This thread had some good answers to the question. I especially like imagining Dagger Aleph's answer spoken in a sighing, wistful voice.
The one I prepared for my last job interview was "I can take criticism too hard - such that can I start nodding and agreeing even when the criticism is off base and I ought to be engaging it instead." Don't remember if I used it.
I'm currently sitting near a flyer for a Cary Tennis writing workshop. All the tearaways have been taken.
Did that work, Minivet?
I was looking over a list of suggested questions for external candidates for the position just above mine at my organization. One of the questions was, "Have you ever faced an ethical dilemma at work? How did you handle it?"
Someone helped me figure out a good one, but the one that came to mind first was, "I was told that I had to backdate documents (treatment plans and assessments) so that we could bill for the work that we had already done. I thought that this was wrong, but I did it anyway." Still sort of ashamed.
3.last:
After the operation, when that poor girl she went into a coma, Dr. Towler called me in. He told me that he'd had five difficult deliveries in a row and he was tired... and he never looked at the admittance form. And he told me to change the form. He told me to change the '1' to a '9'... or else... or else he said, he said he'd fire me. He said I'd never work again. Who were these men? Who were these men? I wanted to be a nurse!
I've gotten a lot of questions about what I struggle with as a teacher, and that's super-easy, and easy to sound like whatever you're doing, it's a lot more thought than most people have put into it.
(1) Teaching poetic meter to students from non-accentual language backgrounds. (Solution: I studied Chinese just enough to be able to talk about the difference between tonal and accentual poetry. It really helped me communicate better what accent is to a much wider range of students.)
(2) A lot of my students are adults with jobs and kids and have a million conflicts that I can't really ding them for, but they still have to stay on top of the work. (Solution: I set up wikis for my courses and assign someone every day to be responsible for taking notes. I get to see some of what they're getting out of the class, and absent students get a better, if imperfect, idea of what's happening when they're gone.)
Stuff like that. I don't have to say it in the "My problem is I'm just too devoted!" way, but it communicates that message, and that I think about problems creatively.
7: That was my answer in my interview to "what did you do in college?"
I got the job, so possibly. But the interviewers mostly asked me about my skills, interests, and experience, with only a small admixture of annoying formulaic questions.
But the interviewers mostly asked me about my skills, interests, and experience
One of the nice things about academia is that interviews are generally like this. I never had to deal with any cutesy "Fermi problems" or other HR bullshit.
No one asked me about weaknesses, but my least-pleasant job interview this year had some really annoying questions. One of them was "would you say you work on A, or on B? Because you seem to have some work that is A and some that is B." And I said "well, right, I do both." "So are you more A or more B?" "Depends what project I'm focused on at the time." "Well, but if I have to call you A or B, which one do I call you?" And so on. I was eventually asked to break down in detail what percentage of my time I spend doing what.
This was the same person who asked a question that amounted to "why did you write paper X? It's obviously wrong, because it contradicts something I believe based on minimal evidence." A few hours earlier, a different person at the same place had asked me "why did you write paper X? It's trivially correct, and everyone already knew it!"
11: Ugh. One of the reasons I'm so excited to be taking this job is it's the one time I've had any conversation with academics that didn't turn into 11.1 or 11.2. In English, everyone says they want "interdisciplinary" scholars, but just as long as everything they do can still be neatly categorized by discipline and period.
"Sometimes I can be too much of a perfectionist; yes, people are sometimes late with deadlines. No, setting fire to the building while screaming and naked isn't the best way to encourage timeliness."
"My control over my psychic powers is still maturing."
"Eleven years ago, I killed a man."
I always say my greatest weakness is the amoint of time I spent fucking around on the internet. They think I'm joking.
"I'm missing a leg you insensitive asswipe."
From Quora:
"I wake up in the morning and piss excellence, but sometimes I'm a little groggy so it hits the seat."
"Gravity. That flirty little minx."
