You know it’s the end of the interview when...

Last Tuesday night I flew down to D.C. for my LAST interview. I left the hotel early on Wednesday morning to beat traffic and made it to the site early enough to run through the presentation I had to give just one more time in the car. I didn’t have a lot to eat that morning because I was a little nervous and didn’t have much of an appetite, but it was only going to be a morning interview, so I figured I’d have plenty of time for lunch afterward.

The interview was pretty low-key. I met with the group supervisor for about an hour, then he took me on a two-hour tour of their lab facilities. After that we went back to his office and talked a little bit more, then he rounded up the rest of his group to be an audience for my presentation. We finished around noon, and since the interview was essentially over, I was now really looking forward to eating lunch. But the supervisor asked me if I’d be interested in talking with some other people in the group to get a better idea of what they do on a daily basis, so to be the good interviewee, I said yes.

We started walking down the hall toward another guy’s office and the supervisor started telling me about his recent LASIK surgery. He went into all kinds of gory detail about the procedure and how his eyes felt like they were on fire afterward as we strolled down the hall. I started to feel a little light-headed by the time we got to the office - I reached out for the doorframe to steady myself, but before I could sit down, I started getting tunnel vision.

The next thing I knew, I was flat on the floor on my back. Apparently I passed out and fell straight backwards. In the process, I guess I dumped the rest of my cup of water onto myself, the floor, and my interviewer (let’s call him Bob). As I was lying down, getting my bearings, I overheard ambulance sirens and Bob told me that he had called the paramedics. When they got to the building, they stormed right in and put me in the neck collar, on the backboard, and rushed me into the ambulance. I gave my medical history and the description of the kind of pain I was in to at least five different people.

I’ve fainted before, so this all seemed like a really big fuss for something that wasn't really a big deal. But by the time I was velcroed into the collar and on the board, it was a little late to say no. They took me to a nearby hospital, where I had an EKG, a chest CT, and gave away large amounts of bodily fluids. It took four different nurses and 9 different “sticks” to get enough blood drawn for the tests and to get an IV in for the iodine they had to inject as dye for the chest CT.

When I was in high school, I had to get a tuberculosis test before I could volunteer at the local hospital. When I went to my doctor’s office to get tested, the nurse there chuckled as she jabbed the stubby needle into my arm a couple times. “Gosh, you’ve got tough skin!” she said. As the second nurse at the hospital last week was trying to draw blood out of my shriveled veins, I told her what the other nurse had told me back in high school. “Well,” she said, “it might sound silly, but you really do have tough skin.”

It was sort of a toss-up which was more uncomfortable: getting poked with needles over and over or getting the chest CT. The actual scan didn’t hurt, but the iodine has to go into your veins quickly right before the scan, and that burns when it goes in. It makes you feel warm all over and kind of like you peed in your pants...

A little while after I originally got to the hospital, Bob showed up to make sure that I was okay. It was nice of him to come, since it sucks to be in the hospital by yourself, but then he started asking me questions about my desired salary range and telling me about how his company does all sorts of unique work. I nodded along for a while, mostly because it was nice to have a distraction from all the trouble my tough skin was causing, but later on, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I have no interest in interviewing in a hospital gown, no matter what job it’s for.

I finally managed to convince Bob that he didn’t have to feel bad about leaving me in the hospital, so for a while I just slept on my bed in the hallway while I waited for my test results (only the really sick or injured people got rooms). I was exhausted with all the drama of the day and my missing blood. When I woke up, magically, Josh was there.



I went home with a mostly clean bill of health; thankfully, no serious cause for the fainting. And luckily, the HR department at the company was very generous in re-booking me a flight home the next day and not complaining when I brought the rental car back late.

One of the nurses from the hospital asked me if my chances of getting the job were better or worse after fainting. I have no idea, but I’m not sure I could take the job even if I got an offer, just out of sheer embarrassment from the whole mess.

Just a couple more

This coming week I have two more interviews, and regardless of how they turn out, they will be the LAST interviews that I go on in the foreseeable future.

The first one is a quick on-campus interview with a large aerospace & defense company. I applied online several months ago and honestly, had basically forgotten about it. I'm not holding out much hope that the interview will lead to anything though. Even if everything goes well and I get a second round interview, I don't think it would happen before I have to make a decision on my other job offers. I'm also not convinced that I'm going to be thrilled about the work, or that I'll even learn any specifics about it very soon.

The second one is on Wednesday with a government agency that I'm much more interested in possibly working for. The only twist about this interview is that I have to give a short presentation at the end. Since it's only supposed to be 15-20 minutes, talking about my thesis wouldn't really be appropriate - it would take much too long to get into any useful detail. Plus, I'd have to make a new set of slides. Yuck.

