Academic Job Interviews in the biosciences

As some readers know, I’m co-teaching a survival-skills course for our neuroscience doctoral students this semester. Last week we talked about job talks and the crucial skills involved in flying in for the day-and-a-half interview for an assistant professor-level tenure-track job.

In thinking about the whole process, the notion of a bank stress test comes to mind. The schedule is quite grueling, it demands a very high level of constant alertness, and there are ample opportunities for making mistakes.

In my experience, the biggest tripping hazard comes at the end of the job talk on Day 1: you’ve just finished giving a spectacular talk after a long series of interviews with potential colleagues. You lower your guard and begin to relax just as you need to be at your peak performance–the dinner where your potential colleagues will attempt to ply you with drinks and food for two hours while simulating the behaviors that go with a social dinner. In actuality, they are looking for insight into your level of scientific abilities and character–all while offering you ample rope to hang yourself with.

Some rules of the road for that dinner:
1) Stay with the formal clothes that you were wearing at your job talk. This is no time to dress-down.

2) Don’t have more than one glass of wine at most. Your ability to remain focused is paramount to success and by this time on Day 1, you are probably close to exhaustion.

3) Don’t gossip. Deflect questions designed to get you to dish on current or former colleagues. Worst case scenario: your dishing goes right back to the person you were dealing the dirt on,. Best case scenario: your scientific character is impugned.

4) Keep aware of your body. Avoid nervous behavioral habits and eat carefully enough to avoid spilling disasters.

5) Ask questions–but keep the questions within the professional scope.

6) Try to focus most of your intentions on intelligent give-and-take scientific conversations, all the while, taking care not to monopolize either in quantity or amplitude. In other words, listen carefully, speak intelligently but not too loudly.

Finally, remember you are not “off-camera” until you shut your hotel room door for the night.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Jim

Is the FT the last serious paper?

From Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. I’m not sure. I still really enjoy the Old Gray Lady and am partial enough to the WSJ to purchase a subscription for family members. But the Financial Times is really indispensable to me. I find it to be extremely well written. More importantly the firewall between the editorial page and the news seems to be rock solid.

Jim

Vasily Kandinsky

I woke up this morning to find the not uncommon mountain phenomenon of being inside a cloud. Virginia’s Blue Ridge can have pretty dramatic weather changes. So instead of the vibrant Fall colors outside my study window, there’s the opportunity to think about painters–and Vasily Kandinsky is my favorite. A retrospective of his work just opened at the Guggenheim in New York. Here’s a preview at Newsweek.

Enjoy. I hope to make it up to NYC to see the real deal very soon.
Jim

Faculty meeting and then headed for the mountains

I’ve been invited today to deliver some comments and do a Q&A by the Institute faculty. After that, I’m headed off to our mountain house for the weekend. While I’m there, I’m going to continue working on a course for next semester on hippocampal function. Interestingly, while much has been written over the years about the mammalian hippocampus, the evidence for what its current function is (in humans) remains somewhat unclear. It most certainly isn’t the “memory” center of the brain, although it pretty clearly plays some important role in mnemonic neurobiology. But it certainly is an aesthetically striking structure, so much so, that it practically pleaded for a functional explanation as soon as it was examined and described histologically by Cajal and his contemporaries. It is also extraordinarily well-embedded in the brain’s system of network connections. So well-embedded in fact that one might devise many “just-so” stories for hippocampal function and seem to be quite reasonable.

Jim

Game theory on steroids

Nicholas Thompson’s article in Wired Magazine on a legacy Soviet-era doomsday machine called Perimeter.

Money quote:

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.



Lunch with Tyler

I had lunch with my colleague (also famous blogger) Tyler Cowen today at a new Indian place in Fairfax. Our conversation drifted all over the map –from the economic crisis to health care to what higher education might actually look like 10-15 years from now.

We also talked about what other countries might be reasonable to live in for academic types such as ourselves if, as seems perhaps less likely now, economic Armageddon ensues. Tyler liked both Mexico and Thailand (the assumptions here are perhaps $40K/year–not the $10M that Tyler was talking about a while ago in his blog–i.e. reality). I mentioned the Netherlands because of their superb and stable social welfare system, but Tyler was quick to disabuse me of that idea–if the US goes, Western Europe will most assuredly go also. Forget “decoupling”.
But, if you consider decoupling, well then Brazil begins to look pretty good according to Tyler (and I agree with him). They make all their own food. They are essentially energy independent, and they don’t do a lot of trade with either the U.S. or China. So they would probably be able to continue, although they would be much poorer.
Well, in that case, I’d definitely chose Sao Paolo, the Los Angeles of Brazil. The only problem with that pointed out Tyler, is that the housing costs would pretty much be the same as here in DC–not really possible on $40K a year.
So I ask you, dear reader–what country would you chose, in case the U.S. goes broke?
Jim

Beyond the NIH Payline….

Many loyal readers know that as an NIH alum, I’m always interested in the latest from my former agency. Here’s a very interesting report on grants that are funded in spite not quite making the mark at peer-review.

Money quote:

The bottom line–at least 19% of NIH’s basic research portfolio is funded for reasons that go beyond quality–may stoke simmering concerns about the agency’s policy that favors young investigators.