In your future careers, it is highly likely that you will be part of teams evaluating prospective employees, to help managers (or because you are a manager) decide who to hire.
<File name> <Your Name> <Date Created> <Name or Names of Essay Subjects>Over the course of the next couple weeks, our class will have potential new faculty members visit the class, in order to give public, technical talks to the campus community (and our class). Giving educational, public lectures is an important part of the duties of a professor, so candidates for a job as a professor must demonstrate their abilities as part of the hiring interview process.
For Assignment 3, you will write an essay evaluating the candidates. You may write two essays that each discuss one candidate in some detail (two essays, two candidates discussed). Or you may write one (longer) essay, which compares and contrasts two candidates. (Or you could write an essay that compares and constrasts all three candidates!)
The goal of your essays is to assist in the hiring decision process. You will do this by:
If you choose to focus an essay on just one speaker, you will discuss the above. If you choose to compare two speakers, you will compare and contrast the above.
50% or more of the 'technical depth' part of your Assignment 3 grade is based on your clear and complete summary of the candidate's talk.
Professional Behavior: This a professional talk, given in what is, for the job candidate, a high-pressure situation. Please be polite. This means, most especially, do not photograph the job candidate's slides. Those slides are the candidates' intellectual property and you have no legal right to copy them.
The talk will not be audio recorded, for the same reason. The potential professor is our guest.
General advice (from Ray Zarling): In the essays for this class I will be looking primarily for interesting (and correct!) content, presented in a clearly structured and organized way. I appreciate interesting use of language and style, but those are secondary to having something to say and saying it clearly, compellingly, and concisely. Length for its own sake, and its cousin wordiness, are negatives in this class and in scientific writing in general.
Submitting Assignment 3: Submit to Canvas Assignment via class Canvas site.
Hint: If your essay is less than two pages, it is likely your summary of the speaker's talk is too shallow, or your consideration of the speaker's strengths and weaknesses needs more thought.
Last edited Apr 1, 2023