Friday, June 20, 2008

Unique thoughts not necessary

Well my interview is over. I think it went okay, having a phone interview with 4 people is really hard and they only allowed 30 minutes so I felt a little rushed to get my questions and answers in.

They really don't do much peer reviewed publishing at all (3 papers in 7 years). In terms of grant writing, I'd basically be reviewing all of their statistics. The director kept saying how it would be nice for the lead researcher (the position I was interviewing for) to come up with unique ideas it wasn't required. Um.. hello, I am a PhD level experimental psychologist, you're not going to sell me on a job where unique ideas are not required.

I don't really get why they aren't looking for a statistician, that's really what they need. Frankly I'm not interested in sitting in an office combing through SPSS files all day, every day.

Oh, and towards the end when I asked about benefits and salary they told me to go to the university affiliated webpage to see about benefits and director said we could talk about the salary privately as their was such a wide range given that a PhD was preferred but not required.
They all seemed very nice and the one person who actually works for affiliated university already kept pointing out how my commute would be so short (I live in same town as university), again, so not the way to sell me on this job. Weird.

6 comments:

AnotherSocialScientist said...

Definitely sounds a long way from your ideal job. So frustrating, huh?

Kim said...

Glad the interview went okay. It is hard going into something with hope and then finding out it was nothing like you hoped for. nclm

post-doc said...

I've been on interviews where it became clear that it wasn't the job for me. It sounds like you made good use of the opportunity to practice and have identified some aspects of jobs that are unappealing. Which makes the experience worthwhile. But a phone interview with 4 other people? Goodness - that's not so smart at all. My personal record is with 2 interviewers and it was awful and confusing. But I'm glad you did it and that you performed well - that's always a good thing. :)

Jennie said...

I knew it was a phone interview but for some reason I didn't put 2 and 2 together.
Personally a short commute would be a draw to a job, not the main reason but likely a deciding factor between two positions I equally liked.
It sounds like the interview confirmed that you don't want the job. That's good, right?

PG said...

The job you were interviewing for has a lot of the same downfalls as the job I interviewed for (e.g., working on SPSS all day, not needing to make any unique input, etc.). My feeling is that if the first job doesn't lead to a second/third more desireable position, there's no point in putting in the time.

Psych Post Doc said...

Thanks for the comments everyone.

Nextfish- yeap.. a long, long way away from my dream job.

Kim- thanks, it was disappointing but I did have an idea that it may not be for me with my prep so the interview itself just confirmed that.

Katie- exactly, my feeling is that you don't know until you try. And it's never a bad thing practicing your interview skills. This was not my best interview, it was too hard to build any repoir and I knew pretty quickly in that it wasn't for me.

Jennie- you're right for some jobs a short commute would be a selling point, it just seemed weird that she kept pointing it out over and over. Exactly, the interview confirmed this was not the job for me.

Psychgrad- Amen to that, there would be no upward mobility in this job and there would be no opportunity for me to jump back into academia if I spent any amount of time there.