Interview

I had a phone interview yesterday for a temp assist prof job. I think it went pretty well, but I was way unprepared. It's been like 10 years since I had to interview for anything at all and doing it over the phone added a dimension of unpleasantness.

The faculty were all quite nice, but I could never tell if they were agreeing, getting bored, wanted to talk, whatever. I only ended up talking over them a couple of times.

The questions were pretty predictable I suppose, but I hadn't prepared for them. What exactly do I think a student should get out of an undergraduate education in anthropology? And what were my best and worst teaching moments?

It also turns out that the class they want me to teach is different than the one I was prepared to talk about. They just said "North American Indian Cultures" so I emphasized contemporary issues rather than a living relics approach. But they offer a contemporary issues course and really want someone to teach basically ethnohistory and government relations contact to early 20th century. That's ok, because I could also do that and had a few ideas at the top of my head.

So all in all I think I did fairly well. And I don't think the applicant pool for this one is too deep. That's the variable that will make the difference I suppose. They asked if I could visit campus some time soon so that's a good sign, but no definite dates or invitations yet.

Fingers crossed.