January 17th - Job search

Why this is important:

• Grad students interact directly with the faculty
• A number of professors have retired or will be retiring soon.

some facts about IU linguistics

• IU ling department is historically gender imbalanced

  • Neither female faculty members were full time in the linguistics department (in 2000)

• Lack of certain subfields

  • No semantics
  • applied linguistics was getting split off
    • under the school of education in the 1960's
    • moved under linguistics in the 1970's
    • 2006: divorce of linguistics and applied linguistics

• Currently, no one in sociolinguistics at IU

• Faculty who are still year and were here in 2000 will probably be retiring in the next 5 years

should new hires reflect the traditional strengths of the department or cutting edge research?

• African linguistics is a particular subfield that is a historic strength but may not be an area of cutting edge research

The talk on the 26th is a sociolinguistics talk, all the others are syntax talks.

if you have thoughts then you should contact Nils or Samson

Syntax job search

• 68 applicants

Quality of candidates is important

Fit in the department is equally important

• Trying to find someone with a secondary specialty that fits well with the department
• Specialities in languages other than English

Be careful when searching for a job

• It's a serious decision for the institution and the applicant
• academia works in much slower hiring cycles, it takes up to a year to remove someone who was just hired

After job talks the whole remainder of the afternoon is for grad students

• We'll just assemble in the seminar room
• You'll get a picture of how scholars interract with grad students
  • This is important for candidates because involvement with grad students is essential
• if you can't make it to the job talk or the after discussion, send Dr. DeJong a note and see if something can be arranged

What should we do to prep?

• What the faculty care about and what we care about is just different
• Our role is to go to every event we can. even if we're not interested in syntax because it impacts everyone.
  • Going to talks you don't understand is a great way to learn and it's also important
• Don't come into this cold, read up on their work on google scholar a bit to get an idea of what they're into
• A campus visit is like a marathon. Campus visits are grueling.
  • Be considerate of the candiates, they are humans and they probably need things like coffee, the bathroom whatever
  • Personal things are off limits for conversation
• Pretty dramatic difference applying before your dissertation is complete.

We may have a debriefing session after them?