Interviewee reduced to a slug

This is me after my promotion interview. A slug.

I find it typical that in academia you have to write your own promotion application, which requires serious work (at least a day of writing). It's as much effort as applying for another job. The interview is an hour of slimy goodness out of which you emerge as a slug. And then you have to wait the rest of the summer to find out if you were successful. Having been interviewed, I now realise my research area is worthless and that I am simultaneously too ambitious and not ambitious enough. Clearly I am lucky to have been employed by them as a lecturer in the first place. Starting proceedings with the question "Can you explain why your research area of "softer than soft computing" has any merit?"  kind of put me off. And the panel stared blankly when I told then about the computational crafts project. Just as well I didn't tell them about plants with personalities. (Remind me to tell you about them sometime. Very cool.)

Comments

[Nicole]

Ah, buggrit. You're excellent, amazing, creative, with fascinating research, and your brilliance shall be recognised.

So there. :-)

[Heather]

Here, here...I'd be interested to find out what the gender balance of the interviewing panel was...

[Heather]

Of course I mean

Hear, hear...

Its been a long year.

[Judy Robertson]

Thanks, Nicole. Funny you should say that, Heather: three middle aged men on the interview panel. All scientists or engineers, despite the fact they could presumably have got a "softer than soft" person from languages or psychology on the panel if they were worried about it. I must say I did wonder if they would have asked the same question of my male colleague who does the same thing.

[Heather]

Hmmm, depending on how things pan out you might have a good case for appeal. It was an eye opener for me here when my (female) boss insisted that I found some male collegues to join an interview panel to ensure it was balanced when we were hiring. It made me realise that all the interviews I had at HW were all male panels...

But hopefully they will see sense and you won't need to appeal :)