Day one

I think the job talk went okay. People said it was fun. Hopefully it's okay to be fun. But if they want to hire an un-fun person, maybe I don't want to work there anyway.

Also, stupid ash cloud. Two of the candidates got stranded elsewhere so there was a last minute re-organisation of the programme, and one of my interviews got moved up to yesterday, when I wasn't prepared for it yet. It was the one about teaching, and I had planned to figure out a teaching philosophy and what courses we actually offer sometime last night. Oops. Still, I think it went better than the interview of the guy before me, who I overheard telling the selection committee that students at this university kind of suck.

The other two interviews were at opposite ends of the interview spectrum. In one, the three people interviewing mainly talked to each other. About cricket. I was worried about that, but talking to the other candidates later, they all had the same experience. The other was the one organised by the PhD students and man that was intense. It was mainly hypothetical questions ("What would you do if your student turned out to be a crack addict?"), with a few "are you a real linguist?" questions thrown in for the fun of it. (Seriously, "Define [technical term] and explain the various schools of thought on that concept.")

The hiking thing kind of turned into a half hour coffee stop and ten minute brisk walk around the botanical gardens, which would have been a relief, except that I didn't know about the change of plan in advance, so still spent ages trying to find an outfit that worked for interviews, job talk and bush-walking.

It's kind of weird interacting with the other candidates. Three of them I knew already; two I didn't. Everyone is being terribly nice to each other. It's quite exhausting.

Due to the rejig of the programme, I don't have any interviews scheduled today—just the candidate dinner. Tomorrow is my final interview, and then they are scheduled to make a decision and offer in the afternoon. I have heard rumours that two of the candidates will only consider the jobs if they are offered a LOT more money than is currently available, so I guess if the offer goes to one of them, we may not know the outcome for a few days while negotiations take place. These are the two currently working in the USA, and apparently they are horrified by the cost of living here, and don't see how they could survive on the usual salary.

My kitten is purring so much she has given herself the hiccups. That is perhaps irrelevant, but I'm a bit out of practice at this blogging thing.