What to write at "Activité en matière d'administration et autres responsabilités" while applying for 'qualification' for MCF position in France

Question

I'm applying for an MCF (Maître des Conférences) position in France in math, where my PhD is from the US. MCF's are equivalently to tenured assistant professor in France. For interested readers, you can also refer to another earlier question of mine that could give you a glimpse into the French academic system.

Now, before applying for MCF, an important and required step is to pass the qualification process, which is where they go through your research and CV to make sure you're indeed eligible for the MCF.

Now, in the qualification application process (see the attached image), I see that there's a place where I'm supposed to fill up my administrative responsibilities - right where it says "Activité en matière d'administration et autres responsabilités".

This is where I'm getting a bit concerned. I think the only distantly relevant things I've done are the following:

*(1) I've strictly informally reviewed the math part of a paper on behalf of one of my former postdoc advisors, but nothing was official. I even forgot the name of the paper but can look it up.

(2) I gave informal coaching to some aspiring data scientists on the mistakes people make while switching from theoretical machine learning to industrial data scientist position, but it was all informal, as there's no proof that this ever happened - nowhere on internet is a trace of that event.*

I'm just not sure if this will be valid at all, or this will be enough? Are they going to fact check this part to see if I really did this type of admin tasks? It's not my intention to lie, but it's a required place to fill in, and I'm in a dilemma as to what to write here exactly, given my lack of experience? How strongly my application for qualification going to be judged based on this part alone?

Answer 1

First, if you have done nothing relevant, then it is fine to leave the field blank (or rather, write something like "néant" to make explicit that you left the field blank on purpose).

"Administrative and other duties" covers a lot of things. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Organizational duties: a conference, a seminar, a workshop...
• Committee duties: if you were a member of some university/department committee that sits regularly.
• Editorial duties: being part of an editorial board, being asked to referee papers.
• Management duties: being a department's (co)chair/cochair, or (co)director of some lab, or rector of some university, etc.

You will have to see what things from your CV apply. At your stage of the career - applying for qualification to MCF - it's normal not to have much to write here. Bear in mind that the process for people asking to be qualified for a senior position (professor) is the same, and there would typically be much more to write in that box.

As for your specific items:

1. Refereeing a paper for a journal can be considered as an "other duty". But honestly, it's part of the job and expected from everyone. It doesn't count for much, but it avoids leaving the field completely blank, I guess.
2. That sounds more like a pedagogical duty. But was this something organized, with scheduled sessions and everything? Or did you just have a chat with aspiring scientists in a corridor somewhere? In the first case, I would consider listing it under "pedagogical duties" along with your other duties. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother.

Finally, I would like to note that for the qualification for an MCF position, this box is not important. Only very junior people apply for that, and they typically have little to write there. What matters much more is 1 that you have a PhD in the correct discipline, 2 that you have demonstrated a little ability to teach. Having had administrative duties is nice, I guess, but not a discriminating criterion. I see that you are working in a mathematical field. The qualification rate in the group "Math and CS" is over 70%. People who don't get the qualification are those who don't have a PhD, or don't have a PhD in math/CS and haven't proved that they can actually research and teach math/CS. (And should have applied for the qualification in another section.)