For example, if you are asked over lunch what it is about [a-large-coastal-metropolitan-area-that-is-not-my-current-hometown] that makes it particularly interesting to you or possibly a good place for you to do your research, and you answer, “have you SEEN the women in this city? I’d be an idiot not to try to move here while I’m still young!”…well, then, people will bring this up in discussions (and it’s the folks who try to connect the comment to your CV who will have the biggest smirks on their faces).

Political psychologists say that when voting, we decide who we like and then find justifications for why they are a better candidate (even if we don’t realize we are doing this). I think this happens in academic hiring too. Chances are in a pool of 3 or 4 interviewees there will be one who is out of the question and then a couple who are equally promising, if in different ways. Connecting with indididuals can help you stand out and showing interest in their work, teaching, activism, whatever… can do that.

I see this more clearly from the other side of the desk (having now been through 5 searches) than I did as a candidate.

By the way, if there is still interest in doing the weekly grad-school myth-dispelling sessions on scatterplot, how about calling it “Line of Best Fit.” Kind of cheezy, but I think that it works.

Mike, you seem to be doing a great job with taking advantage of professionalization opportunities, good for you!

You bring up several very good points, relevant from various perspectives.

1. It is not a good message when grad students don’t show up to meetings with visitors. If this is with a job candidate, especially one who tends to work with students, the person will want to know about them. While it is hard to argue that any one factor will make or break a deal, seeing apathetic grad students can be a considerable turn-off.

2. Any savvy visitor uses the opportunity to meet with grad students as an opportunity to learn about the up-and-coming young scholars in the field.

3. In addition to the benefit coming from #2 to grad students, as you note, grad students can learn quite a bit from such meetings. If it’s not a savvy visitor (as per the type mentioned in the above post) then grad students can learn about what not to do!

Note also that in addition to any specific job that may be on the table, there will be other future interactions with colleagues (and the students will be colleagues in not too long as well) that also suggest taking advantage of opportunities to get to know people.

For my own part, I have found meeting with presenters, speakers and job candidates to be one of the best things that I have done over my career in grad school. I even went to one my first year to a grad student meeting with senior scholar who I knew very little about his work and his work was not in any way related to mine. Over the course of the conversation, he helped me think about how network analysis (that was his specialty) could actually be related to what I was interested in studying. Other times, I have taken the opportunity to find out how other departments work, ask productive scholars how they are so productive (yes, I asked it exactly like that) and advice for the job market for myself. While I fully trust the faculty in my department, we all know that departments have their own quirks and idiosyncrasies, so it is good to get an outside perspective.

What is surprising is that very few grad students go to these “meet-and-greet” sessions. I don’t know if this is unique to my department or whether students are, by default, scheduled in the least convenient time slot (because the more convenient ones are taken by the one-on-one meetings with faculty). In line with Colonel Density’s comments, I wonder what kind of message that sends to a presenter (whether officially giving a job talk or not) about a department. And, like the case of the presenters, it really costs nothing to get huge potential benefits for grad students.