Brainstorming for Fun and Profit

[livingdeb]

I still don't have a cover letter. But I did get the idea to brainstorm reasons why I think I can do the job, without worrying if they are stupid reasons or if they are reasons that could convince others. I came up with 32 reasons on the way home from work, including this one: I'm the type of person who takes vacation time to go to education-related conferences. And I am good friends with a highly experienced statistician who likes to teach people how to do statistics. R. says not to put the second one in a cover letter (though I could mention it in an interview). I should say I have a background in math and some experience with statistics and imply that I already can do whatever is needed. At least one of his co-workers told him you should always act like you can do 40% more than you really can.

I guess that once you imply you can already do stuff, you are motivated to quickly learn it on the job. To me it feels too much like lying, which sounds like a bad idea. Even if it's a good idea for some people, it's probably not a good one for me because it's totally not my style. Still, he's probably right that saying I know someone else who knows how to do relevant stuff is not the best strategy.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

(sally)

I couldn’t tell whether you were kidding about this or not, so I am going to respond to your post at face value here at the risk of sounding like a clueless blowhard.

I would go farther than R. and suggest that talking to a hiring committee in an interview about a friend who is a statistician who likes teaching people about stats as though this is a qualification is not a good idea. I find it difficult to imagine the situation in which this would make you sound like a stronger candidate. In my opinion, any advantage you gain by demonstrating that you have access to this resource which will increase your likelihood of successfully doing the job is swamped by coming across as dependent on someone else, not fully up to the job in your own right, and, well, weird in not a good way. Best case scenario, this seems like a wash to me.

My recommendation, if you are concerned that it’s been so long since you’ve done analysis and perhaps you have never done program evaluation work, is that you brush up a bit on this before your interview so you at least have some familiarity. This will help your confidence as well as give you something recent to speak from. (And hiring committees generally look favorably on people who have done some research before their interview.)

For instance, I assume that you could make your way into the psychology department computer lab to take a look at the current version of SPSS. (Be glad it’s SPSS and not SAS. The learning curve on SPSS is much kinder because you can get pretty far just using the menu system. The downside, of course, is that many people never bother to learn the syntax and thus never become capable of using the program to full advantage, but this ease of use works in your favor when you first get started.) I think with a little bit of clicking around in it, it will look fairly straightforward and you’ll recognize the common regression, analysis of variance, etc., techniques from grad school. And then you can talk about familiarity with SPSS with honesty.

You could also take a look at some program evaluation resources on the web, like mentioned at http://www.theaps.org/education/promote/links.htm. I don't think you have to invest a lot of time in this, but even with a brief review, you'll get an idea of the fundamental elements of evaluation and be able to talk up in your interview the aspects where you have knowledge and experience.

Be prepared, be confident; I think you'll do fine. Good luck.

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Responding to my requests at face value is generally safe, and if it isn't, I will blame myself, so it's really always safe.

Thanks for all this excellent advice! I should hang on to my friend as a secret weapon and use your advice for getting a real clue very efficiently.