I've been blizzarded

I had my interview today. It was very formal. I think it was a good two-way conversation, where they got to know me more and vice versa. It was three vs. me again. They said they'd call me by early next week.

It started lightly snowing in Jamestown around 3 p.m. The local forecast has predicted a blizzard to hit around midnight tonight. Needless to say, my 7 a.m. flight out of here tomorrow got cancelled. Now, I get to play in the snow and make snowmen until my rescheduled afternoon flight. I wish I brought my mittens...and had friends to enjoy the snow with...

I feel so tired and bloated right now. All that happens on interview trips is eating and talking. Going to restaurants and eating and talking. Then sitting in conference rooms and talking some more. Then going on driving tours of the town and listening to someone else talking. Talking is tiresome.

I'm ready to go home. For the first time in my life I'm wishing, "please don't snow too much."

Sleepless in Seattle

I had trouble falling asleep last night. I was thinking about the interview I was going to have today with the Jamestown Sun. This newspaper, comparable in size to the California one, is located in North Dakota. The thought of North Dakota kept me tossing for a good 30 min in the dark.

When the prospect of a job gets within range - where you can picture yourself saying goodbye, packing up a U-Haul, and apartment hunting in a foreign place - the once fuzzy picture comes into frighteningly sharp relief.

While waiting to fall asleep, I tried imagining myself living in some small town somewhere (this applies to both papers I've recently interviewed with). It was hard to picture. It was also hard to think that the main reason I turned down the Wisconsin offer was to go to a bigger, better place (paper and city). Well...the prospects I'm facing lately aren't all that grander...

I've had to come to terms with thinking about the job trajectory of my chosen career path. I think I'm going to be starting off small. Smaller than I was originally willing to settle for.

Anyway, back to the interview. I've had conference call phone interviews before but this was the first time I had three people interviewing me at once. It seemed a little excessive, but to their credit, the editor and her assistant editor were originally going to interview me, but the editor had to step away, so another reporter joined in and in the end it just ended up being three vs. me.

I think the interview went okay. The main thing was that since it was a conference call on speaker phone, they sounded all far away and echoey and there was a noticeable lag time. Every time I asked a question or finished a sentence, there was a pause. In my head, I imagined them making eye contact, looking at each other, while I sat and squirmed. I don't like having to imagine what sort of non-verbal cues a group of people are sharing on the other end of the line.

The interview ended with a cool and ominous "we'll be in touch." There weren't many sparks flying with this one.

On the road again

This week's tag-along trip takes me to Columbia, Tenn. I'm here with my roommate Yen who has meetings to attend to while I have cable tv to attend to. It took us about six hours to get here when it probably only should have taken about four. There were various hold-ups: the delay getting our rental car from The Most Skeevy Enterprise rental place in The Known Universe (it kinda looked like it could have been a crack house not too long ago...), a couple pit stops, and one 45 min phone interview.

We pulled into a Wendy's parking lot where I had Interview Numero Dos with the HR lady from the Desert Dispatch. And thankfully, the interview went very well. Even though I was in a car, sitting with my laptop in my lap, and battling the last flickering bar that T-Mobile was threatening me with, I managed to eke out a pretty decent conversation with my interviewer.

I think there's such a thing as making a Professional Connection - the counterpart to the idea of a Personal Connection. A Personal Connection is when you hit it off easily with a person you're meeting for the first time. The encounter is fresh. There's momentum in your conversation. You hope (and are already plotting ways) to talk to them again in the near future.

A Professional Connection is similar, despite a different agenda and balance of power. Usually for an interview, you put on your happy face, which for me is trying to be a Chatty Cathy. You're trying to break the ice but it only really shatters when the Interviewer acknowledges your effort and responds to it - by being nice. It's simple enough.

If you quickly convince them that you might be friendly/tolerable enough to work with, they feel no need to intimidatingly lord over you. This, in turn, frees you to be more honest and less uptight. In the best case scenario, the Interviewer will genuinely spark to something you say. After all, you're both in your mutual element. This drives the momentum. Even while in the interview mode, you dream of when you'll hopefully speak to them again - gainfully employed, of course.

It's a delicate act, however, to balance being friendly and appearing qualified and wanting to please. And in the end the Professional Connection is always dictated by keeping one's eye on the prize. It can be genuine and enjoyable, but the stakes remain.

I think I made that connection today. I hope I made that today.

The latest news

I'm having my second round interview by phone with the Desert Dispatch (the California newspaper) on Monday afternoon.

Originally, the Desert Dispatch was suppose to have made their final decision about the position by Friday the 17th and have told me either yay or nay. They had also told me to expect a second round interview call from human resources before that time. As the time passed from my less than illustrious phone interview performance, I grew more certain that I had blown my chances and should chalk one up for a "learning experience."