Well, it takes me a long time to learn anything, I'm kind of a goof-off, a little stuff starts disappearing from the workplace...
In English, everyone says they want "interdisciplinary" scholars, but just as long as everything they do can still be neatly categorized by discipline and period.
Fact.
Partitionability is key to determining the information content of interdisciplinary work.
I recently found myself in what I had thought was going to be an informational interview with an individual, but turned into an interview for a secretary job at an international school. I have a PhD in the particular foreign language of that school, and don't really want to be a primary school secretary. So for the first time ever, I found myself in an interview situation where I didn't care at all about the outcome. When they asked the question about my greatest weakness, I basically took everything I knew about the problems Americans can have in a German context and turned all of them into über-German traits I have that make things difficult for me in American workplaces. I half didn't think that they'd believe me (example: "Sometimes I can be too straightforward. I can be very blunt, sometimes too blunt for a workplace relationship.") but they seemed to eat it up.
Of course, I don't know how well it actually went off, since I withdrew from consideration via email later in the day. That whole thing was weird.
13, 25: Has anybody tried to do Bayesian Early Modern English Lit, for example?
27 -- "I tend to wear small glasses, weird sandals, and get uncomfortably overapologetic whenever anyone mentions the Second World War."
...and black socks even with running shoes.
Uh oh, is this thread going to turn into a flamewar about the dangers of generalizing about a whole culture?
13: It's great that you've found a job somewhere that wasn't like that, then! I hope it goes well for you.
Maybe this would be a good tool for generating answers in German.
Boy, that sure is an expensive article when you don't access it from a university.
with a Popeye-style swipe of the arm: 90° elbow bend, fisted hand.
I love the careful detail that went into describing this maneuvre.
17 might be true, but I can't say that. I'm trying to get ready to switch jobs, and I hate all these questions so much (cover letters too) that I worry that my irritation will show through. Plus, you know, even "strengths" can be hard to talk about (as opposed to skills).
27: My current job is one I was always ambivalent about, so I felt super confident and at ease and did well enough to get hired in 2 days before I had even sent a thank-you note.
Heebie: I struggle with describing things in a manner that conveys the sense I want to get across. So I put work into seeking out like examples of the thing to be described, so that my listeners can get my meaning. For example, I did this recently with respect to the phenomenon of "crooning."
(I tease, I tease! I think the examples Heebie gives in answer to "What are your weaknesses?" are terrific.)
Maybe this would be a good tool for generating answers in German.
Yours for only €1020! ELRA members get it for half price!
8 DVDs of "die K"ochin mit dem -/#Tufenk/- -/#tu/- -/#topf/- -/#Tupfenkoch/- Tupfenkopftuch kocht Karpfen in dem Kupferkochtopf" ... the mind boggles.
It may not have been the greatest idea for OKC to dress 100% of its fans in the opposing team's colors.
Worked for the Germans at the start of the Battle of the Bulge. I suppose OKC has a better plan to capture the fuel dump.
If I ever need to drive through a tunnel of fire, I now know I should get a Toyota truck.
When Voldemort makes his rebuilt body in Goblet of Fire, I wonder that he didn't start out with a full bladder from all the liquid in the cauldron. That might explain why his face looks so contorted, even for a face without a nose.
Of course Voldemort has an 11 year gap in his CV, so he'd better have a good answer to any bullshit question from HR.
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I didn't want to put this in the bottom of the public-schools thread, so I'm posting here since this one seems to be active.
If you want to do more about US school funding than complain in blog comments, you can send comments to the US Department of Education Commission on Equity and Excellence. Their e-mail address is equitycommission@ed.gov.
The transcript from their recent hearing in Philadelphia has a number of interesting remarks, including some history on US school funding from Rep. Chaka Fattah at pp. 13-16.
If you want to give testimony in person, additional public hearings are scheduled for Dallas, Boston, Milwaukee and Jackson, MS, over the next month. Spoken testimony is limited to three minutes.
I encourage each of you to contribute.
