Saturday, October 06, 2007

A quick note on blogging while on the job market (+ Sharp Dressed Mason)

This is a brief update to a blog entry from last year (late October for the one in question and then maybe I referred in another entry to the head of the Oxford mathematics department having read the entry before I got hired).

I found out while having dinner tonight that the hiring committee apparently had an internal discussion about that given that I mentioned a bit about how my interview went (though without any details of how the process works that wasn't already public information). It was mentioned at dinner that they certainly had never seen that before. See, I'm already changing how they do things around here! :) Playing "Freebird" at the graduation ceremony comes next...

One reason I bring this up is that when one is interviewing, it probably is a good idea to remove links from outside web pages to blogs. (This had been recommended to me the month before my interview but I hadn't gotten around to it yet. It was one of those piece of advice with which I basically agreed but wasn't going to follow anyway. I'm a pain in the ass that way sometimes. But it doesn't mean that it's not good advice...)

Oh, so I'm going to need to buy a suit (and I guess a white tie) to serve as an examiner in December for a thesis defense. (Both the person defending and the faculty have to wear this stuff for that. And I guess an academic robe on top of that... but I can borrow a robe.) I'll deal with this after my bank situation is in order. Apparently, I would be far from the first faculty member who needed to buy the clothes to do this. (The mathematicians here essentially dress like the mathematicians back home, so I think there are a fair number of them [possibly even a very large majority] who prefer to be casual. The head of the applied math group suggested jokingly that I should put this in my blog, so I'll mention it now and maybe have Makeup Party Entry: Part Deux later on when I go to buy the suit.

2 comments:

Travis said...

I think I'll have to live with my blog being visible to employers. It's widely linked enough that it'd be pretty difficult to prevent people from finding it. Hopefully the places I'm applying to won't care, or the recent lack of posting will make it seem innocuous.

Mason said...

Well, it didn't stop me from getting hired, though it very easily could have. (Of course, if I hadn't gotten hired for that reason, I doubt I would have ever found out.) The stuff I posted in relation to my trip last October was definitely innoccuous, but I think newfangled stuff tends to be viewed with suspiscion as a default. I guess there was a discussion about this by some of the internet-famous science bloggers (I remember your mentioning it, at any rate) and they seem to have some very good jobs. It's problably more an issue of not revealing state secrets and not doing anything stupid. (There's actually an interesting case over here about some 07 Oxford graduates getting fined after-the-fact over Facebook pictures they showed from the celebration of their graduation. I don't know the details and the article I read in one of the student newspapers wasn't exactly impartial.)