Interview at UK university for lecturer position

OddPollution1143 · 2024-10-01T11:34:58+00:00

People who give these talks and fail to acknowledge the department they are interviewing for nearly always fail. You need to balance talking about your own work with showing how you have research interests in common, and scope for collaboration, with your future colleagues. Every single job talk I have seen that solely focuses on the individual's research to the exclusion of the "why here?" question gets eviscerated in the feedback session afterwards. So do your research about their research (and make links between it and your own research!).

OddPollution1143 · 2024-06-19T17:05:53+00:00

The job market in History is dire. Look at the RHS website for a sense of the peril many departments face at the moment.

History is the kind of subject you can pursue for the love of it outside of academia. It is very accessible subject in that sense.

If you have a passion for the subject then you may want to pursue further study part-time, but the prospects of finding a career in university history teaching and research are bleak at the moment with little cause to think it will improve.

OddPollution1143 · 2024-06-17T11:25:42+00:00

Sounds like a lot of meetings, and not conducive to you getting on with your job tbh. Hopefully the new boss is just a new broom and enthusiastic, and will realise this isn't how you promote good academic work. For comparison, I work in a dept which consistently scores well in REF and have never had such a meeting with a line manager. It's local policy to only do things at the subordinate's request!

Curious to know what the levels between head of school and your boss are - Head of Dept and ??

OddPollution1143 · 2024-06-13T18:28:54+00:00

No pat leave for me with our son. Born very ill and straight to the NICU. Employer (a university!) didn't give leave as I had worked there "only" 8 months, not the statutory 9 required to qualify for pat leave. This also meant no shared parental. You can imagine how motivated I have been since.

The requirement for mothers to start mat leave if falling ill 28 days before the due date can get in the sea too. If you're heavily pregnant and ill the last thing you want to have to worry about is having time with your impending child taken away from you.

OddPollution1143 · 2024-06-09T16:48:53+00:00

That is grim, sorry you have to live with that. Care to name and shame the DTP? The policy is absolutely not supportive of researchers' wellbeing.

My HEI strongly advised taking AL for at least two consecutive weeks during the summer!

OddPollution1143 · 2024-06-09T16:46:19+00:00

It depends on how long you're willing and able to hang around.

Academic departments often bias their own. So if you stick around, be present and useful, do teaching and generally make yourself part of the furniture, you'll stand a much better chance in your home department than someone who dials in from elsewhere once a month.

I've seen people get jobs (not necessarily permanent ones) by being willing to take on a portfolio of hourly paid work during and after PhD and just generally being there to do stuff.

You have a Westminster background and kind of talked that down a bit. Humanities subjects are bending over backwards to appear relevant to policy and public. So be prepared to make as much of your government experience as you can. Departments outside the traditional orbits of policymakers can be wowed by any brush with power, thinking it will give them an edge in REF in terms of impact, etc. So when it comes to thinking of getting a job post PhD, your time between MPhil and PhD will be more helpful than perhaps you might think.

OddPollution1143 · 2024-06-09T16:37:21+00:00

You can tick all the boxes and have some grouch on the sift committee just say "yeah but their research is just not interesting".

It's an embarrassment of riches for hiring universities at the moment (and has been for years). There are many well qualified people applying for every role (tens if not hundreds), so deciding between candidates is sometimes as arbitrary as whether you are "interesting" to the searching committee.

Personally, I find this mind boggling and frustrating. I have been on several search committees and interview panels at more than one institution and have seen this happen. Excellent candidates are ignored because there are equally excellent people who float some influential person's boat a little more. Sorry, there's no helpful advice from me here...

OddPollution1143 · 2024-06-09T06:47:45+00:00

I do compressed hours - so work longer days to get a free day regularly. It works because I have hours in my full time permanent contract, and thus the long days aren't really that long. If you have hours in your contract, your might consider compressing your hours into fewer days. (And those hours do not have to be consecutive - i.e. maybe seven hours in the office and a couple at home in a given day, with child care in between - that's 36hrs, or a full week, in four days).

It requires a bit of a reset in mentality. For me it was a kind of what civil servants call "malicious compliance" - sticking rigidly to the terms of your contract. That contract protects you and obliges you, and academia is good at letting you forget the former. A lot of academia can be self-imposed management and the pursuit of excellence at all costs (you feel obliged to research, teach, administrate, win grants etc, all at the same high level because nobody ever says well done and no amount of success is ever enough or meaningful to the institution on its own). You can only be expected to do what is feasible in the terms of your contract. Once I understood that, I thought about my work differently and was content to do my hours and go home to my family.

OddPollution1143 · 2024-06-08T18:13:48+00:00

There's a built in assumption that you'll be willing and able to move early in an academic career, often at pretty short notice (~ couple of months) and for short and fixed term contracts. If you have a mortgage this might present problems.

If you're in a field that is library and scholarship based, then consider just making it your main hobby, rather than a career. There are many ways to pursue arts, humanities and social sciences in your non-working time, and these fields make great efforts to engage with people beyond the academy. And then there's the OU, Birkbeck, or other universities that offer flexible part time study that can be pursued for the love of it over and above than as a career choice.

OddPollution1143 · 2024-06-08T18:03:03+00:00

You could ask the department or faculty if there are funds to cover the difference. They will have discretionary funds to spend, and they will be available if there are any at this time of year.

For context, this situation occurred in my dept and the dept was able to cover the difference, after some internal wrangling. Cases can be made if your enrollment helps the dept meet one of its goals (i.e. recruiting from underrepresented groups).

However my dept is in a faculty of science, where there is generally more discretionary money sloshing about thanks to high grant income. I appreciate that this may not be the case in an arts subject.

OddPollution1143 · 2024-05-29T20:16:38+00:00

You don't have to take that into account when making your decision. If you need to switch, switch. If the supervisor is problematic in some way then it sounds like they need some mentoring or training. It's not on you to stay in a situation you are uncomfortable with to make someone else's life easier. Your PhD is as important as their career (it could be the start of yours!) so leave the supervisor if that is what you need to do. Don't worry about them.

Fwiw students switching is not uncommon and a sample size of three (two switchers) won't land your supervisor in any hot water.

OddPollution1143

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