HW

It's been an eventful couple of weeks for me. After extensive interviewing (seriously, five friggin' rounds of interviews), I finally bagged a job as an SAT tutor. Evidently the vetting process for SAT tutors is as more or intensive than the vetting process for most finance jobs.

Three of the interviews for this gig doubled as training sessions. I was given a lengthy curriculum less than a week before the first training sesh and told to prepare all three hundred-odd pages of it for a classroom environment in time for that first session. The five-day span in question was an exceptionally busy one in the first place. I thus ended up dealing with an academic time crunch of a sort that I haven't seen since I was actually, y'know, in school. By the time the third training session rolled around this past Wednesday, I'd put in dozens of hours of unpaid preparatory labor, and was so stressed by the weeks of evaluation that I was shaking noticeably during training. Fortunately, my performance wasn't as shaky as my limbs, and they hired me.

So now it's time for me to stop worrying about getting the job and start worrying about doing the job.

The day after my first training session, I tried my palsied hand at a wholly-unrelated new skill: I interviewed one of my favorite musicians for my newish writing gig over at Invisible Oranges. I've only interviewed a handful of people in the past, and among them, the only musician was someone who I already knew. The experience was nerve-wracking, but ultimately quite rewarding.

Hint: not this guy.

Weirdly, the experience I drew on most while composing and conducting the interview was my own recent history as an interview subject. I ended up handling the bulk of the interviews and press for my own band's recent album release, and most of the questions I received were completely boilerplate—they could've been put to basically anyone. It's a lot easier to speak at length to an interviewer when the questions are immediately relevant to you, instead of just vaguely relevant to the band-guy-shaped slot that you're filling in the conversation. Doing your homework makes all the difference.

I guess that "doing your homework" is the overall theme of this rather unfocused post. This blog is a drag!