Research your department before the interview: find out if they prioritize research or teaching, check the campus location, and look at what courses they actually teach. One candidate learned too late that the nearest Chinese restaurant was 50 miles away.
you want to do your research ahead of time. Are they a heavy research institution? Are they heavy on teaching? Do they have multiple campuses? What is it that the department is looking for? Have they had expansion? What type of courses are they teaching? You can find a lot of this with just a little bit of research, and if you're doing a dissertation, you got really good research skills. You want to know something about the school and where it sits. I once went to an interview to a school and they started asking me, "Oh, do you hunt?" I said, "No, I don't hunt." "Well, how about fishing?" "I'm not a big fisher." "Well, how about—" And they went through 3 or 4 activities before they got one I was interested in. And I also found out that the closest Chinese restaurant was 50 miles away. And I didn't think there was anywhere in America that was 50 miles from a Chinese restaurant. So this is research I should have done ahead of time because I wouldn't have gone on the interview because it didn't match.
