During my more than a dozen faculty interviews, I set out to collect and organize the essential information about each university and department so that I could make an informed choice of where to join later on. Ideally, this information would also help me not torment myself with various "what ifs".
To aid myself, I came up with the following 6-dimensional framework for systematically collecting data relevant to each tenure-track job. I would write out this framework in a notepad and fill it in over the course of an interview. I was particularly grateful for it when I couldn't think of a question to ask. I'm posting the framework here in case someone else would find it useful.
1. Department and College Ecosystem
- Size: how many faculty and students are there in each unit?
- Reputation: what is the place known for? What does it pride itself on?
- Culture: how social is the place? How formal is it? How many people work remote/in-person? What is distinctive about its culture?
- Politics: how are the decisions made in the department? How often do faculty meetings occur, and what happens in them?
- Subgroups: how do people visualize the social graph of the department? What are the cliques?
- Vision: how does the leadership see the department's trajectory? What are the current aspirations and challenges?
- Cross-appointments: how hard is it to get a courtesy/non-0% appointment? (this is relevant to me since my work never seems to fit nicely into one department)
2. Funding Precursors
- Department collaborations: who in the department can I collaborate with and on what?
- College/university collaborations: what collaboration opportunities exist with other departments/institutes/centers?
- Industry collaborations: what are the local companies and labs? Which faculty have a history of industry research funding? Are there any memos of understanding (MoUs) in place?
- State-related opportunities: what funding is available at the state level? Is this an EPSCoR state? How far is DC with its agencies?
- Faculty development: what are the faculty development opportunities? How structured are they? mentoring, programs, workshops, etc
- Grant support: what does the pre/post-award support look like? What are the relevant units and what services do they provide?
3. Students
- Layout: what are the programs and populations of students? What fraction is international?
- Pipeline statistics: what are the graduation rates, years-to-graduation, and ratio of students per faculty?
- Funding costs: how much funding do I need to bring in for a graduate RA or an undergraduate? How much can TA appointments help? How common are students with fellowships?
- PhD admissions pool: how many students apply to the PhD program, how many of those get accepted, and how many of those accepted decide to join?
- PhD admissions mechanics: through what mechanisms are PhD students assigned to the faculty?
4. Research precursors
- Space: what do faculty offices look like? What do student offices look like? How is lab space assigned? What is the lab space available?
- Equipment: where do faculty keep and use their equipment? Are there shared lab spaces or high bays? Is there a special server room, a data center, or a local cluster?
- IT support: does the department or college have a dedicated IT team? What services do they provide?
- Centers: what research centers or institutes could I join? What are the benefits of joining them?
5. Teaching
- Load: what is the expected load for pre-tenure faculty? After tenure? What portion of it is graduate/undergraduate?
- Class sizes: how many students are in a typical freshman/senior/graduate class? Are there multiple sections?
- TA support: what and who determines how many TAs a class gets?
- Cross-listing: what does it take to cross-list a class across multiple programs? How is co-teaching credit distributed?
- Buyouts: what does it cost to buy out of teaching a class?
- Opportunities: what courses could I teach? Would like to teach? (Typically, the department has these questions too.)
6. Area
- Pricing: what are the house prices? What is the cost of living?
- Locations: where do the faculty tend to live? Why?
- Commute: how do the faculty tend to commute? Are there biking/busing/walking options?
- Airports: what airports are nearby? What connecting hubs are commonly used?
- Schools: what are the school districts? How do they compare?
