l'esprit de l'escalier...
...is French for "the feeling you get when you're done talking to someone and you're finally coming up with good things to say but it's too late to say them." Yeah. That kinda sums up my post-job interview feelings. I'm still a little residually nervous, but going for a walk to check out nearby apartments for rent helped me calm down a little. I should call some of those places, and try not to think too much about all the stuff I should have said at the interview. But first I'll vent some of my post-interview woulda-coulda-shoulda:
What went well: Turns out they're hiring one person to work on two projects and whatever random other stuff they're working on (grant writing for new projects, etc.) so I'd be doing a lot of different stuff, which is good since my attention span is about 15 minutes long (not good in a half-hour interview, but oh well). It also turns out I'm one of only four people they decided to call for an interview, so I think that means they think I'm good, right? Finally, one of the projects is basically "We collected a lot of data about risk behaviors and drug and alcohol use in middle- and high-school students, and we need to find a good way of presenting it so lots of people can use it (i.e. big web page)." I could rock out all over that. I actually care a lot about presenting data in a useful and informative way, and I think I got that point across --- how I hate it when people lie with statistics, or perhaps worse yet unintentionally lie with statistics because they present them so poorly. I also like that they're a really small company, so I'd feel like a person and not a numbered drone.
What didn't go so well is I'm not so sure how well I'd get along with these people. The administrative lady was definitely cool, but the two research investigator guys I'm not too sure of. In particular, the guy running the fetal alcohol syndrome prevention project kinda gave me a weird vibe. He's a Pomona graduate, which was cool, but he thinks there should be laws against selling or serving alcohol to pregnant women, which I don't think I'm cool with, if only because how the hell is the server supposed to tell if a woman's pregnant? (That was a rhetorical question, meant to illustrate the difficulty of the problem, not to get you guys to envision freaky scenarios where women have to piss on a stick or otherwise prove they're not pregnant to buy booze.) I think I'd get really pissy if I tried to order a beer and got a lecture from the bartender, whether I was pregnant or not. (I get tact points for not mentioning any of this at the interview.) His project seems to be about training bartenders to give that lecture, even though it isn't required by law. On the other hand, it's barely getting started, and I might be responsible for going to bars and interviewing servers about how they decide who to serve and who to card and whatever. And I think that would be really entertaining.
So, to summarize, I don't know if my interview went well or poorly, and so I'm feeling kinda iffy about getting this job. On the other hand, I was absolutely sure I wouldn't even hear back from them when I turned in my application, so in that sense I'm already doing way better than I expected to. And that's good. Edited to add: They're interviewing all their candidates today, and I should hear back from them either way on Monday or Tuesday.
Ok, hopefully I've cleared my brain enough to do something else now.