Because it's almost the new year and I haven't given Orin anything to make fun of for a while, I thought I'd share a recent dream I had about faculty hiring. I'm sure it means that I've been on our hiring committee for way too long if I'm dreaming about hiring over the winter break.
So in the dream, our team was hiring presumably at AALS although for some reason we were hiring by the side of an indoor heated swimming pool rather than in a suite. Okay, so I'm in Cleveland in the winter - what do you expect?
It was around 5pm and we had interviewed about 20 people already. The candidates were getting stranger and stranger ie various increasingly pronounced physical and facial tics and speech impediments (which may reflect my own state of mind and personal conduct at the end of a long day of interviewing). The candidates' respective subject matters were also getting more and more specialized eg alligator rights law, cardiac surgery law etc.
After interviewing what I thought was the last candidate, the hiring chair went back to his room. Then someone presented me with a list of 30 additional candidates who all started flooding into the swimming pool area complaining about how long they'd been waiting for an interview. I realized they had been scheduled from 5pm onwards and only two or three of us on the committee were left. The additional candidates were demanding to be rescheduled and it was our job to find a new date that would work for 30 candidates with different schedules from different cities around the country and the world. At that point I woke up (probably in a cold sweat - I can't remember).
I know the process is much more traumatic for the actual candidates than for the interviewers, but it's clearly playing on my subconscious somewhere in there...
My approach to dream interpretation involves close attention to language and listening for puns or double meanings. Pool of candidates comes to mind. Also "wading" instead of "waiting" for an interview. There's often a joke inside the dreams to accompany the record of what happened the previous day and the element of anticipation/anxiety/wish fulfillment. The joke is that this feels less like a pool and more like a "flood" of candidates. Just a guess.
Posted by: JT | December 30, 2010 at 08:24 PM
Free online dream interpretation - that's really cool, JT! I guess one could "wade" through a pile of CVs, to continue the metaphor...
Posted by: Jacqueline Lipton | December 30, 2010 at 08:33 PM
I love the idea of alligator rights law. . . . That's awesome!
Posted by: Tung Yin | December 31, 2010 at 12:38 AM
How odd -- something very much like this actually happened to me, except we ended up hiring the alligator rights person and it was all going great until she ate the senior person who did small-mammal rights.
Posted by: Eric Muller | December 31, 2010 at 10:14 AM
At least you're hiring pool side. That could be a fruitful recruiting device. Was there a wait staff (preferably in Hawaian-style resort wear) to take drink orders?
Posted by: Kim Krawiec | December 31, 2010 at 10:24 AM
If there had been a Hawaiian themed wait staff I would have been much less stressed, pina colada in hand...
Posted by: Jacqueline Lipton | December 31, 2010 at 04:59 PM