I'd much rather give an old presentation from a project that I've worked on it the past. My best choice, I think, would be a presentation that I gave toward the end of my year of full-time work. Over the past couple days, I started to panic because I couldn't find the presentation, or anything else that I saved from my time in Houston. It wasn't on my hard drive and I worried that I had been dumb enough to not take any of the work I had done with me when I left.

It turns out that I'm just bad at keeping things organized. Earlier tonight I found the CD with all my work data on it, so I'm pretty sure I'll be able to use one of the presentations for this interview. The lesson to be learned from this is KEEP YOUR WORK! You'll never know when you might need it again. Save big presentations, save your personal records of what you worked on (for example, we wrote "activity reports" every week to turn in to the boss), and save contact information. I copied down email addresses and phone numbers from several people that I worked with, and I've referred to it so many times since I left that I wish I had been smart enough to do that at all the places I've worked in the past.

My ideal job

This time three years ago, I had a job lined up for when I left college and started living in the real world, but I was in the typical 20-something quandary: I had essentially no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be done with school because my education, though pricey, hadn’t prepared me to tackle real engineering problems. But I didn’t want to stay in school because I didn’t know what I wanted to study.

Thus, the job hunt began. I was lucky to be job hunting during a brief time when the government agency that I had always dreamed of working for was hiring. I applied, had a couple interviews, and poof! I had an offer. The deadline to accept or decline was December 1st - way before I had a chance to do any other interviewing.

I had no idea what to do. Here it was, what I thought was my dream job offer, but it somehow felt like a cop-out if I didn't at least see what else was out there. Somehow it was too easy. Everyone I talked to said, “Ooh, tough call!” but didn't offer any real advice when I asked. Thankfully, my academic advisor took on the role of high school guidance counselor for me when no one else would.

So I took the job. I figured I could at least get some experience and beef up the ol’ résumé while I was figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.

Unfortunately, the job didn’t pan out like I had hoped. A lot of that was my fault, but I did manage to learn a few things from it. I at least had a longer list of what I liked and what I didn’t like, both in terms of work and in terms of a company to work for. A year later, I received my acceptance letter to grad school, and over the past year and a half I’ve come even closer to really nailing what kind of work I want to do.

The type of work, I think, is more than half the “describe your ideal job” battle. An engineering degree, it seems, can get you a job just about anywhere. An aerospace engineering degree only limits the field by a little. Some of the topics we studied in school were materials & structures, kinematics & dynamics, fluid dynamics and aerodynamics, thermodynamics, and controls. I knew what I didn’t like (materials) what I kinda liked (aerodynamics), and what I just didn’t get (controls). It wasn’t until I took a propulsion class during my senior year that I learned even a little about astrodynamics (how planets and other things in space move around due to gravity) and thought - hey, this is pretty cool!

The job I took with the government mainly involved spacecraft trajectories - how a hunk of metal wants to move in the atmosphere or in space and how to steer it to follow the path that you want instead. That stuff was pretty neat too. I knew about that kind of work as an intern, but I was never able to land a job actually doing it until I took the government job.

In grad school, much of my classwork has focused on guidance, navigation, and control. Here I finally saw that there was a reason that anyone bothered to understand control theory. I’m still not a huge controls fan, but it’s a necessary evil on the way to doing cooler things, like guidance algorithm development and trajectory design.

Okay, so I’ve gotten a little off-topic. My original point was to whine about how I can’t figure out what job to take! Now that I mostly have the “what kind of work I want to do” figured out, all that’s left are those other “minor” details to figure out - what about all the other stuff besides the work?

I haven’t gotten very far in making a job decision by making a pro/con list for the two companies that have made me offers, so I’m trying to approach it from the other end - what is my ideal job at my ideal company?

I want to have a job where...

• I look forward to going to work every day
• The actual work is interesting to me
• The work, and the company’s mission, is useful - the work benefits others, and has a clear purpose
• I get along well with my co-workers and my boss; the atmosphere is friendly and helpful/supportive
• The hours are reasonable - the job doesn’t take over my life
• The company is respectful of work/life balance
  
• The work is technical, but it involves more than just me sitting in front of a computer all day (I’m already doing this for my thesis and it sucks)
• There’s a good mix of working with people and solving problems on my own
• There’s a variety of work, and the company is willing to accommodate me when my interests change and I want to try something new
• My co-workers are motivated to get things done
  
• The company’s goal is to deliver work that is thorough and correct, not just on-time
• There’s a good mix of young people and older, more experienced engineers
• The company encourages me to expand my horizons and further my education - not necessarily toward a degree, but at least job-related training. Bonus if they have a very broad definition of what’s job-related. :)
  
• It pays enough to cover my expenses, plus some extra to help me save for fun stuff