job hunting
Dec 7th 2005WallabyGeneral & nerd alert
Got back late last night from my first site visit, to GE in Indiana. This is the third stage of interviewing, so it’s encouraging to have gotten this far no matter what they decide.
They were actually interviewing five of us at once, which seems odd; usually it’s one at a time, at least for chemical companies. I guess it’s better for them to lose one full day for five candidates than have pieces of five days disrupted doing them individually. They did stress that we weren’t technically competing, since they’ve got several positions available and we don’t all have the same background, but… “several” doesn’t mean “five” (certainly not in six sigma terms). The job talk went about as well as could be expected, given that I’d finished the slides the day before and hadn’t actually delivered it to anyone except a hotel room wall. That’s probably good practice for my data meeting, actually 
Two of the interviews went really well, I think I hit at least a few of the “HR questions” out of the park. Two were barely interviews at all; one just asked me to go through my job talk again since she hadn’t been able to come to it because she was doing interviews. The fifth one, with the boss’s boss (i.e., the one that counts) — just not sure about. She was hard to read.
I’m not actually sure whether I’m hoping for an offer or not; the job itself sounds very interesting, and everyone I met was very friendly. The salary range they mentioned was pretty generous. And Evansville looked like a nice area — inexpensive, good sized town, growing. But… Indiana is not North Carolina. In fact, it’s only about half an hour closer (14:20 vs 14:50). So I’d get to drive 20 minutes to work in a nice car to spend 10-12 hours a day analyzing plastics only to come home to an empty house. Blah.
They’re moving fast on this, one of them said that they were actually going to be meeting yesterday after we all left to decide about each of us. So, a phone call by the end of next week. Definitely need to be more aggressive about hunting up a postdoc (or something) down there.
One Response to “job hunting”
Tigger on 11 Dec 2005 at 9:50 pm #
if you do end up in Indiana, well, no worries, I could just move up there and make the occasional batch of cookies to pay my rent, etc. etc. not a completely empty house!
but while you’re back in ____, you should really do a little updating of your amazon wishlist, or some other form of hint-dropping. y’know, to pass on to the elves. v. important, unless you want to end up with something you might’ve utterly forgotten about.
*waits patiently*