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Tips for campus interviews in the UK?

In our January “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

I’ve been longlisted for a job in the U.K. and, in case I’m invited for a campus interview, I could use some advice about the U.K. interview, esp. since all of my experience thus far has been in North America. I’ve heard different things about how long the presentation tends to be (I’ve heard as short as 20 min., or as long as 60 min.), and I’ve heard competing things about whether it is just a research presentation (similar to a North American job talk) or is meant to be an overview of past and future research plans, as well as an overview of teaching. I’ve also heard competing things about who attends the presentation: just the search committee or the whole department. Could any U.K. academics give advice? Thanks in advance.

Does anyone have any helpful tips to share?

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13 responses to “Tips for campus interviews in the UK?”

  1. Anonymous

    First off, all candidates will be interviewed on the same day, and likely you will all have lunch and/or dinner together and be kept in a holding room as you go in for your talks and interviews. On one hadn it’s nice to know who the competition is, but on the other, it can be awkward. Usually it’s fine though.

    Your presentation will likely be on the short side (20-40min including Q&A). Sometimes they will want a “job talk” (where you present a paper) and sometimes they’ll want more of a presentation of your research wehre you discuss waht you’ve done so far and what your research plans are. Occasionally they’ll ask instead for a mock lecture for undergraduates. They’ll let you know what they want when they invite you for the interview.

    All candidates will take turns doing their presentations — usually this is just for the search committee but I’ve had one or two where it was for the whole department (faculty, not graduate students). After everyone has done their presentations, it’ll be lunch time and then after lunch each candidate will go in and do their interview.

    Interview will ask you about 5 main themes: 1) research plans–publication plans/venues, etc.; 2) teaching; 3) ability/plan to attract grants; 4) impact (look up the REF to know what that means); 5) some sort of collegiality question. Obviously this could vary, but I did about 5-6 interviews in the UK and those were the questions in each one.

    In my experience and that of everyone I know, if you got the job, they’ll call you that day. If you didn’t, you’ll get a call or email (most likely) a day or two after. Not getting a call the same day doesn’t mean you won’t get the job, but it does mean that you aren’t their top candidate. Obviously things could happen and they aren’t able to call same day, but in my experience every time I did not hear from them same day, I did not get the job, and vice versa.

    YMMV, especially at Oxbridge where everything is just different (and I never interviewed there).

    Reply
  2. Anonymous

    I think you heard different things because interviews can truly be so different – I’ve encountered all the versions you mention. My main advice is to explicitly ask the Chair what the presentation should cover and how long it should be – though they will probably tell you. I would say the only constant based on my experience is that the presentation is open to the whole department, and while attendance varies there will likely be other staff as well as some graduate students. I can also note that sometimes the search committee includes only members of the department and is very small, which might be unusual in other countries.

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    1. Anonymous

      As an addendum to this, it’s also worth getting explicitly clear on who the presentation should be *aimed at*. In my dept., job talks are exclusively attended by faculty and graduate students, but candidates are usually asked to present on their research as if they were teaching to to advanced undergraduates. It’s usually pretty obvious when someone gives a rote conference talk rather than adapting their material to give a sense of how they would teach our students, and the former case rarely looks good even if it would have been a perfectly good conference or senior seminar talk.

      Reply
  3. Anonymous

    Places and interviews vary in relation to all three matters. 1) On length, the norm of what you’re asked probably 20-25 mins, but they can be longer. 2) On what you’re asked to present, typically it will be presenting a current piece of research, though sometimes you’ll be asked to preface this with a summary of your research plans or track record. The key thing with both 1 and 2 is to do what you’re asked – ie don’t go over the time you’re given or just present an overview of your overall research when you’re asked to present a particular bit of work (or vice versa). Also you’ll be told that they will treat your research talk as evidence as to how you’ll teach/lecture. Sometimes you might get asked to do a specific teaching independent presentation but that’s rare. 3) In terms of audience, it is typically the whole faculty invited (though not everyone will attend), and often grad students as well. There are places that limit it just to the panel + some others who can commit to attending every talk, but those places are the exception as far as I’m aware.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    On this theme, for an Oxbridge interview I’ve been asked to give a ‘simulated tutorial’ (but to no students). Any particular insight into what you would say that might entail, given there aren’t exactly going to be tutees?

