Phone interview!
Apparently I’m already a “finalist” for the temp faculty position at “Hobart University”. I suspect that that means I just made it through the initial screening of “is breathing and apparently has a degree in chemistry.” But they did mail me the morning of the day they were to begin considering applications, so that’s encouraging – at least they didn’t take long to decide that I’m breathing.
So now I have to prove it with a phone interview tomorrow morning. This’ll be my second one of those ever — first was for GE Plastics, back when it was still GE Plastics; that one went well, so hopefully this one will too. Been reading up on stories about what to expect, as far as questions go, and came across this story –
I found out after I was hired that the SC [search committee] was having a puppet show during my interview. They were all sitting in an office of someone who had a nice little collection of pig stuff including a pig finger puppet. So at some point one of the SC members put on the puppet. Needless to say I wondered why some my answers seemed so overly amusing.
So hopefully they have finger puppets at Hobart, because that actually sounds like a fairly nice practice. Unless, of course, it simply means that the SC was horribly bored by the candidate.
I’m still a bit unsure what to expect, since it’s technically an interview for a temporary position that sounds like it’s going to be teaching-only (the ad says the candidate will teach general chemistry, instrumental analysis and advanced analytical, with a lab component for the instrumental class — a full load even for a PUI). So most of my questions for them are along the lines of “is that all at once?!?!” and “I can reuse the last guy’s notes, right?!”
More constructively, I also went through and analyzed the current faculty. It’s a relatively “old” department, and only about a third of them are visibly active in research. One spectroscopist; the analytical side is largely separations/extraction/environmental stuff, so I’ve been thinking up ways to collaborate with them. Of course, they don’t seem to have any Raman setups to speak of, so I’d want to get one of those at some point – no, not this next year. Gotta pick some lower fruit first – there IS a good new FTIR setup, and quite a number of separations-mass spec combos. (Restrained enthusiasm. Maybe something semi-novel with data processing?)
That’s assuming I’d have time for anything in the lab after all that TEACHING, of course….