First Person

A Tale of Two Interviews

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By Joel Singer

I hate writing résumés, cover letters, and the entire experience of selling yourself to a company. I've never been good at it. It always feels smarmy to me, like I'm jumping up and down, waving my arms, yelling "Look at me! Over here! I'm the best! Choose MEEEE!"

Yet, one can only lock oneself in the ivory tower for so long, and since I didn't want to become an academic dinosaur, it was off to the bookstore for me. I purchased a résumé guide, and tried my darndest to write a kick-ass résumé, full of powerful words like "extensive," "proficient," and "high aptitude." After I attended a few career-center presentations on job interviews and writing the perfect cover letter, I was ready, and I was psyched.

To be honest, I haven't had much practice in job interviews. During senior year of college, I was reasonably sure that I would continue straight on through grad school, so I sent out applications to universities and concentrated on my studies. But I hadn't found any on-campus assistantships or other employment, and was starting to get worried about how I'd make it through the summer. Back in March, however, I noticed a display in our department with advertisements from six or seven companies offering summer internships. I spent an hour scratching out a really half-baked résumé, sent the applications off, and promptly forgot about the whole thing.

As I stepped out of the shower one Friday morning in early June, the phone rang. My roommate was still asleep, so I rushed over to the phone still dripping wet. "Hello, this is ---- ---- from Chevron. I'm looking for Joel Singer." She proceeded straight into quizzing me about my experience, my qualifications, my desire to work at Chevron, etc.

While sitting there on the kitchen floor, totally naked, I frantically tried to recall the details of the job description from three months ago. I must have done a good job, because after about 45 minutes she said I sounded like a good fit and proceeded to offer me a job on the spot. It sounded like a great job, at a rate of pay about twice what I was hoping to get, with good industry experience in operations research, my field.

How could I say no?

I still can't believe my good fortune. I spent an enjoyable summer there, working and learning about surveys and oil pipelines and computing applications. Now, in 1999, I've had five more years of experience and I'm a freshly minted Ph.D. I've been through all the classes, I've sent out résumés and cover letters, and I'm ready to toot my own horn.

My first shock came when I got my e-mail Tuesday morning at work. (I'm currently working part-time for my adviser, finishing up a few projects.) The e-mail was from the human-resources person at XYZ Corporation. She said they liked my résumé and would I please come in for an interview today at 2? Oh, and be prepared to give a 10-minute talk on your research experiences.

This company was only 25 minutes' drive away, thankfully. But I couldn't believe it was normal to give a candidate such short notice. Was this their way of indicating just how interested they were in me? I gave her a call and thanked her for the offer, but explained that I was already working on projects that day and could we please reschedule? We settled on next Monday, again at 2.

For the next few days I learned more about XYZ, a small consulting company. I talked to my adviser and decided to prepare a short talk on my dissertation research with additional comments on a few projects we thought they'd be interested in. I wrote up the talk, photocopied the slides, made extra copies of my résumé and my thesis abstract. I practiced my talk for friends and in front of the mirror. I read the career center's information packets -- what questions are they likely to ask you? What questions should you ask them? How should you dress?

I was so nervous it was tough to sleep Sunday night. Monday I dressed up in a nice suit and power-red tie. I even shined my shoes on the theory that it was better to be over-dressed than to be too casual. Before the interview I double-checked everything. Laser pointer? Extra copies of everything? Breath mints? Went to the bathroom. Washed my hands. Twice. Left 15 minutes early, just in case there was a traffic jam. Found the building, found the offices, took a deep breath, and walked in a few minutes before 2. I identified myself to the desk attendant, and she showed me to a seat.

After twiddling my thumbs for five or ten minutes, she directed me to a small conference room. There I was met by the company founder and head, who basically proceeded to give me a 45-minute spiel about how wonderful his company's product was and how their program could do so many things. He asked me almost no questions about who I was, what I was doing, what I could do for them, what I wanted in a career. His only remark, on my work experience at my adviser's company, was to say, "ABC? Oh, they've never done any worthwhile work at all. They're filled with politics and backstabbing." I managed to get a couple of questions in edgewise into his monologue. His business model seemed to be that I would come up with an interesting idea, write it up and program the whole thing, then sell it to other companies for a fee. Hmm.

After that, he left and I was shown into a larger conference room where a group of other employees filed in. Eventually I figured out that I was supposed to give my job talk to them (one of them said, "That's why we're here? Oh, great."). I went through my slides, giving them my past four years of research compressed into 10 minutes. They asked a few interesting questions and then filed out, not particularly enthusiastically. Someone else took charge and started showing me the nifty computer models the company makes. After a bit the owner came back and presented me with his offer: "Come work with them for a while, a day or so. See if you like us and we'll see if we like you. After that, we'll talk." I thanked him and got the hell out of there.

So much for all my preparation. Yet, I learned a lot about companies just from that one interview. I've found that the "corporate culture," the way people work together, means more to me than I previously thought. Maybe years of working on my own in graduate school, with little direction or restriction, has given me a desire for a bit more guidance and structure. I might want a larger, more traditionally-run corporation than one with a flexible start-up atmosphere. The company head's way of hiring and his business model might appeal to someone else, but not to me.

On the other hand, there's something to the freedom of scheduling my own time and projects. At any rate, I've gotten a lot of the groundwork done for future interviews. I'm attending a career fair soon, and I intend to sprinkle a few dozen résumés around. Maybe next time I'll be hit with an interview question several of my friends have had: "If you could be any vegetable, what type would you be and why?" I'd better get cracking ...