This assignment offers you a chance to learn more about departmental faculty members who can help you accomplish your personal and professional goals. The conversation should be relaxed and pleasant; it’s not an exam. At the same time you must be prepared, which means more than showing up and saying, "So… you're a professor, huh? Uh, so, what's that all about?" When doing your homework - preparing for an interview - you might start by learning more about the professor. One place to start is our department website:

http://www.sjsu.edu/comm/

Go there and select "About Us" from the list of options at the top. From there, select "Faculty" from the list of options on the left. The resulting list offers basic contact information and, sometimes, faculty webpages. Now these webpages are in various states of development. Some offer less than barebones information; other are quite detailed. Faculty webpages can be a good place to learn about potential interview subjects.

You might also search faculty publications at the following site:

http://publications.sjsu.edu/

Learning about what your faculty members are writing is a good way to get some insight into their interests, from which you can develop some potential interview questions. Again, the faculty publications option is a good place to start, but it's not perfect. Even my own publication list (http://www.sjsu.edu/people/andrew.wood/publications/) is incomplete. Still, these two resources offer useful places to start.

Want more options?

You might ask colleagues who have also taken courses with your potential interview subject. These folks can provide information [which may or may not be correct] on a particular faculty member, background that might help you craft questions.

The goal, of course, is to ask relevant questions about a faculty member that help you (a) gain insight into that person and (b) allow you to learn things that may help you personally or professionally.

Taking all this into consideration, let's compare a bad interview question and a good interview question.

Bad question: "Where did you go to college?"

This question is bad because it indicates that you didn't do your homework before the interview. You don't need an interview to find this out - heck, our SJSU catalog outlines the educational backgrounds for SJSU profs - and you won't really learn much of importance from a purely fact-based question anyway.

A good question is something like this:

"I read that you finished your doctorate at Ohio University. What led you to California from the Midwest?

or

"Checking out faculty publications, I see that you wrote a book on world's fairs. How did you choose that topic?"

See?

These types of question are good because they show how you've done some basic homework before the interview, demonstrating that you respect the professor's time. Ideally, of course, your questions should stem from your actual interests. Thus you may not care about a faculty member's publication record. Your obligation then is to find things that do interest you (items which are also relevant to the professor).

While I don't want to script out your interview - really, the point is for you to enjoy a conversation about things that interest both you and your chosen professor - I'm happy to recommend a handful of other potential questions:

1. Why did you choose to become a professor?

2. What is your teaching philosophy?

3. How did you choose your research interest?

4. What advice do you have for someone who's interested in becoming a professor?

5. If you could go back into time, what advice would you give yourself as a college student - knowing what you know now?

Well, I hope that this note offers some insight into the Get To Know a Faculty Member activity.

Of course let me also take this moment to remind you of other essential guidelines:

• Offer plenty of advance notice of your interview request.

• Work around your chosen professor’s office hours.

• Arrive promptly at the designated time.

• Send a thank-you note after the interview.

Finally, keep in mind that some faculty members are not available for this activity. Free free to ask, but have a back-up plan, just in case.

Questions? Concerns? Please let me know.