Vancouver vs. Durham, part II

Last month I posted about some of the things that I had to get used to upon moving from Canada to the USA. Now, while I sit at the airport waiting to leave Canada at the end of my vacation, I have a few additional thoughts about my home and native land:

1) It's cold here! Given that I'm in the warm part of Canada it is obvious that I have become a complete wuss in the two years I've been gone.

Anatomy of an Interview: The Morning After

The interview proces was so exhausting, I had no energy left to post updates during the trip. Now that I'm back home and have had a decent night's sleep, here's the recap:

Day 1:
Meetings. So many meetings. I think I had individual meetings with 13 different faculty members. I'm pretty sure by the time I reached dinner I was no longer witty or charming, and perhaps no longer completely coherent,

Anatomy of an Interview: T-minus 12 hours

I think I have discovered the solution to pre-interview jitters:


Be very, very sleepy. It is hard to be anxious when you are having trouble staying awake.
Drive into an unfamiliar city at night, in the middle of a thunderstorm/torrential downpour, complete with lightning, power outages, and tornado warnings. Trying to find your hotel in these conditions will distract you from any anxiety you

Anatomy of an Interview: T-minus 36 hours

And so begins the countdown to my first interview.  I have decided that this period of the interview process must be the obsessive phase. The ability to sleep eludes me now. Oh sleep, how I miss thee! My ability to eat, however, has not diminished at all. A lot of ice cream and cookies have gone into this talk preparation. There is a lot of list-making, and double and triple checking that I have

Job talk prep... and valuable life lessons?

In late summer, I started thinking about what I would need to prepare to go on the job market this fall. With the dawn of the new academic year began the CV updating and tweaking of research statements and the gradual accumulation of a list of current job postings (I really do enjoy making lists). In late September, I started sending in my first batch of applications, which I've dealt with in