Joint Locks Don't Work on an Invertebrate...
Thanks to daylight savings time, I'm wide awake when I should be going to bed, so I figured I'd update things around here.
The Brookhaven visit was generally a success. They liked my talk, the one-on-one interview stuff seemed to go well and as far as I know they aren't looking at anyone else. That's a little odd, but then again this is a job where I didn't actually apply for it before they asked me to come out, so the whole thing is a little weird. The only downside of the whole trip is that it coincided with NY's last big blizzard of the year, so I ended up stuck in the airport for an extra day and had to chip my car out from under a sheet of ice when I got back to Pittsburgh.
The UCLA trip was a little more up and down. The one-on-one stuff seemed to go pretty well, but my talk was kinda uneven. The person who introduced me mentioned the whole "got admitted, but then turned us down" thing right before turning the floor over to me, which was more than a little awkward. She meant for it to be sort of a "look at this successful person who very well could have been one of you grad students" thing, but that wasn't really the first interpretation that came to my mind. Then I managed to step into a verbal gaffe when I was a little careless about what exactly the WMAP results tell us about the curvature of the universe with one of the WMAP people in the audience. He called me on it immediately (as he should have), and I was thrown off my rhythm for the next 10 minutes or so. In their case, they're looking to hire someone who does extra-galactic stuff to complement their Galaxy-scale and smaller science. I think I managed to cross the threshold of competence, so it's basically gonna come down to what direction they want to take, science-wise.
So, where does this leave things? Well, in both the Brookhaven and UCLA cases, I'm gonna be waiting until the end of the month to hear back from them; if it's sooner than that, then it's probably because I didn't end up getting the job. I've gotta post-doc lined up at Fermilab (where I won't be getting a faculty offer, as it turns out), so I'm not completely buggered either way. I am a little surprised that I didn't end up getting on a shortlist at Davis, given that I had a number of very positive chats with faculty folks there at the COSMO meeting back in September and even got asked to apply to their computer science faculty spot by the guy running the search. Like I said, I don't quite understand what happened there and haven't quite worked up the wherewithal to send an email asking what was the deal.
In lieu of information on that front, I get to sweat out the next couple weeks to see where the hell I might end up being at this time next year. Fortunately, we're in kind of a time crunch in the day job for the rest of the month and I'll have basketball to fill up the remaining hours, so I don't think I'll have to look too far afield for distraction...
The Brookhaven visit was generally a success. They liked my talk, the one-on-one interview stuff seemed to go well and as far as I know they aren't looking at anyone else. That's a little odd, but then again this is a job where I didn't actually apply for it before they asked me to come out, so the whole thing is a little weird. The only downside of the whole trip is that it coincided with NY's last big blizzard of the year, so I ended up stuck in the airport for an extra day and had to chip my car out from under a sheet of ice when I got back to Pittsburgh.
The UCLA trip was a little more up and down. The one-on-one stuff seemed to go pretty well, but my talk was kinda uneven. The person who introduced me mentioned the whole "got admitted, but then turned us down" thing right before turning the floor over to me, which was more than a little awkward. She meant for it to be sort of a "look at this successful person who very well could have been one of you grad students" thing, but that wasn't really the first interpretation that came to my mind. Then I managed to step into a verbal gaffe when I was a little careless about what exactly the WMAP results tell us about the curvature of the universe with one of the WMAP people in the audience. He called me on it immediately (as he should have), and I was thrown off my rhythm for the next 10 minutes or so. In their case, they're looking to hire someone who does extra-galactic stuff to complement their Galaxy-scale and smaller science. I think I managed to cross the threshold of competence, so it's basically gonna come down to what direction they want to take, science-wise.
So, where does this leave things? Well, in both the Brookhaven and UCLA cases, I'm gonna be waiting until the end of the month to hear back from them; if it's sooner than that, then it's probably because I didn't end up getting the job. I've gotta post-doc lined up at Fermilab (where I won't be getting a faculty offer, as it turns out), so I'm not completely buggered either way. I am a little surprised that I didn't end up getting on a shortlist at Davis, given that I had a number of very positive chats with faculty folks there at the COSMO meeting back in September and even got asked to apply to their computer science faculty spot by the guy running the search. Like I said, I don't quite understand what happened there and haven't quite worked up the wherewithal to send an email asking what was the deal.
In lieu of information on that front, I get to sweat out the next couple weeks to see where the hell I might end up being at this time next year. Fortunately, we're in kind of a time crunch in the day job for the rest of the month and I'll have basketball to fill up the remaining hours, so I don't think I'll have to look too far afield for distraction...