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Fun game, though it looked like a blowout in the first half. I missed the 3rd quarter playing a few turns of Civ3. I hate Gandhi.
In one of the original drafts, when Voldemort applies for a job at Hogwarts, Dumbledore asks him what his biggest weakness is, and that's how he finds out about the horcruxes.
I suppose my greatest weakness would be my inability to convey the fullness of my contempt for those inferior individuals who manage to obtain popular approval, despite their obvious flaws of character.
"I see, yes, well, do you think that you can keep this impairment from interfering with your duties as Potions Master?"
.... I assure you, it will not.
With a steely squint and a slow nod, "Cocaine, yes, definitely cocaine".
In one of the Civs I won a nuclear war with Gandhi. In my defense, he started it.
I did once say in an interview that my greatest weakness was robbing banks, but I was trying to do less of it. However, it was an internal vacancy and I knew the interviewer pretty well. We had to get the HR person a glass of water.
I don't think I have ever been asked this, but I think the best answer would probably be "Whaddya got?"
52 is funny and would probably work for me in an internal position at my current place, but I want out.
It was kind of a serious question, though I do appreciate the Mineshaft's humor.
I once found a list from around 7 or 8 years ago of questions and answers for management consulting interviews. There was a question asking what famous person the interview admired. For whatever reason Nelson Mandela was described as a safe name. I sort of doubt that he would have been considered "safe" in the early 80's.
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Here's one fer ya, Yggles linking to someone about DSK
I was so annoyed at this executive-class woman's gratitude and joy at being liberated and empowered by a "nothing to lose" hotel maid that I wrote a comment that needed to be deleted. For those who get around, this can be connected to my comments over at Crooked Timber about the utter waste of time it is for decent people to help these bourgeois twits.
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49: For more than a decade I kept above my desk at work a little image of Sir Richard F. Burton with the caption, from a book review, that "[h]e was never at a loss for more than adequate ways to inform those above him of his contempt for them."
A beautiful phrase from the comments to the post linked in 55, "Hopefully Anonymous" in response to Keith M. Ellis:
"And, as I'm sure you'll retort, that's exactly why there's now a fair amount of good work being done by feminists on race and class and how sexism, racism, and classism are all deeply related."
Gentrification of the moral highground.
I love it. I fucking love it.
A beautiful phrase from the comments to the post linked in 55, "Hopefully Anonymous" in response to Keith M Ellis
"And, as I'm sure you'll retort, that's exactly why there's now a fair amount of good work being done by feminists on race and class and how sexism, racism, and classism are all deeply related."
Gentrification of the moral highground.
I love it. I fucking love it.
Keyboard glitch
Sounds like a Dr. Seuss character.
My keyboard glitch is young boys.
Reminds me of the similar interview question, about a mistake you've made or a tough situation and how you've handled it or something. My answer was from when I was a reporter. I have the feeling I've told this story before, but can't find it in the archives, so here's a short version: my newspaper had a policy against reviewing articles with their subjects before publication, which I think is pretty standard. Reviewing quotes for accuracy is as close as we could come. Well, one guy wanted badly to see the article. I told him the policy, but he badgered me to read him the article itself over the phone, and at one point said that if I did he'd buy something like $500 worth of advertising from the paper. I didn't read him the article verbatim, but I did go over it with him in more detail than I normally would just due to his persistence. The bribe should have been offensive enough for me to hang up on him cold. (And besides that, the bribe is comically stupid. It's not like reporters see any money from ad sales.)
I think that's one of the best possible answers to the "tell us about something you screwed up" style of interview questions. It's genuine mistake - I should have thought on my feet better and/or not been badgered into it, I should have told him off or hung up on him or discussed it with my boss in a more serious way than I did - but it's a weird event that no one could really have predicted in that situation, and if I didn't handle it perfectly, well, not much harm done.
But Cyrus, you have to explain how you fixed your mistake or what you did about it. Come on. Jeez.