If you had yourself organized properly, the researching and writing of your dissertation would be a fluid process which would end naturally and prepping for your interviews should be not that hard, since all the work you have been doing all these years is leading up to this moment – get your act together. It’s candidates like you [i.e., who actually prep for interviews] who just BORE me to death at APA.
Interesting. "Organizing myself properly" would make my dissertation work itself prepare me for talking about, say, how I'd teach classes I've never been allowed to teach as a grad student. Also, it would prepare me for asking a department well-informed questions about interesting things they have going on that I see myself contributing to. Well, that's one perspective.
Via Henry Farrell, we get another perspective from Ari Kelman, a historian giving advice to history grad students about how to prep for their conference interviews. You should definitely read the whole thing, but let me give you a taste:
5: Figure out as much as you can about the composition of the interview committee. No, this does not mean reading everything they’ve ever written. But you might want to know the arguments of their major works. And, at the very least, you should know what they’ve written about. . . .
6: . . . Know what your work is about, focusing on the so-what question. . . . It’s your responsibility, then, to tell the rest of the committee why your scholarship is important. . . .
7: You should also have a polished response explaining what you’d like to teach (recognizing that their needs not your desires should inform your answer), how you teach (methods and the difference between your introductory, intermediate, and advanced undergraduate courses, as well as, if relevant, your graduate courses), and what courses you’ve taught in the past. You should prepare an answer in which you detail how both your research and your teaching will complement what [the prospective employer’s] department already has on the books.
And at the terrible risk of BORING a Prof Who is Interviewing, Kelman adds:
8: Practice your answers. Which is to say, find a friend, have them ask you a series of questions that are likely to come up at the AHA interview, and make sure that you have replies that are both true and plausible.
Gosh, what different advice these two profs are giving about conference interviews! What could possibly explain the contrast? Well, one hypotheses is, the disciplinary differences between philosophy and history mean historians have to prepare for presentations of various kinds, whereas philosophers have the power to magically "organize themselves properly" so they never need to bother prepping for anything. Another hypothesis is, A Prof Who is Interviewing at the APA has his* head so far up his ass he has no fucking clue he's giving the Worst Advice Ever.
You know, I'm going to go with hypothesis number two. Not least of all because A Prof Who is Interviewing's advice is pretty much the exact opposite of what people in my program get told by the best senior profs in the department--that is, all of them except Evil Columbo. But also because it's the exact opposite of what all the junior profs tell us, who've all done this themselves in the pretty recent past. In fact, I'd say is just about the exact opposite of everything I've ever heard about interview prep from anyone who wasn't a complete know-nothing asshole.
*Yeah, I'm assuming a gender here, which I don't usually like to do. But come one, this is philosophy, and you know this asshole's a guy. If I'm wrong I'm wrong. Fallibilism!
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