I am always amused, and sometimes horrified, by the stories candidates bring back from their on-campus interviews. It’s clear that institutions have a wide variety of interview practices, and that the range of skills and inclinations in planning and executing those visits is astounding.
I have often said here that candidates enhance their chances by consistently striving to be positive, professional, and courteous when they visit a campus. No where is the asymmetry between hiring institutions and job candidates more clear than in the stories of how poorly candidates are sometimes treated when they visit a campus.
I have heard more than one candidate tell of being dropped off at a motel on the outskirts of town with no restaurant in sight, no offer of a meal, and no suggestion of how to obtain one. I’ve heard others describe how they were used as target practice in their job talks by bickering colleagues. Ensuring that candidates are comfortable, properly fed, and treated with dignity doesn’t seem that hard, but it must be as it’s far from universal.
Still, some departments do know how to treat candidates. At my first job, I had a colleague who would say, “I want every candidate, even those we don’t hire, to feel positive about the experience of visiting campus and to continue to think of us as friends and colleagues thereafter.” He was remarkably successful in that approach, and we maintained positive relationships with many unsuccessful candidates, which I still view as a small miracle given the tense and often poisonous atmosphere of the job market. His philosophy is worthy of emulation.
What have you experienced in on-campus interviews that was either exceptionally positive or negative?
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20 Responses to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Interview
donmon - October 10, 2011 at 9:21 pm
The admonition to use “Blackberry” only as an adjective is standard practice for protecting trademarks. If the trademark becomes regularly used as noun, it is harder to defend against people arguing that it is just a normal word, like “kleenex.” So the lawyers would like it to be “Kleenex(TM) tissues” or “Blackberry(TM) personal digital assistants.” (The TM is also needed to protect the brand, but only on first reference.)
That doesn’t have much to do with the “the” business, though, as in The Rockefeller University.
11167504 - October 10, 2011 at 9:40 pm
I get it, but that is still not an adjective.
Susan Broyles - October 10, 2011 at 10:07 pm
Regarding band names and the ironic addition of “the,” an example: in “Range Life” by Pavement, Stephen Malkmus referred to being “out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins.” Supposedly his use of “the” made Billy Corgan at least as angry as the lines that followed (“nature kids, man, they ain’t got no function, I don’t understand what they mean and I could really give a f***”).
Benjamin Slade - October 10, 2011 at 10:18 pm
“The Beowulf” has (since sometime in the early 20th century?) become “Beowulf”, but “The Iliad”, “The Odyssey” retain their articles (as do “The Mahabharata” and “The Ramayana”).
ruritania - October 11, 2011 at 6:19 am
“Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is often erroneously written with the article. R.L. Stevenson never put one there. Meanwhile, “the Batman” is the proper way to refer to DC’s seminal superhero.
iriselina - October 11, 2011 at 7:09 am
Amusing ! As an Indian professor of English I have termed this the “sins of omission and commission” as many Indians have a problem with the use of the article. Many of us tend to drop the ‘the’ where it should be and put it in where it shouldn’t be.Indian languages do not have the article.We have ‘this’ and ‘that’ or ‘one’. ( Tamil and Hindi ). I have rules and rules and struggle to teach this, hence I am amused to see your version of the problem.Even the verb ‘enjoy’ is used by American TV as it is in India with no object following it. Enjoy what? …..I wonder.
mbelvadi - October 11, 2011 at 7:23 am
There may be an internationalization component to this, as influences from British (and as another commenter mentioned, Indian) English seep into American English. In particular, the British have been going “to university” or “to hospital” without an article for quite a long time, and recently I’ve started to hear that usage creeping into American tv programs, jarring though it is to American ears.
iriselina - October 11, 2011 at 7:40 am
but ‘hospital’ means ‘medicare’ and ‘university’ means ‘education’ and therefore do not require the ” the ” ! We use ‘the’ when the university refers to a building and hospital refers to the place , the building again. So too in school, prison , church, bed each word meaning education, imprisonment ,worship and sleep .
d91193d - October 11, 2011 at 8:00 am
The Johns Hopkins University must fall into that category as well…
johnbarnes - October 11, 2011 at 8:33 am
As a sometime writer of adventure stories, I notice that down to the 1950s putting “the” in front of a ship’s name (in dialogue) denoted a civilian; dropping “the” marked someone used to the military usage. So Mrs. Blithering-Twit sailed to Halifax for the summer on the SS Plutohauler, but her nephew, Commander Figbert, escorted convoys in HMS Redundant. Probably due to countless adventure stories since, the usage has spread to pretty much any vehicle with a name; space shuttles were almost always articleless, unlike the Spirit of St. Louis, the Memphis Belle, the Hindenburg, or the Wright Flyer.
grupenhoff - October 11, 2011 at 8:36 am
The dropping of “the” began to be practiced in radio and TV newscasts, where news items, or “stories,” were on a short time clock: one could get more info in without the “the.” Check out KYW in Philly on any given day.
bioemeritus09 - October 11, 2011 at 8:45 am
And, as its former football-playing attendees (are any of them graduates?) call the University of Miami, THE U.
judithryan43 - October 11, 2011 at 9:32 am
Soon English will be Russian.
dank48 - October 11, 2011 at 10:02 am
“When I was went to Yale long ago . . .” Oh, well.
One of the hardest things about ESL is when to use the definite article and when to omit it. The rules are bizarre. Fashion, whim, and fancy, not to mention the desire to push noses, let people play with the language a bit. It’s not going to hurt anything; most of the precious brand names that are supposedly being protected will be gone and forgotten a long time before Kleenex is.
Ever notice David Letterman’s habit of sticking in a superfluous or at least nonstandard “the” before nouns. My guess is he just likes playing around with English.
mbelvadi - October 11, 2011 at 12:34 pm
I’ve read dialogue written by British writers like this:
P1: “I heard John was shot! Where is he?”
P2: “He’s at hospital.”
P1: “Which one”
P2: [names a specific hospital]
To my American-native-speaker ears, P2′s first response sounds completely foreign – John is at “the” hospital, even though P2 has not yet specified which particular one.
But if there are other pre-Millennial American-native-speakers who disagree, maybe this will turn out to be a regionalism issue.
jffoster - October 11, 2011 at 1:23 pm
It might become regional, but I don’t think it’s there yet. I think it’s showing up in people who have American and not British nor Canadian accents who are in the littoral artsy, using the term loosely, world and or radio/tv and trying to copy the British. And I’m definitely “pre-millenial” — Indeed I’m so old I practically recall what happened to the Continentals at Queenston Heights and Lundy’s Lane!/ And it really jars my ears when it comes from an obvious American — but not when it comes from a Canadian or British mouth.
Tracey Walterbusch - October 11, 2011 at 4:38 pm
I completely disagree “The Ohio State University” is one of the best names in higher education.
Go Bucks!
Geoffrey Hooker - October 11, 2011 at 5:21 pm
When we played against Defiance (Ohio) back in the mid-1990s, their practice balls were labeled TDC for The Defiance College.
22156392 - October 13, 2011 at 11:22 am
And let us not forget “The Calculus.”
sand6432 - October 18, 2011 at 6:29 pm
Officially, it’s The Penn State University, but everyone calls it Penn State University. I used to be director of The Pennsylvania State University Press, but we even shortened it further to just Penn State Press.—Sandy Thatcher