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im curious about beetles, too

since the last year of my bachelor, my life has been on non-stop fast forward. i dont feel march, i dont feel april, i dont feel may.. i dont feel time at all.

anyway, this is about my interview :D looking back from the preparation phase to now, the funny thing is that: i prepared to talk to 4 professors by asking young dudes :D the young dudes have very different perspective on what is cool about this world compared to 4 professors. they ask me to be creative, to be soulful, to have personality, to be modern... well, all of these sounds useless fancy to the old generation i must say. they think i'm head over heel.

as disasterous as it sounds, it was a very good experience for me talking to these young and old people, in my own term, and i'll explain now. (i hope you'll grab the feeling why i dont recommend others to do like me).

preparation

first guy

(aka boyfriend)

profile: young freelancer,

i ask him to tell me his interview experience. beside the code and technical questions, he has some general questions that are useful for me

why do you think you fit us in present and future?

this is a general question which means that eventually it will lead back to introduction about yourself. you should write down 3-4 types of introductions, different narratives, when you are too nervous, you tend to forget everything, some practiced speech will help. the question is not important, it's the way and the content of your answer that deals.

you should prepare stories about what you do, if it's succint, when you say it, people see that you get the core.

what is your biggest achievement? tell us about what you can be proud of

this question is to see your ego, your value system, your degree of compatibility with the team, your own evaluation..

it's clear that this guy has no idea about academia, but he speaks important and useful idea.

second guy

profile: undergrad, speaking python, drives car (i know that every one drives car here but the way this guy speaks about driving car from his home town to school and back like he has independent spirit is funny and cute)

so, after talking to the first guy, i come to see an academic guy to talk about the questions and my answers. the questions are boiled down to this:

why you want to study in trento

what is your research topic in master

what do you do in phd

i was messing every words up but finally i kinda push the message through and he provides some feedbacks on spot. he searches on his smartphone to show me trento rank, good public school, he says.

though i have vague idea of the answer in my head, the first attempts to verbalise it is always a mess. and it's so important i have some audience to hear my version 1 (a unit test). i need their spontaneous and instant response. however, showing your half-baked idea is embarrassing and dont push yourself too hard. i believe in these mantra to make it easier: "if you are not embarassed about your version 1, you've waited too long", "fail fast, fail often", "dont worry about failure, you only need to be right once"..

me

after this, i start to write spoken script to see how the whole picture of me looks like. it's right that the questions are actually not important at all. the questions are just to get you started to paint you in the way you want. so i start to jot down what do i do, and what i have..

i prepare a concise version (an elevator pitch) of my thesis master, of an experiment, of programming, of my bachelor thesis of m&a, of my working experience, of my internship experience (stuff i wrote on my cv).

my boyfriend reads it and suggests some details in some place, like: focus on what you learned, what you do.. more interesting.. (well, i have to disregard his interesting spirit because acad is less lively fun than real world)

and it bombed :D

waiting

i had very bad anxiety in the morning before interview. i always have. it's nothing to do with the context, it's the fear that invoke before formal interaction. i came to the building and i fucking saw people in SUITs. screw me. i got relief a bit while i saw a guy from same school, he wears a bit like me.

but then, we wait for hours. and everyone shows nervous. one guy keeps walking from this side to the other, one girl keeps waving her legs. the thing about anxiety is that if you start to mirror each other, it fucking escalates. so i try to sit still on the umbrella rack and it hurts like hell after a while. despite the fact that i sit in the corner, the atmostphere is thick. everyone is rehearsing their scripts and i'm just sitting there trying to have enough oxygen.

and i hate that building. it looks nice but the isles are designed so that the air circulates around the building to generate quiet flow of winds on its own. and these silent winds are DEADLY for me. it lowers the temperature in an alarming way. and it hits me. my body system screws up and i got cold and chills like in winter. this is just my problem, and the solution for this situation is just as simple as walking into the hot sun/hot room or staying in a warm room, covered in blanket, all doors closed and the air stays still and calm as a bay. and i cant leave because they say nothing about the schedule.

so i start to convert alphabets into numbers, then i start to encode messages into numbers, like "thank you" is ... (i dont remember the sequence), "hello" is ... as i'm encoding "pig latin".. a guy comes to help and gives us the most confusing schedule i've ever seen. there is no estimated time, there is just mixed between skype slots and 3D interview slots...

