Academic Job Search: Be prepared.

How much time do you get to prepare?  The delay between being asked for an interview and the interview date:
Range: 6 to 84 days
Average: 24 (+/- 22) days
Median: 16 days.

You’ll have plenty of time to freak out.  But usually not really enough time to prepare well if you don’t have good starting materials.  Delays that spanned the last two weeks of December are in gray.  Once a committee decided they were interested, they wanted me on campus as soon as possible.  The places with longer delays wanted the interval to be shorter, but earlier dates weren’t possible either due to my schedule or key faculty availability on their end.

Sample preparation and data collection in Materials and Methods.