Friday 28th September 2012 - Interviews as examinations

I have been interviewed three times in the last few days.  All the occasions were somewhat more straightforward than the experience I recounted in my second most recent blog dealing with an interview in Romania.  The first interview was broadcast live on Radio Sheffield and involved me and Cliff Allan (Deputy VC at Sheffield Hallam) answering questions from Rony Robinson, including at least one that he described as a 'googly', intended to put me on the spot.  The second was a telephone interview with a market researcher seeking to gain my views on another university - a 40 minute long discussion.  The third, of about an hour, was a face to face interview with a researcher seeking to evaluate a particular project that the University has been involved with for some time.

Interviews, particularly when live, are a little like exams.  There's little time to think.  It's important to structure the answer very quickly, to be coherent, and to retain the bigger picture and not get bogged down in anecdotal detail.  Some people find being interviewed an ordeal: fortunately I don't.  In fact I find them very productive sessions that often result in me rationalising a particular position or point in a way that I ultimately feel has been convincing where I have not produced such an articulation before.  The questions from a good interviewer also point in directions that one may not have thought of and prompt new thinking.

Teaching is also like that.  It challenges me to find ways of expressing complex ideas to students. But what often takes my thinking further is actually the questions they then raise - on issues that I haven't got fully covered, and from viewpoints I haven't taken into account.  I used to run the training sessions on conference presentations and 'getting published' for new research students in the Faculty of Social Sciences.  One of the pieces of advice I always gave students before their first conference presentation was that the question session would be more valuable to them than the giving of the paper. It would challenge their thinking and put them on the spot on key issues - they should look forward to it as the bit that would add greatest value to their whole research agenda.

So I believe that being questioned about one's work and ideas is inherently a good thing.  And the better the questioning the richer the value of the session.  On Tuesday of next week I am lecturing in London to a group of senior executives from around the world with the expectation that I will sum up the major issues in contemporary international migration in 45 minutes. The audience will probably number about 70, from around 50 different countries.  I am sure the question and answer session after the lecture will be adrenalin-producing, but also very stimulating. 

Wednesday 19th September 2012 - My father's education and what it means to me

Like many of my generation, I was the first in my family to go to university.  Neither my parents, not my grandparents, nor any of my older cousins had so much as applied to enter a university - most had not stayed in education beyond the standard school leaving age (13, 14 or 15 at that time).

My father had actually passed the entrance exam for his local grammar school, and had been successful in obtaining his School Certificate in 1937 - involving passing English, Maths, Science, Geography and German to get what will soon (it seems) be re-created as the English Bacc.  A tiny proportion of 16 year olds in his day achieved such a qualification.  There was some consideration that my father might go on to study for the Higher School Certificate (the equivalent of A levels).  But the Head Teacher asked to see my grandfather - a printer's machine minder who spent his life on night shifts - and told him that there was little point in my father continuing at school since my grandfather had no business or profession to hand on to his son and more education in the small town they lived in would be a waste of time: better to get my father into a job as soon as possible.  My father started off as a general trainee in the post office, followed his own father into printing and then publishing, and ended his career as a personnel officer in the BBC.

My father was a very intelligent and able man whose potential was partly unfulfilled as a result of that decision about his future when he was 16 - an observation I made when I gave the eulogy at his funeral in 1998. He was keen on poetry, could complete the Guardian crossword each day during his 25 minute train journey to work in central London, loved using logarithms to solve 'big sums', and in his 70s researched a dissertation on the history of the local almshouses in order to 'pass' a test to become a local heritage guide.  Yet somehow he always lacked the confidence that could have been his had he had the chance to pursue his education further - to the age of 18 or (as I believe he could have done) beyond.

This week we have been welcoming our new undergraduate students.  Their opportunities are so much greater now than they were in my father's day, or even than they were in the early post-Robbins expansion period when I was singled out by my school as someone with the potential to go further (the reverse of what happened to my father).  But I know that there are still some young people whose potential remains unexplored and who are not encouraged to think of university as a reasonable goal, or as a path to a wider and more fulfilling life.  Many of my generation have, or had, fathers or mothers whose lives could have been different if they had not been blocked by the discouraging of educational ambition.  And we as a university must do everything we can to prevent that happening for today's school leavers.

Every year during Intro Week I wear one of my father's favourite ties.  It's a small gesture, but something of him finally gets into a university by my doing so.

Friday 14th September 2012 - The most challenging interview of my life - in Romanian

Things sometimes go wrong, and we have to deal with them on the spur of the moment. 

I have been through two sessions of 'media training' and have accumulated quite a bit of experience of newspaper, television and radio interviews.  But the scenario I faced yesterday was one I had not been trained for.   I was reminded of two recent events involving others - one when John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister in the Labour government of the time, asked for the tape to be stopped during an interview so he could start his answer again, only to be remined  that the interview was live.  The other event I recall was when BBC Television Centre took a man who was there for an interview for a low grade post and whisked him into the studio for a live discussion of a technical aspect of IT. 

I was in Bucharest, Romania, for the launch of a joint Masters programme being offered by the University of Sheffield (via our International Faculty) and a Romanian partner university.  The launch had been at the British Embassy, and we had been given a very privileged send off by the Ambassador and his senior team.  Part of the publicity that had been lined up was a live panel interview on one of the main Romanian TV News channels at prime time - 1800 hours in the evening.

Media training says that one should always ask the interviewer before the start as to the line of questioning he or she is likely to develop. There was no chance for that, since the programme was already running when we arrived at the studio so we only met the host of the programme when we were shown onto the set while footage of the morning's launch at the British Embassy was being shown.

I was told that any questions to me would be given in English and that my answers would be simultaneously translated behind the scenes to be broadcast in Romanian as a voiceover.  I was also provided with an earpiece into which an English translation of the discussion with my two fellow interviewees, both Romanian, would be piped.  In that way I could follow the course of the discussion.

Our glamorous interviewer (the host and lead personality on her own daily news show) asked me a first question in English and I replied.  So far so good.  She then turned to my fellow interviewees and switched to Romanian.  I waited for the English translation through my earpiece - but simply heard an amplified version of the Romanian discussion.  I quickly realised that I was not going to get an English version at all.

Media training also says that in group interviews one should look interested when colleagues are speaking, and try to reinforce their message through body language.  So I turned my attention to that and sought to look engaged.

The second question to me, again in English, was a 'stand alone' question that I was able to deal with.  But I then realised that the discussion with my colleagues was moving into a phase where they were being expected to comment on each other's answers and add further material.  The inevitable happened: turning to me the interviewer said in English: "could you give me two sentences to add to what your colleageus have said."

Fortunately I do have a passable knowledge of Italian, as well as reasonable French, and although this was my first visit to Romania I had found that it was possible to at least understand what was being said, if not the detail.  Romanian is closest to Italian within the family of Romance languages.  By concentrating hard I had grasped the nature of the responses of my two colleagues, and was able quickly to think of two international dimensions that they had (I believed) not covered, so I gave my answer using those two points. 

That was it and we were quickly ushered out of the studio ready for the next item.  One of my Romanian colleagues immediately said that the simultaneous translation for me must have been incredibly quick since I was able to answer the final question without waiting for the full tenor of the previous answers to be provided for me. It was only then that I was able to let the others know that there had been no simultaneous translation at all piped into my earpiece.

I will probably never know how effective the interview as a whole was.  But sometime next week the TV programme should be published on the web and I will look keenly at it to see what expression crossed my face when it dawned on me what was happening.