The Great Fishbowl Quest #7

I have a handful of good problems I’m dealing with at the moment. I much rather have these issues than others.

1) I did really well at SPE last week (it feels like it happened a month ago). Out of the twelve institutions I interviewed with, five expressed a high-level of interest at the exchange and two others have contacted in the past week. Where’s the problem? I’ve already scheduled two on-campus interviews. My goal is to not take more than five on-campus interviews total, and there’s at least one more institution from SPE that I hope to get contacted by this next week. That means that I’m going to TPE with the goal of accepting no more than two on-campus interviews. I guess it comes down to the worry that I’ve committed too quickly to two on-campus interviews.

2) Some institutions are pursuing fast. I shoot to be the top candidate (as everybody should) and get the first offers. Having attended the first placement exchange of the recruiting season, there is a real potential that if I do well, I may receive job offers prior to attending TPE. I don’t know that this will happen, but if it does, I need to be able to say, “I won’t be accepting an offer until (fill in the blank) date.”

3) I’ve got no clue about which institutions will jump to the top of my list at TPE. At SPE, my #1 quickly became my #0 and an institution that was low on my list jumped to #1. It makes it hard to accept and decline interviews.

4) This whole job search is getting expensive fast. I have an on-campus next week that’s an eight-hour drive away. I’m not flying for a couple reasons: last-minute plane tickets aren’t usually cheap and my wife won’t be able to check out the place unless we get two tickets or drive. Institutions (reasonably) won’t pay for my wife’s travel and they won’t reimburse if they offer and you don’t accept. I hope to do well enough to receive multiple offers, which means I won’t be getting reimbursed one or a few times.

5) With my recent success at SPE, I haven’t been motivated to get ready for TPE. I rather by a second plane ticket and treat Boston as a min-vacation with my wife. My wife, however, is far more sensible, and doesn’t want me to pass up opportunities that may land us at our dream home that we don’t know about yet.

Needless to say, all of those are good problems. Not-so-good problems include the fact that I have an inner-ear infection that makes me fall to the left whenever it feels like it, we may have to rent a car for this on-campus road trip next week, and coursework is piling up on all sides of me.

The cohort that I often refer to do is doing well for the most part. It seems that those with some type of job search parameters (geographic, benefits, etc.) are doing much better than those open to anything. The ones open to anything are truly taking whatever interviews are offered first and are filling their schedules. Those with parameters have been declining more interviews than accepting. I guess we’ll see how it turns out at the end.

I've got to stop writing and get to work. Today I need to write cover letters for all of the institutions that I currently want to interview with at The Placement Exchange at NASPA. I’ve never attempted to attend more than one placement exchange, and I’m not sure that I’m a big fan. However, after spending $400 on a plane ticket, I find myself committed to the idea.

Keep up the work, you candidates and recruiters.