but finally i figure out that i'd be at earlest in begining afternoon. so i write my phone number on the list and go home. many leave somewhere else too. it comes to the point i'm so frustrated i'm tired of being anxious, i go home to get some clothes on though the sun is sweatingly hot walking on the pavement.

how it went

the structure is like this: the student will sit behind the table (where professor supossed to sit) and they sit around the table like your audience. that's a bit unexpected. but it's fine. it's an interview anyway.

i never bring my ID, no way i will do that. i lose my stuff all the time. and losing ID card is extremely painful, especially in italy. so i have my student card (for the mensa) and my bus card. my student card have my information and my bus card will have my picture. (they except me doing this in exam also).

i start to speak my conscise version of my thesis and no one understand. just very vaguely. so they cant judge me. and it comes to the point that one asks: who is your advisor?

i start to see the disaster and here is why the judging committee of thesis or interview or anything needs to be made public before the event happens:

there is a psychologist in the room and i completely fail him. communication just dies and never gets to any mutual understanding. no mutual ground was founded so i never get to the phase of starting to building some idea on that to show them. it's devastating because i waste his time and others time, also, and i waste my time not doing real work or not enjoying life to prepare for all this formal interaction also.

it gets a bit better when i start to speak about experiment. it is not the best of me but at least it is still what i do and what i think about. (btw, the conversation never gets to programming or working experiment or any whatsoevers other hehe. i guess it'd be even more deadly silence). because the point is that it shares some ground so that the discussion can be on. but it is bad for me. i know that as i go along. but i keep going. because i dont want to walk in a room of 4 professors and walk out without getting anything from them. i just dont.

some of them start to respond. at least something is established. they show and talk about their ideology and what they think. they refute me (not just respond me, refute). and hell yes, the idea is beaten very very hard.

finally, to conclude, they ask about what is the meaning of my project to the world :)

i'm there to be honest, so i say i do it because of curiousity.

another one asks, what do you think it means to be economist?

i say economics is not a fundamental science on its own, it stands at the cross road of many other things, we got psychology here, cognitive science here, mathematics here, and some programming here.. together it's intellectually gratifying, and trento has a network for that..blah

he says, if it's pure curiousity, you can be curious about beetles, what's so speciall..

and OMFG i reply instantly with this line and a happy face:

i'm curious about beetles, too

this is truly the climax of me, i have to frame this sentence on my wall !!!

he smiles and says, but as economist, i think we should have policy suggestions.

i think a bit and says, i never think that my project will have policy sugestions. (and i was being real about that. asked me that question again, and i still say that.)

(out of the room, one friend says you could have replied that quantum mechanics doesnt have policy suggestions, too but it still benefits everyone. he's so true.)

i dont regret but i dont recommend the similar route

in general, the advice is that, KNOWING your audience is a must. by knowing, i mean not just search about them on google to see what they write in their researchgate profile but the better is to have some face to face (even normal) conversation with them, or the best is you have experience in their class. this is completely NOT to please them, but to avoid the disaster case of getting lost in words and symbols.

i have more time to discuss thesis, and i surely take this lesson to heart. the interview was not good. they dont think high of me. but what can i do. if the conversation cant be pushed to somewhere that we have the same ground, all parties leave the room feeling emptied and wasted. i try to make the best out of the situation, keep the positive lesson and discard the rest. if they dont mind talking to me again, i'll start over. if they mind, i'm fine keeping the distance. the status quo is that everyone was born strangers. im fine with that status quo to almost all people. for some rare others, i dont have free will.

i dont say that i want to join in pushing conversion all the time. i suffer from negative emotions of others, too. but occasionally, it needs to. and under pushing, people reveal layers of who they are, what they do, they offer you a peak into their value system.. and vice versa. in these occasions of the masks falling off, we may find what we really like about each other.

i'm also not the creepy kind of guy that enjoy pushing people to peel back to their inner layers of intimacy. no way. i hate that also. i think it's important that we have our intimacy privacy. there is an outside layer for hanging smiles. and there is a line that we can kindly ask people to let us in and share some thoughts, but after that line, it's not for curiousity anymore, it is the decision on their side exclusively if they want to share their intimate secrets or not. (for example of me, the secret is that me and my sisters speak farts and shits to hysterically laugh our lungs out, we do that since born). one thing for sure is that when it happens, it sweeps us to a secret dimension that only exists between not among.