Career Resources

Below I have compiled a list of questions (that I can remember) that I got when I was interviewing for tenure-track positions in 2022-2023. I hope this can be useful for someone. I will just mention that my experience was in materials science departments as well as physics departments and I interviewed in four different countries. Finally, I only made five applications in total so my experience is very limited. If you're interviewing, good luck!

DEI/Teaching/Mentoring

• What experience do you have mentoring students from diverse backgrounds?

• What is your plan for promoting inclusion in your group?

• What strategies will you use for hiring diverse team members?

• What is your ideal group size and how do you plan to reach it?

• As an instructor, what action would you take if you witness microaggressions in your classroom?

• What will you do to engage students who have to take your class but are not interested in the content?

• If you were free to develop a new class what would it be?

• How would you deal with a situation where two of your students are arguing over who will be first author on a paper?

• How do you plan to organise supervision of your students and postdocs?

• What will your first graduate student work on? What is plan B if that does not succeed?

Research Support

• What infrastructure do you need in order to succeed?

• How much will you need to budget to start your lab?

• What are the main funding sources you will look into?

• When will you submit your NSF Career/ERC StG and what will you put in it?

Research itself

• Can you define your field? [Note: for me this question called for defining quantum materials]

• What is the most important challenge in your field?

• Who are your main competitors in your field and how are you doing to differentiate yourself from them?

• How will you differentiate yourself from your previous advisors?

• What would you like to be known for in ten years time?

• How would you describe innovation in your field?

• Beyond your group, how would you strengthen your field in our University?

• What collaborations would you pursue in our department?

• Why do you think you are a good fit for our department?

• How closely would you work with theorists?

Other

• How well do you think you would fit in with our culture? [Note: This was a country I haven't lived in]

• What would be the hardest part about moving here?

• Why did you apply here and not a higher ranked University? 

• Which of your achievements are you most proud of?