Friday, January 22, 2010

Interviewing in the Rain

If you've been reading/watching/absorbing-via-some-kind-of-strange-osmosis the news lately, you'll already be aware that the weather has been anything but bright and sunny in California this past week.  Not only not-bright-nor-sunny, but with the added bonus of flooding.  The kind of flooding that led the LA Times to refer to several freeways as car pools (hah!).  The kind of flooding that shuts down several southland freeways, but fortunately did not affect my travel plans.  At least did not affect them in a couldn't-get-places way.  But did, instead, make it take more than twice the time it should have taken.  This happens when people refuse to drive over 30 miles per hour.  Which is probably for the best, all things considered, because driving is kind of scary when the rain is falling so hard that the car which was previously 50 feet ahead of you suddenly disappears in the deluge.  This is also the kind of flooding that delays shuttle buses and leaves folks (i.e. me) standing in the rain getting steadily soaked.  The interviews were good, though!  At least, the parts where I wasn't focused on how the lower 2/3 of my legs were completely soaked.  Or the way that my wet socks and shoes tore my feet into blistery messes.  Pretty picture, right?  It didn't occur to me until I got home that, having been at a hospital, I should have asked for a band-aid or two.  Of course, now I'm home, and I still haven't done anything about it.

I'd just like to go ahead and throw a generalization out there about interviews: at least in my experience, just knowing what it is that I've written about in my application tends to be good enough.  Sure, the interviewers occasionally throw some crazy questions, but I've found that just telling the truth, while certainly a lot less entertaining than telling outrageous stories about knights and dragons and slaying the o-chem monster, is a lot easier and usually succeeds in conveying whatever point I was trying to make.  Of course, if your interviewer opens with a line about dungeons and dragons, by all means, tell some stories!

Anyway.  That's my posting for the day.  Yes, it wasn't much about interviewing.  No, none of the interviewing actually occurred in the rain, per se. And maybe I mostly just talked about how the rain did nothing to improve my week.  But you'll live.  Somehow.

Where it's at --
Primary applications: 16
Instant rejections: 1
Secondary applications: 15
Post-secondary rejections (i.e. without an interview) to date: 2
Interview invitations to date: 4
Interviews completed to date: 3
Post-interview rejections to date: 0
Acceptances to date: 0

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