Derailing Questions

In any political situation (e.g., professorship interviews, panel discussions on TV, board room discussions in industry, etc), there are two types of derailing questions:

Open-ended Questions

Open ended questions like “What do you think about the professorship Robot Learning?” These questions need to be answered the following way:

• Restate agenda: VU Amsterdam would therefore create a professorship on the topic of robot learning.
• Highlight importance: Robot Learning is currently one of the hottest and most promising research topics. Major scientific breakthroughs and results in this field are imminent and will have major.
• My importance: I have been making major contributions to this field including the most robust robot learning algorithm that ever played air hockey.
• Gains for others: Based on my work, there will be loads of joint research funding for larger groups of colleagues, new industrial collaborations and VU Amsterdam spinoffs…

Hostile Questions

Hostile questions like “Without Stefan Schaal, you would be an irrelevant researcher, wouldn’t you?” (I actually got that question by Kai Uwe Kuehneberger at Osnabrueck) or ‘At VU Amsterdam, we do a 100 MSc theses per year - you do only 4?’

• Let the air out by acknowledging: “Stefan Schaal was a great PhD advisor and mentor, which does rub upon you!” or ‘Of course, as a postdoctoral scholar, I am not yet a professor and have different metrics.’
• Reset the situation: “However, I have been running my own lab with four PhD students and two robots independently and successfully for several years.” or ’Despite being just a postdoc, I have been allowed to supervise more theses [than the other postdocs in the lab| than typical in Germany]’
• Turn to your advantage: “I would actually bring a fully functional lab with equipment and personell along … and the current momentum would really give the new chair at U.Osnabrück a great start.” or ‘The theses that I have supervised have been published as scientific papers in ERA A+ conferences, top CS journals like PAMI and received awards.’

There are way more ways to ask hostile questions (e.g., "Aren't you too young? Too male? Too female? Too nerdy?") but if you know these two recipes, you can survive nearly all situations. BUT: You need to train these to become good at them!