Interviewing to be a professor
academia nlp linguistics by Vagrant GautamI did not get it, but here are my materials for my first faculty job application, long-list interview, and campus visit.
I recently interviewed for a (tenure-track assistant) professor position in computational linguistics—in Vancouver, even![1]—and although I didn't get the job, this has really been the professional highlight of my year so far. Briefly, the timeline was:
- November 2024: Submitted application materials
- December 2024: Got long-listed
- January 2025: Had a 30-minute, structured Zoom interview with 6 professors; got short-listed for an in-person campus visit
- February 2025: Got flown out for a 2-day campus visit (including meetings with undergraduate and graduate students, curriculum committees, 2 lunch interviews, a dinner interview, and 2 talks - a research-focused colloquium talk and a pedagogy talk/discussion)
- March 2025: Rejected (womp womp)
Since I benefited greatly from others generously sharing their materials with me (and giving me feedback on mine), I am sharing all the materials I applied and interviewed with[2], with the institution redacted:
- Cover letter (2 pages)
- Research statement (4 pages + references)
- Teaching statement (3 pages)
- Curriculum vitae (as of 2024)
- Research talk slides (40-45 mins talk + 15 mins Q&A)
- Pedagogy talk slides (15 mins talk + 45 mins discussion)
I also previously posted this list of interview questions for faculty jobs that I compiled and used to organize my thoughts before the long-list interview and the campus visit, with the hope that it's helpful.
The absolute best part of the whole experience was getting to have good old-fashioned nerdy fun: talking phonology with a phonologist, doing literal back-of-the-napkin syntax, getting to introduce a student to crip linguistics, learning about effort-based grading, etc. It was particularly gratifying to do a job talk in Vancouver, in front of academics I've admired for years and people I care about. Getting shortlisted has totally upstaged my PhD defense for this reason, because it likely won't be timezone-friendly for Vancouverites 9 hours behind German time.
Beyond the fun it was also really useful to have the experience for potential future applications, and putting materials together early helped me clarify the overarching story connecting all my research and see which parts of my application were weakest. Once I'm done with my thesis and start my postdoc in a few months, I'll have a chance to apply all that to my research program going forward!
Home! Here's a list of things to do in Vancouver if you ever visit. ↩︎
Note that I applied at the end of 2024, so the application materials reflect my work / CV at that point in time and are already outdated. ↩︎
- Previous post: Faculty job interview questions
- Back to the archive