A little professional advice

Karina writes:

A word of advice to prospective graduate students: Don’t tell graduate students anything you really don’t want their advisor to know. That’s excellent advice, and not just for prospective graduate students.

When we interview candidates for faculty positions in this department, we always schedule a lunch for them with our graduate students. We do this, mainly, because it gives candidates a good chance to ask questions about us, and they’re able to see if they get the same answers from our graduate students that we’ve given them ourselves. But the meetings with graduate students serve another purpose.

We often learn things about the candidates from these meetings that affect our evaluation of them. We are looking for colleagues who will be good graduate advisors, so candidates who don’t develop a good rapport with our graduate students have a mark against them. But candidates also have a tendency to let their guard down when they’re talking with graduate students, probably because they’re similar in age and life experience. Sometimes when candidates let their guard down, though, they reveal things about their attitude towards the department or about their approach to science that are disturbing.

Good or bad, we hear about these things — because we ask our students about them.

So whether you’re a prospective graduate student or a job candidate, just remember that everyone you talk to will contribute to your evaluation in some way. There are no times when you’re “off.”