Three pieces of advice for academic interviews

For prospective grad students and faculty

It’s been a while since I’ve had to undergo a series of academic interviews. I got hired by the University of Toronto in 2020, but the process was a strange one because of the pandemic. The last time I was really interviewed for an academic job was when I was hired by Yale, and that was long ago—The Matrix had just come out.

But I’ve been on the other side of the process—interviewing prospective graduate students and prospective professors—about a billion times. I give three main pieces of advice to my students who apply to graduate school or academic jobs, and I’m going to share them with the world now.