Siliceous and Delicious

This week has been really, really hard. And I put it down to the overwhelmingness of the job search. My calendar has been utterly overwhelmed with career events and talks, I’ve spent two nights after work at recruiting events or related talks, I’ve had at least one or two talks or events to go to each day, and my head freaking hurts from all of the information coming in, and the conflicted emotions it’s causing.

I haven’t gotten jack shit done in research. Good example: today. I was up late last night after attending a recruitment event for Innosight at the Charles Hotel, and had a terrible time getting out of bed in the morning. I made it in to work just in time for the JAWG meeting at 10, which lasted until noon. Then I grabbed some lunch. Now I have a pitifully short period of time before the next presentation I should go to, at 2:30, which—if the last week is a guide—will be utterly unproductive, because my head is spinning with job-hunting indecision, anxiety, and uncertainty. It takes time to go from practicing your answers to interview questions about your leadership qualities, or digesting a potential employer’s presentation and interaction, to figuring out how to plot individual character states on a morphospace in R. These activities reside in very different spheres, and it is exhausting beyond belief to try, daily, to go back and forth between them.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. I have gotten no research work done in the last week, and almost none in the last two. I’ve gathered an assload of impressions and information about consulting, business culture, the range of employment out there, Inkling, interviewing, resumes, business model innovation theory, and how to prepare for case interviews. But I’m feeling more overwhelmed than ever, and am coming ever closer to packing it in and giving up on the job search for this round. I need to focus on the PhD to get it done. It will not get done at this rate. I will find something, anything, to feed, clothe, and shelter myself for a year once I am done. I want to focus on this. I want to get it done. And then I want a sabbatical, some time off of serious career brain work, to figure out my next steps. It can’t all happen at the same time. It’s too much pressure and if I keep subjecting myself to it I’m just going to crack.

It somehow took me most of the day, and most of non-wasted time Friday (what the hell did I do yesterday?), but I finally managed to annotate my PCO plot with images of diatoms. And, I did this in the least efficient yet most elegant way possible (by a completely flexible and extensible R script that will now automatically draft figures like this for any given list and number of taxon names, provided there are similarly named JPEG files in the designated image folder). Woot.

In other exciting news, finally managed to follow up on a career event in a timely fashion—sent off emails to the recruiter and a consultant from InnoSight, whom I had met at a career thing on Friday (one of three events I went to that day…). The company seemed a little more reasonable in terms of their work ethic/hours/travel schedule, so I thought it worth at least continuing the conversation to the next step. It is taking me a while, but it seems that I am learning, and getting better at this whole “networking” and “job-hunting” endeavor.

Anyhow. In five minutes it’s time for the next event to start—a presentation from the barf-inducing Bain & Co about case interviews. But, I’m tired of working and have some time to bridge before Kati comes back across the river, and I might as well learn something about the interview process if I am going to go through it with some company eventually.