Strongly Worded

XTreme Job Search

After an incredibly depressing job-search dry spell, I landed my lovely foster job. And because life is ironic, I immediately got a call from another leading university (also not Harvard), about a different (permanent) student services job. During a speed-round 29-minute phone interview, I was told that the position would involve a caseload of 1,000 students. "You mean in the department, right?" I asked, "A 1,000 students split up over everyone in the office?" The interviewer set me straight: There are 9,000 students split up over everyone in the office. You'd have 1,000.

OK, then. The job sounds challenging at best. And having the foster job in place makes me loath to break out the leather folder with my name engraved on it, and reluctant to trot out my answers to holy trinity of interview questions: Tell us about yourself? Describe your ideal supervisor? Describe a time when you solved a difficult problem under pressure?

And yet I am doing it, because I am one driven chick. Tomorrow I am meeting with three sets of decision-makers in a 2.5 hour interview marathon in which I will also deliver a 10-15 minute presentation. I was invited to create a PowerPoint for this.

The interviewers will "role play" as students, and this makes me suspect that it's not a presentation at all, but rather an "elimination challenge" in which they will act like nasty disgruntled students, or else refuse to engage at all so that I will have to demonstrate how well I can draw out recalcitrant participants.

I agonized all week about this presentation, and promised myself I would not create a new workshop, since I've done workshops on approximately 6 zillion topics in my day and I don't know if I even want this job. And yet. I this entire day developing a flier, talking points, and two handouts for a faux workshop that showcases brand new content.

When they ask for my strengths and weakness, I'll just point to the work I did. Ambitious and self-directed? Yes. And also insane.

Posted by Dori at 6:11 PM