Deflation.

by clothwright

The interview I had this afternoon was a video conference with a committee.  It was a second interview, which is good, because yay!  it means that I’m starting to get past the phone screenings into finalist territory.  The job search coordinator sent me three prompts to address during the interview.  Ok, I thought.  Better make sure I can answer these really, really well.

I prepared.  For almost a week.  I revised a presentation of my research to emphasize a Big Question and to last exactly 10 minutes.  (In the interview I believe it clocked in at 10:03).  I went over my job history and created a unifying narrative explaining why I thought I was a good fit for the position.  (With charts!)  I came up with lists of ideas on what I would do if I were offered the job.  All of that went ok, I think.  At least, I didn’t feel as if I truly messed anything up, although there were many instances where I could have phrased things better or where I forgot one of the details I’d noted.  There was a zinger, though, which left me feeling bad about my performance in this interview.  Near the end they asked me if I had any questions and I’d been so focussed on what I could do for them that I panicked a bit.  Don’t judge me too harshly–I’d asked most of my questions in the first phone interview.  The position is a limited term and I asked them what success would look like at the end of the allotted time.  This turns out to be a pretty good interview question; I have used it several times now and gotten informative answers.  Interviewers can certainly bluff it or dissimulate, but it seems to help bring out aspects of expected performance that might otherwise not be addressed.  Anyway, the coordinator said that success in this position would include advancing my own career goals and having a clear direction at the end of the stated time.

This threw me.  I spent so much time and effort preparing how to talk about everything I could do for them–how my skills are a good match, how my experience is relevant, how aspects of the job excite me.  I didn’t even think about how the job might be good for me, beyond the fact that it would allow me to exercise skills I enjoy using.  This is all a little vague, and could be made clearer, but I’d like to leave it indefinite at least until I hear their decision.  The job is designed as a limited-term stepping stone and they want to know how I would use it to further my career. The way it was presented was different than the usual “where do you see yourself in five years” chestnut.  The position is what might be called semi-academic, and I gathered that they wanted to hear about how I’d use the position to further my research.  Argh.  It really set me off balance, because for the past several months I’ve been systematically avoiding thoughts of my academic research because I’ve failed in my current position and it’s clear I’m not going to get a professorship.  I’ve moved away from concern about the next field trip or how to elaborate on my projects.  I suppose I assumed they’d languish and eventually die.  But also, at an informational session about this position some months ago, the job was explicitly promoted as a way to change careers.  I was thinking of it as a means to explore different avenues and then move into a different career path.  It is presented this way in the promotional materials.  So really my answer is that I hope to use this position to determine my next career direction.  And they seemed to want me to have a fixed direction already.

When more time has passed I’ll try to remember what I actually said.  Several friends have suggested that I use the thank-you note to present the answer I couldn’t come up with at the time.  After it was all over though, I felt deflated.  As if I’d failed (again).  Disappointed.  And angry.  Angry that the interviewing team wanted evidence of something that, according to all previous information, was in no way required for the position.  Mostly angry at myself.  I spend so much time thinking about what I can do for other people that I rarely stop to imagine what I want to get out of a given situation.  There are dozens of possible answers to how I could use this position to reinvent myself.  Being unwilling to give into enthusiasm, which leads to hope, I didn’t mentally rehearse the trajectory of any one of them.  To do so would be tempting fate, or so my devious mind believes.  If I’d allowed myself to dream about how good the position could be for me and what I could accomplish personally while there, I might have had a ready answer.  If I didn’t have so much social conditioning forcing me to think of others first and to fit myself into the boxes provided by other people, I might have made a reasonable reply.

This is frustrating not only because it may have cost me a great job, but because it’s a trait which carries over into many other aspects of my life.  Ultimately I end up living with continual low-grade unhappiness, which isn’t terrible, but isn’t great either.