By Kimberly P. Hadaway, Pamela E. Harris, Kimberly J. Harry, Lucy Martinez, Miriam G. Norris, and Rebecca Patrias
Research collaborations in mathematics can create beautiful spaces where informal mentoring and professional guidance naturally emerge. Our group – spanning graduate students to tenured faculty – formed at a research workshop [1] to develop a unifying juggling framework for understanding Kostant’s partition function in the context of simple exceptional Lie algebras. After the workshop, we continued our collaboration through virtual meetings and a later in-person visit [2]. Over a delicious Peruvian dinner of ceviche, chaufa, and lomo saltado, our conversation turned toward preparing a team member for an upcoming academic job interview. What followed was a collective effort to brainstorm interview questions and refine strategies for answering them, which we share for all early-career academics below.
- Tell me about yourself and what attracted you to apply for this position.
Keep it relevant and have a purpose. Prepare a ready-to-go answer; this is not the moment to give them your whole life story. Incorporate specific aspects of the job description. If appropriate, discuss why the geographical location is a good fit. - Tell us about your research and what you are currently working on.
Let your elevator pitch (that short 1-2 minute description of your research) shine. If it applies, you should mention opportunities where you have mentored undergraduate and graduate students in research. - What are the big remaining open problems in your research area?
The purpose of this question is to gauge what you know about the broader research area in which you work. This gives you the opportunity to distill those major open problems in your field in a way that is recognizable to experts and understandable to nonexperts. If the environment allows, draw pictures or work through examples to help the committee understand. Remember to be mindful of the length of your response. - What are you most proud of in the research work you have completed?
An ideal answer here would involve detailing a problem where 1) your initiative led to finding the problem, 2) your expertise in the area allowed you to arrive at a creative solution, and 3) your mathematical community was interested in or impacted by the solution to the problem. Any subset of these is also a good answer. - What courses are you interested in teaching, and what books would you use?
They are hiring a professor, and they expect you to be able to jump right in to teach courses in their department. Check their course catalog and see what courses you would like to teach. Check what books they use and tell them whether those align with what you have used or whether there might be a new book on the market that could be an open education resource you would like to try. - Can you detail a good/bad experience in your past teaching?
This is the opportunity to tell them about the great work you do in your teaching. You can focus on how you build community or how you help students address challenges they face in succeeding in your course. It is also an opportunity to show them how you have adapted and grown as an educator. Take time to share a place of recent growth by mentioning a past challenge and what you have done to remedy this moving forward. - How do you incorporate technology in the classroom?
This was an important question, especially in the context of the upcoming federal digital accessibility guidelines that allows universities to become more accessible [3]. As digital accessibility is also a compliance concern, being knowledgeable on the upcoming changes and ways to create digitally accessible documents is a plus for all of those interviewing for academic positions. - Can you detail your past experiences seeking and or securing external funding?
Be ready to share what upcoming funding opportunities you plan to apply to and to share your past success with securing funding if you have any. Any experience writing grant applications is important to mention, and this includes scenarios where you helped your supervisor complete an application or where you attended a workshop on relevant content. If you have not yet received grant funding, discuss what you learned from the experience and how you plan to incorporate those changes into future applications. - What are you most looking forward to doing in this role?
Tell them what most attracted you to apply for the job, even if you applied just because they had a post in your area. Find something that you are passionate about that they are already doing and tell them how you would like to be involved. If there is something you are enthusiastic about but which you did not see as an activity in their program, tell them that this would be something you would be interested in leading. - What would your colleagues say is the best part of having you on the team?
Give an example of a character trait you think defines you in collaborative environments, and it also provides a space for you to give a story that exemplifies this characteristic. The story you choose is stronger if it describes something that you do often as opposed to a one-time event. - Do you have any questions for us?
Always ask something, as it shows you are interested in their job. Examples:- I would like to apply for x grant/fellowship in the future, would I be supported/able to do so in this role (if relevant).
- Is there anything in my file that gave you pause that you could give me the opportunity to address?
- Does your department work with community partners or do outreach with local schools?
- What is your favorite thing about the department/institution/location?
- What is the timeline for the rest of the process? This question is a must if the search committee hasn’t already discussed when you should expect to hear more from them.
Experiences like this vary widely—some of us benefited from structured mentoring such as mock interviews or explicit guidance from advisors, while others encountered these kinds of conversations far less frequently. Regardless, as a community we can always benefit from sharing our advice and helping ensure that the next generation of professional mathematicians are supported Beyond the Math as they advance in their careers.
[1] Women in Noncommutative Algebra and Representation Theory 4 (WINART4), https://www.birs.ca/events/2025/5-day-workshops/25w5422
[2] Collaborate@ICERM https://icerm.brown.edu/collaborate[3] Kaitlin Garrett, New Federal Digital Accessibility Requirements: What Higher Ed Needs to Know and Do Now. url: https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/olc-insights/2025/09/federal-digital-a11y-requirements/, retrieved January 22, 2026
Kimberly P. Hadaway is a Ph.D. candidate in the Mathematics Department at Iowa State University, where she is the President of the local chapter for the Association for Women in Mathematics and a participant in the Preparing Future Faculty program.
Pamela E. Harris, a Mexican-American mathematician, currently serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research work is in algebraic combinatorics and she is a Fellow of both the American Mathematical Society and the Association for Women in Mathematics.
Kimberly J. Harry is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Northeastern State University. Her area of research is in algebraic combinatorics.
Lucy Martinez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Mathematics Department at Rutgers University, specializing in combinatorics and combinatorial probability. Her research is funded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.
Rebecca Patrias is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her research interests are in algebraic combinatorics.