Drizzly day of good news

No, not a job offer.  But I did get another first interview request today, and now I have a Skype session scheduled for next week.  The position is similar to others I’ve been interviewing for but might have a greater emphasis on creativity.  That would be fine by me!   And I got an invitation to a campus visit at one of the places I Skyped with last week.  Woo hoo!  No guarantees, but it means I’m still under consideration, and at the worst, I get to visit a part of the country I’ve never been to and talk with some friendly people about interesting stuff.

Both of these things make me feel good.  They give me hope that my current situation of uncertainty will not last forever.  If I were a Buddhist I might have something meaningful to say about my current spiritual and emotional malaise.  In order to preserve some kind of sanity I am trying not to get too excited, nor to wallow in despair.  It’s like standing on a raft and trying to bend your knees to compensate for waves so that you can maintain a steady line of sight.  I am attempting to remain detached and not become emotionally bound to any particular outcome; at the same time I am trying to be a fully active participant in this job search business and take initiative to help myself move forward.  (Obviously.  I mean, no-one else is going to do my job search for me, right? I have to take action).  Being active without being attached is a challenge. Ten or twenty years ago I’d have been a blubbering mess.  Now, I’m uncomfortable, but I’m still able to function. It’s odd how when you are young, significant changes bear the weight of forever but as you get older you realize that change is simply change; few changes are for the rest of your life unless you want them to be.

A two-interview day

Interviews are tiring. I had one this morning, a local in-person interview, and one this evening, a long-distance Skype interview with a committee.  Both were fun.  I’m trying to avoid thinking too much about how they went, because analyzing and itemizing everything I did wrong or everything I could have said better is not a help.  I did not feel as if either one was a failure; both, in fact, felt pretty good.  But there’s no way to know if the interviewers felt the same way or what the competition is.

Tomorrow I have another interview and I’m preparing intensely for this one.  Which is another reason I’m not engaging in interview post-mortem right now.  Getting sleep is more important.

Recovery from the computer failure is proving to be slow.  Due to great good fortune, I have found most of the files that were lost on various backup systems.  Things are not back to normal, but the new laptop is getting broken in, my most frequently used applications are up and running, I have implemented the first part of a regular backup plan, and I am enjoying the improved graphics on the new screen.

After tomorrow afternoon’s interview I will have more to write, out of relief if nothing else.

Disaster: 1 Motivation: 0

A week ago, the night before I was to leave for a conference and be out of town for four days, the night I was planning to put the finishing touches on my conference presentation, my computer experienced a kernel failure.  In non-technical terms, it died and could not be resuscitated.

Hence I have been offline for most of a week.  Yesterday I got a new laptop and am slowly rebuilding my library of applications, renewing all my passwords, re-discovering bookmarks, and so on.  In one sense, the disaster was a blessing: it took the decision of what to do at the conference out of my hands. I sent the panel organizer a message apologizing as deeply as I could from the depths of my panic and explaining that I had nothing to present.  Nothing.  I do have some stuff saved in the cloud, but with no computer available on which to work with it, no hope of getting a presentation done in time.  This will long remain a low point in my career.  I am well aware that “my computer died” is a lame undergrad excuse, and there’s no reason it should ever happen to a professional who takes proper precautions.  My computer failure brought me face to face with the extreme cost of practicing frugality: in the past I’ve had multiple backups because work provided me with a second computer (a benefit which ended last summer), I purchased online backup subscriptions (the most recent one stopped working for complicated reasons and so has not been updating frequently), and I set up regular backups to external hard drives (something I kept meaning to do as soon as I had an extra $100 or so to spend on a few more terabytes of storage… which of course I never did).  My efforts to make my 7-year old laptop limp along until I got a new job proved devastating.  Purchasing a new laptop last year or the year before would have been well worth the expense if it saved me this last-minute tragedy.  I’m all in favor of frugality but it must be balanced with an accurate evaluation of risks.  My evaluation failed in this case.

I did not want to travel to the conference but reluctantly agreed with PILW that since not going would be as expensive as going, we might as well get on the plane.  Imagine our surprise when, descending into the city, the pilot said “Local weather is 75º and sunny”.  Really?  Really.  It was the most perfect spring weather all weekend.  We ran 8-10 miles a day and walked a lot, all over the city, up and down hills.  It was a lovely respite.

Now that I’m back, however, panic and depression have set in once more.  My old laptop is in a 3-5 day queue for data recovery services, which are likely to become expensive.  Out of pure need I purchased a new laptop, an expense I can ill afford at the moment; but it had to happen sooner or later.  I pray that my cash flow won’t be interrupted to the extent that the purchase proves to be a huge problem.  A laptop is approximately a month of living expenses, and my cushion wasn’t big to begin with, so…  not too happy about the desperation purchase.   I hope it will last a long time–though obviously I’ve learned my lesson and will replace it well before the 7 year mark.  And I also got two external hard drives at the same time, so regular backups as well as cloud syncing are in the works.

