Anxieties

Going to job talks makes me nervous.

Specifically watching people give a job talk for a junior faculty position gets my sympathetic stress hormones pumping.

Especially when they bomb it.

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I'm so afraid that I'll be that person. Standing in front of a room of impressive strangers. Not understanding what their questions are.

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Sometimes I wonder when people realize that this isn't just going "not so well." It must be sometime in the Q&A. When the same question is asked for a third or fourth time, you have to know that it's all gone wrong. And by then you're so frazzled you can't answer the softball questions people are trying to give you.

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It's depressing how memorable the BAD talks are. I don't really remember the details of the Q&A for any of the faculty that have been hired while I've been here (and I went to all of their job talks).

But the bombers, I remember. There was the one who didn't know how one of their key variables was coded. Someone else who couldn't summarize their hypothesis. Today's struggled with the casual inference question. It was painful to watch.

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It's not like we expect them to fail. They're coming from the elite schools. With big name advisers. My adviser told us this afternoon, "And you haven't seen the letters of recommendation on this one."

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I have to believe that I won't do that.

That my committee will actually read my work and makes me think through a lot of hard questions before my job talk.

That coming from an interdisciplinary background I will have heard questions from all sorts of angles. I'll be prepared for them. And hopefully better able to think about the curveballs.

That I will find that balance between owning your work and acknowledging the shortcomings.

That I will remember key phrases. "Wow. That's a really interesting way of looking at the issue. That's a valuable insight. I don't know much about that area, but know that it is your area of expertise. Perhaps we can talk and think about some ways to collaborate?"

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I still feel a long ways away from the job talk. I should be stressing about my finals for the term instead of my finals for grad school life. At this point, the job talk is a low grade, back of the mind under piles of other projects worry, dug out when I listen to other people. Another month until this search is over and then I'll bury it again.