    Reply
    1. Charles Pigden

      This is weird and you should ask for more information. In an Oxford tutorial (or a Cambridge ‘supervision’) the student will have written an essay for their tutor/supervisor which will often be read out during the tutorial though it may be have been submitted earlier. The tutor/supervisor then critically discusses the said essay with the student, possibly adding written comments. It is hard to see how this could be simulated without somebody role-playing a student with a simulated student essay to discuss. There is the further problem that the tutor/supervisor will typically have set the essay question or at least the essay topic. which means that they will know in advance what it is that they are supposed to be talking about.

      I suppose that it is just about possible that YOU will be the tutee and your writing sample the student essay which will be critically discussed by a member the search committee, playing the part of your tutor. But that does not seem very likely since it would not assess your skills as a tutor and tutoring is typically be a large part of what you will be paid to do.

      Now it may be that the intensive one-on-one (or sometimes one-on two) tutorials are a thing of the past even at Oxbridge (it is now 47 years since I graduated from Cambridge). But if it isn’t you still need to know what form a tutorial is supposed to take in order to simulate one. At my university tutorials are typically small group discussion sessions relating to a large-group lecture. It is hard to see how you could simulate such a session without people simulating students with an imaginary lecture to discuss.

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        OP here (of the original question, not the one you just responded to): Could you tell us more about the mix between supervisions and lectures at Oxbridge? I don’t have a sense of how much of the teaching is just regular classes/lectures vs. how much is the supervision/one-on-one feedback session on essays you’re describing. Thanks in advance!

    2. Anonymous

      These are common at Oxford/Cambridge for interviews for permanent posts and temporary pure teaching roles (I have only had interviews for the latter). As far as I understand the aim of these presentations, they are intended to gauge your aptitude for small group (1-3 students) tutorial teaching. But given that you won’t have students who will have written an essay on the subject (which you will in tutorials) or even done any reading, they are inevitably an imperfect comparison. My sense is most people do a brief presentation on a topic from the syllabus (you’ll likely be provided with that), and incorporate questions about that topic which are designed to lead into interactive discussion with the students (if there are no students the questions will come from the panel, who might ‘pretend’ to be students with varying degrees of verisimilitude).

      Reply
  5. AGT

    This was already said before but just to emphasize. I don’t know what your long-listing involves, but your ‘campus interview’ (if there will be one, since many places just do things online these days) surely will be explained to you in the invitation letter: they will tell you what kind of talk, how long etc etc. You can in response ask questions (esp if for some strange reason they don’t give you instructions).

    It does not appear to be relevant here, but for professorial positions there can be, certainly at places I am familiar with, a different process. In particular, in my most recent case, the department was only in an advisory role in the hiring and the decisive interview and decision was made on the upper admin level (the candidates would have an ‘interview’ with the applicants but they can only express their view as advice, they don’t decide the matter). I assume this was because the professor was also hired for the role of department head, i.e., an administrative leadership position.

    Reply
  6. Anonymous

    Seconding what others have said, I’ve done a couple of campus interviews in the UK and they were fairly different formats. Whoever invites you should give you specific instructions related to your questions. In both of my cases I was asked to give a normal research talk i.e. a paper. A few differences from N.A. to be aware of:

    -You might be provided lunch but will likely be left on your own for dinner. In general there are fewer informal/social meetings.
    -At the end of the interview they might explicitly ask you whether you will accept the position if offered. Otherwise, in my experience, interview formats are pretty similar everywhere and the types of questions have more to do with the type of job than the country.
    -It might be helpful to google terminological differences, e.g. classes are usually called modules. But make sure to look up this info for your specific uni since it can vary.
    -Like others said you might meet all the other job candidates, although IME this is not inevitable.

