 80 percent -- quickly volunteered an hour to tell me about their career path when I emailed my request. That's probably what's most different about networking between academia and the rest of the professional world: nonacademics prioritize networking and relationship building even though their calendars are far more constrained and far less flexible...

Q: Can you describe your job outside academe and how you came to get it?

A: I'm a communications strategist and proposal writer for a global consulting company. On a fun day, I work with senior members of the firm to craft a compelling sales message or collaborate with the rest of our creative team to convey that message as memorably as possible. On a boring day, you might find me applying a style guide to a massive technical document or checking to make sure that everyone's name and title are correct in an organizational chart. Essentially, I apply a wide array of skills I learned earning my doctorate: synthesizing information, weighing ambiguous evidence, writing clearly and framing what is usually quite boring information in an exciting way that can hold an audience’s attention. I used to travel almost weekly to work with teams on site -- and will be first in line for a COVID-19 vaccine if it means I can do so again!

I found the job through networking. Someone I had cold contacted for an informational interview put me in touch with someone he knew at the company, and a good chat with that individual led to a call with a superior of his who had also been an academic. The focus of that call -- and this is important general advice -- was that people with advanced degrees look overqualified when applying for entry-level jobs: to his mind it was far better for people like me to seek midcareer positions. At the end of our discussion, he hesitated slightly before asking me for a writing sample. He was apparently happy with what he saw: shortly after receiving it, he referred me for a position that was about to become available. I didn't even know I was being considered for a job until I was asked to schedule the first interview! At the time that seemed crazy, but I now know that most midcareer positions are filled by referral rather than application. That fact makes it essential for academics to step outside their comfort zone and learn how to network. It really is how you create your own luck -- especially in a job market as competitive as today's.

I hope some of the Cocoon's readers find this helpful. Feel free to share tips and anecdotes of your own in the comments section below!

In Limbo Conversations (blog series)

Alan Isaac and Sahana V Rajan (University of Delhi) have been developing In Limbo Conversations, a blog series of conversations with philosophers about the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The most recent conversation was with Simon Critchley (The New School for Social Research) on love, children and suicide during the pandemic. They have also had conversations with Tue Sovso (Humboldt University of Berlin), Christopher Tindale, Dr. Jana Mohr Lone (UW Center for Philosophy for Children), Nick Byrd (Stevens Institute of Technology), Benjamin Smart and Alexander Broadbent (University of Johannesburg), Wim Vandekerchkove (University of Greenwich), Kevin McCain (University of Alabama, Birmingham), Stephan Guttinger (LSE). 

All of the interviews are in both text and video format. Looks like a great series!

Mastery Learning and Argument Mapping in the Classroom (An Interview with Javier Hidalgo)

I recently came across the pedagogical work of Javier Hidalgo (University of Richmond), and I was especially interested to hear more about his experiences with mastery learning and argument mapping. Thinking that readers of the Philosopher's Cocoon might be similarly interested, I asked him for an interview. He was very generous with his time and, as you will see, is even more generous with the educational resources he has created. I want to thank him for his time and welcome him to the Philosopher's Cocoon.

Peter Furlong: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and explain what led you to seek less mainstream pedagogical methods?

Javier Hidalgo: First of all, thanks so much for the interview! It’s an honor.

About myself: I’m an associate professor at the University of Richmond in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies. This is an interdisciplinary school and it’s a bit like a school of public affairs. I usually teach political philosophy, critical thinking, and topics in international affairs. Most of my students have never taken a philosophy class.

About my teaching “journey”: for years and years, it never occurred to me that teaching might be a real craft and that there’s rigorous evidence about how to do it well. I honestly never thought about it. Instead, I adopted the teaching methods that made intuitive sense to me and those that my own professors had used. And the rest I figured out through trial and error where the main feedback mechanism was student evaluations. In retrospect, I was probably not a good teacher.

But a few years ago I was preparing to teach a class on critical thinking. I was dissatisfied with the standard critical thinking textbooks. So I decided to look up what other people have done. It turns out that some people have actually studied how to teach critical thinking well. It’s tough to do rigorous educational research at the university level. Yet these people were doing their best, using pre-tests and post-tests and control groups. And they found that some methods seem to work much better than others.

Ethical Theory Review interview with Jennifer Herdt (Yale Divinity)

Ethical Theory Review, Bradford Cokelet's (University of Kansas) new podcast interviewing authors of recent and forthcoming books in moral and practical philosophy, has posted its second interview, this one with Jennifer Herdt (Yale Divinity) on her recent book Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition (University of Chicago Press). 

Cokelet's next interview will be with Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA) on her recent book, Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals (Princeton University Press), which "provides a new interpretation and development of Strawson’s argument [in 'Freedom and Resentment'] and the social naturalist metaphysics of morals that underlies it."

How Can I Be a Philosopher in a Non-Academic Career? (APA Blog Interview)

The Blog of the APA has a great interview up today with Gina Helfrich, who received her PhD at Emory and "is now program officer for global technology at Internews, an international nonprofit dedicated to empowering local media worldwide." A couple of choice passages:

Q: Tell me about the twists and turns.

....

There were a lot of unexpected moments. Sometimes, it seemed as if a perfect job fell from the sky with the job description written just for me. Other times, I had to work very hard to find a position.

My first full-time job, as assistant director of the Harvard College Women’s Center, fell from the sky. I saw it come across a mailing list I was on as a result of my graduate fellowship working in the Center for Women at Emory University, and it was a great fit with my scholarly focus in women’s and gender studies.

After a promotion to director and four years at the women’s center, I felt restless. So I read books like What Color Is Your Parachute? I did informational interviews. And eventually, I networked myself into a tech job at a startup—but I got laid off after a year, and I then was stuck with this bizarre resume.