The computer disaster has entirely sapped my motivation.  Some of the things that were not recently backed up include the different versions of my resumé, my job searching links, and the Scrivener project with all my cover letters, application notes, status labels of each application, and so on.  I am avoiding the very thought of recreating it all.  I’m simply…  ugh.  It gives me a sick feeling in my belly.  Eventually I will drag myself together and start the process again, but right now everything feels nearly impossible.

Add to that the fact that my Dad is in the hospital again, and my ability to get things done seems to have taken a nosedive into negative digits.  Sort of like the way the temperature here is dipping below freezing tonight and there have been, I kid you not, solid white particulates drifting down from the sky today.  Ridiculous.

Interview exhaustion

This afternoon I had a phone interview for a job that could be fun and exciting.  It could also be a great career-starter.  Naturally, since it is an awesome job and the people I interviewed with sounded friendly and collegial, I am convinced I must have made a major mistake.  Or perhaps I didn’t make a huge mistake, but because the job would be so good for me and me for it, I assume that the likelihood I’ll get asked for a second interview is extremely small.  It would be nice not to have to play this mental game of getting enthusiastic about something in order to convey interest and energy during an interview, and immediately try to forget about the possibility because job lottery statistics indicate it probably won’t go any further.  I can’t afford to get emotionally invested in any opportunities before I have a job offer.  Forcing myself not to hope is extremely tiring.

Job searching is as bad as dating.  Sometimes worse.  The jobs you want don’t want you, and the jobs that want you aren’t the ones you want.  So frustrating.

To rein in the generalities though, I’ve recently been examining an apparent gap between the jobs for which I think I’m a natural candidate and the jobs for which I actually get expressions of interest.  I have only submitted a couple dozen applications so far, but the (admittedly sparse) feedback is interesting.  I thought I’d be a very strong candidate for institutional research positions at academic institutions.  Institutional research analysts collect and compile data about many different aspects of a college or university, perform analyses on those data, and usually produce reports for university administration and/or state and federal regulating agencies.  I’ve worked in academia for over a decade now, I have database skills, know SQL and R, and most of my academic and dissertation work involves analyzing datasets.  From the job ads I’ve looked at, IR positions seem to vary between data mungers who don’t do much analysis to directors who not only analyze but make recommendations about institutional policy and direction to administration.  Obviously I don’t have the expertise for the latter; I could have, in a few years, but I don’t right now, so those positions aren’t a good match for me.  There are some ads for positions at the other end which indicate that I could be far overqualified.  I was hoping to find postings for a sweet spot in the middle.  So far, callbacks from IR postings: 1 request for a phone interview next week.  To be frank I’m a bit surprised at this.  Perhaps many of these positions are filled by internal candidates; perhaps my skills aren’t at all what they are looking for.  Hmm.

Contrarywise, I started applying to more IT-like positions in an effort to expand my options and get some results.  I’ve applied to things with titles such as Data Analyst (often similar to what’s described above but outside of academia), Systems Analyst, Business Analyst (I’ve held both of these titles in the past when working in finance), and Report Writer.  I would not say that I’ve gotten a lot of interest from these submissions.  But I have gotten more than from my efforts to find a position using my technical skills within the academy.  This is a head scratcher.

Case in point: one of the fellowships I applied for takes a single application and sends it to many different institutions.  Each institution can choose any applicant from the pool.  On the application one can indicate a preference for different categories.  The categories have to do with academic research (mostly humanities), data curation, and visual arts.  I checked “academic research” when I submitted, because I thought it was the category for which I was best qualified.  Luckily this does not rule out my being considered for other categories; so far I’ve had one interview request from data curation–the description of the position emphasizes data science, data management, digital infrastructure, and so forth.  There has also been that odd experience in which I was sent forms from a place I couldn’t remember applying; the place turns out to be another institution with a position in data curation.  I’ve no idea if that indicates an actual expression of interest.  I’ve heard nothing more from them, so I’m not counting on it, but it’s thought provoking nonetheless. I was hesitant to portray myself as an expert in these more technical areas but when it comes down to it, I guess 10-15 years of experience with SQL and databases and such is valuable.

There was not a whole lot of progress on the job search this week except for the fastest rejection ever.  I only submitted one application besides that one.  I did successfully complete a phone interview today, and got a request for another interview next week.  That’s all good.  Eventually some interview will, I hope, lead to a second interview, and some second interview will lead to more… I need to find a way to increase the speed though.  I’m becoming very nervous about impending unemployment.

Fortunate Friday progress update

More positive stuff!

1a.  Another tailored application submitted today, along with one resume to a company database (probably useless, but it’s easy, so why not).

2a.  Interviewer returned my e-mail and is still interested in talking; phone interview some time Monday afternoon.

3a.  Relative’s connection invited me to get in touch with her directly, so I did!  E-mail sent.

4a.  Discovered a couple more job sites that are focused on data and analysis work.

Now the weekend.  Seems to me as if snow flurries are a good excuse to make hot chocolate.