8.5.4 Find out more about the university

Most junior applicants are too narrowly focused on the job in question and their future department or school. However, showing you know more about the university as a whole indicates you have made a real effort. It also signals that you are potential leadership material as you are able to take a broader perspective.

Find out what is the university well-known for. You can search for the Universitys most cited publications using a general search. Make sure though that to double-check that the university in question is listed as an affiliation of the author, not in the references or any other part of the publication (see Section 5.3.5 for more details).

Having found out what your panel members are working on, try to establish whether there is anyone else in the university working on similar topics. You can do this in the general search function by including the topic and the university in question. Your interview panel will be mightily impressed if you have identified another academic in their university that shares their research interests, especially if they werent even aware of him/her.

You could even try to link this to a more general discussion on multi-disciplinarity and your own views on this. Although some universities might equate multidisciplinary research with a lack of depth, many universities acknowledge these days that big world problems can only be solved with multidisciplinary research.