Interview and my fat stomach

I had an interview yesterday with a consulting company, here in the Midwest. It is a large international company and I met one of their –ologist at a conference in dissertation town last April. He was there recruiting students and gave me a card. We have e-mailed some. He encouraged me to e-mail the company’s’ office when I moved here in July. I waited until last month and specifically applied to two of the positions as advertised on their website.

Yesterday morning I had to run down to the big box store because I could not button any of my dress pants, which I needed for the interview. Where did my flat stomach go? I miss you, come back. I know I’ve been neglecting you over the past three years and have seen the slow decline in your definition. I’m aware that when I don’t run and I eat yummy pastries and chocolate and drink lots of beer you can not fulfill your part of the bargain. I’m sure once my dissertation is finished I’ll be able to focus more on you, in the mean time please feel free to distribute your weight more evenly through my body.

I hate that I spent $25 on a pair of pants. They are cute, and they fit, but $25, darn. And they are 2-3 sizes bigger than my ideal.

Back to the interview. The office was about a 40 min drive from my house (leaving at 11am) and an hour drive back (5pm). I will have to take the train to the office because there is no parking and at times I will be taking a field truck home with me. My train is about an hour plus a 20 min walk to the office, and the latest train to go back home is a 6:12pm, which might be a problem for late nights.

I went into the interview thinking that I don’t want to be a consultant but that it will be good to learn about the company. Most of my opinions about the differences between consulting and academics and government jobs has not changed but a few have. One is the hours. I will be working 8-12 hour days when doing field work and was told most employees work 45-50 hours a week. My thought was that consulting would be a 40hr job. I guess it’s not, but still, it’s likely not as demanding as academics and def. not as competitive.

Second, I think this job sounds really interesting and I’ll take it if offered. I think I’m starving for structure and deadlines and field work. I’ve been in front of my computer for so long now. But I also worry how long I can take that type of rigorous scheduling before I hate it. One needs to bill all of their time worked, in 15min increments. This won’t be hard at first since 70-80% of my job will be field work. All of the people I interviewed with (4 male employees) told me that I would likely move up quickly with my background. I asked one of them what the demographics were in the office. Seems there are about 30% women (his made up number) in an office of around 40 employees. One of the women was on the top tier for that office.

Also, this job would round out my education. What I studied for my dissertation and during graduate courses is complementary to this job but most of what I’ll be doing I know nothing about. So I’ll get to learn an entire new set of skills and another aspect of my -ology.

So, I’ve decided the deciding factor in taking this job or not is my husbands work. If he gets the position in home state then I won’t take this job but if he stays at his post-doc this will be the perfect in between job for me. Of course the timing is going to be completely wrong and if offered the job I’m going to have to think of the proper wording to let them know I don’t want to decided until I know about my husband. I don’t want to screw them over by taking the position and then quitting before I can even start. I told them my earliest start date would be June 1^st and at that time I’d could work part time (2-3 day/week) so I can be certain to finish my dissertation. My husband should hear back from his job application in home state 30-45 days after March 4^th. Which should be by the end of April. During the part time work discussion I was told about a young mother who works 30 hr/week and another person who works from home one day a week due to a young child. Good to hear they are flexible on work hours, I wonder if these employees are equally compensated to their full time counterparts.

In terms of home state jobs for me. I’ve applied for two consulting companies, that I likely need to do a follow up e-mail with, and I contacted someone about doing a post-doc. He said he would like to work with me but has no funding. I know of one fellowship for a July deadline and of course there are many fellowships to apply for in the fall. I haven’t e-mailed him back yet because I want to have a better grasp of these funding opportunities. My husband mentioned that I could volunteer in his lab-also something I’d like to mention to the scientist I contacted. I’ve decided to apply to teach part-time at two different community colleges in the home-state-area with the hopes that I can also start volunteering until funding can kick in. I need to get these teaching applications out!

So life is moving quickly right now. Hopefully it will slow down so unbalanced reaction, myself and many others can finish their dissertations this spring!