Interviews
Why We Ask Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How — And What Aspiring Professors Can Learn From the Answers
Every interview at Professor University begins with the same six questions. Here is why that matters — and what the answers reveal about the academic life you are working toward.
If you have ever taken a journalism class, sat through a writing workshop, or simply paid attention in a high school English course, you have encountered the six questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how. They are sometimes called the five W’s and an H. Journalists call them the foundation of every story. Detectives use them to reconstruct events. Scientists use them — often without naming them — to build hypotheses.
At Professor University, we use them to understand academic careers.
Every professor we interview is, in a sense, a solved puzzle. They started somewhere — a curious undergraduate, an anxious graduate student, a postdoc eating cereal at midnight while revising a manuscript — and they arrived somewhere else: a faculty position, a body of published work, a classroom full of students who will carry fragments of their thinking forward for decades. The six questions are how we reconstruct that journey in a way that is useful to the people still at the beginning of it.
This post explains why each question matters, what we have learned from asking it, and what the answers mean for you if you are an aspiring academic trying to figure out how to get from where you are now to where you want to be.
Who
The “who” question seems obvious. It identifies the person. But in the context of an academic career interview, it reaches much further than a name and a title.
When we ask a professor who they are, we are really asking: who were you before this? Who shaped you? Who gave you permission — or denied you permission — and how did that affect the path you took?
The answers are consistently illuminating. Many of the professors we interview did not grow up expecting to become professors. A significant number were the first in their families to pursue graduate education. Others came from academic families and experienced the particular pressure of following a path that felt predetermined rather than chosen. Some describe a single person — a high school teacher, an undergraduate mentor, a graduate advisor — whose belief in them was the decisive factor. Others describe the conspicuous absence of such a person, and how that absence shaped their determination to become the mentor they never had.
The “who” question matters for aspiring academics because the academic world is, despite its pretensions to pure meritocracy, profoundly relational. Careers are built in networks. Opportunities are created and transmitted through relationships. The single most consistent piece of advice we hear from established professors is some version of: find people who believe in your potential and work hard to deserve that belief.
This is not cynical advice. It is practical wisdom about how institutions actually function. A brilliant dissertation completed in isolation, without an advisor who will advocate for you, without colleagues who know your work, without a network that will flag opportunities when they arise, is a far weaker foundation for a career than good work done in good company.
Who you know matters. More importantly, who knows your work matters enormously.
What
The “what” question — what do you study, what do you teach, what is the contribution you are trying to make — is where academic identity lives.
For many aspiring academics, the “what” feels like it should be the easy part. You are in a PhD program. You have a dissertation topic. You know what you study. But the professors we interview consistently describe a significant gap between the “what” they thought they were pursuing when they started graduate school and the “what” that actually defined their careers.
Research interests evolve. The dissertation that consumed five years of your life may turn out to be the starting point of a career rather than its defining statement. The field you trained in may splinter or merge with adjacent fields. Methods that were cutting-edge when you were a graduate student may become standard or obsolete before you reach tenure.
What the most fulfilled professors describe is not a fixed “what” but a generative one — a set of questions that kept producing new questions, a line of inquiry that remained open rather than closing down. The academics who seem most intellectually alive in our interviews are not the ones who solved the problem they set out to solve. They are the ones who discovered, in the process of pursuing their original question, that the field was larger and stranger than they had imagined.
For aspiring academics, the practical implication is this: hold your dissertation topic seriously, but hold your research identity loosely. The “what” of your career will be shaped by what you do after the dissertation far more than by the dissertation itself. Be willing to let it evolve.
When
Timing in an academic career is partly a matter of strategy, partly a matter of circumstance, and partly a matter of luck — and experienced professors are unusually candid about the role all three have played in their trajectories.
When we ask professors about the timing of their careers — when they went on the job market, when they got their first position, when they achieved tenure, when they made pivots or took detours — the answers rarely follow the tidy timeline that graduate programs implicitly advertise. The canonical narrative (finish PhD → postdoc → tenure-track position → tenure) describes a minority of successful academic careers, and an even smaller minority of academics who entered the market in the past two decades.
What the “when” question surfaces, more than anything else, is the reality of an academic job market that has contracted significantly while the production of PhDs has not. Most people who earn PhDs and pursue faculty careers spend more time in contingent positions — postdocs, visiting appointments, lecturer roles — than they anticipated. This is not a sign of failure. It is the structural condition of contemporary academic employment.
For aspiring academics, understanding the “when” means resisting the pressure to measure yourself against a timeline that was always somewhat fictional and is now genuinely obsolete. It means planning for a longer runway between degree completion and stable employment than your program’s placement statistics may suggest. It means treating the years between graduate school and a permanent position not as a waiting room but as a phase of your career in which real professional development happens.
The professors who navigated this phase most successfully, based on our interviews, are those who used it deliberately — publishing, building networks, gaining teaching experience, and maintaining their research identity — rather than those who simply endured it.
Where
Geography shapes academic careers in ways that are rarely discussed openly before people are deep into the profession.
The academic job market is, in most fields, a national and increasingly international market. If you want a tenure-track position in your discipline, you need to be willing — or at least open — to going where the jobs are. This is straightforward in principle and genuinely difficult in practice. Partners have careers. Families have roots. People have preferences about where they want to live their lives.
The “where” question in our interviews opens up some of the most honest conversations we have. We hear from professors who turned down positions at more prestigious institutions to stay near family, and who have never regretted it. We hear from professors who made the opposite choice and carry a complicated mixture of professional satisfaction and personal cost. We hear from professors at small colleges in rural areas who describe a quality of life and a depth of connection to their students that they would not trade for anything, and from professors at research universities in major cities who thrive on the density and stimulation of those environments.
