It was a phone interview for Univesity of Minnesota at Morris.
Background: I grew up in near Alexandria in west Central MN which less than 30 min away from the small town of Morris.
The question (asked by a student who was one of the interviewers) and my response were something along the lines of...
Q:UM Morris is in a small town that is 2-3 hrs away from any "big" cities. How would you deal with this isolation?
Q: <laughter> Sorry, but I don't exactly view Morris as that "isolated". I grew up in Alexandria and my parents still live there. So, far from this being a detractor that I would have to "deal" with, I view this as one of the benifits of your school!
Unfortunatly[*], I got a VIGRE post doc offer
and informed Morris that I was off the market before things had any chance to progres much further.
[*] Getting the VIGRE post doc offer wasn't what was unfortunate. Having to withdraw my name and take my self off the market before really hearing back from Morris (and several other really cool schools) was the unfortunate part.
When it comes to issues of timing, I think that the "endgame" of any job hunt is like this and the timeline of postdocs searches seems much earlier than tenure track searches.
So, when I contacted some of the schools that I really wanted to know about, they were too early in their search process to have any sense of how likely I was to get an offer and I was faced with the whole "a bird in hand vs two in the bush" issue.
