The Apinautica - Chapter 9: Beekeeper Survivor
Continuing the memoir, and having just left Egypt, we pick up 24 hours later. For you the lead up to this was months ago but someone reading through the memoir itself will hopefully recall from two chapters ago when I applied for this job while still in Australia.
May 5th, 2013, California - "This is not a game of survivor, no one is getting 'voted off the island,' we hope for a fun, casual week."
I’ve barely been back in the States for 24 hours but now I’m up in Chico, California, for that job interview. For four days five of us candidates for two positions will be up here working with the existing staff, who will determine which two get the positions. I understand they don’t want us to look at it like some survivor gameshow, but, well the set up is the same.
Everyone’s great and we have a lot of fun. We tour the organization’s local offices and are told about what the job entails and how the organization works. The job would be traveling around testing beehives for diseases. We spend a day out in the field with beehives going through them doing the kind of testing we would be doing - visual inspections of frames for number of bees and signs of disease; also tests where a section of the brood (developing larvae) is killed with liquid nitrogen and a week later it is re-evaluated to see how many of the dead brood the bees have detected and cleaned out (“hygenic behavior”). One of the candidates has a bad reaction to bee stings and has to leave the field early. The staff have no critiques on any of my techniques. I think I’m doing very well, though at least two of the other candidates I feel are very strong contenders so it’s not in the bag.
I had initially been told they’d make a decision within a week, so afterwards I visit friends up and down California before returning to my parents’ house in Orange County. If I don’t get the job the plan is to return to my job in Australia.
May 17th - They haven’t made a decision yet. I have emails asking about projects in Nigeria and Kenya, and a potential beekeeping job in France, but all I can do is wait.
May 31st - after three weeks I finally learn I didn’t get the job. In fact eventually I learn that all four other candidates were offered jobs with the organization, leading me to ever after wonder what terrible thing I had done to curse my candidacy. Someone in the organization later says she thought maybe they didn’t think that I would stay. I think I would have, but I suppose we’ll never know. What I do know is over half the people they had in that position did leave within the next year.
At this point the potential projects in Africa are no longer on the table, nor is the job in France. I call my boss in Australia, but he’s found a replacement.
So three weeks later I fly to Turkey to spend more time with Deniz.
Recounting this event is inherently snarky I think, but I think it's important to include because the deep feeling of "what is professionally wrong with me??" over being the only one not hired in this circumstance got me down for literal years and years. The first person they hired was the guy who couldn't complete a day of work during our assessment, WTF??
The one other possible explanation I encountered was that I was talking to another extremely well qualified beekeeping professional (with a PhD) and he had said he had been in discussions to work for them but felt they'd dropped him over his expressing his views that "the bees are disappearing" was a misleading and untrue statement -- I had also publicly said the same thing (you'll notice it's now 11 years since they were saying that and the bees have not, in fact, disappeared), and the principal body keeping that belief alive is... this organization. Obviously their funding and such kind of depends on it and they're good at releasing true but misleading news releases stoking the idea.
May 5th, 2013, California - "This is not a game of survivor, no one is getting 'voted off the island,' we hope for a fun, casual week."
I’ve barely been back in the States for 24 hours but now I’m up in Chico, California, for that job interview. For four days five of us candidates for two positions will be up here working with the existing staff, who will determine which two get the positions. I understand they don’t want us to look at it like some survivor gameshow, but, well the set up is the same.
Everyone’s great and we have a lot of fun. We tour the organization’s local offices and are told about what the job entails and how the organization works. The job would be traveling around testing beehives for diseases. We spend a day out in the field with beehives going through them doing the kind of testing we would be doing - visual inspections of frames for number of bees and signs of disease; also tests where a section of the brood (developing larvae) is killed with liquid nitrogen and a week later it is re-evaluated to see how many of the dead brood the bees have detected and cleaned out (“hygenic behavior”). One of the candidates has a bad reaction to bee stings and has to leave the field early. The staff have no critiques on any of my techniques. I think I’m doing very well, though at least two of the other candidates I feel are very strong contenders so it’s not in the bag.
I had initially been told they’d make a decision within a week, so afterwards I visit friends up and down California before returning to my parents’ house in Orange County. If I don’t get the job the plan is to return to my job in Australia.
May 17th - They haven’t made a decision yet. I have emails asking about projects in Nigeria and Kenya, and a potential beekeeping job in France, but all I can do is wait.
May 31st - after three weeks I finally learn I didn’t get the job. In fact eventually I learn that all four other candidates were offered jobs with the organization, leading me to ever after wonder what terrible thing I had done to curse my candidacy. Someone in the organization later says she thought maybe they didn’t think that I would stay. I think I would have, but I suppose we’ll never know. What I do know is over half the people they had in that position did leave within the next year.
At this point the potential projects in Africa are no longer on the table, nor is the job in France. I call my boss in Australia, but he’s found a replacement.
So three weeks later I fly to Turkey to spend more time with Deniz.
Recounting this event is inherently snarky I think, but I think it's important to include because the deep feeling of "what is professionally wrong with me??" over being the only one not hired in this circumstance got me down for literal years and years. The first person they hired was the guy who couldn't complete a day of work during our assessment, WTF??
The one other possible explanation I encountered was that I was talking to another extremely well qualified beekeeping professional (with a PhD) and he had said he had been in discussions to work for them but felt they'd dropped him over his expressing his views that "the bees are disappearing" was a misleading and untrue statement -- I had also publicly said the same thing (you'll notice it's now 11 years since they were saying that and the bees have not, in fact, disappeared), and the principal body keeping that belief alive is... this organization. Obviously their funding and such kind of depends on it and they're good at releasing true but misleading news releases stoking the idea.