Maryland Institute College of Art

Helen Armstrong just got back from the CAA conference, a professional conference for college-level educators in studio art and art history. Some schools who are hiring new faculty conduct interviews at CAA. Most interviews are set up in advance, but there is some spontaneous networking as well. Here are Helen’s notes:

• The orientation was useful but not necessary. This happens the night before the official conference starts.
• Some schools don’t have tables in the interview hall. They just do the hotel room interviews
• A number of schools had tables this year and most were open to application packets (even though the conference materials said meetings should be set up ahead of time).
• Some schools were there that did not appear on the CAA website because the schools who are not CAA members can also use the hall for interviewing.
• This may be common sense but each interview might involve 2-5 people, so you need to bring enough materials so that each person has at least a resume for each interview. I ran out of materials. I would have dropped off more packets if I had had them.
• I wasn’t able to attend any of the sessions because my interviews fell at the same time as the most interesting ones. So read the conference schedule ahead of time to schedule interviews around sessions as much as possible.