Thursday, June 19, 2008

Job Interview Prep

I came home from work today and slept for about an hour, I was so exhausted I felt nauseous. I am so glad that my interview tomorrow is over the phone and not until 10:30am.

I've been prepping for my job interview tomorrow for a couple of hours and I've come to conclude that I really don't want this job. As a matter of fact, I'm no longer quite sure why I applied other than my angst about not applying for anything during long periods of time. One of my main criteria for a non-academic research position is that I can stay active in ways that would allow me to return to academia if I so choose. It seems that this job would not entail producing peer-reviewed publication, presentations at national conferences that would allow me to interact with academics nor does it allow any room for the person in this position to put forth some of their own ideas. From what I've read so far they want a kick ass statistician and public speaker to analyze their data and present their results to the public. Um.. yeah, this is so not me.

I am going to go through the interview, try to keep an open mind in case I'm getting some weirdly skewed picture of this job and try to seem very enthusiastic. After all, even if I don't want them, I want them to want me. :) If the job does turn out to be what I picture right now then I will probably turn down the in-person interview if they offer me one.

Still no word from job interview #1 place, which is starting to get on my nerves. Even if they haven't made any decisions, they could at least respond to my email saying I have questions about the reports they sent me. After all when they sent me the damn million page reports they said "let us know if you have any questions".

3 comments:

Queenie. . . said...

Good luck with the job interview tomorrow. I can tell you are deep in job-hunting stress. Sometimes it helps to just go in there totally confident, and not worry about whether it's the right position. I currently have my dream job, and could have never known going in (and didn't) that I was going to love it this much. Sometimes, it's just a leap of faith. You never really know until you get there. Good luck!

DC said...

Good luck tomorrow! Worst case scenario: you get to practice your interview skills. :)

AnotherSocialScientist said...

A month or two back I pulled out of a series of phone interviews when I decided the job just wasn't right for me and I felt so relieved when I did. It can be tough holding out for the right job but if you've got bad feelings go with your gut.