    Also, given the often short notice for these things, it might be worth ordering a UK power adapter and ETA (travel authorization) ahead of time, if needed. Good luck!

    Reply
  7. Charles Pigden

    There are lectures but they are not compulsory. You get no credit for attendance and can bunk off with impunity. After my first two terms I largely stopped going to lectures. A friend of mine, a distinguished professor of economics who did PPE at Oxford, claimed that he stopped going to lectures after the first two weeks! The real medium of instruction is the tutorial or supervision in which a student’s weekly essay is dissected and critiqued by their tutor or supervisor. However these are not compulsory either (though you might get a talking to if you did not attend) and in my day you got no formal mark for your essays, all the assessment being concentrated in the yearly exams. There were several of these, depending on which topics you had chosen to study. Sets of lectures would be rather loosely associated with the syllabuses for these topics, but ‘loosely’ is the operative word and in my experience many of them were not much use. The tutorials or supervisions were where the action was, and a good tutor or supervisor would be getting you to write essays covering the subtopics in the syllabus. If you had not written essays on the said subtopics for your tutor or supervisor, you would be likely to come a cropper in the exams.

    That’s what it was like from the undergraduate perspective. As potential teacher, you might be putting on a course of lectures, but by far the bulk of your teaching time will be devoted to tutorials or supervisions, mostly with students from your own college. As an undergraduate I derived an enormous amount of benefit from this system which works very well for autonomous learners, but friends and acquaintances who have taught at Oxbridge complain that the term-time grind of of tutorials or supervisions can be something a strain.

    I should stress that I left Cambridge 47 years ago, that I have never taught at Oxbridge (though I have friends and acquaintances who have) and that there are probably many others who can supply you with more up-to-date information.

    Reply
  8. Anonymous

    If you have dual citizenship where one is UK, you *must* use your UK passport to enter the country. This has caused problems for many.

    I had my fair share of UK interviews, and got one offer. The most striking experience I had was that an HR representative was present at one of them. I’ve heard elsewhere that for one particular university, the philosophers make a recommendation, but HR has the final say. So take HR seriously, even if you think the questions they ask are unprofessional.

    Reply
    1. Charles Pigden

      If you have dual citizenship where one is UK, you *must* use your UK passport to enter the country. This has caused problems for many.

      Quite so, but this a NEW requirement of which dual British-Plus citizens the world over need to be aware.

      I am a dual New Zealand /British citizen and for the last 26 years I have been travelling everywhere, mostly to Britain, on my New Zealand passport. I have now had to renew (or rather revive) my lapsed British passport solely for the privilege of being able to return to the country of which I am a citizen. It has cost me a good deal of time and trouble as the online form requested the exact date of my parents’ wedding and the number and issue-date of my 93-year-old Mother’s passport. I had to ring her in the UK , get her to find her passport , which she managed to do in about three minutes despite the fact that she is nearly blind, and then get my sister-in-law out of bed to read out the details over the phone, something my Mother was too visually impaired to do. I had to send all my previous passports or complete photocopies thereof, plus my birth certificate back to Britain, all of which had to be individually weighed and priced for customs at the post shop. It has been an enormous rigmarole, costing me two day’s work, and an expensive rigmarole at that, since I am over NZ$300 down.

      The whole thing has been big news in New Zealand where 25% of the population were born overseas, a sizeable proportion in Britain. . When I went to the post shop to send off my documents, four other people were there on the same errand (and none on any other). They were not happy. My three adult children, all dual or triple citizens, will have to go through the same expensive and vexatious process in case they need to visit the UK, though they can travel everywhere else on their pre-existing New Zealand or Australian passports.

      If you are not a dual British-plus citizen, please excuse the rant.

      Reply

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