So you’re ready for your big job interview after prepping for weeks for every question imaginable? Well, think again. No interview is perfect. Just consider what happened to these three academic job candidates during recent interviews:

• The beeswax candle she lit to calm her nerves during a Skype interview set fire to the syllabus on her desk.


• The hiring committee asked her to describe her life in a one-minute improvised performance, and her panicked pantomime fell flat.


• She accidentally dropped the F-bomb during a teaching demonstration.

Suddenly you’re in recovery mode, scrambling to resurrect an interview gone awry. Interview committees are more forgiving than you might think. In most cases, there’s still hope.

“Don’t just slink away in shame if you’ve blown it,” says Mary McKinney, a clinical psychologist and academic-career coach who runs a Web site called the Successful Academic. “Go overboard to re-establish your professionalism.” Although starting a fire during an interview will probably make you a memorable candidate, the most common blunders are more mundane:

1. You draw a blank on something you’ve studied for years.

“If you go blank, slowly and thoughtfully repeat the question out loud,” advises Ms. McKinney, who taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an adjunct assistant professor of clinical psychology. That will buy you time. If you’re lucky, the interviewer will elaborate on the question, giving you even more time to rack your brain for an answer.

If the brain freeze happens in front of an audience, consider turning it on them.

“It’s OK to say, ‘I’m not really sure about that,’” Ms. McKinney says. “Maybe you have some thoughts, or perhaps someone in the audience has an idea.”

2. You’ve practiced so much that you end up reciting a book.

Sometimes it’s having too much to say that will get you into trouble. And let’s face it, no one but you is likely to be excited about the anti-predator strategies of the California spiny lobster.

“The biggest problem that young academics have is the desire to be exhaustive in their answers,” says Karen L. Kelsky, who runs an academic-career consulting business and blog called The Professor Is In.“ That translates into rambling, because the answer never finishes.”

Outlining all the contradictions and citing all the footnotes is essential for a research paper, but it’s “death to an interview,” says Ms. Kelsky, a former associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Oregon.

She advises clients to come equipped with a concluding sentence they can whip out when the urge to elaborate strikes. Something like, “And I’ll stop there. Let me know if you have any questions.”

3. You get something wrong in front of a group of academics who know the material cold.

Don’t be afraid to take a deep breath and admit that you’ve made a mistake, that you were flustered when you said “Hegel” when you meant Marx. Once you admit your error, you’re less likely to fixate on it during the rest of the interview.

If you feel as if you’ve flubbed the interview, go out of your way to be considerate in the follow-up. Write thank-you notes to individual committee members, outlining specific points you hope they took away about why you’d be a great match for their college.

4. You answer the wrong question.

When the interview’s conducted by phone and foreign accents are involved, confusion often results, as Serena Love discovered when she interviewed for a job teaching archaeology at the University of Queensland, in Australia.

The head of the program pointed out that she had done “a great deal of outreach in her career.” With his accent, the American scholar heard “Korea” and said that no, she’d never worked in Korea. “Laughter erupted, and I was mortified,” she said. After she admitted her misunderstanding and the interview committee stopped laughing, “I answered the question about my outreach programs, and we moved on like nothing happened.”

5. You’re never ready for everything they throw at you.

Christine Heckman’s interview for a community-college teaching position was going smoothly, and the lesson she’d delivered had been well received. As a final note, the committee asked her to sum up her life in a one-minute improvised performance. Even though the job she was applying for was in the theater-and-speech department, and acting was second nature to her, the request caught her off- guard, and her messy mix of pantomime and text left even her confused.

“When you improvise, you’re supposed to be completely open and let it happen,” she says. “That can be a real liability in an interview if you let whatever fly out of your mouth.”

Four years later, when she applied at the same college, she created a narrative just in case they sprang the same request on her. They did, and again she wasn’t called back. Still, she says, “in an interview, I just prefer to think before I speak.”

6. It’s not always the gaffe that matters, it’s the recovery.

When her clients respond to interviews with sweaty palms and shaky legs, Ms. McLean suggests asking a physician for a beta blocker, a suggestion some might find extreme.

A graduate student in Toronto opted for a more natural remedy, lighting a candle to soothe her nerves before an interview, on Skype, for a humanities teaching job. The candidate, who asked The Chronicle not to reveal her identity because she’s still on the job market, was feeling pretty relaxed until her syllabus caught fire.

Another professor, who also asked not to be identified, accidentally swore during a teaching demonstration. She gasped as soon as the F-word slipped. The dean looked horrified, and she apologized immediately and profusely. He said she handled it well, but she didn’t get the job.

Some blunders, of course, may be impossible to recover from. Several years ago, a job candidate in microbiology at North Carolina plugged in a flash drive to begin his presentation to a room full of Ph.D. students and professors. Instead of microscopic organisms, orgasms seemed a more fitting title, as a flash of pornography filled the screen. Mortified, “he closed the window, pulled up his PowerPoint and gave his talk,” Ms. McKinney says. “I have no idea if he was coherent, or if anyone was even listening at that point.”