Reviewing Applications

It is application season in our department – we're hiring  for three new positions (one tenure-track and two term positions), and graduate students and honours students have submitted their applications as well. So at every level, we have the extra job of evaluating people to decide whether we want to work with them. It is an exhausting process.

I am on the graduate application committee for our clinical program, and this weekend reviewed forty-five applications, rating them as excellent, good, acceptable, or unacceptable. Tomorrow I meet with the committee and we compare our ratings and decide which students are high priority for an offer, taking into consideration which faculty members are high priority to get students. I am happy to have taken graduate students each of the last two years, and have decided that it's best not to take a student this year. After reviewing all of the graduate applications, there was no one who applied to work with me who stood out as excellent, so I think this is a good decision. It also makes being on the selection committee a bit easier, because I don't have to worry about the politics of advocating for myself.

I am only minimally involved with the faculty search, attending meet and greet sessions and job talks. I went to one awkward dinner (awkward not because of the job candidate but because of a particular faculty member in attendance) at a steakhouse (looking back, I don't know why I agreed to this at all, since there was obviously nothing on the menu that a vegetarian could eat), but after that decided not to say yes to any further requests of this nature. We have had three of four job candidates come through, and the last one is next week. If we are unable to hire for all of the positions from this pool, there will be more interviews, and more awkward dinners to say no to.

The applications for the honours program are technically not due until tomorrow, though we have already been given a spreadsheet with information about the applications that have been handed in so far.

Once again, I am happy to be on the other side of all of these applications, but evaluating people based on limited information to decide whether you want to work with them for a period lasting from one year to potentially thirty years (in the case of the faculty hires) is not so easy. It seems easy to make a mistake, and although the anxiety is much lower being on the side of things, there is a sense that these decisions are something of a heavy weight. I will be glad when this is all over!