The 100 by 30 project

Job interview DON'Ts

A few days ago, we had a young (26 or so) grad student giving a job talk. In academia, a job talk is what it sounds like -- a talk faculty job candidates give about their current research.

So the speaker is giving his introduction and emphasizes that his work looks for genes related to aging.

"So you can see this is an important issue, especially for the ladies."

The funniest part is this wasn't an offhand, foot-in-the-mouth comment: it had the stiffness of a rehearsed joke!

Talk about a happy May Day!

Out of the blue, our department chair just sent an email saying stipends will increase by 12.5% next year. That follows a 6% increase this year. I assume that our top rivals increased stipends significantly, and this is in response.

Sure, we still make less than the grad students in CS, but today I'm too pleased to care!

You'd never know that she didn't go on for a PhD:

From Megan McArdle:

"Academics are terrible, terrible snobs about certain forms of consumption, and painfully few of them are aware that these tastes are class markers, not ordinal virtue rankings written into the fabric of the universe at the beginning of time."

The problem with being a nerd

I'm a big fan of decorating with books -- what a great, frugal way to do a design refresh by working with what you have (and love) -- and I especially love the trend of organizing bookcases by color: isn't this just gorgeous?

Unfortunately, when you're an analytically-inclined nerd, you accumulate a lot of Springer books: notice a trend here?

If we tried that, it'd be a sea of yellow.

The value of B-school: none?

The Times has an article arguing that business school is a waste of time and money for anyone aspiring to be a Master of the Universe. They make two main arguments:

1. if you have a job in finance, a cost-benefit analysis will reveal B-school isn't worth it
2. if you do go, future employers will reject you for having bungled said cost-benefit analysis

The caveat is that if you're trying to transition into finance from, say, engineering, business school might not be your blackball.

And, of course, none of this necessarily applies if you aren't looking to be one of the hedge fund superstars.

Talk about your irrational decisions...

I am so, so close to dropping out of grad school right now because I can't stand the brown-nosing. I can't.

It's going to be a well-compensated summer!

Remember when I was disappointed with the pay for my summer job? Well, two things have happened recently to make me feel a little silly:

1. The summer pay is really pretty great -- my major concern with the summer pay was more what I thought it indicated about potential full-time pay; I'd love for this summer job to blossom into something more. Anyway, I was recently talking to a woman in my program who took a summer internship in finance, and she's only making 15% more than me. Given that Wall Street hires people from my program in the $200-250k/year range, I'm happy. (Not that I expect this company would ever pay anywhere near that full-time, especially since the type of job I want is far, far less stressful and hellish than finance. But it's good to know that summer pay isn't as indicative of salaried pay as I'd feared.)
2. They sent me info on the summer housing that they're paying for. Wowza. It's a gorgeous three-story , 4 bedroom/2 bath townhouse downtown that I'll share with three other women. It's fully furnished with central air and a washer and dryer in every townhouse.

I'm starting to feel for the first time that I might not completely regret agreeing to spend the summer away from my husband.

This isn't really PF related, but I don't have a multi-purpose blog to indulge my ramblings on, so here goes:

You know what's really cool? Suppose you want to explore a thesis topic that no one in your department works on -- in fact, an area that few academics work in for complicated reasons -- so you don't know where to begin to find a thesis topic. And one of your officemates is having a terrible time on her thesis because she found a topic herself, instead of just plopping into one of the ongoing projects in the department, so you're starting to feel really anxious about this plan. (Too bad this is often a required of students in our department if, like her and me, they don't want to do astronomy or neuroscience.)

And then you go to the website of that discipline's professional organization and they have a full PDF of a conference that was just held that was essentially titled "Controversies in Our Discipline."

Sweeeeeeet.

Ok, back to studying for midterms.

I love filling in bubbles.

Because his comments are closed, I'll just link to this post to say how much I love Frugal Law Student's law-customized hipster PDA. I especially love the Scantron bubbles! If not for the fact that, two years after purchasing it, I've finally gotten used to using my Palm I would be all over this.

Job interview mistakes

I am interviewing for summer jobs, and last week I had my first ever phone interview. I was trying to make an effort to treat it as seriously as an on-site interview. To this end, I:

1. woke up long before the 11 am interview, showered, dried my hair, and put on street clothes (no, not an interview suit, but given that most research days at home are spent in yoga pants and a sweatshirt, this is an improvement)
2. printed out some descriptions of jobs available at the company in the group I was interviewing with and studied them the day before
3. made sure I had water, paper, and pencil with me before the interview

All in all, I think the interview went well, but I made one giant mistake: I thought I was too good to learn about the company. Of course I didn't think of it like that beforehand, but I think that subconscious reasoning played a role. "I'm interviewing for a research job. We're mathematicians with or working on PhDs! We can't be bothered with nonsense like when the company merged, or how many people it serves, or its market share unless it actually applies to our research problem -- that's for people applying to jobs in marketing, HR, and PR to worry about."

Yeah. That reasoning didn't serve me very well. My heart sank when she asked, "Tell me about <company X>." I'm still pretty sure they're going to offer me the job, but I feel really silly I didn't spend ten minutes studying the company's website.