There is no universal right answer to the “where” question. But there are two mistakes aspiring academics commonly make. The first is assuming the geography will work itself out — that the right job will appear in the right place. It rarely does. The second is treating prestige as a proxy for fit, and assuming that a position at a more prestigious institution in a place you do not want to live is always the better choice.
The most consistently satisfied professors we interview are those who made deliberate choices about place — who thought carefully about what kind of environment, institution, community, and life they actually wanted, and pursued positions accordingly.
Why
The “why” question is the hardest one to answer and, in our experience, the most important.
Why do you want to be a professor? Not why did you go to graduate school, not why do you love your research topic, not why do other people think academia is a good career — but why, specifically, does the job of professor appeal to you?
The honest version of this question is uncomfortable because the answers that sound best often have the least to do with the realities of the work. People say they want to teach the next generation. They say they want to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. They say they want the freedom of intellectual inquiry. These things are true, and they are real features of the work. But they are also the features that look best on a statement of purpose and bear the least resemblance to what a significant portion of the actual job involves.
The “why” question, when we ask it of established professors, produces a more complicated and more useful picture. The professors who seem most professionally satisfied are those whose “why” was anchored in something specific and durable — a genuine love of a particular kind of problem, a specific commitment to a particular student population, a relationship with a discipline that felt less like a career choice and more like a calling. The professors who seem least satisfied are often those whose “why” was primarily relational — they wanted to be professors because their advisors were professors, because it was the next obvious step, because they did not know what else to do with a PhD.
For aspiring academics, the “why” question is worth taking seriously before you are deep enough into the path that leaving feels impossible. The academic job market is long and difficult. The years of contingent employment are genuinely hard. If your “why” cannot sustain you through multiple job cycles, through rejection letters, through watching less talented colleagues land positions faster than you, through the unglamorous administrative work that constitutes a significant fraction of most faculty jobs — then the “why” may need examination.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is an invitation to honest self-reflection, which is, after all, supposed to be one of the things that distinguishes intellectually serious people.
How
The “how” question is where abstraction meets practice, and it is where our interviews tend to be most directly useful to people who are still building their careers.
How did you get your first position? How did you develop your teaching practice? How do you manage the competing demands of research, teaching, and service? How do you maintain a research agenda while teaching a full load? How do you handle the politics of a department? How do you survive the tenure process?
The answers to “how” questions are the ones we hear most frequently requested by readers, and they are also the ones most frequently omitted from the official guidance that graduate programs provide. Programs are very good at training researchers. They are considerably less good at training people for the full job of professor, which includes an enormous amount of activity that has nothing to do with research — grading, advising, committee work, curriculum development, grant writing, collegial negotiation, and the particular emotional labor of caring about students’ intellectual and personal development.
The “how” answers we collect from professors are varied because careers are varied. But some patterns recur often enough to be worth noting:
The professors who developed strong teaching practices most quickly are almost always those who sought out feedback early and often, rather than waiting to feel ready. Teaching is a craft. It improves through iteration and honest assessment, not through natural ability alone.
The professors who maintained productive research agendas despite heavy teaching loads almost universally describe protecting writing time with unusual discipline — treating it as a non-negotiable appointment, not as something to be fit in around everything else.
The professors who navigated departmental politics most successfully are those who invested in relationships across their departments before they needed anything from those relationships — who showed up, contributed, and built goodwill in ordinary times rather than only appearing when something was at stake.
And the professors who survived the tenure process most intact are those who understood, early, what their specific institution valued and built their case accordingly — rather than pursuing a generic version of academic excellence and hoping it would be sufficient.
What This Means for You
If you are an aspiring academic — an undergraduate considering graduate school, a graduate student trying to imagine what comes next, a postdoc or lecturer building toward a permanent position — the six questions are not just a framework for interviews. They are a framework for thinking about your own career.
Who are you building relationships with, and who knows your work?
What is the line of inquiry that genuinely animates you, and are you pursuing it with enough flexibility to let it evolve?
When do you need to make key decisions, and are you planning for a realistic timeline rather than an idealized one?
Where do you actually want to live and work, and are your job search strategies aligned with that?
Why do you want this particular career, and is that “why” durable enough to carry you through the difficult stretches?
How are you developing the full range of skills the job requires, not just the research skills your program emphasizes?
The professors whose interviews appear on this site have navigated all of these questions, in their own ways, under their own circumstances. None of them had a perfect map. Most of them took detours. Many of them arrived somewhere different from where they had planned, and found it was better than what they had imagined.
What they share, almost without exception, is that they paid attention along the way — to what they were learning, to what the work was asking of them, and to what they actually wanted their professional lives to look like.
That quality of attention is something you can practice right now, wherever you are in your journey. The six questions are a good place to start.
Every professor has a story that could change someone’s life — and right now, thousands of aspiring academics are searching for exactly yours. At Professor University, we sit down with faculty across every discipline, institution type, and career stage to capture the honest, unfiltered account of what it actually takes to build a life in academia: the job market years, the tenure process, the teaching breakthroughs, the detours that turned out to be the point.
Imagine your hard-won experience — the things nobody told you, the lessons you learned the difficult way — reaching a graduate student at the exact moment they need to hear them most.
Visit www.university.contact today and submit your interview request; it takes a few minutes, and the conversation you start could be the one that shapes the next generation of scholars.
Professor University publishes interviews with professors across disciplines and institution types. If you are a professor interested in sharing your story, visit our interview request page.