Personality
A couple weeks ago we were sent an email about the faculty job candidate talk which was held today. The speaker had applied for a faculty position in the Information Security track at the School.
I turned to my colleague in the lab and asked him, "Are you going to the talk by [Speaker] on the 1st of Mar? We just got the email."
"Oh its [Speaker]! I know him, that is, I met him at an an information science conference last year. Its funny, the first time I saw him I didn't realise he was an assisstant professor. I thought he was just a graduate student from the way he came and talked to me so casually."
My other colleague joined in, "Yeah, he looks and talks like a graduate student. I met him at another conference and didn't think he was very bright or accomplished. But you should check out his resume."
Another colleague pitched in, "At that last information science conference we went to, he spoke on such mundane topics like data, information, and knowledge. I mean, everyone in the information science community knows these terms."
Now my interest was piqued enough and I Googled his name and came across his website. The guy is amazing! He is 27 years old and has completed a bachelors, an MBA and a PhD at a well-known information science program. Now he is at a top information school on the East Cost and oversees two research groups. But the most amazing thing is his list of publications. Six edited/authored books, over a 100 articles in publications of the IEEE and ACM along with journals, and he also works as a consultant in industry. How does one achieve so much by age 27? And yet so down-to-earth as to mingle with graduate students at conferences. I was eager to attend his talk and meet with him.
Today he spoke as a faculty job candidate on information management in the intelligence community. My colleagues were right, he does not look or talk like a faculty member. I didn't find his research stellar, nor his presentation exciting or extraordinary. Infact, his slides were bad in every respect; full of all the errors that people make with Powerpoint. There was too much text, only text, lots of bullet points, bad visibility of text against the background, no explanatory diagrams or graphs or figures. Infact most of the text was long quotes picked from interviews or wordy definitions that he didn't read out loud nor explain.
He was also not a good presenter and stumbled through most of the presentation in a way that said that he had not prepared for the talk or did not take it seriously. He did not follow the golden rule - "tell your audience what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them". There was no structure to the presentation and no signal to let the audience know how much longer they would have to suffer. He kept telling us that he would talk about a model that he had developed but never did get to the model, even when an audience member said that they were interested in looking at the model. In short, this was not at all what I had expected of the speaker after being awed by his resume.
After the talk [Speaker] was alloted time to interact with graduate students. I took this opportunity to ask him, "So, I looked at your resume and I was amazed. You have such a long list of articles and books and you are not even two years our of your PhD. How did you do it?"
He replied "Its about collaborating with a lot of different people on different projects. I never think in terms of papers, I think in terms of projects. Out of this last project we got about 35 publications. I have also collaborated with people I met at conferences, students who emailed me about my work, other graduate students in the department etc."
I did not find his answer satisfactory because yes, being able to collaborate with different people is a great skill and may lead to more publications, but what about time and energy? I also got the feeling that he was arrogant in a way that said "I have a great job at a great university so I don't really care about his one. I'm here to see if they can offer me more money and resources. That is why I did not take my talk very seriously. I am good, I know that, so I am not really sweating this, I'm here for fun."
I don't think that is a good attitude to have because no matter how great we are, we can all benefit from learning about other people's ideas and work and that is the attitude one must have when approaching a school as a job candidate. In short, his personality did not complement his long resume and that goes to show "never judge a man by the length of his publication list".
I turned to my colleague in the lab and asked him, "Are you going to the talk by [Speaker] on the 1st of Mar? We just got the email."
"Oh its [Speaker]! I know him, that is, I met him at an an information science conference last year. Its funny, the first time I saw him I didn't realise he was an assisstant professor. I thought he was just a graduate student from the way he came and talked to me so casually."
My other colleague joined in, "Yeah, he looks and talks like a graduate student. I met him at another conference and didn't think he was very bright or accomplished. But you should check out his resume."
Another colleague pitched in, "At that last information science conference we went to, he spoke on such mundane topics like data, information, and knowledge. I mean, everyone in the information science community knows these terms."
Now my interest was piqued enough and I Googled his name and came across his website. The guy is amazing! He is 27 years old and has completed a bachelors, an MBA and a PhD at a well-known information science program. Now he is at a top information school on the East Cost and oversees two research groups. But the most amazing thing is his list of publications. Six edited/authored books, over a 100 articles in publications of the IEEE and ACM along with journals, and he also works as a consultant in industry. How does one achieve so much by age 27? And yet so down-to-earth as to mingle with graduate students at conferences. I was eager to attend his talk and meet with him.
Today he spoke as a faculty job candidate on information management in the intelligence community. My colleagues were right, he does not look or talk like a faculty member. I didn't find his research stellar, nor his presentation exciting or extraordinary. Infact, his slides were bad in every respect; full of all the errors that people make with Powerpoint. There was too much text, only text, lots of bullet points, bad visibility of text against the background, no explanatory diagrams or graphs or figures. Infact most of the text was long quotes picked from interviews or wordy definitions that he didn't read out loud nor explain.
He was also not a good presenter and stumbled through most of the presentation in a way that said that he had not prepared for the talk or did not take it seriously. He did not follow the golden rule - "tell your audience what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them". There was no structure to the presentation and no signal to let the audience know how much longer they would have to suffer. He kept telling us that he would talk about a model that he had developed but never did get to the model, even when an audience member said that they were interested in looking at the model. In short, this was not at all what I had expected of the speaker after being awed by his resume.
After the talk [Speaker] was alloted time to interact with graduate students. I took this opportunity to ask him, "So, I looked at your resume and I was amazed. You have such a long list of articles and books and you are not even two years our of your PhD. How did you do it?"
He replied "Its about collaborating with a lot of different people on different projects. I never think in terms of papers, I think in terms of projects. Out of this last project we got about 35 publications. I have also collaborated with people I met at conferences, students who emailed me about my work, other graduate students in the department etc."
I did not find his answer satisfactory because yes, being able to collaborate with different people is a great skill and may lead to more publications, but what about time and energy? I also got the feeling that he was arrogant in a way that said "I have a great job at a great university so I don't really care about his one. I'm here to see if they can offer me more money and resources. That is why I did not take my talk very seriously. I am good, I know that, so I am not really sweating this, I'm here for fun."
I don't think that is a good attitude to have because no matter how great we are, we can all benefit from learning about other people's ideas and work and that is the attitude one must have when approaching a school as a job candidate. In short, his personality did not complement his long resume and that goes to show "never judge a man by the length of his publication list".
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