So I did what you do: I put myself out there, chased a lot of opportunities that didn’t pan out, and eventually landed a communications position with NumFOCUS, a nonprofit that supports open-source scientific research. Around the same time, I cofounded a staffing and consulting business to support better diversity and inclusion in technology. We started getting a lot of attention, and even got some venture capital, so at a certain point I was basically forced to leave my full-time/regular job. But the business didn’t work out, and after seven months of “funemployment,” I found my way back to NumFOCUS for few more years.

Then, something else fell from the sky. When I heard about my current position, I thought it was perfect—the candidate needed to understand open source software communities and be conversant in issues of diversity and inclusion. I submitted my resume and cover letter, and got the job.

Honestly, even that summary of my career feels a little too neat; it was very messy and unexpected. So that’s the non-academic path—terrifying, but beautiful!

.....

Q: What can philosophy faculty do to help their students pursue non-academic careers?

The most important thing is to be supportive. Graduate school can really undermine one’s self-confidence. But you need self-confidence to get a job—and faculty support helps.

Another thing faculty can do is get familiar with some basic resources to help graduate students find careers—things like the book Designing Your Life by Stanford University professors Bill Burnett and David Evans.

Faculty have to reckon with the fact that PhD students fund their lifestyles, but there are not enough academic jobs for every PhD student. So faculty really owe it to PhDs to support them in the search for all types of work. Our community should also do more to encourage and support hybrid careers for PhDs—you work in tech, for example, but also teach a course or write philosophical articles.

P2P Hypothesis interview at Borealism

The other week, the blog Borealism published a brief interview with David Kyle Johnson (Kings College) on how our lives would change if we discovered we are living in a computer simulation. Dr. Johnson kindly mentioned some of my work on The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Simulation Hypothesis (see here, here, and here), which led in turn to the blog owner to send me a few follow-up questions. Borealism published my answers in part here, but here they are in full (I hope some of you find them interesting!):

1. Your theory maintains anchored in the idea that time flows subjectively and that the physical universe is a timelessly existing array of information which our consciousness is able to perceive as it chooses to perceive. In other words, that each person’s consciousness can read the physical information, akin to the laser of a CD player reading the information on the compact disc and playing it back to the observer. In your observations and experiences, how does the quantum world of collapsing wave functions and the observer effect work to support this hypothesis? 

Great question, and many thanks for taking an interest in my work and sharing it with your readers!

Let me begin by suggesting this video to any of your viewers who may be (understandably) unfamiliar with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is an incredibly well-confirmed theory of fundamental physics. Indeed, every bizarre prediction it makes has so far been observed to be correct. Yet quantum mechanics paints a very strange picture of reality. Among other things, it entails that every particle in the universe is simultaneously in many places at once (quantum superposition), but that whenever we observe a particle, we will always find it in some particular place in space-time (wave-function collapse). As I note in my 2013 article, ‘A New Theory of Free Will’, Einstein thought this to be so absurd that he once scoffed, “Do you really think the moon isn’t there if you aren’t looking at it?” Perhaps the weirdest thing here is that according to the dominant interpretation of the equations of quantum mechanics—the Copenhagen interpretation—the superposition every particle is in never actually goes away or ‘collapses’. Rather, every particle is always in a superposition (many places at once), but observation makes the particle appear to ‘collapse’ to a single particular state.

My theory provides an elegant explanation of these phenomena. In a peer-to-peer networked computer simulation, each computer on the network is running its own unique simulation. So, for example, if we are playing a peer-to-peer networked internet game on 2,000 game consoles, there are in a sense ‘2,000 simulations’ running, each with its own ‘reality’. But at the same time, insofar as all of the computers on the network are interacting with each other—updating what they are simulating based on the data the other computers on the network give them—there is also in a sense just one simulation: the entire network.

This is how the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Hypothesis explains quantum superposition and wave-function collapse. Insofar as each simulation on the network has its own unique representation of where objects in the simulated environment are, unless there is absolutely perfect error-correction in real time (a computational impossibility), different computers on the network will have slightly different representations of where things in the environment are. Thus, at the level of the network as a whole, it is right to say that everything in the environment is always in a superposition: each particle in a 2,000-computer network will be represented in the network as being at something like 2,000 different places simultaneously. Yet, whenever any particular individual playing their game looks at the simulated world (on their computer), they will always observe things in one particular place or another: since their computer is one of the 2,000 computers running the simulation. So, in a P2P network, objects really are in a sense always in multiple places at once, but will always be observed by any observer to be at one particular place or other—exactly as the equations of quantum mechanics entail.

Virtue and Meaning: an Interview with David McPherson

Ethical Theory Review, Bradford Cokelet's (University of Kansas) new podcast interviewing authors of recent and forthcoming books in moral and practical philosophy, has its first interview up here, which you can listen to online or on Spotify. The interview is with David McPherson (Creighton). Here's a quick description of the interview:

We discuss [McPherson's] new book, Virtue and Meaning, which develops and defends a new theory of human nature – the human being as the meaning seeking creature – and explores its implications for ethical theory.  We discuss David's criticism of Aristotelian Naturalists such as Foot, Hursthouse, and MacIntyre, his alternative account of moral virtue and the good life, and his view that Aristotelian moral philosophers need to develop accounts of the cosmic meaning of human life and of human spirituality.

Ethical Theory Review (new interview series)

This is just a quick note that Bradford Cokelet (University of Kansas) is launching a podcast interview series on new and forthcoming books in moral and practical philosophy. The series, Ethical Theory Review, is scheduled to begin this month with an interview of David McPherson (Creighton) on his new book Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective (Cambridge University Press). The series' current tentative schedule can be viewed here. Anyone interested in being interviewed or proposing an interview can find relevant contact information here!