interview update

Overall, I feel good about the Vandy interview that I had Wed night to Thurs. I thought my talk went well and I had some interesting conversations with people I met. For some of the meetings with people, we were discussing such interesting ideas and connecting common interests, and the time FLEW by! :-) In my talk, there were lots of questions in my talk along the way - about 20 minutes total judging from how long I had previously timed it straight through vs. actual time it took. I felt I handled those pretty well, from the responses of people who had asked (e.g., smiles, confirming I had addressed their question).

The one negative component was this head guy of the institute that funds that position. Especially in my talk he was pretty combative. He had "some concerns" about my application in the first place - specifically, he wondered if I was "the extremely talented candidate" their program is looking for, since I don't have a prestigious National Science Foundation graduate fellowship. Of course, that is the only measure of success. (eye roll) So, I wonder if he was just looking for a reason to pick on to not like me. The grad students of the woman I would work with there (one of whom was an undergrad assistant in my PSU lab for my first year - small world!) independently made the same observation about his combativeness. However, they also said that he is like that for many talks. That makes me feel a little better, that maybe his argumentativeness wasn't so much about me but more about him showing how smart he is. :-P He was particularly critical of some of my experiment materials - basically, he wanted them to be more externally valid (realistic) and continued to ask about this even when I explained that the point of the study was to have them be more experimentally controlled (to have the only difference between the materials be what I was assessing). It's always a trade-off one has to make in research, but he seemed to insist that there was one "best" way regardless of the purpose or the research question. I disagree. Oh, and I thought it was a nice touch [insert sarcasm] that he yawned (unabashedly) several times in my talk.

So I don't know if I convinced him. Everyone else was great though, especially my potential post-doc mentor there - she helped me know what people's quirks or expectations are before I met with them, which was wonderful. So for example, she said "well I know that X judges whether people are good researchers by whether they are interested in what he/she does. So, ask lots of questions about this person's work!" It was great to know.

I should hear sometime soon, hopefully within a week. Lynn thinks that it will depend more on internal politics than on how I did at this point. If I get the offer there, Steve will go down to meet with people he's been in touch with, give a talk on his research, and see how he likes it. I will keep the blog posted with updates!