But today, I received a call. It's the kind of thing that confirms my theory that unemployment = experiencing life as a bipolar person. Manically excited and drooling one moment. Listless the next.

Phone interviews gone rusty

There were several awkward pauses in my phone interview today with the editor of the Desert Dispatch. All on my part. I've had my fair share of interviews and I felt pretty comfortable going into this one - I knew what to expect and knew my lines. I expected to talk about journalism, why I wanted to report for their newspaper, and stuff like that....

So it threw me off a bit when the editor opened -after the typical formalities -by asking me, "What's been your biggest challenge and how have you overcome it?" Then followed straight by, "What are you most proud of?" But let me back up here. Most newspaper interviews, in my experience up 'til now, aren't interested in your life story/world view/idealism. They want to figure out if you can write a story competently and quickly, and that's what I've grown accustom to discussing. So when the editor lobbed his first question at me, I naturally followed up by saying he meant relating to journalism, right?

Wrong - he meant life. In general. Gah. I sputtered for a few moments and then came up with some BS answer that, I think, didn't reek too much of BS. Whew, I thought, dodged that one ok...but then the next 15 minutes proceeded to be more life-y stuff where I just had to scrap together answers off the top of my brain. It was not off to a good start.

Luckily it got much better once we started to talk about more concrete relevant things such as past internships, experiences, stories, etc. I felt like we were back in familiar territory. I have to say, though, I felt really outta practice and rusty today, and I think it showed. It's been two months since my internship ended and my brain's already starting to turn mushy along the edges........oh no.....moan.

After about 80 minutes of talking, we ended and he left me with hope that I might get a second round interview sometime in the coming days. The final decision will be made by the end of next week, he said. After I hung up, I stood up and walked into my room and had to lie down for a bit and recover from Mushy Brain Syndrome.

Wisconsin

So, I'm here. In Wisconsin. In Stevens Point, to be more specific. It's not what I pictured, really. I'm not sure what exactly I had imagined, but I think I was preparing myself for the worst, just in case. It's a '70's town, for sure, but quite hospitable.

I arrived and met the managing editor at the airport. We chatted on the 40 minute car ride back into town. Mainly rehashing my summer internship, etc. Then I had lunch at a cute little place called The Wooden Chair with the community editor (who, btw, shares the name of an X-Men character - cool or what? I'll leave you to guess which). We actually had a wonderful conversation that was part work/interview-ish, but generally totally enjoyable.

After that, one of the photogs - who's lived here forever - took me on a driving tour of the town. North, south, west, east. Nothing to raise the pulse, but I got a good honest lay of the land. There are a lot of parks here - strange parallel to Gwinnett county...hmmmm.

I took a good long nap after checking into my motel and am now waiting to go to dinner with the ME. Where are the pictures, you ask? They'll be coming soon enough....

Going for a test run

They've finally given me my schedule for the trip! I just got a call from one of the editors at the Stevens Point Journal and she gave me the breakdown of what I'll be doing there from Wednesday to Saturday.

The biggest news: they're going to test-drive my reporting abilities and have me write a few stories while I'm there. This should be quite interesting and, needless to say, challenging since I have never been to the city, will not have a car and will be in a totally new environment. I just hope there's no silly hoop-jumping....like a try-out tuned bad turned into a scavenger hunt (like find out the mayor's dog's middle name *shudder*).

Where's my coffee?

I practically became addicted to coffee after working at a place where a machine that produced nice individual cups of hot steaming [fill in the blank: everything ranging from costa rican to french vanilla to chai tea] brewed just steps away from my desk. So now that my internship is over, I must do without a late morning cup of joe in addition to being jobless. Great, just great.

My internship at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was a 10-week whirlwind that left me with memorable experiences, a stack of clips and many new friendships. There are some things that I eagerly leave behind (like banging down doors in a neighborhood where a 4-year-old girl was murdered, and driving around places lost with a map in the dead heat of summer - to name a few), but I have to say, I am fully satisfied with the experience. Now after 10 weeks, they've thrown me out on the street/out to the wolves. I have to find a job. Which is where this blog comes in.

I'm going to chronicle my job search here - the good, the bad, the weird. I'll do my best to post photos because, hey, we all know that those are the best part of blog posts (who wants to actually read this rambling nonsense?).

This all begins at a very opportune time, because I am going to be flying up to Stevens Point, Wisconsin, this week to interview at the Stevens Point Journal.

Any and all feedback is welcome. Don't check back too often, because it's not like I'm going to be updating every hour. In case you haven't checked lately, newspapers are shrinking/morphing like crazy, so those offers aren't exactly piling up. But I do get the job of navigating these waters during very interesting times. So, stay tuned! And welcome to The Search!